Women Really Do Exist
8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:
They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.
Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that. [ETA 13 May 2011: I stopped doing this because it was too much trouble!]
And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:
