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.
I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.
Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.
Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America's enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
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