Women Historians

Paper Summary:

This paper explains why the approach taken to recording and reporting history differs between the genders and points out that a woman's viewpoint of history is very different from that of a man's. The paper also explains that men have traditionally had mixed views about the feminine take on history, alternating between welcome and derision and that this different take exists only because men and women really do have different viewpoints regarding historical events and how they should be recorded.

From the Paper:

"It should make no difference whether men or women write history. But it does. (It might equally be said that it should make no difference whether white or black Americans write African American history, but it does, also.) Perhaps a more interesting question is not whether it makes any difference but why the difference it makes is a fact. Des Jardin more or less asserted it as fact when she wrote about the WPA programs in the 1930s when women preserved "irrelevancies" such as diaries of Mormon settler women and African American folk tales in Florida collected by famous author Zora Neal Thurston, who wrote the very "tribal" African American novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; that work finally made it to TV movie status in 2005, despite being a seminal work concerning the early days of African American freedom in South Florida. Indeed, the fact that it took several generations to get that very fact- and drama-filled story from book to screen also says something about the differences that result when women have written the history instead of men. While it can be argued that Thurston's work is as rich with meaning and history as Richard Wright's, for example, hers is rarely studied, his often. Both are African American; one is female."

More papers on Women Historians:

• Essay # 68255 : "Female Historians"
• Term Paper # 68448 : "Male and Female Historians"
• Essay # 143631 : "Women In Eastern Europe"

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