I personally loved this podcast from Lady Science; I am a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, so it was very interesting to draw parallels between my two disciplines. I appreciated and agreed with the speakers on the podcast that “there is no room for women in the Great Man Theory,” and deciding the stories that should be told in history is arbitrary. In history classes since elementary school, we are ingrained with “stories” about [typically male] figures who have made some sort of influence. We have discussed this in class– who decides how we should tell history? Historians pick out what is “important” and who we decide to include in historical accounts, but the voices of women have been silenced unless they epitomize typically “masculine” leadership traits. For example, in the MLK articles we have read, the great strides made by Coretta Scott King in the Civil Rights Movement have been greatly silenced by historical accounts. The article we read from the professor completely discounted her work and MLK’s disloyalty to her as his experience, not her historical legacy.
I was also intrigued by the “HERStory” approach to studying history– telling history from a feminist point of view– because so much history is attributed to men. Instead of silencing the women who have made valuable contributions to society and crediting the majority to men, the feminist response is to uphold these women. Recognizing this issue from an intersectional lens allows consumers and students to understand the societal structures preventing women from elevating themselves. Lady Science uses the example of the lack of women in the STEM field today; through gender analysis, we see that women are pushed out of high-paying professionalized fields due to pay inequity, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination, so there are a limited number of women in the field.
Anna Marston
I agree that women’s voices have mostly been silenced throughout history and when they are recognized, it is often because of their association with a man (such as Coretta Scott King, when the author of the MLK article mentioned her it was only in connection with him and not about her own efforts in the civil rights movement). I also liked how they talked about looking at history through a feminist lens because I think that it will change the way we look at a lot of historical events.