We know HIStory, what about HERstory?

[Fifty]

If you're a serious historian, you would know that the discipline of history is extremely phallocentric, as we have had occasion to discuss previously.

Like the academic discipline of history, this subforum is populated mainly by phallocentric threads on phallocentric topics. This is not an insult, it is in fact vitally necessary because this forum is mostly full of guys.

I want to make a more organic thread, however, something more sustainable.

So lets talk for a minute about herstory. I do not want to play mere lip service to herstory, herever. I want to be real about it. Like I said, sustainability and organitocity are the key words here, and they aren't just buzz words.

So lets talk not about single GREAT WOMEN, which is as much phallocentric as anything else as it celebrates and elevates the notion of a unit, which is a phallocentric notion.

Lets instead talk about women as a COLLECTIVE have done throughout herstory. And when I say a collective, lets not just go on a marxist rant about popular movements. The notion that women can only be some poor oppressed group that "rises up" through mass appeal is just as phallocentric as anything, because it emphasizes the masculine value of "fighting against the odds"

This thread is about nurturing.

It is about caring for and about others.

Before I begin, let me just say that this is not a joke thread. Sure it is "unorthodox", but shattering orthodoxy is the point. Lets be fluid, not rigid.

On that note, let me lead it off with a question, more fluid and less rigid than what is commonly countenanced by the cadre of the professoriat:

Is herstory a tragedy or a comedy?

 

[BananaLee]

Well, using herstory as a counterpoint to history is etymologically incorrect.

Personally, I think this idea of "herstory", that women are somehow different and can be treated as "a collective" is as silly/useful an idea as treating "the English" as a collective.

Can you say all women do/think the same thing? Can you say all English think the same thing? No. However, we do use it as a convenient way of grouping people up.

Thus, "herstory" is no more different than "the history of the English-speaking peoples" or "black history in America"

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Portraying herstory as focusing on nurturing and caring for one another is just as chauvinistic and phallocentric as anything else you mentioned as being such.

 

[Fifty]

Well, using herstory as a counterpoint to history is etymologically incorrect.

etymology = the history of words

funny how history is set up to immune itself from even the possibility of herstory as a counterpoint. . . . .

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

funny how history is set up to immune itself from even the possibility of herstory as a counterpoint. . . . .

Funny you should say this. Griselda Pollock said essentially the same thing, but about art history, in Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Art.

 

[Lord Baal]

Women, as a collective, have given birth to all the great men of history.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

It's not bias, but simply facing facts to largely ignore women from historical discussion. Until recently, women did not have the social, political, and economic rights to allow them access to do much of anything. So if they have had little impact on history until recently, it is only because they did not have the means to do so, not because they were somehow incapable. Those instances in which women did have a historical impact were rare.

 

[Plotinus]

It's not bias, but simply facing facts to largely ignore women from historical discussion. Until recently, women did not have the social, political, and economic rights to allow them access to do much of anything. So if they have had little impact on history until recently, it is only because they did not have the means to do so, not because they were somehow incapable. Those instances in which women did have a historical impact were rare.

That's only true if you assume that "history" is all about "the great and the good": kings and emperors, the leadership of nations, the rise and fall of political regimes, wars and battles and other "boy" things. History of the 1066 and all that kind. And yes, women have, overall, played a very small role in all of that. But if, on the other hand, you think that "history" has a wider scope than that, and includes other aspects of society and the way that ordinary people lived in the past, then women are just as important as men. Women didn't "do" little - they "did" plenty - just not the kinds of things that old-fashioned historians were interested in. The only difference is that those things didn't tend to get written about in the past, so they are much harder to study historically. But that doesn't make them any less historical or important.

 

[Agent327]

Portraying herstory as focusing on nurturing and caring for one another is just as chauvinistic and phallocentric as anything else you mentioned as being such.

Indeed. Also, social history picked this up already several decades ago...

 

[kulade]

women are extremely important, but overlooked in history . think of all the great men that women have raised and cooked food for . you never read about them in the history books .

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Women didn't "do" little - they "did" plenty - just not the kinds of things that old-fashioned historians were interested in. The only difference is that those things didn't tend to get written about in the past, so they are much harder to study historically. But that doesn't make them any less historical or important.

It's also far more impersonal. Yes, collectively, women had a great impact, but rarely individually.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

And why, precisely, is it the individual impact that matters?

Also, Fifty: You may not be joking, but the OP is hilarious.

 

[LightSpectra]

So lets talk not about single GREAT WOMEN, which is as much phallocentric as anything else as it celebrates and elevates the notion of a unit, which is a phallocentric notion.

Oh, okay, so when I speak of how amazing people like Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and others were, I'm actually being sexist?

Also, Fifty: You may not be joking, but the OP is hilarious.

I concur.

 

[Pangur Bán]

History includes everything, including the history of women (and elephant domestication, coffee, microsoft, and so on). I wouldn't say it's as gender-imbalanced as you're making out either. In most past societies woman have had certain roles that mean they aren't prominent (except as wives, sisters or mothers) in the areas of life that are well recorded. However, in areas where they are as well recorded, they get fair treatment and pretty much always have since such sources have been analysed (social history for instance). Literature is what really makes history. Narratives about the last millennium BC in Europe are dominated by Greeks and Romans, because they are subject of surviving literary texts. There were polities in central Europe in the same era that were more powerful and just as original in much of the same period, but we don't even know their names or even what languages they spoke, and so can't write about them.

Woman are part of every society they participate in, and every woman is biologically (and hence socially) close to as many men as women. A woman will fight for her male relatives at the expense of less related fellow-females, just as men will fight other men to protect related females. There is no such as "herstory" to be studied in isolation (men gathered plants in the neolithic era, women led armies in the Iron Age, but gender division is not HerStory). And so on ... much of this HerStory stuff is little more than special pleading.

 

[attackfighter]

That's only true if you assume that "history" is all about "the great and the good": kings and emperors, the leadership of nations, the rise and fall of political regimes, wars and battles and other "boy" things.

This is incredibly sexist - all the women and girls I know are intrested in those allegedly "boy things", probably more so than they're intrested in mundane practises such as cooking/sewing/whatever other societal role you'd attribute to women.

Also, society was largely dictated by men. They were the governors, prophets and husbands who pretty much forced women into such dull lives. By celebrating traditional womens roles you're pretty much spitting in the face of everything historys' "greater women" have accomplished - the same way that someone studying black history would be spitting in their faces by only studying colonial slavery.

 

[Traitorfish]

I wonder why it is assumed that, because the minority who historically held power were primarily male, that the entire male gender is somehow advantaged as a result? It seems to me that traditional history neglects the majority of the human population, regardless of gender.

 

[warpus]

You know what they say about women

"Behind every great man is a great woman".. of course except when they're getting it on, in which case the man is usually behind the woman.

 

[Lord Baal]

Behind every great man is a great woman, driving him to spend as much time working as possible, so as to avoid heading home.

 

[Zulu Impi]

This is incredibly sexist - all the women and girls I know are intrested in those allegedly "boy things", probably more so than they're intrested in mundane practises such as cooking/sewing/whatever other societal role you'd attribute to women.

Also, society was largely dictated by men. They were the governors, prophets and husbands who pretty much forced women into such dull lives. By celebrating traditional womens roles you're pretty much spitting in the face of everything historys' "greater women" have accomplished - the same way that someone studying black history would be spitting in their faces by only studying colonial slavery.

I have not met any women that I can remember who were more into the history of war then any societal role generally attributed to women.

So we should ignore women that retain the traditional role as punishment for they're choice?

 

[GinandTonic]

I always thought it was "behind every great man stands a surprised woman"?