I first posted the following remarks on History Survey on 9/8/07.

Often in history we have to analyze the situation of oppressed people, including slaves, the working class, women, and religious and ethnic minorities. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to handle this kind of analysis. We can treat the oppressed exclusively as objects with no will or mind of their own. Or we can also try to comprehend them as subjects who, no matter how oppressed, might have nonetheless left behind hints of their humanity in the form of actions, words, or things they made.

It is usually easier to treat the oppressed as objects. Then all one has to do is identify all the wrongs that they endured. End of story. Treating the oppressed as subjects requires one to go the extra mile. Besides laying out injustices inflicted upon them, one must try and learn how they lived, acted, thought, and felt.

In the case of Spartacus in ancient Rome, we can look at the slave war and consider what actions slaves took and deduce why, even though we do not have direct testimony from Spartacus or his fellow slaves. In the case of Glückel, a Jew in early modern Germany, we can analyze her memoirs in order to determine not only what she was not allowed to do, but also the real possibilities she had for action. Can you think of other examples?

Image: Working poor in Victorian England via John Burnett, "Working-Class Attitudes: Stoicism and Acceptance" at The Victorian Web

This post received a couple comments too:

techfun said...

Great point. I think the tendency to look at history as a series of photographs instead of as a movie is beaten into American kids where we were graded on memorization of factoids instead of any true understanding of what was going on at the time.

I also see a HUGE tendency towards this kind of thinking and writing in the present when people discuss labor conditions in Chinese factories and the like.

People talk about boycotting Chinese goods and such as if its a good thing for the workers over there. That kind of reasoning implies that the workers would all take much better jobs if only that darn factory would close. It completely ignores the fact that each worker made a choice by taking that job because it was better than the alternatives available to them locally.

September 14, 2007 9:59 AM

nicole jackson said...

For other examples, you have Ourika in "Ourika" who is not only socially oppressed because of her gender, but also because of her race. There is also a type of self-oppression, because she never allows herself to view herself as equal among her peers after over hearing the women talk about her color and marriageability.

In "A Doll's House" Nora deals with more gender and social class oppression. In her era there was so much gender inequality... with the females getting the short end of the stick. She had to deal with intellectual oppression, because it was not considered acceptable for a woman to be too smart. There was also the judiciary inequality, which led to her having to forge her father's signature because society viewed women as being to incompetent and irresponsible to be trusted with such matters. Socially, the women could act superior to people below their class, but never to men of the same class without being shunned or causing scandal.

November 20, 2007 8:54 AM