SOURCE: Smith, Hilda L. “Women Historians and Women's History: A Conflation of Absence.” Journal of Women's History 4, no. 1 (spring 1992): 133-41.

In the following review, Smith discusses Novick's problematic treatment of female historians and developments in the field of women's history in That Noble Dream.

In That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, Peter Novick has given us a key to understanding the evolution of professional historians from the 1890s to today. By focusing on questions of objectivity, he has identified a problem that concerns each of us as historians, whether expressed explicitly in our writing or not. Following the appearance of his work, which received reviews marking it as a work of singular importance to the profession, a panel of critics discussed it at the 1990 American Historical Association meeting. Their commentary was ultimately published in the American Historical Review, where Novick was given an...