Women tell other women that they are not crazy, dumb or inferior: a 600 year history. Part 2.
"Women have always been 50% of the population, but only occupy around 0.5% of 3500 years of recorded history." - Dr. Bettany Hughes
I recently started writing some of the scripts for Breaking Down Patriarchy’s YouTube series Patriarchy 101.1
My first two assignments were to cover second wave feminism.
Ok, no problem. I’ve read the Feminine Mystique. I’ve seen Ms. Americana. I’m no stranger to a Gloria Steinem interview.
But as I dug, and mind you I only dug for a few days, I was stunned at my own ignorance.
How have I never heard of Aileen Hernandez, the first woman to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission? How have I never heard the story of how bra burning (incorrectly) became synonymous with feminism? How have I never heard of the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 where tens of thousands of women all over the country went on strike from work and housework?
My own lack of education, yet again stunned and saddened me.
I found I was not alone.
I came across a documentary called Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation by film maker Jennifer Lee, who edited such films as Forest Gump and Back to the Future.
When Jennifer learned of the stories of what it actually took to get anti-discrimination laws passed during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s- she was shocked she had never heard of them before.
So she interviewed dozens of women involved and made her film. She has received hundreds of responses all saying the same thing: How have I never heard of these women before? How have I never hear their stories?
Jennifer explains one reason this happens:
“My daughter’s 4th-grade textbook History-Social Science, California Studies (Houghton Mifflin) includes a six-page chapter, “A Call for Equality,” that covers the years 1960 to 1975. There is a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Act, and Cesar Chavez. Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, is only mentioned briefly. There is just one sentence about the Women’s Liberation Movement: “Women also spoke out against unequal treatment in the 1960s.” - Jennifer Lee in TIME magazine
Not one of the women mentioned by name. The message is clear to students: “You don’t need to remember these women.”
The September 1970 cover of Life magazine prophesied that the women’s liberation movement is “the revolution that will affect everybody.”
They prophesied correctly. Think of how different our world is today than it was in 1970 because women aren’t legally allowed to be discriminated against in the workforce, because women can now own property, get loans, have credit cards, serve on juries and have access to birth control.
These changes changed the world. Yet what do we know about the thousands of women who banned together to fight for these freedoms? The women who organized groups in their living rooms, hired lawyers, went to court, and testified in Congress?
Compare that with how many stories and people we know of America gaining freedom from Britain.- how many pages of textbooks and days of our education is dedicated to learning these stories and names.
When white men gain independence from other white men- history crowns them important heroes and ensures we all learn their stories. Their legacies memorialized in textbooks and museums, with plaques and statues.
When women gain independence from men? We call them man-hating feminists and never bother to learn their names or stories.
Our public memorials make it clear which revolutions are important. And which are not:
“Only nine of the 100 statutes in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building are of women. Not one of them is a woman from the Women’s Liberation Movement. I have never seen a park or an elementary school named for a feminist from that time. Moreover, there is not even one federal holiday in the United States named for a woman.” - Jennifer Lee in TIME magazine
One woman interviewed in Jennifer’s film, Sheila Tobias, responsible for establishing the first women’s studies course at Cornell University in 1970, said, “One of the great travesties of growing up in the ’50s was not knowing about women’s history except for a brief moment in time in which there was suffrage.”
Sheila knew a few of the suffragist’s names, but not that they were arrested, jailed and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes exactly as her peers fighting for gender equality in the workforce were arrested, jailed and on hunger strikes.
Women in the 1970s had to reinvent the wheel because they did not know the lessons learned from the women in the 1870s.
Nothing has changed in the way of learning women’s history since the 50s unfortunately.
Time marches on and with it our memory of how it came to be that women couldn’t get fired for being pregnant.
As if fairies dropped down one day and granted women birth control and the right to own property and a credit card. No struggle. No fight. No heroes.
Gerda Lerner established the first graduate program for the study of women’s history that had ever been made in our country in 1972.
(1972!)
It did not occur to us to diligently study the history of half the human population until 50 years ago. And even then it was thought of as an “exotic specialty.” Even now, graduate programs in women’s studies are rare. And almost always only studied by women.
Well women don’t really contribute much to human progress anyway, do they?
The argument that women aren’t fit to lead because they are less intelligent or too emotional has been made for centuries. Men like Rousseau and Jordan Peterson say “Where’s your proof? If women are so intelligent where are their contributions? They aren’t the ones leading corporate, scientific or government innovation.”
Infuriatingly, we have to have this conversation every generation.
In addition to the fact that women have been systemically kept from spaces where innovations are made, when there have been inventions and contributions by women, those have been erased and contributed to a man instead.
This is why we’ve heard of Socrates, but not his mentor Aspasia. This is why we all learn of Pythagoras but never of his writing partner Theano.
