Professor Amy Leonard is a history professor at Georgetown University, where she has been teaching since 1999. She specializes in women’s history particularly during the early modern period (1450-1648) and Reformation in Europe. Her passion for women’s history has led her to teach a class called History Focus: The Early Modern Woman.

The Fem Word’s Assistant Editor, Meera Dahiya, an Economics major at Georgetown University, spoke with Dr. Amy Leonard about her career and interest in women’s history.

*edited for clarity*

Meera Dahiya:

To start off, you've been teaching history at Georgetown for over 20 years. When did you first realize that you wanted to specialize in women's history, and more specifically, what sparked your interest in women's history during the early modern period and in Europe?

Professor Amy Leonard:

I grew up a feminist. My mother was a feminist. She's a scientist and she was denied tenure in New York City because she was told that she had a husband who had a job. [They said] the other person who was up for tenure was a man, so he should get it because he was providing for the family. Because she was a woman, she didn't need tenure because her husband could provide for her. This was in the late sixties. She was always a feminist and raised me with that. I was always interested in women and hearing about their history.

[Then] I fell in love with early modern Europe. I fell in love with Martin Luther and the Reformation, which makes not a whole lot of sense if you know my family at all. My mother, being a scientist, was on sabbatical in Oxford, England, and she took the whole family. This was my junior year in high school. I hadn't had real history — I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and it was taught by the basketball coach. I had history for the first time [in] sixth form and they were doing 16th century Europe. So you had one module that was 16th century England — it was Tudors, Stuarts, Queen Elizabeth, and you had another one that was Europe. I learned about Martin Luther for the first time, and I had no religious background. I read him, and I was like, “Oh, well, he's interesting. I now understand people's faith. I understand theology a little bit better.” He didn't convert me or anything, but I found him endlessly fascinating.

Then, learning more about the period and about the Reformation and the Renaissance, I just decided this is the most interesting thing I've ever come across. Unlike many students, I went to college knowing that I wanted to major in history, knowing that I wanted to do early modern history. I went to Barnard, a woman's college, so I was putting together my feminist interests with my history interests, and Barnard has a great history program. I took a class on women in early modern Europe, a seminar. Christine de Pizan was the first book that we read. I was just like, “what, this woman is writing in the 15th century?” I think it was eye opening for a lot of students in this class. I had no idea. This was in 1985. So that would have been my sophomore year. It all came together at that point.

Then I went to grad school. My advisor was like, “okay, you want to do women. Great. You want to do the Reformation? Do you want to do women, their own voices? Or do you want to do peasant women and have to read them through tax records?” I said, “I want their own voices.” He said, “well, nuns might be a good place to go because they're educated, and they write their own history.” That's how I came to that point. Influences from everywhere created my very firm desire to teach women's history and to study women's history. When I went to England it was 1983. It's [been] almost 40 years that I've been studying this, and I still love it.

Meera:

You talked a little bit about your experience in Barnard and just getting to know professors and people there who helped guide you. Do you have any particular role models in the field of women's history who have helped you on your journey to becoming a historian? Do you have a favorite historian?

Professor Leonard:

Merry Wiesner. [She] was teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, which didn't have a PhD program so I couldn't go study with her. [So] I went to Madison, Wisconsin to work with Bob Kingdon, who was a wonderful advisor because he had trained Merry Wiesner. [He] accepted me, and I got to meet Merry Wiesner my first year there. I met her and she became a mentor, and then she became a friend. I just think of her as one of the best historians out there. She's the model of what I think a historian should be. I would say without a doubt, she has been one of the most influential mentors and models for me as I go about doing my history.

Meera:

Speaking of Merry Wiesner and the book we're reading in class, I was just thinking about how Wiesner talks about how the study of women's history is relatively new compared to the study of history in general. We've been studying women's history for less than a hundred years. What do you think sparked an interest in women's history, and how has that field of women's history evolved as you've been teaching?

Professor Leonard:

That's a great question. First off, it's connected to social and political movements. You have Olympe de Gouges in France, you have Mary Wollstonecraft in England, and you have people for the first time that we would say are feminists who were saying, “women deserve equal rights — politically, socially, economically.” That led to people looking at the position of women. There's an important book in the early 20th century, but it really explodes in the sixties and seventies with the women's movement. The sixties and seventies is where women's history as a really sustained field, a sophisticated field of historical study begins. There are examples before that. There's some great women's historians from before the sixties and seventies, but that's once it really begins as a discipline.

It started off as women's history. In my lifetime, when I went to grad school, I was asked by Bob Kingdon, my advisor: so are you doing women's history or are you doing gender history? That was the big question then in the ‘80s [and] early ‘90s. And I was like, “I'm doing women's history. Gender history is just cutting women out of the picture again.” It was very hostile; it was definitely at the time people [said] you choose one or the other, and people were very hostile to gender history or vice versa. Gender history had a lot of theory and had people like Judith Butler writing in this very kind of complicated, difficult terminology and jargon. That was just very difficult, and now that's completely gone.

