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.
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.
When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.
One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.
It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.