Why Gender History is Important (Asshole)
historicity-was-already-taken:
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
READ THIS.
Tag: women
men: *decided women weren’t allowed attend schools, study sciences, or have access to higher education*
men: well if women are so smart then how come there aren’t many contributions from women in history huhThis post means well, but still erases women’s contributions in the same way men have. The truth is that women have made so many contributions to history and science despite men denying them access, but that men have either taken credit for those accomplishments or, when they couldn’t, completely divorced that accomplishment from the woman so that no one remembers them.
In fact, this happens so often that there’s even a name for it. It’s called the Matilda Effect which is defined as “the systematic repression and denial of the contribution of woman scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues” but which applies to other fields as well and goes doubly for women of color. How about just a few (certainly nowhere near all) women who contributed to science? And this is just science, not even history in the larger sense.
- Margaret Hamilton – Lead programmer on the Apollo project, wrote the code to take us to the moon
- Hedy Lamarr – actress and inventor of wifi
- Annie Jump Cannon – developed first stellar classification system and classified nearly 400,000 stars, more than any other person ever
- Lise Meitner – research paved the way for the discovery of nuclear fission, colleagues refused to credit her help, she received no credit while they were given a Nobel prize
- Grace Hopper – computer scientist who created the first compiler
- Rita Levi-Montalcini – Italian neuroscientist who won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor
- Melba Roy Moutan – mathematician who led a team of
mathematicians at NASA, nicknamed ‘Computers’ for their number
processing prowess- Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman – the primary programers of ENIAC, the first general purpose computer
- Joyce Jacobson Kaufman – chemist who developed the concept of conformational topology
- Vera Rubin – co-authored 114 peer reviewed
papers. She specializes in the study of dark matter and galaxy rotation
rates.- Mary Sherman Morgan – rocket scientist who invented hydyne, a liquid fuel that powered the USA’s Jupiter C-rocket.
- Chien-Siung Wu – physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, as
well as experimental radioactive studies. She was the first woman to
become president of the American Physical Society.- Mildred Catherine Rebstock – first person to synthesize the antibiotic chloromycetin.
- Ruby Hirose – chemist who conducted vital research about an infant paralysis vaccine.
- Hattie Elizabeth Alexander – pediatrician and microbiologist who
developed a remedy for Haemophilus influenzae, and conducted vital
research on antibiotic resistance.- Marie Tharp – mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and provided proof of continental drift.
- Mae Jamison – astronaut who holds a degree in chemical engineering
from Stanford University and was the first black woman in space.- Ada Lovelace – mathematician and considered to be the world’s first computer programmer.
- Patricia E Bath – ophthalmologist and the inventor of the Laserphaco Probe, which is used to treat cataracts.
- Barbara McClintock – won a Nobel prize for her discovery that genes could move in and between chromosomes.
- Cecilia Payne – discovered what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is
made of (Henry Norris Russell is usually given
credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the
Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than
Payne—after telling her not to publish).- Yanping Guo – mission design leader and one of the women who made
up 25% of the New Horizons team. She configured the entire mission
trajectory, including Jupiter and Pluto flybys.- Agnodice – went to study medicine in Alexandria to help keep women from dying in childbirth, pretended to be a man when she came back because it was illegal for a woman to be a doctor in Athens, was so much better than her male colleagues they brought her to court and accused her of seducing her patients as an explanation for her popularity but since she was the reason so many of the court had living wives and kids they were shamed into changing the law instead of executing her.
- Queen Seondeok of Silla – set up first astronomy tower in Asia
- Jocelyn Bell Bernell – discovered first pulsar, Anthony Hewish took credit listiner her as an assistant despite having nothing to do with the discovery, he received a Nobel Prize
- Nettie Stevens – discovered that chromosomes determined sex, sent her findings to a colleague for peer review, he published it as his own and named her his technician
- Marie Curie – won 2 Nobel prizes and was constantly attacked by her male colleagues and barred from academic organizations because she was a woman, still managed to be better than them
- Marie Van Brittan Brown – black woman who co-invented home security surveillance
- Vera Rubin – discovered dark matter at Cornell after being rejected from Princeton because she was a woman
I’m too tired to keep going but how about Jane Goodall, Sally Ride, Rosalind Franklin, Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorothy Hodgkin, Shirley Ann Jackson, Kalpana Chawla, Maryam Mirzakhani, Flossie Wong-Staal, Alice Ball, Ida Tacke, Ester Lederberg, Mileva Maric?
The absence of women in history is man made.
One weird and specific thread that I’ve seen flow through a wide variety of tumblr conversations is that you people have no fucking idea what women in our 30s are like: you don’t know what we do for fun, you have no idea what we look like, our media interests puzzle and frighten you and the whole vibe is that every time you find out a woman is over, say 33, you gasp that a wizened hag has again managed to slip in among you. Surely she must be a secret immortal or a terrifying ghoul.
Things a 30 something woman can do that are suspicious according to tumblr:
- Enjoy hip youthful things like currently popular bands, movies, cw tv shows, etc
- Enjoy things from her own youth, e.g., Harry Potter, Sailor Moon
- Enjoy square adult hobbies like pintrest crafts and candle collecting
- Enjoy odd adult hobbies like doll or dollhouse collecting
- Have the body of a woman who has given birth to children, or the face of a woman who spent her youth in the sun
- Have the body of a woman who does yoga and the face of a woman who wears sunscreen and has good genes.
- Talk about her pets, especially if she has no kids
- Talk about her kids
And once you get over 40, you become a cryptid.
I can be a cryptid now??? Amazing
“American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and … labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”
— bell hooks
Finally a motivation video without fitness models, but with ordinary girls!
I love this!!!!
HELL YES
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH
Not gonna lie, if this was the kinda of representation I saw growing up, I would of not have thought that I needed to already be a good weight and healthy to partispitate in physical activity.
^^^^^^^^
YAAAASS! 🤩
I will share this each time I see it.
LOVE LOVE LOVE 😍
Kindness is a practice and a discipline.
i'll apple your turnover 