Dear Elsa Barkley Brown,
I love your idea that to truly
understand, write, and contextualize the history of marginalized women, we must
completely reconsider how we view history in general. Before reading your
essay, I felt that I understood the ways in which standard historical
narratives disregard or misconstrue Black
(/Latina/Native/queer/impoverished/etc.) women’s histories – these women are
belittled, or left out entirely; huge swaths of their identities are whitewashed and
overlooked. However, your essay made me realize that this problem can never be
fixed simply by including more and more diverse women into history textbooks.
History as we tend to see it was invented by and for the powerful. So long as
white men are writing history as “classical music” (302), the story of
marginalized people will be incomplete at best. The field of women’s history
cannot simply view women through the traditionally male framework – it must
develop a different and more inclusive framework. Before I read your essay, I
believed that our collective historical lens was focusing on the wrong people.
I now understand that we are using the wrong camera entirely.
Sincerely,
Molly Culhane
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