“For most of history, anonymous was a woman.”
-Virginia Woolf
0.5%
^The amount of recorded history that researchers have estimated is devoted to women’s stories.
The obliteration of women from memory and time is a double edged sword: it serves to embed in public consciousness the idea that women have seemingly contributed less to society, which in turn further entrenches the patriarchal order of society. Unravelling the systematic erasure of women’s stories enables us to understand how our way of viewing the world itself is shaped by the patriarchy. It allows us to ask whose story are we really seeing? Whose achievements are we really celebrating? Is it just giant leaps for man-kind? What about women in his-tory? It’s about time to highlight her-story.
Amanda Foreman, renowned biographer and historian writes:
“The tools of oppression begin with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and that's why you have to set the record straight."
"History has long been a boys' club, from the people being written about to the people writing the books. What we've been reading and writing has been the history of man, starting with man the hunter. If you follow that male perspective, what have women been doing all these years? We're just waiting in caves for evolution to come to us. But maybe there's another story. Maybe men were out hunting, but as we know from modern hunting and gathering societies, meat provides less than half the nutrients that these societies depend on. Women have been gathering and foraging, and maybe they're the providers. Suddenly you have a completely different perspective on our history. That's much more inspiring and interesting.
For example, Enheduanna, the High Priestess of Sumer, invented literature. You would think that words are male, that writing is something that men invented, but they didn't.
That blew my mind away actually, because I'd followed the male scribes, writing, poets, Shakespeare malarkey, and I really didn't know the profound influence women had had on writing.”
She writes about the discovery of when the silencing of women began, “We have a law, one of the first laws in history that came down to us from 2400-2300 BC, and it says that when a woman speaks out of turn she will be smacked by a brick, and that's it. That's where it began. It's true there has been a conspiracy to silence us. I think that was the most shocking thing because you feel like most women are terrified of public speaking, we feel inauthentic—it still exists. Where does it come from? It came from there. It's not magic. You can get a handle on these things. These things evolve, and they evolved for a reason.”
Her views on underrepresented women that people should know about immediately:
“Go find out about Enheduanna, it's absolutely vital. Go find out about Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji is incredible. It's a moving novel, and the first novel in history so read it and feel proud. Three, go find out about Olympe de Gouges, the woman who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, or Mary Wollstonecraft. These last two are absolutely key—they are the female response to the enlightenment and vital to establishing what human rights means. Finally, go back and discover the origins of the Pill, because the Pill was the idea of a woman, funded by a woman, and the research and the release was done without any kind of government support whatsoever. It was a woman-led revolution and it reminds us what we can do when we put our minds to things.”
What is The Matilda Effect?
The name was coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter, referencing suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage’s essay Woman as Inventor. Published 100 years before, Gage describes the bias against acknowledging the achievements of female scientists, instead attributing their work to male colleagues: “Although woman’s scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her.”
She continues: “A very slight investigation proves that patents taken out in some man’s name are, in many instances, due to women.”
Although The Matilda Effect typically applies to erasure of women within science it’s acknowledged far beyond that, from the arts to writing.
Women’s work has historically been credited to men simply because it could be – the patriarchy is designed to benefit men after all. There’s also the fact that it would be taken more seriously in the scientific, artistic or linguistic community if it was put forward with by lines belonging to men, as male gatekeepers perceive work by them to be more credible. And for women who had landed on discoveries they believed that sharing the life changing information with the world was more important than taking credit for it.
But erasure of women is dangerous. If we don’t know that women were responsible for or contributed to these scientific breakthroughs or defining pieces of art, how do we teach young women that they too can strive to do the same? Hidden figures in science mean that at school we are taught about the inventions of Alexander Fleming, Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, but the only female scientist we can talk about is Marie Curie (we also know that her husband helped her with the research, but were we taught anything about Edison’s wives?) Let’s also take a second to think about how easily those names roll off tongues, with the world having such high regard for their work that most of the time they’re simply referred to by their last name. Marie Curie is never just referenced as Curie.
It spreads into the arts, too: we read Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger and William Shakespeare, but none of the main texts we study in school barring a few were by female writers.
Let’s have a little quiz now, I want to see how many of you all know these women?
The iconic Afghan Girl from the National Geographic cover?
Few people know the name of Sharbat Gula, yet her image is instantly familiar. Steve McCurry’s photograph of the young refugee, taken years before even he learned the name of his subject, came to sum up the tragedy of Afghanistan and the dignity of its people in the face of war and exile. The image, known simply as The Afghan Girl, eventually became the most recognized photograph in the history of National Geographic magazine, after it appeared on the cover in June 1985.
