Lessons From History Biographies

The world lost much by ignoring half its population for millennium.           I no longer teach much ancient and medieval history, but I remember one recurring theme from my old college classes was the frustration of my female students over how silenced women’s voices were in earlier eras of human history. To some extent this was my own failing at that time (there have long been many great studies looking to discover more about the roles of women in ancient societies), but there was also a major structural weakness directly based on the source materials. Namely, many pre-industrial “might makes right” societies gave very few women the ability to even learn how to read and write, much less truly express themselves and become major voices within the patriarchal leadership. Thus, the entire early field of “History” (maybe one day we’ll rename it something like “Ourstory?”) as we know of it, in the sense that historians would research earlier sources and try to reach conclusions about the