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.
We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.
America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.
In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Listen my children and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.
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