We could just get to introducing ourselves, but the spirit and intent of Ask Historians is to provide context … So, context incoming.
"Placing Women in History: Definitions And Challenges” by Gerda Lerner arrived on the scene in 1975. Recognized as one of the foundational texts of a then nascent branch of history known as “Women’s History”, she laid out how a consequence of traditional approaches to the historical record meant women often went unremarked on. Not that our words, labor, ideas, and work were unremarkable but that the men writing about history saw our presence as background noise to the “real” history their fellow men were making.
Lerner wasn’t the first to recognize it but articulated that when we envision the past as a place dominated by men, it’s that much harder to envision an equitable future. Since then, in ways big and small, historians of all genders have worked to push, prod, and encourage the field to approach the historical record in a more thoughtful, and more complete, way. With varying levels of success, they have helped their fellow historians move from framing women as someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter to attending to their full humanity, agency, and experiences.
The field of women's history reminds us that in order to tell the full story of the past, we need to consider the actions of all people. And the work truly means all - Women. Men. Nonbinary people. Girls. Trans women and men. Black, Indigenous, multiracial women. Women of color. White women. Women with developmental disabilities, women with physical disabilities. Women sex workers and women rulers. Everyone in between. All.
Telling more complex, more accurate histories, though, is only part of the work. Another essential part is setting the record straight about who does the telling. Many women historians write about topics generally thought of as “about women” such as fashion, pregnancy, or feminism. Many women historians write about history topics generally thought of as “about men”, including wars and armies. Women historians write about whoever we want and whatever we want -- in short, we write history.
Today, groups like Women Also Know History (#womenalsoknowhistory) encourage the public and media to use women experts when talking, writing, or learning about history (and avoiding the dreaded manel.) From their website, “Women Also Know History is inspired by and indebted to Women Also Know Stuff, an initiative to bring attention to the work of women Political Scientists.”
And in the spirit of the WAKH project, we wanted to formally introduce ourselves as women moderators, historians, and members of the AH community.
Making the decision to identify oneself on Reddit as a woman can, on its face, seem like an easy decision. However, it’s worth stating explicitly that it is a complex decision to identify as a not dude on here. Each of us, including some women members of the mod team who made the perfectly reasonable decision to not be part of this post, have been misgendered. We routinely see or experience gender-based insults. We, and the non-women mods, have had to deal respectfully with users who suspect there’s a woman at the other end and use that as an argument for why they were right, and we’re wrong. Users have even used our fields of study as insults, as if the history of things mostly associated with women is less worthy than the history of things mostly associated with men. Basically, it sometimes sucks when people on the internet know you’re a woman.
However, it’s sometimes not that bad. Like when we get to metaphorically stand up to say, “Hi, I’m a woman,” and know there’s some woman or girl out there reading our words, who needs to know that history is for her, too. She’s seen male-gendered names on the cover of nearly every book in the “History” section of her bookstore or on her textbooks and she knows how many of them are biographies of men. When we write as women historians, we model she can read history, she can write history, and she will be memorialized in history.
Not only are we modeling women as historians through writing on the sub, in many ways we also model women as historiographers through our volunteer work as AH mods. In the most basic sense, this manifests itself in our fulfilling the basic moderation requirements of the sub along with the other non-women mods; however, as female moderators we are also able to - and often take the opportunity to - not just keep an eye on the content that already exists, but try to cultivate the content that we want to exist. We can highlight questions that celebrate under-explored and under-represented topics by flairing them with Great Question flairs; we can recruit brilliant women podcast and AMA guests to share their expertise; we can share in Meta threads and Methods posts the vision that we have for what this sub can be: open and welcoming to all, whether in or out of Reddit’s target demographic, and giving voices to a wide variety of historical experiences and perspectives.
We are women who love history.
In the comments below, five women members of the all-volunteer moderation team have shared our thinking about posts we’re proudest of, the ones we best liked writing, posts we wished we could edit but can’t cause that door has closed, or general observations on the sub. Feel free to say hello or share your favorite post!
Women of the AH Moderation Team:
You know I don't actually do "women's history" in my own work?
Nope! My overarching philosophy as a research historian is to use women's and men's stories together to tell a broader history. In medieval, that often gets left out today, amidst so much focus on "masculinities" and women's communities and so forth.
But one of the problems we tend to face in history is the idea it's somehow cool or better for women to do non-women's history--the historiographical version of "one of the guys."
So here on reddit--yeah, I'm going to write about men (Was Chaucer a rapist?), and yeah, I'm going to write about gender-inclusive topics (Traveling the Oregon Trail, how likely were you to actually die of dysentery?).
But I'm also going to use women to answer questions that readers were expecting to be about men and let me know it, not always politely (How powerful were translators?), and I'm straight-up going to talk about what women's history is and why it matters (Women's history vs feminist history vs history of women).
And above all, although it was originally an accident, every time you read a post by me, you read the words of a medieval woman author you'll never read in school:
You shine into my soul
Like the sun against gold
Here's the sun against gold, by the way.
In case you had any doubts about the power of a woman's words.