I'd say one of the biggest things that happened in my career is that we can do women, we can do gender, and we can mix and match. You don't have to take sides. I think that the intersectional aspects of the study — that's what's really changed. You can't just talk about gender, and that's what Natalie Davis said years ago: that we talk about race, gender, and class all together, but people really weren't doing it. Now you can't talk about gender without talking about class.You can't talk about that without talking about race. Now we're talking much more about sexuality, which we didn't [before]. Even if people in the past didn't have the vocabulary that we have to describe these things, it doesn't mean it's not worthy of studying. It doesn't mean it didn't exist. They may not call themselves gay, but same sex relations existed in the 16th century. We know that, and we have to be aware of how to look for it and study it.

Meera:

As you're talking about this evolution of history, the percentage of female students studying history has actually increased over the past 50 years. Do you think this has led to a growth of the field of women's history? Has this allowed us to dig deeper into the field and learn more?

Professor Leonard:

Absolutely. There are two answers to this. The first one is yes. The more women you have in academia, the more that they're going to take seriously women and gender history. It's sad that it has to be identity politics in that way. I'm interested in women's history because I'm a woman, that is one of the reasons. That's one part of it, but I do think that it needs to be more open.

It shouldn't just be that all women's historians are women, no matter how they're identifying. It needs to be something that more people are doing to give it the respect and to make it a part of the larger narrative and discourse so that it's not just something like, well, that's women's history or that's just disabled history. I think that's something that we're always working at. One of the ways of doing that [is] you teach it more as your normal class. This class is on women in history, women in early modern Europe, but it should be like my Reformation class, where women are coming through in all of it. It shouldn't just be a niche subject.

Meera:

Slate Magazine did a study comparing the number of history books written by women to those written by men. And they found that out of 614 popular history titles published in the U.S. in 2015 by 80 different presses, about three quarters were written by men. Why do you think that, although interest in history through female students has increased, there's still this gender imbalance in the way that history books are published? Do you think this is an obstacle?

Professor Leonard:

It's certainly an obstacle. I'd have to look at the list and see, are these academic presses, or are these popular presses, or is it both? Because [I] think that would be part of it. Who's getting the jobs? We can say that there are more women in undergraduate institutions than there are men these days. Georgetown is an example of that. I think it's like 55% women, 45% men. But once you get to grad school that flips, and so you have more men in grad school, and then once you get into it, like the history department at Georgetown, we are 30% women, 70% men.

We try to hire women. Part of it is you hire people like you. You're hiring white, male, cis people because that's who you are on the committee. It's a real problem. I think it's more of a problem in terms of race than gender. I think gender has really caught up, whereas, how white departments are is a real problem. If you don't have them in academia and in those positions, then they're not writing the books because they're not getting the research support and they're not going into the next phase.

It takes a long time to get there also. I would also say this is going to be something that we're going to see down the road in a couple of years. COVID is going to be a nightmare, speaking specifically about women in history, but for women in academia, because so many of the academics who have been hit by COVID, it's the woman who was taking care of the kids at home, it's the woman who was having to do school. What that means is that there's going to be this lag time, and I could see it in my own department of what's happening to some of the people with families — they're not able to do their research anymore. Yet the men still seem to be chugging along doing their research. So we're going to get a lot of things published, and there's gonna be a lot of resentment in places

Meera:

Speaking of writing books, on the Georgetown website, I saw that you're currently working on a book called the Reformation of Virginity: View of Female Sexuality in Reformation Europe. It explores shifting perceptions of female sexuality during the Reformation. What inspired you to write this book, and how did you choose this topic?

Professor Leonard:

“The performance aspect is one of the things I love, and I love my topic. Getting that reaction from students, it makes me feel powerful. It makes me feel like I'm connecting, like what I'm saying is coming across to them. I really love that.”

~ Dt. Amy Leonard, Georgetown University

Well it comes out of my original love of nuns. My first book is all about how the Reformation comes and tries to close down all these convents. It's my favorite topic. Other than Luther, it's my favorite topic. One of the things that they're attacked on is that this idea [that] perpetual virginity is wrong and women can't remain virgins. It's not good for them, and they should get married. Everybody should get married, but women in particular. I was writing about that for the first book, but then it made me really interested in how the woman's body, sexuality, and virginity becomes this huge political and religious topic that happens between both Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century.

It takes on a spiritual weight. I just thought, why are men so obsessed with women's virginity, which they still are? What is going on with this [and] how does religion play into it? How does politics play into it, and what's the reality? Because lots of nuns refuse[d] to leave. So they're being told, no, you can't be perpetual virgins. And many of them are like, screw you. I'm going to remain a perpetual virgin, even in Protestant areas.

For the women, it had a power and an activeness to it. Men see women's virginity in one way that is very passive and negative, whereas women, the way that the nuns were describing it, see it in a much more powerful way. Now, we understand asexuality in a way that we didn't before and we understand different kinds of attraction and ways of viewing our body and sexuality. It made me think that these nuns ha[d] a sexuality and that women who don't have sex still have a sexuality.

