Taking History Out of Context

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Submitted by Maureen Costello on February 15, 2011
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There are three questions students of history should always ask:

  1. What’s the context?
  2. What’s the context?
  3. What’s the context?

Yes, I know, it’s a play on the old real estate joke (location, location, location), but the importance of understanding how a quote or an event sits in terms of what’s happening around it cannot be overstated. 

I could now summon all-too-common examples of people cutting and pasting selective quotes from the Founders about religion or passages from the Quran about jihad.

But those are third-rail topics that always trigger intense argument. Instead, I’ll illustrate my point with something seemingly benign that I heard today on the radio while driving into work. It was one of those “On This Day in History” items:

On Feb. 15. 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Well, isn’t that nice? And taken out of context, it suggests that women “made it” long before they actually did. It also suggests that it all came about because those great defenders of rights, Rutherford B. Hayes and the members of the 45th Congress, decided to do the right thing. When we take our history in little doses of factoids doled out like pieces of candy, we lose the facility for critical questioning that is essential both to understand history and to be effective citizens.

And here’s a short list of facts that might be considered alongside the item above:

  • The law passed through the singular efforts of Belva Ann Lockwood, who lobbied Congress for five years to get it passed.
  • When Lockwood completed her studies at National University Law School (now George Washington Law School), the school refused to grant her a diploma because she was female.
  • Earlier, in 1870, Ada Kepley became the first American woman to graduate from law school. Although she had a diploma from the Union College of Law (now Northwestern), the state of Illinois denied her a license to practice law. That law wasn’t overturned until 1881. Not one to be defeated, Kepley went on to earn a Ph.D. as well.
  • In more progressive Iowa, Arabella “Belle” Mansfield became the first American woman admitted to the bar, in 1869.
  • And just because a handful of women were fighting incredible opposition to work as lawyers doesn’t mean women even enjoyed the vote. In 1872, the year before Belva Lockwood finished law school, Susan B. Anthony was arrested in New York for voting—illegally, of course—in that year’s presidential election.
  • It would be another 40 years after Hayes signed this bill for ratification of the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote.
  • Women wouldn’t be admitted to Harvard Law School until 1950.
  • The first woman wouldn’t be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court until 1981.
  • Of the 112 justices who have sat on the Supreme Court, 108 have been men.
  • According to the American Bar Association, only 32 percent of all attorneys in the United States are women (as of 2008), and they earn, on average, only 77.5 percent of the typical salary of a male lawyer (in 2004).

And that is context.

Costello is director of Teaching Tolerance.

Comments

Typically, the reason that

Submitted by Keith Moore on 16 February 2011 - 12:31am.

Typically, the reason that context is important is that it informs the truthfulness of a claim or comment. Something that is presented out of context is true in an absolute sense (the words are indeed the words that were said or written) but are presented in a way that deceives the hearer or reader about what is being said. Historical context, on the other hand, informs the most correct way to perceive something. Historical context can make a progressive action seem ordinary or cynical or it can make what would appear to be an action of little consequence all the more impressive. Unlike context of statements, however, you can pile extra and irrelevant details on to something to diminish it far below what is justified by the truth. None of the extra detail is factually incorrect but correct is not the same as true.
Take, for example, the law signed by Rutherford B. Hayes permitting women lawyers to argue cases before the Supreme Court. The truth of the matter is that a law establishing that a woman attorney may argue cases before the highest level of the federal appeals court establishes, by implication, a power to argue cases before all OTHER levels of the federal appeals court. This undoubtedly created pressure to extend this permission to all courts since the federal courts generally trump state courts and in the context of the times, as established by the extra detail, this was a very important step forward.
But then more detail is piled on. Details are added that take note of how women were not treated equally. The detail is added that Iowa was more progressive than the federal government. An irrelevant detail about how women were denied universal suffrage was added. Another irrelevant detail about when the first woman justice was added to the US Supreme Court was added. Yet a third irrelevant detail about how women are still (allegedly) discriminated against is added. None of these details actually enlighten someone who's interested in the 1879 law but they sure do their part to make the good action look like a small bone being tossed to women that really did nothing important. Piling on unnecessary and irrelevant details is a form of deception about history and the motive is invariably to distort an event's significance downwards. This is not how a serious and honest historian treats history and this is certainly not how a student ought to be taught about history. Context is important but teachers ought to be wary about piling on details and "context" that does nothing but warp a clear understanding of the history being considered.