Just want to stop by and thank you all. As a woman redditor I am always excited to see fellow women standing up and speaking up as experts in their field; I’m in a field that is predominantly female and still experience sexism. I can only imagine what it’s like for you all.
We see you. Thank you.
Unlike the other mods here, I’m not an historian – I study the internet (and more specifically, r/AskHistorians)! However, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a bit about women’s experiences online.
The web is not working for women and girls.
The world has made important progress on gender equality thanks to the unceasing drive of committed champions everywhere. But I am seriously concerned that online harms facing women and girls – especially those of colour, from LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalised groups – threaten that progress
–Tim Berners-Lee
The early years
The earliest dreams for the internet were hopeful. It was envisioned that the it would provide a space where women could participate equally with men, meet and organize political movements in the pursuit of offline equality, and provide a space where women could publish and engage in entrepreneurial activities on a par with men. Until the 1990s, everything online was text-based, so it was theorized that reduced cues would create a more egalitarian environment, where contributions would be judged on merit rather than other social signifiers of status, like gender. The idea was simple: equality was possible because on the internet, nobody knows you’re a woman.
This is a rather interesting theory, especially when you consider how, when these hopes and dreams felt most like reality (before the late 1990s), there were far fewer women online than men. The lack of women’s participation in the early days was in large part due to how the internet was accessed: through work (and typically in jobs traditionally held by men) or school (and typically through programs traditionally taken by men). This began to change and by the early 2000s in America there were as many women online as men. The increase was in large part due to the rise in home internet and advent of the World Wide Web that both extended Internet access and made it faster to adopt. In the early 2000s, communication was still largely text-based, so equal participation and reduced cues meant that women had now achieved equality online and everyone lived happily ever after . . . right?
😂😂😂 Of course not! But why? One explanation is that men and women tend to have different communication patterns. Early work on computer mediated communication (CMC) found that men tended to post longer messages, assert opinions as facts, swear, were more adversarial, and tended to care more about threats to freedom of expression than following the rules. Women, on the other hand tended post shorter messages, say thank you and apologize, and use more emoticons. In other words: just because you can’t see who you’re talking to, doesn’t mean there aren’t clues. These clues led to women being treated differently online. While being a woman online in the earliest days meant that you might get a lot of attention, it was often not positive. Women had lower status, were often treated as interlopers, or faced harassment and abuse. Nancy Baym’s ethnography on the Usenet group, r.a.t.s (rec.arts.tv.soaps) provides insight into one of the earliest online communities that had more women members than men. She reports that responses to survey and interviews highlight how “nice” and “friendly” the community was. Nonetheless, it was, at times, “brigaded” (they didn’t have that word then) by trolls (they didn’t have that word then either) posting messages like this:
Soap operas are for fat old house wives who have nothing better to do with the time they have then sit around in curlers, eating bon bons, and getting fatter. Then they watch these show and it just shows them how pathetic their lives really are. (October 5, 1991)
While this post, and posts like it were certainly rude and disruptive, women on the early internet experienced far worse, such as the incident chronicled in Julian Dibbell’s piece, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” in which one user of the MOO (multi-user dungeon object oriented), LambdaMOO used a “voodoo” command to force two other users, both women, to engage in sex acts against their will. While the rape may have been virtual, the rage, tears, and violation felt by the women was not, prompting Dibbell to state:
the more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the notion of freedom of speech, with its tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real.
I want to take this moment here to highlight this: while we often talk about online interactions as something separate from “real” life, they aren’t. The things that happen online carry into our offline lives – whether that’s the joy found in a good meme, the intimacy of friendships made, or the pain, trauma, and terror of harassment – what happens online has consequences and it matters, even when it is just “speech.”
The current state of affairs
So where are we at today when it comes to women and the internet? Raw stats-wise we see women and men using the internet at almost the exact same rate (91% of American women use the Internet vs 90% of American men) with women surpassing men in certain kinds of spaces, such as social media where 78% of women are users vs 65% of men.^1 So while we have near equal usage rates in the US, and have had near equal usage rates for a long time, this doesn’t necessarily translate to equal experiences online. Take, for example, online harassment. While men are more likely to have experienced online harassment in general (44% of men vs 37% of women), men and women experience different types of harassment at different rates. For example, men are more likely to have been called offensive names than women (30% vs 23%); however, women are more likely to encounter sexualized forms of abuse online, such as sexual harassment and receiving explicit images they did not ask for. Women are also more likely to be the victim of non-consensual pornography than men. And new technologies are disproportionality being used to target women more than men. For example, startup, Deeptrace found that 96% of the deepfakes circulating were pornographic. Of course porn isn’t in and of itself victimizing (sex work is work!); however, many of the deepfakes they found had superimposed women’s faces into the videos without the consent of (any) of the women involved. Deepfakes are also being used to target and harass women political activists and reporters as well as ex-partners. The type of harassment they receive may be why women perceive online harassment differently than men: 35% of women who experienced harassment described it as extremely or very upsetting whereas only 16% of men described harassment the same way.
