Bonnie J. Morris - Womens History For Beginners

For Beginners LLC
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Text 2012 Bonnie J. Morris, Ph.D.
Illustrations 2012 Phill Evans

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A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book
Copyright 2012

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eISBN: 978-1-934389-64-5

For Beginners and Beginners Documentary Comic Books are published by For Beginners LLC.

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Welcome to the history of more than half the world: the history you never learned.

Read through a basic history booksay, a state-approved U.S. history textbook intended for middle-school classroomsand youre left with the impression that all of human history was achieved by one sex: Male.

Of course, women as well as men lived, worked, reproduced, and died in every era of time. Mothers, daughters, and wives were present at every world eventthough seldom as equal participants. But we learn very little about them. Their roles seem to have gone unrecorded. Why?

The simplest answer is the system called patriarchy. For most of the pastin Western as well as non-Western historywomen were neither free and equal under the law nor believed to be capable of acting independently. Females were subject to control by their fathers, husbands, and other male leaders or owners, through laws, local customs, and religious faiths dictated and adjudicated by men. These systems guaranteed that women remained in the private sphere, restricted to domestic roles under the watchful eye of male relatives, although most women worked as hard as men at repetitive daily chores in and around the home. Without property rights, independent income, education, or legally recognized personhood, only the most exceptional women were able to transcend such barriers to become rulers, warriors, scholars, and artists in the public sphere. Because so many women were denied access to schooling, it was almost impossible for them to write down their own versions of what really happened during the medieval witch trials, or below stairs in the servants quarters, or in the slave cabins of Mississippi.

Furthermore, most women were held back from public participation and achievement because they were married very young, typically at puberty, and bound to early pregnancy and the rule of their husband thereafter. Womens actions reflected on the men entrusted with guarding their chastity: Some of the earliest written laws command good women to cover their hair, a theme later reinforced in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sometimes with a spiritual basis but more often interpreted as preventing anyone other than a husband from looking at a mature female. It might be a source of shame and dishonor to a husband if his wife attracted attention, good or bad, for attention equals looking. As early as 430 B.C. , Pericles told other Athenians that women were not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.

A man might be embarrassed and insulted if his wife made a name for herself separate from his own. Note that we still retain the tradition of a woman taking her husbands name upon marriage; her actions will then be inextricably linked with his own reputation, and except as a question on bureaucratic forms, she will no longer supply her former maiden name. She is no longer a maiden. (Who recalls the maiden name of Abigail Adams? Eleanor Roosevelt? Betty Ford?) The most recognized women in AmericaFirst Ladiesare of course known by their married names. At most, a few choose to bury their original family name in the middle, when they continue using it at all: e.g., Hillary Rodham Clinton. Name changes at marriage also mask or alter the womans original ethnicity: My own mother lost her Jewish family name (Schiller) at marriage, and accepted my fathers Welsh and Protestant surname (Morris). My childhood schoolmate, Sangita Bhasin, who emigrated from India as a child and grew up to become a doctor in America, married a Jewish man. Today her patients know her as Dr. Rosengarten.

When women of the past were denied access to the roles and activities available to their brothers and sons, they funneled their own creative talent and human spirit into sheer survival. Much of that legacy may be seen in the material culture women invented for domestic life: tools, quilts, birthing stools, textiles, and cooking utensils. Because objects meant for daily use and survival in the home sphere lacked the prestige of real art, womens history courses, too, are sometimes laughed at as basket weavingan insult which reveals much more than intended. Womens work itself has been judged as both natural and personal, repetitive and trivial, unfit for history books; whereas mens roles in the public sphere were celebrated as worthy: events and breakthroughs of politics, commerce, and culture. But in examining the past with a lens wide enough to encompass both sexes, historians are now beginning to recover a more complete record of human life and human achievement.

Where women and men have played different roles, those very differences tell us a great deal about power, citizenship, and democratic ideals. We may acknowledge that our foremothers held different but equally important functions in human history. Still, most of what is described in history is, indeed, his story, the lives and writings of great men.

Pop quiz: How much actual womens history do you know? In terms of your own family, youre probably well acquainted with the life stories of your mother, grandmothers and aunts. Were certainly taught to honor our mothers, for female caregivers shape our lives, serving as our earliest role models. You may have been raised by the combined efforts of a single mom, female babysitters, and day-care workers, female elementary-school teachers, school and camp counselors, social workers, coaches, and tutors. Youve probably worked for more than one female employer by now; had several consultations with a female doctor; you may have female friends or relatives presently serving in the military; you may have voted for a female candidate in a local or national election. Taking all of this into account, you may feel well-satisfied that todays women have the same opportunities as men, and its not hard to find statistics showing how far weve come. Female students now outnumber males on most American college campuses.