I am not sure that before this podcast I ever noticed that “everyday” women do not show up in history. It makes total sense how it took a certain privilege throughout history to be able to “misbehave”. This allows us to, oftentimes, only recognize the women throughout history who were in the upper class and able to achieve upward mobility in spite of their risk on the societal standpoint that came along with going against the status quo. At the same time, women of color who often did misbehave are still erased from history from the sheer fact of them not being acknowledged, so there were prerequisites to having the ability to gain general traction in the event that some marginalized “Great WOmen” did “misbehave”.
I love the point they made about describing ladies of science as beautiful. This is what draws away from their contributions and plays into gender roles and expectations. It is bothersome that women are not acknowledged enough for our contributions throughout history as a whole. Women often do immense amounts of work to either support men or have men take credit for their achievements very often and this is so sad.
What is even sadder and eye-opening is how easy it is for women to fall into the great man theory as well. It was crazy to hear the story from the special guest about how she and her students could only find one example of a woman in science to write about from their science literature at their entire university. It is sad to say that there are a lot of examples of how history is often only told from one perspective. There are so many great people that get lost along the way.
This reminds me of the idea of implicit bias. Everyone is primed so often to believe that men belong in the positions that society deems to be powerful. Everyone is then also primed to believe that women are not only supposed to support these men in doing so but to also get used to not getting credit for their actual contributions. Men built the system this way, and women live in it and perpetuate it. I am grateful, as a STEM woman of color, for this podcast highlighting this for its listeners and for myself.
It is sad that I have to actively seek information on people whom I know existed, that fought odds and made waves and also looked like me. It is because society does not value them enough to teach anybody, even little girls who also like me.
To go off of what you are saying about implicit bias, people are so much more used to seeing men as leaders that it impacts the way they view female leaders. There are certain traits they expect to see in male and female leaders that if women were to act the same way men they would not be respected. They would rather be looked at as too masculine and would be passed over because of that.
I wholeheartedly agree with both Lauren and Ellie. The idea of implicit bias is very important in all aspects of how we as humans think, but applies especially well to the Great Man theory. Unfortunately, there are certain traits that we cannot even imagine women possessing or exhibiting in certain ways which is predicated upon our perceived notions that we have of our “typical” male leaders. It is, sadly, almost as if we cannot imagine women being leaders due to our societal concrete expectations for how a leader is supposed to appear and act.
I think an important part of your response was recognizing that women had to have a certain status to be able to misbehave. More specifically, women of color did not have those opportunities–to act out of the norm in order to make a name for themselves. Starting a revolution or even attempting to give a speech against the hegemonic masculinity that existed could’ve been life-threatening.
I really liked your mention of how “it is bothersome that women are not acknowledged enough for our contributions throughout history as a whole.” This is disturbing as it makes me feel as if half of history was just ignored. It is also disturbing because if one pays attention they can see this same phenomenon happen today in life all the time! In magazines woman are extremely misrepresented and when they are they are often sexualized, regardless of their background and the true reason they deserve to be on a magazine cover. Paying attention to how we remember and represent a woman in our culture can largely attribute to the way youths today and of tomorrow envision their future, their value.
I 100% agree. When the hosts brought up the quote about “well behaved women rarely make history” I was not sure how to feel. I’m pretty sure I have this quote somewhere in my room but after hearing what the hosts has to say about the quote, I am questioning it’s meaning. It is still an important quote but like any of these theories or ways to think about history, it is important to remember that if we only on people who are able to misbehave, do we are only going to be focused on the select elite slice of society. I think this demonstrates the fact that it is our duty as scholars to try our hardest to combined contextualize these theories (great man, her-story, etc.) to get the most comprehensive picture of history that we can.
I agree with practically everything in this post, especially when you say it is sad how it is that we blindly accept the GMT. This theory, in addition to many others, is one that we assume as the truth and that limits our framework of thinking. If we were to reconstruct the theory with an unbiased attitude toward gender, we would have abetter understanding of leadership and attributes possessed by leaders. Although we have progressed, there is still this underlying influence of this theory that hinders the full understanding of what makes a leader, and until we reject it COMPLETELY we will always blindly follow it, either unconsciously and consciously.