Last month I wrote and published 29 articles during Black History Month. 

Toward the end of the month, I had the pleasure to ask two women in their late 60s/early 70s whether they’d ever heard the Defense argument in the Emmett Till case.

They’d only ever heard that a woman who looked like them had lied on the stand.

Neither of them knew that Carol Bryant never actually testified in front of the jury. In preparation for Women’s History Month, I also asked if they’d ever heard any of the arguments the women Anti-Suffragists had.

Neither of them knew there even had been women’s Anti-Suffrage groups, let alone what their arguments were.

These were educated women who care about such issues, but these ideas had been blocked out. Even when they were in school, 60 years ago, these topics were not being discussed.

This Women’s History Month, I’ll be offering a Woman’s History that is not often heard or taught.

I’ll be relying heavily on the research of Dr. Janice Fiamengo, a retired English Professor from the University of Ottawa. Over many decades she’s read and dissected many of the core texts of Intersectional Feminism.  

We are told in society that this ideology is new and is only to be perceived as a universal good.  

If this is true, then why, other than “deeply internalized misogyny,” would many women reject this obviously positive movement?  The answer may be the same reason that many find history boring.

For history to be engaging, it needs to be about people, not just a series of dates, battles, and God-like deities. These alleged histories are often nothing more than simplistic misrepresentations –  little more than fairy tales for adult children.

People are not as simple as Gods. They’re complex, hypocritical, have conflicts, and live in a real world where actions have consequences. Those aren’t always pretty.

Women’s History Needs a Makeover

The way Women’s history is taught is boring.  It’s dogmatic and two dimensional.  Worse, it deifies the Women in History and dehumanizes them in it’s attempt to show only the power of Women’s good. 

In the process, it objectifies by treating the “Leaders of the Women’s Movement,” mostly educated, wealthy women of leisure, as agents who’ve written everything good in history. 

It infantilizes Women, in general, by failing to acknowledge the power and value of the contributions of the everyday women who bore and raised children and controlled a social domain that has been eschewed by the elites over the last 100 years.

Not only is this approach to history boring, it’s pathological.

In order to pretend that Women have never had any power and that demanding it is somehow a new thing, we are completely negating the power that women actually have by virtue of their biology.

While biology is not currently fashionable, it is a long term trend.  Reality is a thing that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

My aim with this series, like my Black History Month series, is to bring to light the nuance of Women’s History and give some reality where only fantasies existed before.

With the help of Dr. Fiamengo, and some of my own research, I plan to shed a realistic light where something akin to religious propaganda existed before.  

Women are wonderful, but they are not powerless. This has been the biggest lie told in the history of the species and many people believe it because it’s expeditious to do.

Women are also great and terrible, because they’re not Gods. They’re humans and it’s their humanity, with flaws intact, that make them interesting.

We are entering into a new era of human understanding. The 100-year anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, three full generations of Affirmative Action and hopefully, the end of the 50-year war that Sexual Politics began, is all upon us.

I hope this article finds you, Dear Reader, ready for a new, more informed, more nuanced perspective on the real humanity of Women and their history.