By Louise Bernikow
September 19, 2011
On Tuesday (8 PM, EST), “History Detectives” on PBS will feature a ”Votes for Women” segment in which author Louise Bernikow helps the crew unearth the origins of an early 20th century purple and gold banner. Her experience provoked the following thoughts about women’s history, the media and where we are now.
Picture this: New York harbor, October, 1886. Dignitaries, including President Grover Cleveland, elbow each other on the Bedloe’s Island platform, huge crowds crane their necks toward a tall draped Statue of Liberty about to be revealed. In the water, flag-flying steamers, tugboats, rowboats. Look closely and you see a barge carrying some well dressed white ladies holding signs: “American Women Have No Liberty. Give us the vote.”
Lillie Devereux Blake and her companions set the stage for an even more daring event three decades later. In December, 1916, women piloting small bi-planes and dropping “Votes for Women” leaflets hovered over President Woodrow Wilson’s yacht as he sailed down the Hudson River to preside over the electrical floodlighting of the statue.
Now that’s American history. I’d love to see these troublemakers in textbooks and documentaries, but I don’t think it likely. Too provocative.
Pundits and politicians lament the ignorance of our young about their own country’s history and pass educational standards to address it, but I fear they are doomed if they don’t learn more about women and repair their thinking on the subject.
Every March, I get my hopes up. March is Women’s History Month, with apparently mandatory programming. Some TV stations know they must do “something about women,” but they don’t appear to know what “history” means. I’m not being the fuss-budget who insists we call it “herstory,” because I firmly believe that women’s history is American history. Still, Women’s History Month means you tell audiences something about female people and the past. Instead, year after year, I see individual, contemporary “outstanding women” profiled in March. Often they are corporate leaders. Duty fulfilled.
Not so fast.
We are, I suppose, a nation of individualists. Our reigning myth is the Lone Ranger—who was not, I remind you, “lone” because all his feats were accomplished with the help of Tonto, who doesn’t count because he was not a white man. When it comes to women, the telling of history in popular media follows the same pattern, focusing on “leaders” or “outstanding women,” always “lone.” Even Ken Burn’s “Not For Ourselves Alone,” perhaps the most elaborate television telling of an aspect of women’s history in our time, stinted on showing the movement around Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—the others who inspired them, challenged them or thwarted them, carried their ideas forward, passed it on. Every woman whose name has made it into our consciousness has had others, who go unmentioned, with her.
Thankfully, the women we do see from the past are no longer just the white women. Some people actually know that Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972 or that Rosa Parks was part of a cadre of activists, including a large number of black women, who had been trying for some time to challenge segregation on public transportation. But those stories, you know, belong in February, which is Black History Month. If Harriet Tubman showed up at suffrage meetings, which she did, where, in this divided telling of America’s past, does that story go?
So I am caught in a historical nightmare in which it’s 1970 and many people, activists, writers, academics, students, are asking loudly, “Where are the women?” Our school textbooks, college curricula and public entertainment had so few. Because we asked the question, and were doing the work to answer it, things changed. A better, more balanced view of the country’s present and its past began to emerge, one with women, all kinds of women, in it. And now it’s faded again.
We are left with an obligatory nod to women’s history—events in March, the odd segment on a cable show, the single female commentator in history programming. Media people consider they have “done women” when they’ve put 30 minutes on the air. All women, only women, any women, merely women—that’s the attitude that came through a few months ago when the New York Times Book Review ran a half-page photograph of a delegation holding “Peace” signs arriving at a 1916 international women’s conference to illustrate a book about opposition to World War One. “Women” was how the caption writer identified Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Mary Heaton Vorse and several others. It reminded me of the difficulty of finding and writing women’s history at all when, researching the suffrage movement, I uncovered photographs in newspaper archives captioned “suffs leaving prison” or “suffs on a rooftop.”
Others may call this carelessness, but I call it disdain.
The suffrage movement was not a bunch of old fashioned old ladies reeking of camphor talking about an irrelevancy called The Vote. We have not exhausted the possibilities of this and all the other rich stories in our history and I, for one, hope we will not let them fade.
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.
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MERYL Streep: “I’ve always had empathy for older people.” Photo by Ruben Nepales 
On Labor Day 1940, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for all citizens, “Labor Day must be one of the most significant days on our calendar. On this day we should think with pride of the growing place which the worker is taking in this country … That is as it should be in a democracy.”
8 Comments
Thanks for this great column. I have been a strong advocate for women – women in history – women in politics – women in the corporate world – womens rights, womens right to choose – you name it – women just being women. I have written news columns, I have spoken numerous times supporting womens rights, the ERA, and hopefully have taught my daughters and granddaughters about women in history!
Women have been getting a bad rap since the “beginning” – even Adam shoved Eve out in front of him and said “God she did it!” Nice guy Adam! Women were abused. misused, raped in the bible and that’s been ok with men throughout history…the doing of it and the reading of it!
