Remedial history months

It's Women's History month. For those who might wonder why we still need such a thing, Ruth Rosen explains spells it out in an article published at Open Democracy last Sunday. She begins:

"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” —Gerda Lerner

Aside from the Republican’s relentless War on Women, let me offer you another reason why even one token month is still necessary to America’s political culture.

I’ve just finished reading a book titled The Season of the Witch, written by David Talbot, who founded Salon.com in 1995, the first web magazine in the United States, known for breaking investigative journalistic stories. The book is an evocative political, social and cultural history of San Francisco from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Since he dealt with every trend and movement, often in overheated prose, I kept waiting—and waiting--for him to describe the sudden explosion of the women’s liberation movement.

Astonishingly, Talbot didn’t even write one paragraph about the women’s movement, which certainly transformed American political and social culture more profoundly than did the two chapters he devotes to the San Francisco 49ers football team.

Did his publisher tell him that half the population was dispensable? Did his agent convince him that including feminism would diminish the appeal and profits? Is he just ignorant?

This is just one example why we need Women’s History Month in the United States. It’s to prevent students, teachers, intellectuals and writers from forgetting about half its population.

The origins of this month reflect an era in which the grassroots efforts of a few prescient individuals created a national month dedicated to informing the public about women’s lives. It was during the late 1970s when a growing number of women, grasping the subordination of women in the present, began to wonder about what women did in the past. The idea of “women history” was still very new, and yet a group of women on the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women initiated a "Women's History Week" celebration for 1978.

Rosen goes on to recount some of the history of the area of the discipline called "Women's History." And then she concludes:

Fast forward to 2014 and one has to ask, so is Women’s History Month still necessary? Didn’t we transform the curriculum in all the disciplines, change laws and customs, legalize abortion, force everyone to call us Ms. instead of Mrs. and Miss, and teach students not to faint when a female professor entered the room?

Unfortunately, it is still necessary to have a token month devoted to women’s lives. Every generation of little girls and women need to learn their past so that they can imagine a future in which gender equality is the norm and not the exception.

Understanding women’s history is also an essential antidote to the Republican’s “war on women.” We are no longer in the midst of just a “backlash” against the women’s movements, as was true in the 1980s; feminism is the object of a serious right-wing attack against women’s rights, especially women’s reproduction freedom. And even our friends and allies, writing about San Francisco’s cultural history, clearly need reminding that women transform history.

No one ever expected Women’s History Month to change our political culture, at least not by itself. It doesn’t change the double standard that still exists when a woman runs for electoral office. (Did she spend too much or too little time with her children?) Nor does it change the endless scrutiny of women’s appearances—attacks against Hillary Clinton’s thighs or descriptions of Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas who stood up for women’s reproductive rights as “Abortion Barbie.”

I've sometimes wondered, and I know that others have, too, why we still have such remedial "token" months as "Black History Month" (which was last month) and "Women's History Month." Black people should be an integral part of all non-specialized histories of the US, and women should be, too. When I was a university teaching assistant in the 1970s, one of the professors I taught for excoriated me after a visit to one of my classes, chiding me with the assertion that "Women and children are irrelevant to 19th-century European history." He, I already knew, was clinging to what Lerner calls "a world that does not exist"--and did not really exist even in the 1970s. That was forty years ago. Do people still cling to worlds that shove anyone who isn't a white male so far to the margins that those worlds, too, do not really exist? We know they do. Will we still need these token months forty years hence? You tell me.

A detail from Robinson's Galileo's Dream

I've been slowly working my enjoyable way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream. I'm about two-thirds of the way through (it's a big book!) so I can't review it yet or offer any substantive comments other than that Robinson has drawn an amazingly vivid, plausible character who is very much of his time in the way most historical figures in fiction tend not to be. (For an excellent review, check out Nic Clarke's here.) An interesting aspect of reading the novel at such a leisurely pace is that I'm finding that details from the book linger in my thoughts, long after the scene in which they occurred, and because of that leisurely pace, I've granted myself ample time to think about them. One of these details in particular is affording me immense satisfaction. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it's because I am so often vexed and irritated by novels embedded in history. Of course Galileo, in this novel, is set in at least one alternate timestream to our own (at least so far as his own personal biography is concerned). The passage in which the detail is set depicts Galileo talking with Hera, a woman he is visiting via "entangler," living in the 31st century. Hera has just mentioned that a century before, people in her culture were in favor of spending enormous amounts of energy ("the complete sacrifice of the two outermost gas giants") placing entanglers in various times and places in the past. She remarks,

"It has all since been reconsidered. By no means everyone agrees it was a good idea."

"I should think not," Galileo said. "Why did they do it at all?"

