Quotations about the history of half the human race. Until fairly recently, few historians looked at women’s part if human history, and we are still discovering that half of history. Who was the first woman to (do something)? What were women doing when men were off fighting a war? Or in peaceful times? What did ordinary and unique women contribute to where we are today?
History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women’s history is an assertion that women have a history.
There is no life that does not contribute to history.
For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.
The longer I saw Lady Byron the more she interested me; her insight and judgment are admirable, and I never met a woman whose scientific tendencies seemed so strong.
Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.
Women have been kept from contributing to History-making, that is, the ordering and interpretation of the past of humankind. Since this process of meaning-giving is essential to the creation and perpetuation of civilization, we can see at once that women’s marginality in this endeavor places us in a unique and segregate position. Women are the majority, yet we are structured into social institutions as though we were a minority.
Women’s History, the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women, is providing the body of experience against which new theory can be tested and the ground on which women of vision can stand. A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.
Women have always made history as much as men have, not ‘contributed’ to it, only they did not know what they had made and had no tools to interpret their own experience. What’s new at this time is that women are fully claiming their past and shaping the tools by means of which they can interpret it.
The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that … women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.
