Gertrude Himmelfarb A scholar who challenged conventions about the Victorians.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gertrude-himmelfarb-11577837798?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
She was an accomplished historian known for rigorous scholarship, brilliant essays, and her forceful defense of morality in democratic politics. We’re referring to Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Monday at age 97.
A native of Brooklyn who earned degrees from the University of Chicago, Himmelfarb achieved intellectual fame as a writer with her third book, “Victorian Minds” (1968). The collection of essays on major figures in the British 19th century challenged the prevailing view of the Victorians as incurious moral prudes.
In that book and several subsequent collections, particularly “Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians” (1986), Himmelfarb contended that the old virtues—temperance, chastity, industry—didn’t repress individual creativity. Instead they enabled a century of cultural flourishing and political stability.
She also wrote with insight on the follies of the French Revolution and the assorted non-philosophies known as postmodernism, and she was unafraid to criticize eminent peers when she thought their writings wrongheaded or precious. She memorably found fault with Roy Jenkins’s biography of Winston Churchill for failing to acknowledge what every ordinary person knew: Churchill was a great man.
Bea, as friends called her, was a forceful personality who earned her reputation as a historian and intellectual in her own right before the age of identity politics. She was also married to Irving Kristol, the father of American neoconservatism who died in 2009. As a frequent presence in the nation’s finest intellectual magazines, she exercised a powerful influence on two generations of scholars, journalists and policy makers.
Particularly influential was her 1995 book “The De-Moralization of Society,” in which she argued that the modern policy of treating the poor as neutral objects instead of human beings—as recipients of perpetual aid instead of moral actors—had helped to create a dangerous culture of dependency. The following year’s reform of the welfare system, passed by a GOP Congress and signed by a Democratic President, bore the marks of her insight.
Himmelfarb was an example of humanities scholarship for all to follow, and the American academy would be better today if more did.
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