The Definition of History is Rigged to Exclude

Remedial Herstory Blog

The Definition of History is Rigged to Exclude

7/11/2020

In my secondary history classroom, I always start the year with the question, “What is history?” On the surface this is a straightforward question. Most students respond, “the study of the past.” But what is the past? When an event happens to all people agree on how it played out? History was once current events. How many different perspectives are there in current events? The same is true in history. Is it possible to know what truly happened or what it felt like to be there? There could be as many histories as there are human witnesses. History has been written by victors, suppressing the story of the losers, therefore it has not been a truthful account of what happened, but rather the dominating account. History is also the study of the written record. Given that most of human history women were overwhelmingly illiterate, denied opportunities to record or publish, the method of historical knowing, denies women a space. Most importantly, history puts emphasis on spheres of public life that women were barred from: politics, economics, and the military. If emphasis were put on the family, medicine, and food, women would dominate history. The choice of emphasis is fundamentally exclusive of women. Good history is derived consensus of what happened based on evidence. And, as more evidence comes forward, the history changes. History is a moving target. It is alive. It is ever changing.

But this is not how some students learn history. In some classrooms they are told what happened. In some classrooms they read from a textbook that tells them what they need to know: a standard version of history… but there is no standard. There are an infinite number of sources and perspectives to consider. No such document exists for current events. Every newspaper has a different take. In history we find our truths, just like in current events, by the strength of the source, by the evidence that is presented, and sometimes even by an average of everything that is being said.
His-story serves the few. Our-story, which includes her-story involves the voices, stories, and experiences of all of us. We need our story to be told. Why are the lives of women separated from the lives of men in the same coherent story of the history of people? There’s a neat psychological phenomenon that helps illustrate the importance of our-story: the wisdom of the crowd. Aristotle first referenced it, modern juries are based on it, and Galton found evidence to support it.[1] When a crowd at a fair in 1906 speculated for fun on the weight of an ox, Galton found that the median of all their guesses was within one percent of the actual weight of the ox. This was significantly closer than the likelihood of any one person’s guess being accurate. What does this mean for historical study? Merely that the average of the stories told is perhaps the closest to the truth. Our history is better told, more truthful and accurate, when the voices of everyone are included.
However, history being his-story has a long… history. The first professional historians were Greek and Roman, it is from them that our precedent for defining history comes. Beard explains that in the ancient tradition, female subordination was an important part of being a man and was deeply engrained in the culture and accounts of the time. She did a gendered analysis of Homer’s The Odyssey using Penelope as an example. In the story, she said, “as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to control the public utterance and to silence the female of the species.“[2] She explained that entire works were dedicated to the absurdity and inferiority of female power. Examining the stories about the mythical Amazon women, Beard concluded that, “The underlying point was that it was the duty of man to save civilisation from the rule of women.“[3] She elegantly showed that oratory and power in the west have always seemed to be a male sphere of influence.
To illustrate how history was male defined, historian Janis L. McDonald showed the failure of historians to include the work of women. She used Mercy Otis Warren, the US’s first historian, as a “case in point.” She dissected her life, her writings, her overall legacy, and the general devaluing of her historical works and found that the descriptive biographical approach to history writing used up to the 1950s would by definition fail to include women because their benchmarks for inclusion were defined by men. She cited the earlier work of historian William Raymond Smith who too claimed that, “Their categories and periodization have been masculine by definition, for they have defined significance primarily by power, influence, and visible activity in the world of political and economic affairs.”[4] McDonald explained that the standards for historical inclusion, while good for reliability and validity, and provide a clear measure of how widespread the readership was, almost literally exclude women. She said:
The assessment of ideas considered important for historical purposes has placed emphasis on published books, monographs, and political documents. Women have had little access to these forms of expression, and their other forms of expression have received little or no attention. Additionally, women have often become the focus of historical attention only in so far as their lives reveal information about important men. This neglect is partly a consequence of the difficulty of obtaining sources about the women themselves. As a result, their lives could only be explained in terms of the men who surrounded them. They have also suffered from a prioritization of male thought and action.[5]
So it’s not that women have not been writing and making history, it’s that the process of canonizing their history is rigged to exclude them.

Citations:
[1] F. Galton, "Vox populi," Nature, 1949(75), p.450–451.
[2] Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto, (Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017), p.4
[3] Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto, (Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017), p.4
[4] Willam Raymond Smith, History As Argument: Three Patriot Historians Of The American Revolution 17 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), p.207.
[5] Janis L. McDonald, “The Need for Contextual ReVision: Mercy Otis Warren, A Case in Point,” 1992, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=yjlf p.186-187.

Author

Kelsie Eckert is the founder of The Remedial Herstory Project and host of the Remedial Herstory podcast. You can read more about her on the About page.

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The history curriculum in schools is insufficient in their representation of women’s contribution to past events. This blog aims to address that. While teachers want to include women’s history, they have not had access to the training, modeling, and resources to do it effectively. Women make up fifty percent of the global population, and yet are in a small fraction of events discussed in school. Women’s choices have been harrowing, infamous, and monumental, and yet their stories are so rarely associated with mainstream history. Ask your average high school graduate, or even college graduate, to name 20 significant men in history and the list flows easily. Ask that same person to name 20 women and the names drag, if they come at all. This case in point leaves us with conclusions like, “women did not do as much” or “women’s stories were not recorded.” These assertions justify our own indifference to the history of half the human race, and could not be further from the truth.

The flaws and impact of how we teach history are many. Women often get summarized in history in vague terms of their roles, rights, or responsibilities, and individual women are rarely mentioned. Never will you see a section in a history book where men are generalized in this way. If we were to generalize gendered behaviors, it is clear that human qualities such as powerful, innovative, and disruptive regularly make the books. Not surprisingly, feminine qualities of compassion, maintaining, and healing do not make the books as these are often grassroots ideals and are not as easily taught in hisotry. These self-effacing qualities doom women to being underrepresented, yet can you imagine a world without them? And further, when women’s actions have all the hallmarks of history, somehow their accomplishments still don’t make the cut, or do so with the caveat of “for a woman” tacked on.

We study history to learn from our past. Girls have been denied the opportunity to fully learn about women’s struggles and triumphs in schools. Public history teachers, like myself, are stuck in a cycle because we never learned women’s history either . We have failed to mend the errors of our own educations, and are continuing to regurgitate these errors to our students.

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