This is why we’ve all heard of Albert Einstein, but not Mileva Marić- his first wife, a fellow physicist who contributed to much of Einstein’s work.
We have heard of Marie Curie, first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, but we don’t usually hear that the committee wanted to grant the award only to her husband Pierre, but he refused to accept the prize without her. If he hadn’t done that, we would probably never have heard of her.
“If you discover the structure of DNA, you win the Nobel prize right? Well, depends on who you are.”
This is a quote from the MIT professor Nancy Hopkins who we spoke of in Part 1 of this series. She is speaking here of how the discovery of the double helix is attributed to James Watson and Francis Crick, even though they stole Rosalind Franklin’s research and designs out of her lab to make their “discovery.”
This phenomenon is far from new. In fact in 1883 Matilda Gage published a paper called “Woman as Inventor” pushing back on the commonly held belief that “women possess no inventive or mechanical genius” by citing dozens of examples of women’s inventions being attributed to men.
Learning about how women were erased from the history of the C-section ruined my day
This is a picture of Trota of Solerno- a physician and midwife who lived in Italy in the 12th century. I’m guessing you haven’t heard of her, even if you study or practice medicine. But if you were a midwife or physician living in medieval Europe between the 12th and 15th centuries, it’s very likely you would have heard of her.
This is because her teachings were compiled in a book called De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women"), which together with two other books on women’s health formed “The Trotula texts” which became the go-to reference for all things women’s health for 500 years from the 11th to the 16th centuries. It was translated into at least five languages.
Still today more than 130 copies of the Latin text exist and over 60 copies of other translations. If we have that many today, imagine how many more there must have been in its prime.
In 1566, after the printing press was popularized, Hans Casper Wolf incorporated parts of the Trotula into a collection of gynecological texts but changed the author’s name from “Trotula” to “Eros” (a male name).
I only know about Trota because I read all of
’s Substack articles and she wrote one about Trota and how “her methods for cesarian section and surgery of the perineum are classic descriptions which still influence medicine today.”After reading her article I wondered if medical texts today make any mention of Trota. So off I popped down a rabbit hole of the history of the C-section.
The first article I clicked on was called “The History of the Caesarian Section” published on Healthline (whose byline is “medical information and health advice you can trust” with each article being “medically reviewed by experts”). It says:
“The Cesarean section is credited as being named after the great Julius Caesar. While the exact timeline is debatable… some believe Caesar was the first one to be born via C-section…
While Caesar might get credit for the name, historians believe that the C-section was used before his time. It was primarily used to help birth babies whose mothers were dying or died from birth. Because of this, no narratives exist from mothers who had C-sections before the 1500s."
No narratives exist??
NO NARRATIVES EXIST?!?!
Squinting through my stink eye, I then went in search of a history a little more reputable and thorough. I found the National Library of Medicine’s three-part series on the History of the Cesarian Section.
But my stink eye was to find no reprieve. There is not one mention of any woman by name who contributed to the c-section in this official history.2 There is a brief nod to nameless midwives in the Middle Ages. A mention of explorers in the 18th century reporting that midwives in Africa were performing C-sections, but no woman by name.
Meanwhile, J. Marion Sims3, creator of the forceps, is hailed as the “father of gynecology.”
Medical history now cites that “the first official cesarian section” was performed by Dr. F.M. Prevost in 1824 in Donaldson, Louisiana. It says so right on the sign to their town:
We do have historical evidence of c-sections being performed all over the world- by Japanese Sanbas, Mexican parteras and African midwives- but when it wasn’t by men, the records have not been preserved or cited in “official” records.
The book A History of Midwifery in the United States explains the erasure of midwifery of all different cultures in this way:
“What all these midwives in the late 1800s and early 1900s (European immigrant, African American and Caucasian grannies, Japanese Sanba, Spanish Californiana, and Mexican parteras) had in common was commitment to and respect within their communities, and the empirical learning of midwifery. They also had in common a lack of access to the existing health care system, lack of access to schools that would have educated them in the latest update of rapidly developing medical science and discoveries, lack of legal recognition and regulation, and lack of a national professional organization all compounded by racial or ethnic and gender discrimination against them. Furthermore, because of distance, poverty, and language differences, they could not communicate with each other either through a national journal or national conferences. All these limitations mitigated against their survival and ultimately their voices were silenced.” - Helen Varney and Joyce Thompson A History of Midwifery
So. To re-cap: cutting a woman’s stomach open to deliver a baby—an operation performed on women by women all over the globe for over a thousand years—is named after a man and “was invented by a man.”
“Without documents, there is no history. And women left very few documents behind”
Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Without documents, there is no history. And women left very few documents behind.”
This is because for much of history, women were not taught to read or write. Fewer than half the women in the 1700s and early 1800s were literate.
