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Writing women’s history
There comes a point when you read history that you start to wonder where all the women are. Yes, of course Henry VIII had six wives, and both Elizabeths made outstanding queens, and of course everyone knows about Maggie, but in the overarching scheme of things women are still lacking from the historical narrative. When you go digging they are visible, vibrant, present, but you have to actually want to go digging to see them there. None of this is new, the first feminists were acutely aware of this issue, and you can see echoes of it in the treatment of Hypatia, Sapho, and Mary Magdelene, erased from history to the point that their memory is fragments of text. When it comes to writing women’s history those of us who want to read it, reclaim it, own it, have always struggled to find good narratives.
My first degree was social and cultural history, one of those early 2000s degrees that not many people applied to do, and even fewer took. I was the only person in my year doing the course. Yet, for all the eclectic nature of the course, the one thing that stuck with me was that searching for women in history like mining gold, hard work but worth it in the end. What has been exhilarating for me over the last six months of 2023 is the explosion of women in history books being published by reputable mainstream publishers. The sort of texts usually reserved for headline men, chunky, beefy, coffee table weights…
