It’s Women’s History Month! In celebration, this is the first of five bonus episodes coming your way this month. There is also a prize drawing where a listener/reader like you will win some free Her Half of History merch. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find out how to enter.

Every March since 1980, the president of the United States has declared a celebration of women’s history. At first it was National Women’s History Week, and in 1987 it became National Women’s History Month.

Until fairly recently, I wasn’t aware that there was anything controversial about Women’s History Month. Surely anyone who ever attended a history class knows that the standard history curriculum mostly covers men? And surely everyone who has observed life can deduce that roughly half of the people who lived in the past were women?

But it turns out that criticism of Women’s History Month exists on all sides. It comes from some people who feel we’ve already heard enough (or more than enough) from traditionally marginalized voices, and on the other side, it comes from people feel we haven’t heard enough but think that we won’t need a Women’s History Month if we just stop discriminating against women in the regular curriculum.

Respectfully, I disagree with both of those criticisms.

We will always need Women’s History Month. It is not just a matter of ending the deliberate suppression of women’s voices, although that has been a problem, and sometimes still is. The larger issue is baked into the nature of history itself.

Historians would love to study the past, but what they actually do is study the written records of the past. It’s an important distinction. It means that in times when people had no written language or when their writing did not survive, historians have no data. The silence of historians on major sections of the past might be discrimination. But often it is only tragic and incurable ignorance. Where there are no records, there is simply nothing for a historian to say. Archaeologists might have something to say, but the questions they can answer are different.

The historical records that survive the passage of time are anything but diverse and inclusive. They are heavily skewed in favor of the people who actually wrote and successfully stored records: always literate, mostly male, usually rich, and generally a member of the locally dominant ethnicity.

The words these writers left for us are mostly about themselves or people like themselves. This is even codified in advice to modern writers: write what you know. In a past where men were more likely to be literate than women, this means the records are mostly by men and about men. They mostly don’t concern themselves with women, except insofar as those women are beautiful (or not), compliant (or not), and fertile (or not).

On the rare occasions when they did write about women’s issues, there’s a good chance they didn’t know what they were talking about. Pliny the Elder, for example, suggested that a good way to prevent pregnancy was to find a large, hairy spider, dissect it, remove two small worms from its head, place them on a deer skin, and wrap that around the woman’s body. It’s possible that some Roman women believed in this method of birth control. It’s also possible that any competent Roman midwife would have laughed hysterically. We’ll never know because Roman midwives didn’t leave us any surviving records.

The problem of male writers is compounded by the fact that traditionally, history meant the study of politics and war. There is simply no denying the fact that men dominated those fields for most of history. Any “history” written long ago probably has an almost entirely male cast. (For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was first compiled in the late 9^th century England and covers almost a millennium of history. A mere 8 percent of the named people in it are women.) It is only more recently that historians have realized that there is more to life than politics and war.

The double skewing of who wrote the records and which events they thought worthy of recording means that when you dive into the historical record of the Western world, you will always find the stories of white men first. Their records are simply easier to locate. If you want to find the stories of women or minorities, you must make a conscious effort to dig past all the white men and look at what’s left. For the general public, most of whom do not spend their time digging into historical records of any kind, Women’s History Month is an important part of bringing that conscious effort to them. As are Black History Month and Native American Heritage Month and many other such designations.

The good news is that if historians are willing to dig and national celebrations bring attention to their findings, there are still an enormous number of records on women and minorities. The historical record is big. Even if 92 percent of the records are about men, the remaining 8 percent is more than enough to keep us busy for one month out of the year. Some of us manage to stay busy with women’s history for twelve months out of every year.

And for those who have rumpled feelings because they do not see themselves included in Women’s History Month, perhaps they should consider that ignoring women’s history means misrepresenting even the history of the most famous men. Many of the Founding Fathers, for example, could only spend their time on unpaid or badly paid rebellion because their wives were back home running the family business and raising money for the war. Which proves both that their wives were perfectly capable of running businesses and also suggests that men alone could not have won the war (source, source, source). It takes still more digging in the record to notice that they also could not have succeeded without the efforts of the women they employed or enslaved (source, source, source).

Women’s history also throws light on issues that still trouble us today. For example, it can teach us women have always sought to control their reproduction rights, most desperately when they do not feel they can provide a good life for a child. Contraception and abortion are nothing new (see episodes 15.9 and 15.10 for more on that).

Neither is women working for pay. The entire notion that men are providers and women somehow “don’t work” was an invention of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, when we changed the definition of “work” so that many women were no longer included even though they were up and doing economically necessary tasks all day long (see episodes 7.9, 7.10, and 7.11).

Politicians and social media activists often assume that women agree on issues like reproductive rights and discrimination. Women’s history makes it clear that we do not. The most effective activists working against women’s suffrage, against abortion, and against the Equal Rights Amendment were often other women. Women are not a monolith, and both the political right and the political left are likely to be disappointed when they treat us as a united voting bloc.

Regardless of how these issues play out politically or culturally, we won’t know who we are if we don’t know how we got here. We will always need Women’s History Month to show us how men and women created the world we live in.

Thank you for taking the time to read about women’s history! There are four ways to get entered in the drawing:

1. Sign up as a supporter on Patreon, any level. Depending on which level you choose, you’ll get bonus episodes and ad-free episodes.
2. If you’re already a Patreon supporter, bump up your current support on Patreon.
3. Make a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee or right here on the website.
4. Leave me a rating or a review on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify (but also so many others I cannot list them all but pod.link can). This last method doesn’t send me any contact info for you, so to get in the drawing, you’ll need to email me a screenshot of your rating or review at herhalfofhistory@gmail.com.

Doing any of the above is a huge help to me in keeping the history coming in the regular feed, and I really appreciate it. Happy Women’s Month!