This may also impact the way women participate (or don’t). Qualitative research, including my own, has shown two strategies that women sometimes use to help mitigate harassment or other negative online experiences: identity management and self-censorship (for more information about the role of reddit as a platform and women’s participation, you can check out this post I wrote. Identity management happens when women conceal their identity as a woman to avoid harassment, such as the use of a gender-neutral username, or take steps to protect themselves when they do reveal themselves as women, such as the creation of a throwaway account (in fact one study found that women were 154% more likely to use a throwaway account than men). Self-censorship occurs when women disengage from discussing particular topics, as well as disengage from participation entirely. This is problematic because while women may be using the internet at the same rate as men, they may not be creating content at the same rate.
^1 While internet penetration is about equal in the US, this is not the case globally, where 58.3% of men use the internet vs 48.4% of women. There’s a lot more discussion to be had here.
One of the things I love about AskHistorians is that it's given me the opportunity to do women's history! As a collections manager, chances of "doing history" in general are harder to come by, and local history and decorative arts history are much more relevant.
When I started, I was focused on the history women's fashion, and sometimes women in fashion:
What kinds of clothing did pre-teen Victorian girls wear?
How did women get to wear the pants around here?
Bob haircuts on women in 1920s America
From there, I started branching out into non-fashion social history, particularly with relation to women:
Was wool spinning a profitable occupation for medieval European women?
How did marriage arrangements work for poor aristocrats marrying rich american heiresses?
What was the dating scene like for American women during WWII?
What happened to female skilled labor, like Rosie the Riveter, after the conclusion of WWII?
I'm not sure exactly how I got into the history of royal women. I've definitely been interested in them since I was a small child (at 4, my chosen occupation as an adult was "queen"), but I think I came back around into it due to the intersection of queens with fashion (Marie Antoinette, Victoria and her supposed turn to the prudish in dress, Elizabeth I's glorious portraits, etc.) and then because they are in general the historical women who have the most well-attested lives. But I also have a lot of interest in the strategies women have used to gain and maintain power, as well as the power that they had as a result of social status and norms!
Was Queen Victoria actually upset about the plight of the Irish during the Great Famine?
What did the French people think about Marie Antoinette before she became the queen.
Why did people think Anastasia survived/escaped the Romanov execution?
Thanks for the post.
It's just much harder for women in academic history and everyone who's looking can see it. That's very sad.
Personally, I find it difficult to tread the lines in writing history of marginalised groups, but my main gripe is with the idea the answer to writing histories of these groups is to just insert them into the existing narratives and identified power structures. The whole point is that these groups have been written out of history - in itself an egregious injustice - and we don't right that by writing them back into it. That's just a denial of the struggles and injustices those groups have experienced. We have to accept the reality and consequences of those struggles and write a different kind of history that escapes those power structures, somehow. I found approaches in 'women's studies' offered the best models to work from.
So, I guess what I'm trying to do is recognise that my own work is indebted (really quite heavily) to that discipline.
P.s. I'm not sure why you're linking to coronavirus educationals but a good reader always checks their sources even when they're from a very reputable team of historians..!
Hey folkaroos! Due to life stuff, I'm not super in the headspace to write much about my thoughts on women in history and at AH- plus it would be super redundant given the excellent post above! So instead I'm going to list one post I'm proud of having written, one post I best liked writing, and one post I wish I could edit.
Post I'm proud of having written: well, pre-modhood I got my first and only ever Best Of award for this post about antisemitism in the US in the 1940s, so why not include it!
Post I best liked writing: really hard to choose, but there are two (both Tuesday Trivia- a feature I miss a lot!) that I think were the most fun, and that apparently I wrote two weeks in a row...! One is women's kosher meat boycott in turn-of-the-century NYC (incidentally a fascinating bit of women's history!) and the other is the Golem of Prague (which I'm pretty sure is the longest one I've ever done).
Post I wish I could edit: most of my earlier stuff- my style was crap. Instead, I'll link to one I DID go back and edit about Jews and the Black Death, which I'm still not super satisfied with but is basically fine, I think.
Thank you ladies so much ! I have nothing but respect. My historical knowledge is mostly monarchy related. But I can say for certain that field has a bunch of AMAZING female historians and they’re incredible. So keep up all your great work this dude is 100% on board with far far more females in STEM.
I try not to miss any chance to express my appreciation for the mods in this sub, it's one of my must-check subs. Thanks for all the work you do, and the work that goes unnoticed.
What is the Women's studies/Women's History field's response to critics (mostly feminist-adjacent in a broad sense, politically) who reject Women's studies on the basis of rejecting categories of gender and sex as fundamentally oppressive?
I don't know if it's appropriate for me to comment on this post, since I'm a man, but I want to thank you for your very important labor as moderators here, and more broadly as the historians who make us see and understand the vital role women and other forgotten figures such as minorities have in history. Within the fields I'm more interested in, I have to commend books such as The Battle Cry of Freedom, American Revolutions, and Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence, all of which dedicate pages to examining the roles of women. There are many brave women in the history of my country, such as Manuelita Saenz, and I would like to know more of her. There's still a long way to go, especially in the patriarchal society of my country, but with the efforts of women such as you, I think we will get there eventually, and have a history that truly includes all of us. Thank you very much, again.