The photograph also made McCurry’s career, earning him fame and recognition.
For readers in the West, it was a symbol of Afghanistan – still an anonymous, distant location – or else of refugees in crisis. Yet the story inside the magazine said not a word about Sharbat Gula. Her photo was captioned, “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears”, but as Northrup reveals, the fear in those eyes was most likely the fear of Steve McCurry.
McCurry was a complete stranger, and it is not welcome for a girl of traditional Pashtun culture to reveal her face, share space, make eye contact and be photographed by a man who does not belong to her family. For the photograph, she had been moved to a different location with better light and a clean background.
When McCurry entered, he spotted Sharbat Gula’s piercing green eyes, though she made an effort to cover her face. McCurry asked her class teacher to instruct her to cooperate. After being compelled to “let him photograph her… she lowered her hands” – in McCurry’s own words – to uncover her face.
“He poses her like an 80s’ glamour shot,” Northrup observes: “shoulder tilted towards the camera, forehead forward, nice light to illuminate the eyes and direct eye contact – something that she would never ever do.”
McCurry wanted to take more pictures but Sharbat Gula fled. No part of the written story mentioned her narrative or even her name (which McCurry did not care to find out). He did not take her consent or her father’s to publish the image.
When Sharbat Gula finally saw the cover that would make her face world-famous, she felt, she later said, “nervous and very sad.”
It said her eyes were “reflecting the fear of war”. This is false, Northrup says. The fear in her eyes is that of a student interrupted at school by a male stranger invading her space, her personal boundaries and her culture and leaving without even having learned her name.
McCurry and National Geographic would sell the picture for enormous amounts. Steve McCurry Studios prices their open edition 20″ x 24″ print of Sharbat Gula for $18,000 (Rs 12.8 lakh). Larger prints have been sold for as much as $178,900 at auctions.
Until their return for the follow-up story in 2002, Sharbat Gula received nothing.
Unwanted fame and a hard fate
Sharbat Gula was arrested in 2016 in Pakistan on charges of fraudulent identity. She served 15 days in prison and was then deported to Afghanistan, away from a “very good life in Pakistan”. She blames the photo for her arrest, saying: “The photo created more problems than benefits. It made me famous but also led to my imprisonment.”
Besides, her life continues to be in danger. Being on the cover of a magazine still puts her at risk of being identified by “conservative Afghans who don’t believe women should appear in the media.”
What about the woman in the iconic times square sailor kissing a nurse photo?
Her name was Greta Zimmer Friedman.
V-J Day photo: what Eisenstaedt captured that day went on to become one of the most iconic images of the 20thvCentury, standing for the euphoria Americans felt as the WWII ended.
However, the much-loved photo is a depiction of sexual assault, rather than passion. It is an uncomfortable truth. He is perfectly entitled to be ecstatic. He is perfectly entitled to celebrate. However, this entitlement does not extend to his impinging on someone else’s bodily autonomy.
Can you name Mozart’s sister?
Mozart’s older sister Maria Anna was also a prodigy. Some reports say she was better than her elder sibling and he idolized and learnt from her. At 12 she was called one of the best musicians in Europe. But her father called it inappropriate and got her married off.
What about Einstein’s first wife?
Mileva Marić
She was a physicist, too—and there is evidence that she contributed significantly to his ground-breaking science.
Einstein himself credits their work jointly and much of their collaborative research was published only under his name. She solved many of his problems that he couldn’t solve. Einstein later started an affair an divorced her. She threatened to make her contributions public if he did not provide for her and their son.
These stories highlight how little we truly know about our history and how the efforts or actual stories of so many women have been swept away in the sea of male perspectives.
This erasure is all the more profound when it comes to women belonging to oppressed castes or lower classes. This is not because oppressed caste women are not remembered by the community, but because it is elite nostalgia and public memory that forms the mainstay of dominant discourse. In contemporary history alone, Radhika Vemula has relentlessly campaigned against forgetting Rohith Vemula, but her name is absent from our minds and media. Lower caste, Dalit stories are mostly undocumented except for alternative, unofficial sources such as oral traditions and visual clues; thus making it even harder to keep these women’s stories alive.
This is why we celebrate women’s history month, to keep female narratives, contributions and concerns alive and kicking in the 21st century and for generations to come!
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