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Feminist Historiography: Seeing History through the eyes of women

What is history? What is feminist historiography? Why is it necessary to see history through the
eyes of women? It is first of all very important to distinguish between the unrecorded past (all
the events of the past as recollected by human beings) and history (the recorded and interpreted
past). Like men, women are and always have been actors and agents in history. Since women are
half and sometimes more than half of humankind, they always have shared the world and its
work equally with men. Women are and have been central, not marginal, to making of society
and to the building of civilization. Women have also shared with men in preserving collective
memory, which shapes the past into cultural tradition, provides the link between generations and
connects past and future. This oral tradition was kept alive in poem and myth, which both men
and women created and preserved in folklore, art and ritual.

History-making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of
writing in ancient Mesopotamia. From the time of the king lists of ancient Sumer on, historians,
whether priests, royal servants, clerks, clerics or a professional class university-trained
intellectuals, have selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give
them meaning and significance. Until the most recent past, these historians have been men and
what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They
have called this ‘history’ and claimed universality for it. What women have done and
experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected and ignored in interpretation. Historical
scholarship, up to the most recent past has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization
and as unessential to those pursuits defined as having historic significance.

Thus, the recorded and interpreted record of the past of the human race is only a partial record, in
this it omits the past of half of humankind, and it is distorted in that it tells the story from the
viewpoint of the male half of humanity only. To counter this argument as has often been done,
by showing that large groups of men, possibly the majority of men, have also for a long time
been eliminated from the historical record through the prejudiced interpretations of intellectuals
representing the concerns of small ruling elites is to beg the question. One error does not cancel
out another, both conceptual errors need correction. As formerly subordinate groups, such as
peasants, slaves, proletarians, have risen into positions of power or at least inclusion in the
polity, their experiences having become part of the historical record. That is, the experiences of
the males of their group; females were, as usual, excluded. The point is that women and men
have suffered exclusion and discrimination because of their class. However, no man has been
excluded from the historical record because of his sex, yet all women were.

Women have been kept from contributing to history-making, that is, the ordering and
interpretation of the past of humankind. Since this process of meaning-giving is essential to the
creation and perpetuation of civilization, we can see at once that women’s marginality in this
endeavor places us in a unique and segregate position. Women are sometimes the majority, yet
they are structured into social institutions as though they were a minority. While women have
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been victimized by this and many other aspects of their long subordination to men, it is a
fundamental error to try to conceptualize women primarily as victims. To do so at once obscures
what must be assumed as a given of women’s historical situation: Women are essential and
central to creating society; they are and always have been actors and agents in history. Women
have “made history,” yet they have been kept from knowing their history and from interpreting
history, either their own or that of men. Women have been systematically excluded from the
enterprise of creating symbol systems, philosophies, science and law. Women have not only been
educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been
excluded from theory-formation. According to Gerda Lerner, the tension between women’s
actual historical experience and their exclusion from interpreting that experience is called “the
dialectic of women’s history.” This dialectic has moved women forward in the historical process.

The contradiction between women’s centrality and active role in creating society and their
marginality in the meaning-giving process of interpretation and explanation has been a dynamic
force, causing women to struggle against their condition. When, in that process of struggle, at
certain historic moments, the contradictions in their relationship to society and to historical
process are brought into the consciousness of women, they are then correctly perceived and
named as deprivations that women share as a group. This coming into consciousness of women
becomes the dialectical force moving them into action to change their condition and to enter a
new relationship to male-dominated society. Because of these conditions unique to themselves,
women have had a historical experience significantly different from that of man.

Looking at the recorded history of society as though it were such a play, we realize that the story
of the performances over thousands of years has been recorded only by men and told in their
words. Their attention has been mostly on men. Not surprisingly, they have not noticed all the
actions women have taken. In the past years, some women have acquired the training necessary
for writing the company’s scripts. As they wrote, they began to pay more attention to what
women were doing. Still, they had been well trained by their male mentors. So they too found
what men were doing on the whole more significant and, in their desire to upgrade the part of
women in the past, they looked hard for women who had done what men did. Thus,
compensatory history was born.

What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props,
its director, and its scriptwriter, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this
framework. And then they must tear it down. What will the writing of history be like, when the
umbrella of dominance is removed and definition is shared equally by men and women? Will we
devalue the past, overthrow the categories, and supplant order with chaos? No – we will simply
step out under the free sky. We will observe how it changes, how the stars rise and the moon
circles, and we will describe the earth and its workings in male and female voices. We may, after
all, see with greater enrichment. We now know that man is not the measure of that which is
human, but men and women are. Men are not the center of the world, but men and women are.
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This insight will transform consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the
earth is not the center of the universe.

A feminist historiography rethinks historiography as a whole and discards the idea of women as
something to be framed by a context, in order to be able to think of gender difference as both
structuring and structured by the wide set of social relations. In this sense, feminist
historiography is a choice open to all historians. Not a choice among competing perspectives, nor
is the issue here the tokenist inclusion of women. Rather as a choice which undertakes to
demonstrate our sociality in the full sense, and is ready to engage with its own presuppositions of
an objective gender-neutral method of enquiry, as well as with the presuppositions of the social
moments and movements it sets out to represent. Therefore, while doing women in the history of
Christianity, feminist historiography is crucial as the course objectives suggested: to focus
attention on the role of women in the history of Christianity, to deconstruct history to reclaim
women’s legitimate space in the history of Christianity, to recognize and appreciate the decisive
contributions of Christian women in the history of Christianity and also to understand the
significance of such historiographies and to engage in just and inclusive historiographical
endeavors.

“What is written is not always what actually happened. What actually happened is not always
written.” Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

“I wanted to write a feminist history of early Christianity. That means I wanted to rewrite the
history of the early church in light of the fact that women were central agents and subjects in
early Christian communities. Since traditional history was written only in terms of male actors, I
felt the historical record needed to be corrected.” Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.

Source:

Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Edited by Kumkum Sangari & Sudesh Vaid

The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner

In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian origins, ES Fiorenza

Bread Not Stone, The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, ES Fiorenza