Ethical Judgments and Historical Empathy in the World History Classroom

In a 1990 article in Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the medieval historian Barbara Newman discussed the temptation in women’s history to make ethical judgments about the past, to, as she put it, “idealize, pity, or blame.” Idealization, pity, and blame have also been features of the history of sexuality, and scholars debate the extent to which this has shaped views of the past. For example, did Native Americans value men who did women’s tasks and wore women’s clothing as “two-spirit” people who linked the male and female spheres, or is this wishful thinking by contemporary gay activists? My remarks will center on ways of approaching the different moral frameworks of the past regarding gender and sexuality when teaching world history, which offers the broadest possible range of those frameworks. To what extent should an instructor make her own ethical framework and feminist stance clear? How does this fit with our desire to practice historical empathy, which the American Historical Association has just stated is a “core competency” for history students, to say nothing of history instructors? How do we balance our feminist aims to both encourage social change and simultaneously make our classrooms safe and welcome spaces, given that our students’ ethical frameworks, like those of the past, may be different from our own?