HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Susan Pedersen: Bringing the Past to Life

History is so vivid for professor that some of it seems to be living in her back room

-- L.P. Hartley

Susan Pedersen had little expectation of becoming a historian when she took a year off from Harvard College in the early '80s.

Intrigued by questions of socioeconomic class-formation, she spent six months in England delving into the rise of gender hierarchies in the British labor market around World War I.

"I discovered after about three months there that I was spending all my time in the Imperial War Museum, reading archival sources," Pedersen recalls. "When I came back, I thought, 'Your life choices are speaking to you. What normal undergraduate spends time on leave sitting around in an archive? Clearly, this is what you want to do!' "

Although she went on to complete a 1982 senior thesis that helped earn her an A.B., summa cum laude, in social studies, her inner orientation had shifted toward the people behind all those papers. "I became a historian through developing more interest in their stories for their own sake than in the essentially social-scientific questions I had begun with. I was sort of 'captured' by my period."

Pedersen remained here to earn both her A.M. (1983) and Ph.D. (1989) in British history. Last summer, she became a fully tenured history professor after seven years of departmental teaching and research that brought her numerous accolades, including Harvard's 1992 Levenson Prize for undergraduate teaching and the Social Science History Association's 1994 Allan Sharlin Prize for her book on Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State.

In two half courses, she guides undergraduates through British history from about 1760 to 1870 and then from 1870 through developments straight out of the latest headlines. During the second half in 1992, for example, Pedersen had to include the reelection campaign of Prime Minister John Major.

Last fall, Pedersen also taught a conference course on Gender and the State in an Era of Mass War, which examines crises of the first half of the 20th century in Western Europe from the perspective of gender analysis. During the current term, she has led another graduate course on the impact of recent theoretical perspectives on historical writing.

"The hardest thing for students to grasp from the outset is that history is both what happened and a conversation in the present about what happened," Pedersen says of undergraduates. "Particularly when I teach the 19th-century Britain course, I try to combine a relatively clear narrative account of the period in my lectures with a set of historiographical discussions about what various historians have made of that period."

At all levels of instruction, she believes strongly in the value of examining the past through such multiple analytical perspectives. "History right now is in a bit of a crisis," she says, "and it's a nice moment to be a historian, because there are a lot of approaches possible in the field. I think it's good for people to be exposed to a variety of approaches and to suspend judgment long enough to examine them seriously."

Not surprisingly, Pedersen also strives to help students forge their own links to other times and places. "One of my main concerns is that students have some empathy for the past and that they think of it as different from the present. That's hard for them to do, particularly in British history, because the people they study speak the same language, and they begin with the assumption that the British are 'just like us.' "

To help demonstrate that they are not, Pedersen regularly assigns contemporaneous readings from biographies, novels, plays, and political philosophy. "For the 20th-century course, I show movies that were made in the '30s, '40s, and '60s. It's amazing how dated they seem, but they're very good at capturing certain qualities of the past."

Undergraduates must be ready to reason out loud when they walk into her sections. "I want students to be able to discuss causation seriously, to see that some forms of explanation exclude others," she says. "When somebody disagrees with them in class, undergraduates are prone to say, 'Oh yes, I think that too!' They often think that a compromise between two opposing viewpoints is somehow 'truth.' I want them to be able to argue for a coherent analytical position and not simply agglomerate different points of view."

Students teach her much as well. "My students sometimes have tremendous difficulty with the works that I found completely natural [in college], and they have great ease in reading certain recent works that I find more difficult. One of the greatest benefits of teaching is that it keeps you open to methodological and theoretical shifts within your own field and society more generally."

Some of Pedersen's social-science perspective may stem from an "unconventional background" in Japan, where she was born in Tokyo to Lutheran missionaries. Raised in Hamamatsu and Nagoya, she first came to the U.S. for a year at age 8 and returned at 14 to complete high school in Minnesota. "I was completely culture-shocked," she recalls. "It was as if I had fallen from the Moon. I didn't understand the U.S. at all."

Her prize-winning first book was written "very much out of social science." Sitting at the crossroads of several disciplines as it does, the book might as easily have turned into a work of historical sociology or political science, she adds.

Like her classroom teaching, that positioning reflects her own prismatic habits of mind. "I'm not a synthesizer," she admits. "I tend to experiment in different methods and approaches." The latest example is her current work-in-progress, a biography of British legislator and social-welfare activist Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946).

Born to a large and prominent Liverpool family (her father was a Liberal Member of Parliament), Rathbone spent a lifetime crusading for social causes, starting with grassroots social work in settlement houses.

She later developed a program for training social workers at Liverpool University, became the first woman on the Liverpool City Council as well as president of a major national feminist group, played a pivotal role in designing the British welfare system, and spent her final years as an Independent Member of Parliament. During her last decade, she championed Spanish-Republican and Jewish refugees, and lobbied fiercely but with limited success to get the British government to respond to growing reports of Nazi atrocities.

"Rathbone is one of a remarkable generation of women who first become involved in politics as significant figures in their own right -- not as political wives, for example," Pedersen explains. "She is always right in the center of important political and social movements as they develop.

"Part of the reason I find her so interesting is that she feels the obligation of political engagement. Even when she makes mistakes, she is willing to live with them. She learns, and she tries to do things over again. She works the way a real practical politician works in the world."

Pedersen believes that Rathbone's sophisticated writings on citizenship and gender deserve wider recognition. Before World War I, for example, Rathbone understood something accepted only years later by other welfare theorists. "She recognized that in the modern industrial state, conceptions of citizenship become tied up with wage-earning," Pedersen points out. "You have rights as a worker, rights as a soldier, rights because of the things you contribute to the national good."

Realizing that most of these were male-based conceptions, Rathbone cast a critical eye on how her society distributed economic rewards. "She was concerned to try to rework both the economic system and the political system in ways that would make it possible for women to be full citizens," Pedersen says. Rathbone successfully carried out much of this "unbelievably ambitious agenda," convincing William Beveridge (chief architect of the British welfare state) to include family allowances in his plan, for example.

Because of Pedersen's empathetic turn of mind, Rathbone has become more than just another research topic. Through contact with Rathbone's family and friends, she has begun to flesh out the relationship between Rathbone and her lifelong companion Elizabeth Macadam.

"They were very protective of their private life, and their personal correspondence was burned at their deaths, so I've had to do a lot of hunting around in unexpected places. That's been rewarding, because I've found a lot of things that nobody knew before. But this also means that I'm writing a fuller life than Rathbone herself might have been comfortable with."

By the same token, Rathbone can be rather unsettling in her own right. "Much as I admire her, I find her enraging a lot of the time," Pedersen concedes. "In some cases, she got involved in things she didn't understand at all and went around like a Victorian busybody telling people what to do. When you write a biography, you feel like you're living with the person. I feel that this terrible woman is living in my back room, and I want to hurry and finish this book so I can get her out of the house."

In her next book, Pedersen plans to examine changes in British colonial policy between the world wars. She has written "a little bit" on the subject but doesn't plan to plunge in deeper for a couple of years or so. "I've got this woman living in the back room, and I have to deal with her first."