Sitting in history lessons in school, I would often have a weird feeling that I could not put my finger on for the longest of times – I now understand that feeling as perhaps alienation and confusion. The roots of these feelings, possibly the textbook I was to study, aroused concerns within me. My first concern with said text was the ‘male as norm’ language that most history books canonically presented, where ‘mankind’ is interchangeable with ‘humankind’. The 'male as norm' principle was brought up in the 19th century as feminist theory; a younger me, unaware of the debates that conceived this idea as a ‘reflection of systemic biases’, argued endlessly with teachers and classmates in its support. The other concern was the erasure of women in history. Although, it did lead to me and the other young girls in my class spending hours researching for great women in history, the lack of them in the mainstream narrative of our classrooms was almost irksome. Representation builds the foundation of ‘self’ in young people; lack of representation of one’s being in history alienates one from their present, and in this context – propagates the idea of the world being ‘a man’s world’. This not only limits one’s worldview to a world with ‘male’ as the canon, but also leads to loss of identity when one cannot relate to the system represented.
History is subject to the biases and perceptions of the people writing the same. Historians believe that erasure of women came out of these biases, whether conscious or unconscious. A study by Slate determines that 75.8% of the history books from various publishers and bestseller lists in USA were written by men; ‘women only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history’ – those who were recorded were either pushed to fit into cookie-cutter images or critiqued for not fitting them. The obituary of Hertha Ayrton, the woman who won the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal for original research in 1906, highlights the same: it criticised her for neglecting her husband, and says that instead of focusing on her science she should have “put him into carpet slippers” and “fed him well” so he could perform better science. Not only were they shamed through stereotypes, women, especially the ones who were involved in STEM research, were often scrubbed out of history with their work credited to men they worked with or assisted. The Matilda Effect – a term coined by Cornell University science historian Martha Rossiter – describes the common occurrence of a man getting credit for groundbreaking work done by a woman, and is named after Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay Woman as an Inventor protested the conception that women possessed no inventive genius. Alice Ball, who pioneered the research for the cure to leprosy but was not credited for the same up until 1922, is an example of the Matilda Effect in play. Certain important women in history were heavily sexualised as well. Dr Bettany Hughes in an interview with ZMEScience, illustrates the same and says, “Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at math [...] but when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk.”
A recent change in rewriting Indian history poses an even greater threat to women’s history. The NCERT, taught in most Indian schools, which seldom mentions women, is undergoing alteration. The chapter, Clothing: A Social History – which highlights the ‘Upper Cloth Revolt’ of 1822 in Travancore, when women from the Shanar community broke existing social conventions by clothing their upper bodies – is being erased from the prescribed syllabus now, leading to large rounds of debates. Historian Ruby Lal criticises the change brought about by the saffronisation of textbooks and the loss of Mughal History, including that of Empress Nur Jahan.
The rise of women’s history as a subject sought to correct the absence of women from mainstream histories and parallels with the first women's movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when female historians did the same. Amanda Foreman’s documentary series Ascent of Woman highlights the systemic erasure of women and also tells the stories of these women. The lack of women’s history taught in schools is hence a narrative with many complex causes; its erasure does not exist in isolation: it carries with itself caste, class and religious facets. The patriarchal nature of texts solidifies misogynistic mindsets and moreover, it undermines the confidence of the young girls who then read these texts and find themselves alienated from the history of their own people. The recognition of this fact is extremely important in ensuring that academia fulfills its purpose and allows representation to the entire society and not just one section of it. Education is a tool for liberation from oppression, and it would be a huge failure on the part of the entire education system if it instead becomes the perpetuator of said oppression. What we need is awareness that women are the pillars of the society, not the subalterns.
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