Yes, it’s true that the history of women is the history of humankind.
It’s equally true that history is recorded by the victors, and those victors have been largely not women.
Further, the male-recorded, male-dominated history you and I and everyone else learned, unless they went to a progressive Friends K-12 school, gave very little concern or acknowledgement to women. Not to their struggles, and less to their victories, and almost never to their leadership.
Women have always been here; wherever you have powerful, history-making men, you have a woman who birthed him and, very likely, a woman who loved him — as well as women who’ve suffered oppression in the furtherance of his ambition or the reinforcement of his privilege. But we don’t hear their stories. We’re often not even aware they exist. So we need a month, or at least one good book, to nudge us into seeing more and looking deeper. And if we’re willing to do that, whether we’re men or women, whether we’re reading about our country, the narrative of Biblical history, or the story of the world throughout the ages, we’ll become richer.
Every stirring story of a forefather in history is equaled by the true story of strong, intelligent, brave and noble women — stories which are true whether you’ve heard of them or not. I urge you to get ahold of a good book on women’s history, or a well-researched biography of a woman in history. And here’s a hint:
If it’s published by an evangelical publishing house and features a gauzy, pastel-toned cup of tea on the cover, look further. Please. Your daughters as well as your sons need to know who they’ve come from, and if you’ve explained basic biology to them, you’ll have no trouble explaining that their foremothers were no less important than their forefathers, and very often a whole lot more worthy of admiration.
I dedicate this to the life, testimony, and memory of my great-great-grandmother, the physician and evangelist Louisa Spiller Bowles, who helped start the Disciples of Christ denomination in the midwest and worked as both an osteopath and a preacher. I’ll meet her someday, and I hope I’ve made her proud.