For as long as humans have existed, the population has been 50% female, yet women make up just 0.5% of recorded history. Although many may chalk this up to the oppressive systems that prevented women from taking influential roles (which is still a factor), the systematic erasure of women has as much to do with biased historiography than the misconception that women simply weren’t influential.
Even today, our high school history classes are not only dominated by the study of almost exclusively male figures, yet are under representative of female historians as well. Just one quarter of Amazon's bestselling history books are written by women.
From this we see that women are underrepresented in both our history curriculums as well as historiography. A lack of women studying history and writing the books perpetuates this erasure of women: A study found the 69% of female historical biographers write about female subjects, compared to just 6% of male historical biographers. It is apparent that the lack of women in historiography leads to a lack of resources and studies on female historical figures.
The erasure of women from history perpetuates a narrative that it has only ever been men that have been significant in history. This idea not only is an injustice to the women that have come before us but leads to a lack of strong female role models. Girls grow up never seeing themselves in the past and accepting that a male dominated society will always be the case, as it’s all they’ve ever seen in their history class.
Written by Josie
Artwork by Zara Masood
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