The Historiography of the Holocaust

16
Gender and the Family
Lisa Pine
‘The road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men
as men and women as women.’ 1 Yet, the subject of gender is a relative newcomer
in the wider field of Holocaust studies. 2 It is only in the last twenty years
that this area has been explored. Before this time, the subject was barely
touched for a number of reasons. First, the field of Holocaust studies itself was
quite limited in its scope and development from the immediate post-war years
until the 1960s and 1970s. 3 Only as certain other issues and areas were
researched did questions about women and the family come onto the agenda
for research. Second, questions pertaining to gender simply were not asked. It
took until the era of ‘second-wave feminism’ in the 1970s, with new developments
and trends in historical awareness about the history of women and rendering
them ‘visible’, for these issues to be raised. As a result of feminist scholarship,
the concept of gender as an analytical tool developed. Third, the state of the
available sources was not conducive to advancing research in this area. It took
until the 1970s for a proliferation of survivors’ memoirs to appear, as well as
collected testimonies, which became an important source for researchers in
this field. Gender studies of the Holocaust, therefore, appeared only once the
field had developed to a certain point. They emerged as a response to existing
research and available sources within the wider field of Holocaust studies, and
indeed women’s studies. Hence, asking what happened to women and using
women’s perspectives to comprehend the Holocaust have become important
new developments in the field of Holocaust studies since the early 1980s.
Pioneering articles published by Joan Ringelheim and Sybil Milton in 1984
signalled the way forward, but it is only much more recently that the area has
begun to expand with conferences and books focusing exclusively on the subject.
In ‘The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust’, Ringelheim
put forward the argument that women had been ignored in the literature
on the Holocaust, which she termed ‘gender-neutral’. 4 Women had been either
erased or obscured in the ‘universal framework’ of Holocaust experiences.
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