Meera:

That's so interesting. I was just wondering on a global scale, are there some regions where we know more about women's history than other regions? And if so, how do we go about developing a more complete global understanding of women's history?

Professor Leonard:

It's very Western centric, and it's very Eurocentric and white centric. A lot of it has to do with the resources. It has to do with who's interested in studying these topics. It has to do with what's published and what's out there. Even within Europe, England is way farther ahead in doing women's history than Germany is. Even though it's not a sexist society in the same way, the academic world is very sexist. You don't have a lot of women in positions as full professors in Germany.

It's something that is spreading more and more. I think that you just keep supporting the education going on in those countries and supporting more people doing it. You just need to hire more people who are doing women and gender in Africa, hire more people who are doing women and gender in the Middle East. Teaching the next generation and supporting research in that and supporting educational outlets within those countries themselves, because you also want it to be something that's indigenous, you want it to be something that's coming out of those worlds as well. It can't just be that there's a bunch of Americans who write about women in India. You want to make sure, but you know, a lot of these other countries, and this is not saying that the West is so great, but a lot of other countries are behind in terms of women's rights as well. They need their own women's movements, and they need their own pulling themselves into that and being interested in that history themselves to keep building this up.

Meera:

Is there one historical fact that you think a lot of people may not know, but it's super interesting? Maybe particularly related to women's history?

Professor Leonard:

It's funny because I was just rereading Wiesner, and the thing that I always think is interesting is where the term spinster comes from. Spinster comes from usually single women who are making a living by textile work, by spinning. They're spinning, and they're good at it. They're making money, so they don't have to get married. Because they are spinning and single, spinster becomes the way of talking about them as these unmarried old women, which I always think is interesting.

There's so many things about women. My favorite thing is that women are everywhere. Women are writing, women are involved, women are doing everything. This idea that they're not there and that all of this is [a] man's world in the past is just false. We know it's false. It's like we know women today, even women who might not have a big voice — you have a mother, you have a sister, you have a daughter. They are there and they are influences. I think that's the big story: ignore them at your peril, because they are hugely important.

Meera:

Why do you think it's important for students to learn about women's history and history in general?

Professor Leonard:

History in general, I think that you can't really understand what's going on around us now without understanding its history. I don't think that if you don't learn history [you] are doomed to repeat it. I don't believe that. We keep on repeating history, we keep on making the same mistakes, and in each generation it's different. The context is different. Learning what happened before is not necessarily going to keep you from making that mistake, but it does help you understand the context and where we've come from. And it gives you a greater understanding of people, of human nature, of the importance of action or inaction. Think about something like Black Lives Matter. You can't understand Black Lives Matter if you don't understand race in the United States, if you don't understand the Civil War, if you don't understand slavery. Black Lives Matter makes no sense without that context. Learning that is hugely important for our everyday world. I also think history is endlessly fascinating. It's just these stories of the past of people doing things that are horrible, that are wonderful, that are inspiring, that are disgusting. You want to know the history of your family. Learning history beyond that I think is just as interesting.

Why women? Because women were a part of it and women were doing things. We think about political history being male. It's not. Women are important in terms of marriage alliances, women are important in terms of regions, in terms of raising the kings, and sometimes being queens on their own. If you look at all of those marriage contracts, women are a part of the economic sphere in terms of inheritance and dowries. You're not getting the full picture if you don't include women, just as you're not getting the full picture if you don't include race, if you don't include poor people. This idea that history is only made by the winners? No. History is made by those who tell it. We tell the stories and yes, it's harder to find the sources for the people who are not the winners, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Telling that story is even more important because it's part of our identity. It's part of where we come from. And we can't understand today, again, without understanding those people of the past.

“You’re not getting the full picture if you don’t include women, just as you’re not getting the full picture if you don’t include race, if you don’t include poor people. This idea that history is only made by the winners? No. History is made by those who tell it. ”

— Dr. Amy Leonard, Georgetown University

Meera:

You inspire students every day through your lectures, and I would know because I'm definitely one of them. But in your 20 years of teaching, can you describe a particular moment when you felt powerful?

Professor Leonard:

My first time teaching. I came straight from grad school, which is very lucky and doesn't happen much anymore that you've walked right into a job like Georgetown right out of grad school. I was teaching on a topic I didn't feel I knew that much about because it was European history and I was doing the fall of Rome, but students started writing down notes and laughing at my jokes. That to me, it's like, oh my God, so they are writing down what I'm saying, which first off, really, I'm not important, [and] you're writing down what I'm saying. Secondly, [I] could get a room to laugh. That's not very intellectual, but it's part of it. I love to lecture. You can tell. I'm a performer at heart in a lot of ways and not everybody is, and it's a little unfair because I'm an extrovert. It's easy for me to get up and talk to people. Not every academic is like that. I have an unfair advantage. This is not something that's taught. I just, I love to gab away. The performance aspect is one of the things I love, and I love my topic. Getting that reaction from students, it makes me feel powerful. It makes me feel like I'm connecting, like what I'm saying is coming across to them. I really love that.

Dr. Amy Leonard, Women’s History Professor | Georgetown University