The Great Forgotten: The Erasure of Women in History

By Jensen Cox

Actors are typically women. They battled, produced, wrote, ruled, and occasionally yelled. Despite this, they are largely omitted from history textbooks. "I only now, as an adult, realize the deception I was subjected to at school," the author writes. I'm upset about how my female ancestors were treated. Better is due to them. More than we have been taught, we all have a shared past. Why this great oversight? From the age of caves to the present day, Jensen Cox relies on the most recent discoveries to analyze the mechanisms of this biased vision of history. It gives life to erased faces, tells the story of these invisible ones, so numerous, who have changed the world. Pedagogue, biting, irresistible, with her everything lights up. Women have never been silent. This book gives them back their voices. " Free and committed woman, avid and curious spirit, confirmed writer, Author delivers a great story, exciting and true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223897019

Jensen Cox

Jensen Cox is an esteemed author renowned for his profound insights and meticulous research in the fields of history and business. With an exceptional ability to weave captivating narratives and shed light on complex subjects, Jensen has established himself as a trusted authority in both disciplines. Through his thought-provoking works, he has consistently delivered invaluable knowledge and enriched the understanding of readers around the world.

Book preview

Preface

Jensen Cox

Little girl, what do we perceive when we are only told the story of men? when we are told that the masculine prevails over the feminine, in grammar, and basically everywhere? There is much to be surprised and revolted about. What Cox does in this invigorating and cheerful book, attempt to fight against the forgetting (the word is from Césaire for blacks) in which women have been rejected for centuries".

Yet women have never been silent. But we didn't listen to them, we didn't mention them; they were not named; their traces were erased. They have a history that is not linear, but punctuated by advances and setbacks, breaches where they express themselves, quickly covered by the sands of oblivion. Free woman, eager and curious spirit, confirmed writer, Cox explored the work of female historians (and some historians) who have developed a lot over the past half-century and to whom she pays homage; but they often remain confidential. She appropriated them to transmit them to a wider audience. She takes them brilliantly through the first circle of scholarship, she pours them into simple, clear and humorous language, combining anecdote with reflection. It has a driving force because it is driven by the spirit of protest of a generation that lives intensely #MeToo, carrying another look, which it wishes to share.

From prehistory, a fascinating period when so many things seem to have been played out in gender relations, to the present day, it brings out the forgotten who have made history. She unearths names, faces, experiences. Names famous in their time, such as the Merovingian queens, Brunehaut and Frédégonde, but driven back by the undertow of the sea. familiar with the observation of societies, she perceives the invisible hand, she hears the cries, the murmurs at the bend of a news item, a court case, a found letter, an image, a story . It is less about memorable women, important but already listed, than about ordinary women who weave the daily life; less talked about supporting roles – Julie Daubié rather than George Sand, Nathalie Lemel rather than Louise Michel; active, resistant, desirous, more than victims, who draw a women's agency that has secretly changed the world.

It is above all a question of understanding the mechanisms which, in each era, explain the relations of power. There are periods more prosperous than others: the Paleolithic, more egalitarian than the Neolithic which erects the cult of the chief; the Middle Ages (at least the 13th century), where women are found everywhere, merchants, troubadours, illuminators, jugglers and minstrels, and even builders of cathedrals ; the 1920s of the Garçonne and those of the MLF. These advances alternated with moments of tension, such as the great confinement of the 15th and 16th centuries , marked by the misogyny of the clerics, Salic law and the burning of witches. The seventeenth century is not famous either, absolutism extends to language, purged by the Academy of the feminine which corrupts it (author for example). And the 19th century, after the dashed hopes of the Revolution, was a formidable return to the order separated from spheres and sexes, based on the Civil Code, a monument of triumphant virility, including article 324, legitimizing the crime passionate, murder of the adulteress, was not abolished until 1975. Certain structures, nourished by a sexist thought still alive, where biology insidiously replaces the ancient nature, have a hard life. We have not finished with the differential valence of the sexes, dear to Françoise Héritier.

All the more reason to immerse yourself in this great story, fascinating and true. This story gives us immense freedom. That's what history is for. It helps to change the world, writes Cox. His book contributes to this. Must read.

Introduction

Women have never been silent

On taught us that history had a meaning and that, concerning women, it went from a state of total bondage to complete liberation, as if the march towards equality was a natural process. This is not correct. We distorted the facts.

We erased those who had acted, those who, in the past, had governed, spoken, directed, created. We were told that of them, there was nothing to say since they would have been prevented. If the women did not appear in the story, it was because they had been too busy with the children, the housework and the potato stew.

