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As an example, consider secretarial work. This position used to be a highly esteemed one: the secretary is close to an important person, is entrusted with their scheduling, their communications, their crucial paperwork. This role was filled by a trusted, responsible man, and it was an "important" job. (After all, the Secretary of State is the third-highest-ranking officer in the Federal Government). But women filtered into the secretarial role after the invention of the typewriter and the need for better record-keeping in a highly industrialized society. Somehow it is has been decided that secretarial work is now "menial", "unimportant", and certainly unworthy of high pay or respect.
Actually, the job is very much the same as it ever was as far as responsibilities go. But it is perceived quite differently now that many more women do it than men. With each new area that we break into, the men just flee to an ever-smaller woman-free-zone and declare that to be what is "important."
Other examples abound. Think about medicine: When it became established as a profession (ie, when men started getting paid to practice), doctors with broad knowledge were highly respected-- more so than women, whom it was believed only knew about childbirth (and even then, they just knew "folk medicine"). But in this decade, as more and more women choose to become General Practitioners, we are seeing a shift in values. Now it seems that specialists are more important because they have deep knowledge instead of just broad, "surface" knowledge. Whatever men do is considered important, and whatever women do cannot be considered important.
This sheds a new light on why men are so fervently against women in the military, women in the hard sciences, and women in top business positions. What would be left to consider "important"?
So we have ended up with a circular definition: what men do is important because men do it.
Uh... sure.
What you'll find here are some of the history lessons not covered in your classes. The history we learn in school is absolutely not objective; in fact, it is doubtful that history can be completely objective. Instead of pretending that it is, we can recognize that stories are always told from a certain person's or group's point of view, and that the best way to study history is to learn from many different points of view.
Open the average history book -- like the one you used in high school, for example-- and you'll generally find it filled with pictures and exploits of men. On occasion, there will be a small section on "women's rights," usually in the 1920's, that will have a picture of one or two women -- Carrie Chapman Catt or Susan B. Anthony. But that's it.
The pictures of women are chosen specifically to represent "women's history," while the pictures of men are for human history. In the history of war, of science-- of everything but women's suffrage-- women barely exist.
For example, did you know that the concept of artillery was invented by Joan of Arc? That the composition of stars like the Sun was first understood by a woman (Helena Cecilia Payne)? And these women weren't helpmates to men. Joan of Arc scared the church-state enough that they killed her. Payne was no bottle-washer who was working alongside men who made great discoveries. In fact, her research was shunned and laughed at -- until a man "discovered" the very same results a few decades later.
And it's not much better in present-day newspapers. There are more women around, to be sure, and we have to celebrate that. Madeleine Albright, Alexis Herman, and the many women in the House of Representatives and the few in the Senate -- to say nothing of the women in business and industry, or academia. But somehow, we aren't mentioned too prominently. For example, did you know that the person responsible for JPL's Mars exploration program is a woman, Donna Shirley? You wouldn't have guessed that by watching the press conferences.
There are many women in history and many stories of women's history that are ignored, brushed off, or dismissed as "not relevant to everyone," whereas the history of men is assumed to be of paramount importance to all people. We want to change that.
We in the 3rd WWWave have noticed that a new generation of women is growing up believing that if there are only three pictures of women in a history text with hundreds of pictures of men, that must just mean that . . . well, there weren't any noteworthy women in history, right? I mean feminism is over, right? We're equal now, so if women were worth taking note of, they'd be mentioned, right?
Wrong.
Here you will learn about women who helped shape the worlds they lived in-- through social movements, politics, art, or contributions in science and technology. These are women who participated in what men have defined as "important," but whose stories have been told from only one point of view, or perhaps have been forgotten completely. It is important to note that there are many, many more women who excelled in areas not defined as important, and to them we can only give a graceful nod on this limited page. We will instead focus on women who have achieved in the conventional sense.
And we'll take a look at women who are achieving right now. Why wait until their names have been lost and must be recovered? Let's celebrate the women of the modern world who are exploring, adventuring, discovering, and creating.
09/28/07 at 0:16