"Some wanted to retroject science analeptically into a time earlier than it had naturally appeared, in the hope of making human history a bit less dire."

"Why bother, now that you are here?"

"The intervening years were more dire than you know. And we are not just here; we are there too. You are not really comprehending what I have told you.We are all connected and alive in the manifold of manifolds."

Galileo shrugged. "Things still seem to happen one after the next."

She shook her head. "In any case, what you see here is a damaged and traumatized humanity. It was felt for a while that work on the past could make that better. A kind of redemption."

"I see, I think."

And then Galileo, bored, changes the subject.

There are two sets of thoughts that come together for me when reading this passage. The first set of thought is about how an educated person living in early 17th-century northern Italy conceptualizes the past. For such a person, their image of the past is likely to be the one conceptualized by the humanists in the previous three centuries: that the peak age of man lay in the past-- in classical Greek and Roman cultures. (Vico, one of the earliest intellectuals to think about history as History, was born in 1668, a couple of generations' Galileo's junior.) The whole idea of the "Renaissance," after all, is tied up with the idea of leaping over centuries of the past, to try to recover (and maybe even "progress" from) what has been lost. It's rather sad, actually, to think that they had so little sense of more recent history and thinkers (say, those in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) that they did some reinventing of the wheel (again!). Robinson correctly depicts Galileo as feeling irked by the authority of Aristotle (Aristotelian and Aristotelian-derived texts hung in there pretty tenaciously throughout the middle ages, not least because Arab scholars passed them along)-- but at the same time viewing Archimedes as one of his few equals (in all of history). But not many thinkers of Galileo's time thought of history as a flow of events that could be studied for itself (rather than a chronicle of the past that can be ransacked to prove one genealogy or another, whether of political entities (cities or states), theology and ecclesiology, families, possession of property, ideas, etc).

Since Natalie Zemon Davis's History's Two Bodies is still somewhat fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but thinking of the image she considers about "giving to History" and then dismisses as "too unchanging, too sober." :

For a time, I considered adopting the Angelus Novus, the new angel of Paul Klee's watercolor, which Walter Benjamin acquired in 1921 and kept with him until he fled from Paris in 1940. You will recall that Benjamin, in one of his last aphorisms, made this the angel of history: "His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.... His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise...[It] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is tuned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Hera of course is aware not only of history as an accumulation of wreckage, but also that the wreckage cannot be escaped-- even if one physically moves off the planet on which the wreckage has occurred. The wreckage is part of who one is. The idea of making history less "dire" is a dream, of course, of removing that weight of that wreckage from who humans are. There's certainly a good deal of irony in the 30th-century people imagining that if they managed to start the scientific revolution earlier (say back in Archimedes day) the wreckage could be avoided. Galileo's notion of his own genius-- absolutely characteristic of early modern thinking-- is a sort of index of the larger problem that is, of course, invisible to him. (See, for example, Michael Swanick's Jack Faust.)

Of course, now that I've started working on my novel again, I might not be able to keep reading it, at least not until the residency is over and my attention is no longer being held captive.

Geek Feminism and Women's History

As far as I can tell, no-one has alerted aqueductistas to a blog they may find interesting and relevant, Geek Feminism:
The Geek Feminism blog exists to support, encourage, and discuss issues facing women in geek communities, including science and technology, gaming, SF fandom, and more. (Yes, we take a broad view of geekdom.)

Things that are on-topic for this blog:

1. geeky discussion about feminism
2. feminist discussion about geekdom
3. geek feminist discussion about other things

I have recently been added to the roster of their posters, and it occurred to me that my post on the recent Women's History Network annual conference on ‘Women, Gender & Political Spaces: Historical Perspectives’ might also be of interest to readers of Ambling Along the Aqueduct.

Other papers of interest that I heard not mentioned over there included a peep at some preliminary work on the nanny and paid childcare more generally, which sounds as if it will be a very exciting project, by Kath Holden, who recently published a splendid scholarly study, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914-60 (coming out in paperback early in 2010). In the same panel were a couple of interesting papers about the politics of nursing, which raised a number of further questions about women and caring work, and issues of power, authority and hierarchy within female-dominated professions.

Sometimes, just sometimes, reason prevails

PUBLICATION OF REPORT: SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS RELATING TO THE ABORTION ACT 1967 by the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee: full text of the press release can be found here. However, whether these conclusions will get embodied in legislative change remains to be seen.

A piece of self-promotion: Historical evidence on the Abortion Act 1967: Evidence submitted to the Science and Technology Committee inquiry into the Abortion Act 1967 by Lesley A. Hall of the Wellcome Library is now available as a downloadable pdf from the History and Policy site news page.