It's wrong.

First , there have been many eras of freedom for women. And so times when their enemies have taken action against them – openings and closings. Women's history is not linear. Then, even during the periods most marked by hatred of women, there were women to fight. To speak, write, create. Women have never been silent.

This book does not claim to present an exhaustive history of women in metropolitan France from the Palaeolithic to the present day. It's about telling you what we weren't told in class. The number of incredible things that we (re)discover, and how the look at history is upset when we choose the angle of the feminine gender.

For years, research has been going on, and because we are no longer in school, we could not benefit from this knowledge? I am fortunate that part of my job consists precisely in reading the results of this research. Because I have this luxury, I can offer it to you in a condensed version. It is up to you to seek out and deepen the points that interest you. You will notice that I quote many names of female historians. I have a deep desire to help make their work known, to pay homage to them – or femmage (but you'll see, we'll talk about inclusive writing again in due time). If I quote them, it is precisely so that you can read their work or listen to their speeches.

1.

Did the prehistoric woman exist?

I'm in CE1 class, I'm 8 years old, blue jeans and a Hello Kitty pencil case. The teacher says to us: Children, open your history books to page 12. I'm quite excited. I can't wait to have history lessons. I turn the pages, I bend over them and I am visually assaulted by a drawing in garish colors, all in shades of brown and orange.

We see a big and strong man at the entrance of a cave. Dressed in animal skins, he has probably just lit the fire that burns at his feet, but he is already looking elsewhere, his eyes turned towards the horizon, ready to face his destiny, to measure himself against the world, to fight bare hands with existence. For the moment, he is still only a gnat in a hostile world, soon he will be the master of the Universe.

Behind him, a hairy woman is curled up on the ground, her head bent towards the ground, she seems to be sewing something and thinking of nothing.

Looks like an ectoplasm with hair.

Clearly, it will not be necessary to count on it to lead us to the kingdom of 5G. With her, we would never have come down from the tree.

This is prehistory as I learned it. To survive there, you had to have been severely burned. It wasn't with two ovaries that we would have got away with it. I was not told that women were useless. They were simply non-existent. Don't you find that the expression prehistoric women sounds strange? It scratches the ears for a simple reason: it has never been used. We never talked about them. The same phenomenon of dissonance occurs with Neanderthal woman. Until recently, the concept of Prehistory was given to the masculine.

In my history book of that time - the 1980s - we saw men making fires, making tools, using thrusters to kill animals, developing ingenious traps to capture big game, and, their spare time, going to caves to paint masterpieces. We have been generations of students to learn that. And it was the same on TV. I advise you not to watch the episodes of the cartoon Once upon a time the man devoted to this period.

This gendered division of labor, with the man turned to outdoor tasks and the woman returned to the interior and to the servant, was a reflection of Western society in the ¹⁹th century , when the study of prehistory was forged. . What the first prehistorians had imagined was only a copy of the social organization they knew in Paris, Berlin or London. Today, a number of specialists are working to deconstruct these presuppositions, in order to take a fresh look at archaeological traces. But all this, we did not know when I was a student. Me, I started from a fairly simple postulate in life: if I was taught something, it was that this thing was true. This is how I assimilated a certain amount of knowledge which turned out to be false.

Let's go back to the neurasthenic ectoplasm on all fours in his cave and call him Gwendoline.

What the first prehistorians imagined was only a copy of the social organization they knew.

Gwendoline, therefore, we did not pay attention to her for centuries. It is even quite new that we are interested in it. I would love to be able to say that I have a huge scoop, that we have just discovered that Gwendoline ruled the world in the Paleolithic era, that we came from a great matriarchy or even, simply, that we lived in blissful equality then. Unfortunately, what is called intellectual honesty prevents me from doing so.

What you have to understand is that prehistory, well, it's long.

Really, very long.

From 5.5 million years ago to 3,500 years before our era. 99.7% of 3 million years of human evolution. If your knowledge of Prehistory is limited to the film La Guerre du feu , here are some points of reference: we divide the period into three large blocks, the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic and the Neolithic (the Paleolithic being itself subdivided into lower, middle, upper ). Even if we restrict ourselves to the Upper Paleolithic (the closest to us), this concerns 30,000 years. We are not on scales of centuries as in more recent history, but of millennia.

Let's take a concrete example: in France, the two most famous painted caves are Chauvet and Lascaux. More time separates them than time separates us from Lascaux. In other words, Lascaux is closer to us than to Chauvet. Or, to put it another way, more time has passed between Chauvet and Lascaux than between Lascaux and us.

