Why Does A Woman Have To Be "Remarkable" To Be Remembered?: Some Issues With Teaching Women's History

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Have you ever noticed that women's history is dominated by the same kinds of women? It's always the top 100 important women in history or the "remarkable" story of this historical heroine. If she wasn't "brave," or "remarkable," or "influential," she rarely (if ever) gets a mention. This is a major bugbear of mine. Why does a woman have to conform to one of these labels to have a voice? Is her story not worth mentioning if she wasn't hugely influential, in some way or another? And another question: who defines these labels, anyway, and what does it actually mean to be "brave" or "remarkable?"

Let me make something very clear from the start, though. I am not criticising the fact that we have so many books, articles, videos, TV shows dedicated to women from the past. Neither am I suggesting that we should stop celebrating women's achievements or significance. I just feel that we are always celebrating the same kinds of women and, in doing so, we are sending a message that women are only worth remembering if they have broken some kind of social, political or cultural mould.

There is, perhaps, an assumption here that if a woman has not broken a mould or stepped out into the public arena, there is no real story to be told, or that it is impossible to even tell a story. We do have to be practical when it comes to the availability of sources. But just because a story isn't easy to trace, or just because a story might not be immediately fascinating, it doesn't make it any less valuable or worthwhile.

What I have found as a student and a teacher is that women's experiences of the past are often added-on to the male narrative or treated as distinct and separate subjects. We only look at women when we look at the suffragettes, for example, or study the reign of Elizabeth I. I understand the constraints of time and resources. There's a lot of content to wade through, especially at GCSE level, and a limited number of hours in which to teach it. But we never seem to make it clear to students that ALL history is gendered. If we focus on a single narrative of the past, we're really just teaching history, not herstory.

How do we actually teach it, then? This isn't an easy question to answer and one that deserves some debate. However, it is clear to me that it feeds into the point I made earlier about the availability of sources. We should be adopting an approach that makes clear the historical invisibility of women. Where we do have records, that's great. Where we do have women who broke the mould, also great. But we need to make very clear that just because there aren't records, or just because we're talking about the story of men, it doesn't mean that we should just forget the existence and experiences of women. When we're teaching the Norman Conquest, for example, let's have a conversation about the lack of female claimants to the throne, about the maleness of power. Let's have a conversation about how William's consolidation affected women. How many times have we talked about Anglo-Norman marriage and never even considered how this may have affected Saxon women?

If you really want to be inclusive, if you want to teach diversity and want to give herstory the respect it deserves, then it's time to focus less on "brave" and "remarkable" women and start talking about ordinary women, the invisible women, and those who were denied a voice. That's what herstory is all about.


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