How women get written out of history: I'm working on a small blog post about a couple who collaborated closely together. He is the famous one with his own wikipedia page; she doesn't have one. I have to keep correcting myself as this stuff is so ingrained.
For example, I have to stop writing as if his work represents them both: it's important to name her and exactly what she did. Instead of saying 'His vision was XX', I rewrote it to say 'Their vision was XX'.
It doesn't help that all the sources I use talk this way. The first step is taking care to not replicate this language and these assumptions. It does take extra thinking and work.
Names are important too. Men are often referred to by their surname and women by their first name. In this case they were married and she took his name. So I've opted to use first names for them both.
Once you stop treating her as an adjunct to his life, questions arise. Was she paid for her work? What was the division of labour in the household? Was she full-time housekeeping and child-rearing, as well as doing all this work?
There are no interviews or oral histories with her, no quotes. her voice is missing from the records. I have to reconstruct her work from context and by inference eg if she did this thing, then logically she must also have done that thing.
If it takes this much thought for me to recognise and acknowledge one woman's role in an important cultural process, then imagine how it works for people uninterested or disbelieving that women have been overlooked.
These subtle nuances in describing people and their lives make all the difference to making women and their accomplishments visible, and more importantly, transmitted to the next version.
A few more observations. Some years ago I became aware of Ruby Payne-Scott, now acknowledged as a ground-breaking radioastronomer. She was mentioned in a wikipedia page where it was stated, and I kid you not,
her fellow male PhD student undertook this and that significant research, while she was given her research project by her supervisor. That is what it said. I started to notice a similar pattern in wikipedia accounts of women scientists.
The male PhD students would be given agency, while the women were passive recipients of ideas. Needless to say, after much work has been done on Ruby Payne-Scott including a couple of outstanding biographies, her wikipedia page doesn't say that any more.
In my recent research for heritage projects on radioastronomy, I'm finding the women hidden in the publication footnotes. You start with a name, and follow the thread. They're mathematicians and 'computers'; but rarely mentioned or credited.
A number of people have done amazing research on the women 'computers'. They were given this role because it was considered low status and repetitive - suitable for women. Part of rectifying history is to reclassify their job descriptions to match what they actually did.
So there's a few steps: first of all notice. Pay attention to what's between the lines, hidden in footnotes, or who is not named in photographs. 2. Start researching them. The traces of these women are there. 3. Use different language to describe them and their work.
It's important to make clear that re-calibrating history to recognise the contributions and creativity of women does not happen at random. It is an explicit and deliberate strategy of feminist scholars to redress bias.