In documenting the life of Benjamin Franklin- historian Jill Lepore notes that under Massachusett’s Poor Law in the 1700s, boys learned to both read and write, but girls, if they were included at all, were only taught to read, not write.
Ben Franklin and his 10 brothers all learned to read and write, but we only have record of one of his sisters writing him letters and only because Ben taught her how.
Even when women could read and write, they were not allowed to publish. On the rare occasions they were published, they usually had to write under a man’s name for their writings to be circulated.
Women have always contributed to human progress, but their accomplishments weren’t recognized. If they were recognized, they weren’t recorded for future generations. When they were recorded, they haven’t been spread or included as part of history.
Leaving men to assume women haven’t contributed or an innately less able to contribute. And leaving each generation of women to wake up half way through their lives thinking “wait a second… I don’t think this is fair. I don’t think I am inferior actually.”
How different would my life have been if I could have grown up reading Catherine de Pizan and Mary Wollestonecraft? If we could all share and grow from centuries of women’s wisdom?
Instead, each generation, we keep reinventing the wheel.
I wonder if Faridah D. knew when she said, “The only way to protect women is to make sure they don’t need protection.”
that 150 years ago Mary Edwards Walker said the exact same thing. “You men are not our protectors… If you were, who would there be to protect us from?”
Because we never learn our history we keep making the same mistakes
The other unfortunate thing about never learning our own history is that we can’t learn from our mistakes. Consequently, we keep making the exact same ones.
Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Lady Stanton repeatedly refused to include the dire needs of black women in their movement of first wave feminism. The National American Woman Suffrage Association did not allow Black women to attend their conventions. Black women often had to march separately from or behind white women in suffrage parades.
Second wave feminism had more of a veneer of inclusion, but still repeatedly did not include or prioritize black women or their needs. Consequently many black women broke off from the feminist movement. Aileen Hernandez, co-founder and second president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) left the organization when they refused to take on racial inequity and year after year elected white women to every officer position.
Again and again and again in feminist movements, white women center themselves and ignore or betray the needs of lower class women, BIPOC women and queer women.
There is good reason for Rachel Cargle to say that feminism is just white supremacy in heels.
Instead of working to dismantle patriarchy and classism, white feminism has repeatedly just tried to climb up the hierarchy in our existing corrupt power structures- focusing on individual accumulation at the expense of all those left at the bottom.
Feminism also makes the repeated mistake of pitting women against each other. Carol Hanisch, the organizer of the protest of 1968 Miss America pageant, thought to be the kick off event of second wave feminism, had some regrets from her event: “one of the biggest mistakes of the whole pageant was our anti-womanism...Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of our sisters who suffer with us.”
Continually reinventing the wheel
When I first read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique written in 1962, I had a similar reaction to when I read Sonja Johnson’s From Housewife to Heretic.
Wait a second- how on earth has this woman from 70 years ago lived my life? How can she articulate exactly how empty I feel as a stay at home mom today? I thought it was just me?
Then when I read Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper written in 1892, I had the exact same thought. Yes! Trapped inside the wallpaper- that is exactly how it feels! How could a woman writing from 130 years ago write out that same feeling I am experiencing so viscerally today?!
Did she have a time machine, live my life and then travel back in time to describe it?!
I wasted so many years thinking there must be something wrong with me when I couldn’t meet the many requirements for selflessness, meekness, beauty and perfection that patriarchy placed on me.
Like Sonja Johnson I believed that because men were spiritual leaders, I must believe them when they told me what my purpose was. Like Catherine de Pizan I eventually looked around me and realized that my lived experience was at odds with what my church and society taught me about women.
I could have saved so much time, loneliness and self-doubt if I had grown up knowing what I know now of women’s history.
Instead I’ll just keep telling other women about it.
“Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.” - Gerda Lerner
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This is the closest: “Sometime between 1815 and 1821, James Miranda Stuart Barry performed the operation while masquerading as a man and serving as a physician to the British army in South Africa.”
J. Marion Sims is also known for performing experimental operations on enslaved black women.
Mary Edwards Walker said the exact same thing. “You men are not our protectors… If you were, who would there be to protect us from?”🔥
If infinite power and protection can only come WITH others and finite, illusory power, over others—it makes sense that our culture’s ubiquitous domination brainwashing has kept men feeling threatened by women’s and marginalized people’s power for thousands of years.
Seems pretty simple, actually. Historically, female bodies have had the power to grow, protect, and feed THE most vulnerable other bodies (babies). Whether we actually birth children or not, our evolutionary adaptions to prioritize the needs of the collective and to be resilient to pain and abuse in order to effectively protect both ourselves and others more effectively in the future is so fucking upsetting to people under domination brainwashing’s lies that they often have no conscious idea why they hate us so much for our true power WITH.
Thank you using your true power for the good of all women and marginalized people, Celeste.
Studying history is a political act. Writing history is revolutionary