Sometimes, when I tell people I concentrate my historical studies on women’s and gender history, they find themselves taken aback. They’ll ask, “why do you need a specific focus on women? Aren’t they just a part of history?”
They are, but they’ve been written out of our narrative of what counts as “history.”
When we think about women in history, especially for less modern history, often we go to names like Abigail Adams and Mary Todd Lincoln. So often, these women are famous because they are tied to famous men: the “first lady effect.” Even the names we can produce from early American history that are not tied to male politicians, like Pocahontas, have stories that are vastly misremembered and romanticized, because many of the sources we have on them come from men’s perspectives.
For a class last semester, I was tasked with researching and writing a brand new Wikipedia article on a topic in early American Women’s History. According to The Lily, there are about 15 million biographies on Wikipedia in English, and only 17 percent are about women. If women were written as a part of history, as my naysayers claim they are, shouldn’t that figure look more like 51 percent?
Once I got to researching for my article, however, it was easy to see why women make up so little of Wikipedia’s content. I could understand why the women on the provided list did not have an article already. The sources are, frankly, limited. And those that did exist had only tiny fragments of information, leaving me and other women’s historians to piece together whatever information we could find and hope it produced a semblance of a complete picture. (Side note: I chose to write about the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, first government recognized institution established for women’s higher education in the United States. It’s so surreal to google it and have my article be one of the first results!)
The sources I found represented the struggle of women’s historians well: very few were actually written by women. The Academy was founded by a man, and many classes were taught by men. Women’s voices, even at the institution, were not amplified in a space created for them. So often, women’s historians must use documents that were written by men to interpret aspects of women’s pasts. It can be frustrating to feel like women’s work and writing was less valued, simply because it is not as well preserved.
I research and write on women’s history because women represent such a large community of people whose voices have been erased but deserve to be heard. Writing women’s history is an immensely rewarding process, even with the obstacles we encounter. There is always more work to be done to bring the voices of women to the forefront, and Women’s History Month is great place to start.