When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.
Interpretation
Women's history was once overlooked and undervalued, but significant progress has been made in recognizing its importance.
This quote by Gerda Lerner emphasizes the initial challenges faced in the field of women's history, highlighting how women's contributions and narratives were largely ignored for a long time. Lerner's work played a crucial role in establishing the legitimacy of women's history as a significant field of study, pushing back against the notion that women's experiences and achievements were not worthy of historical record and analysis.
In practice
In a women's studies class discussing the evolution of historical narratives.
Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.
Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping' them. Such a world does not exist - never has.
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.
'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'
The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.
In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
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