We still have such a long long way to go. I won’t see the passage of ERA. I won’t see Equal Pay. Or equal jobs. But just maybe my granddaughters will. Please do continue to be strong advocates for women’s right to choose. And keep up the great work!
I’ve always been irked by the obligatory nod to women in March, for women’s history month. Usually, it’s a compilation of several great women, all lumped together because we’re “the other.” If magazines and news programs wanted to honor women’s contributions in a non-condescending way, they could cover our stories every day right alongside men’s stories, as if we mattered. Not as tokens once a year.
Go Louise! Loved your article/blog. And I share your frustration. I’ve devoted my entire career to unearthing evidence of women’s history, and especially the extraordinary but deeply hidden history of feminist thought and activity in European settings. Readers of Women’s Media Center news should check out my women’s history blog, “Clio Talks Back” – it’s now on http://www.imowblog.blogspot.com but archived at the website of the online International Museum of Women.
What bothers me most is that young people don’t see history as particularly relevant to their current lives and futures. No amount of information about women’s history included in textbooks or in the media will help if people (especially young women) don’t pay attention or care.
Thank you for bringing up again the current trend to shovel women-centered history back under the carpet. Like many others, I thought we had moved forward so dispositively since the early 20th century that we would continue to progress. We do progress in certain restricted areas, such as in the area of recognizing the accomplishments of exceptional women. This exceptionalism, or tokenism, takes some pressure off the system, and unfortunately has little or no real impact on the problems of increased misogyny in the arts, lack of political unity, insidious cutting of social programs, and so on. It also bleeds off the most talented women by co-opting them and using their energies to support the misogynistic system. I, too, have recently begun reading about the movement to obtain the vote for U.S. women. It is an astounding story of courage, as can be judged by the way it has been denigrated and ridiculed and ignored and erased from history books. Thanks to this organization for its work.
Great article. Thanks for this spirited and provocative reminder.
Joan Meacham
For readers interested in women’s history, there are more and more books available and progress is being made. Women’s heritage trails on a city-wide, regional, and state basis are bringing their public educational tools to the public with traveling exhibits, extensive websites, and presentations at various community and women’s group meetings. More women’s history courses are being offered in our institutions of higher education, and national organizations such as the National Park Service are currently re-writing many of thier historic site interpretations to include women’s experiences and contributions. And thanks to writers such as Louise Bernikow, more attention is obtained related to the importance of telling the “other half of the story.”
Re the overall national suffrage movement, there is a very extensive book: “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement.” Quoting Ken Burns, producer of the Elisabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony PBS program, ” This is a wonderful chronicle of the untold history of our country – the story of the brave and remarkable women who changed our nation.” This book has received very positive reviews from women’s history historians, and institutions such as the Library Journal. It is by Robert Cooney, Jr., he researched the material and located hundreds of pictures depicting the original suffragist marches and demonstrations, for over 15 years.
The book may be obtained through the National Women’s History Project website: http://www.nwhp.org. Founded in 1980, the National Women’s History Project encourages including women’s history in our primary and secondary public education. Their catalogs contain teacher’s kits and special materials for women’s history month. In addition many women’s history tools are available for conferences and symposiums.
Here in Arizona, we have a 61 page bibliography of Arizona Women’s History on our website: http://www.womensheritagetrail.org, along with brief biographies and pictures of remarkable women who have contributed to the development of their communities and of the state of Arizona.
I encourage all history lovers to explore the resources in their respective locations and to support the women’s history movement. Joan Anderson Meacham, Founding Director, Arizona Women’s Heritage Trail, womensheritagetr@aol.com.
For the reasons mentioned in this wonderful article, the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) has a goal of bringing women’s history “out of the dark” and into the light. So much of women’s history has been uncovered in the last 30-40 years but it remains in the libraries, archives or basement. In our nation’s Capitol building there are 214 statues — only 13 are of women leaders and less than 8% of the statues in our national parks are of women. Young girls still do not see themselves reflected in our national story. NWHM is working to change that.
Think of the inspiration young girls and boys will find when they learn how their foremothers overcame challenges and helped build this country.
Information, online exhibits, lesson plans and biographies can be found at http://www.nwhm.org.
A word to acknowledge women below the age of 40, including women in their 20s, and in high school, who love women’s history and are doing all they can to learn more! Some are lucky in their education, others are not, but I know lots of younger women who love women’s history and know a lot about it too. I grant that the schools could do a better job — even at the college level there are women’s studies programs or gender studies programs that these days deal in depth on cultural topics but omit history and politics. Anyway, check out The Radical Women’s History Project at the blog of Shelby Knox, a young woman in her twenties who loves women’s history and is spreading the word: http://shelbyknox.com