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.
Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten
The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.
If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.
The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
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