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Comment on Ringelheim's "Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research"

In "Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research" (Signs 10, no. 4 [Summer 1985]: 741-61), Joan Ringelheim criticizes her own scholarly work. Her efforts to be honest in her research uncover a snarl in the threads with which she has been weaving her understanding of feminist politics. I believe it is a snarl that feminist scholars must face (myself included), but a snarl that has been covered up by some traditions of feminist thought and crocheted into an ornamental rosette by others. In the context of a scholarly, feminist journal like Signs, I would label the snarl "the problem of the political place of the feminist scholar"-a problem that asks what sort of knowledge feminist research on women yields, and for whom, and for what purposes. When I speak of feminist scholars' research, I am addressing two questions: Which methods yield sound and respectful research on women and in general (an issue shared with many researchers who try to do honest work)? What do we mean by the "politics" that "infuse" feminist scholarship and make feminist researchers politically distinct from traditional scholars, that is, how is scholarship political? As far as the first issue goes, feminist consciousness has guided research in such a way that feminists did not simply add a new topic (women) to existing fields; they improved some of the ways research was done. Feminist scholarship is interdisciplinary, not only in content but in the structure of women's studies in colleges and universities and in the makeup of other research groups and institutes. Because of this, a feminist scholar can bring the fruits of her disciplinary training to her work. She can contribute to the