It is therefore difficult to imagine that there was only one form of human organization during these thousands of years. We cannot therefore answer the question in a global way: how did humans live in prehistoric times? Or, for the subject that interests us: did men dominate women in prehistory?

One can imagine that over this period, throughout the world, there have been matriarchal, patriarchal and even, who knows, egalitarian structures. Look at the extraordinary diversity of lifestyles and cultures on the planet today. Even if we take into account that this diversity has increased over time and with technical discoveries, we understand that throughout the world, human beings must have known very different ways of forming society over the hundreds of thousands of years. years of the evolution of the genus Homo. Life is an abundance. Only one thing is certain: we already needed each other, so we lived in groups.

In the same way that Prehistory was not a long calm river which would cross Périgord, there is not a woman of Prehistory but women, as the historian Claudine Cohen reminds us. Let's take a question often raised: did women at that time hunt? That's what eye-catching articles announced in November 2020, based on the work of Randall Haas and his team. The archaeologist was directing excavations in the Peruvian mountains and discovered an individual buried with cut stones used for hunting big game. However, this body was identified as being female. Other female skeletons have been unearthed on the American continent with similar grave goods. And now, from scientific publications to AFP dispatches, we end up with headlines: Among hunter-gatherers, women also hunted.

At the same time, researcher Sébastien Villatte¹ , who also works on prehistoric remains, observes a deformation on the skeletons which can only be explained by the repeated action of throwing. But in his research, the difference between men and women is statistically very marked and goes in the direction of a gendered division of activities in which only men practiced the throwing activities that go with hunting.

So who to believe? Sebastian or Randall? The one who studies burials in Europe or the one who excavates the burials of South America?

In truth, is it so surprising that the result of their analyzes is different? Wouldn't the opposite be surprising?

I'm not going to tell you that there was no gender division of activities or that all the Gwendolines in the world were great hunters. The reality is more fundamentally complex: there is a diversity of human societies.

This is what ethnography also shows us. To try to understand the way of life of our ancestors, we can study the hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today.² . How are women treated in these groups? They are mostly in a dominated position. But where things get complicated is that there is domination and domination, with varying degrees and differences in functioning. Françoise Héritier gave as an example the quasi-equality that reigned among the Naskapis, an Amerindian people of Canada, and at the other end of the spectrum of domination, the quasi-slavery of women among the Ona who lived in Tierra del Fuego, in South America³ .

The question did prehistoric women hunt? therefore has no meaning. Prehistory is not homogeneous. No doubt in certain places, at certain times, women hunted. It would thus be necessary to go through somewhat long and frankly not sexy formulas such as the women of this group in this place at that time hunted big game or the women of this group in this place at that time seemed to be excluded from the big game hunting. It is certain that in terms of article titles on the Internet, it is less effective. And there is worse: within the same space, at a given moment, we must not imagine that humans lived in the same way. Some communities specialized in hunting horses while others excelled in reindeer hunting. Each group therefore had its traditions and know-how, and no doubt including gender roles.

In reality, it's a safe bet that in prehistory, the distribution of work depended on social and cultural norms, but also: on the climate, the season, the composition of the group at a given moment, the aptitudes of each and each, age (eg postmenopausal women). In addition, some tasks required the presence of the whole group. For example, the cutting of game carcasses, which had to be done in a short time. Male dominance was not necessarily an imperative to which all groups complied, it could be adapted according to the context. (To take a recent example, in our country, of this flexibility, when the men went to war in 14-18, the women took charge of their work.)

Women could be, for example, flint cutters, if they showed talent for it. Moreover, when a grave is found which seems to indicate a particular status of the person buried, it is likely that it is less a question of respect for a pre-established hierarchy than of the particular merit of this individual – who could be a remarkable an outstanding hunter or healer, like the man from Menton. It is a burial dated 24,000 years, particularly rich and which therefore indicated a high social status. The deceased wore a shell headdress, a necklace of pierced deer canines, two flint blades, and iron powder and red ocher were found on him. So we thought it was a man. In fact, recent work has shown that she was a 37-year-old woman. What conclusion to draw ? That signs of prestige could be associated with women. No more no less.

If it has long been persuaded that women were automatically excluded from activities such as hunting, it was also because they were thought to be incompatible with motherhood. But there again, we were victims of prejudice. Already, we imagined that, inevitably, these primitives fornicated constantly: the women were undoubtedly pregnant permanently, with a child clinging to each breast. In reality, we now know that they practiced birth spacing with at least three or four years between two children.⁴ . For this, they used not only what is called lactational amenorrhea, that is, the fact of being much less fertile as long as