I’m A Smiple Woman Shirt
“Where are the women?” When Cynthia Enloe posed this question in 1989, she was thinking about the world of international politics. But the question has also been a driving force for a number of historians who have sought to move beyond the narratives of “great men” that have tended to dominate our understanding of the past. In honour of Women’s History Month, this post outlines some of the central principles and shifts in the practice of women’s history, with some examples from my own field, the history of birth control and reproductive politics.Although documentation of women in history stretches back much further, the feminist mobilization of the 1960s and 70s provided an undeniable impetus to the field of women’s history. Women’s historians during these years outlined a dual project: to restore women to history and history to women. The first entailed recognizing the critical (if usually unrecognized) roles women had played in the key events that dominated historical studies and nationalist narratives: high politics, wars, revolutions, social movements. They wrote histories not only of the more visible actors (the Joan of Arcs, the Sylvia Pankhursts), but also of the peasant women who led marches during the French Revolution and the women who fought in the Algerian War of Independence. But scholars also argued that since much of women’s experience had taken place outside the public realm, a focus solely on women’s activism in these spheres could not tell us the whole story. They thus expanded the limits of historical inquiry into the so-called “private sphere,” writing histories of the family, histories of birth control, histories of childbearing and child raising.
I’m A Smiple Woman Shirt
In doing so, they challenged us to rethink what counted as historically significant. Take the period from the end of WWII to the 1990s, for example. In many historical accounts (the kind we get in textbooks) the focus would likely revolve around the high politics of the “Cold War,” outlining the threats exchanged between American and Soviet leaders and the ideological battle between capitalism and communism… critical issues, no doubt. But what if we shift our position to start with women, and/or the home? We might come to also see the incredible power of new technologies like the birth control pill and shifting cultural mores that led to rapid declines in family size in many countries, altering sexual practices and paving the way for increased women’s participation in the workforce. While these processes are not as easy to document as the chronology of Cold War confrontations, for many they may have impacted daily life as much as (if not more than) the grandstanding of political leaders.