I have spent the last several months researching educational texts which grew in size throughout the 19th century. This growth saw the addition of artistic, scientific and economic histories, a notable divergence from the royal and political histories which dominated earlier educational texts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women’s history continued to be omitted, even as a growing number of women began reading the publications. This part of my research made me reflect on how women’s history is presented in modern popular literature.
The Chambers’s Information of the People, (IFTP), was a popular 19th century periodical publication which regularly printed content on British history. The IFTP ignored women when constructing their historical narratives, drawing conclusions based purely on the experience of men. For example, the text says that the 1838 Chartist movement demanded “universal suffrage”, when in reality the movement campaigned for universal male suffrage.[1] Far too many modern texts demonstrate the same problem. For example, in his 2022 novel, Three Epic Battles That Saved Democracy, Stephen Kershaw describes the ancient Athenian democracy as “fully grown”.[2] This is an objectionably ridiculous phrase to use when Athenian women and enslaved people were prevented from voting. These off-handed remarks, written usually by well meaning academics, make men's history the default and women's history the footnote.
Many authors have addressed this problem by writing separate books about women’s history. Walk into a Waterstones and you will find plenty of these works, quite unmistakable in their presentation. Standing out against the shelves of muted coloured are books with bright pink spines, adorned with snarky titles written in bright bubble letters. Bad Girls of Ancient Greece, Bloody Brilliant Women, A History of the World in 21 Women, to name just a few.[3] Rather than discuss average people, these books center on the few women who achieved regal, political or theological prominence. The childish appearance of these works, coming likely at the request of publishers, makes women’s history look unserious and unappealing. I have no doubt that the authors of these works care deeply about expanding understanding of women’s history, I simply disagree that isolated studies of famous women are the best works to accomplish this goal.
Here I would like to mention my favourite work of popular women’s history, Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.[4] This huge work tells the story of Britain through the lived experiences of average women, noting the hitherto ignored contributions made by those living in deeply patriarchal societies. It isn’t flashy, it isn’t simple and my god it isn’t short, but I don’t believe the history of women needs to be these things. The alternative simplification of this discipline forces authors to take one of two paths. Either they present women’s history as a story of constant oppression and misery, or they focus on successful people to present women’s history as a story of power. The truth is naturally somewhere in the middle. Some women were able to achieve positions of authority despite widespread oppression, but the vast majority suffered greatly under systems which restricted their political, legal and social rights. Just as in the 19th century, writers and publishers seem to believe that average people cannot handle complex works of women’s history.
Despite my general interest in women’s history, I was surprised in a recent discussion with my supervisor to be asked specifically about the presentation of women in Chambers’s Information for the People. Prior to this conversation, I simply hadn’t thought the exclusion of women’s stories was worthy of comment. Upon reflection, this indifference came from reading hundreds of works of popular and academic history which completely eschew women’s perspectives, leading me to think such exclusions are normal. This is precisely the problem with separating women’s history into distinct works. Even when done well, as in the case of Normal Women, separation enforces the idea that mainstream history need not discuss women to be taken seriously. I hope that one day every popular history book I read will include women’s history, not as a footnote or a reference to another work, but as an integrated part of the narrative.
Reflecting on women’s history in this manner has been one of the most enjoyable consequences of my Laidlaw summer of research. I am so glad to have had the opportunity to think deeply about the point of historical research and how we as historians can communicate our work to a non specialised audience. I would recommend all my fellow scholars to look beyond their work in this manner, to see what new topics of interest we have acquired in the course of our studies.
[1] Chambers’s Information for the People, William and Robert Chambers (eds), Vol 2, (London and Edinburgh, 1874), p.172.
[2] Stephen P. Kershaw, Three Epic Battles That Saved Democracy: Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, (2022), p24.
[3] Lizzy Tiffin, Bad Girls of Ancient Greece, (2024).
Cathy Newman, Bloody Brilliant Women, (2018).
Jenni Murray, A History of the World in 21 Women, (2018).
[4] Philippa Gregory, Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History, (2023).