History Lesson

I really am sorry about my tardiness this summer. I can not find time to do anything let alone write every day or every week. However I confess when I write I am a happier person, so I have definitely missed writing blogs. Let's try to stay on top on this, shall we?

I just recently have acquired a new book called Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World. That is such an intriguing question is it not? My assumption is a woman cooked it, but I am still in the introduction of the book...I will tell you what I find out. This book in general got me thinking about the real fact that women in general have a very small place in history books. It's only been about 3o or so years since women started really diving into things and been written into history hard-core, or at least as hard-core as you can get in our still sexist world where women still don't get equal pay. With the thousands of years of history that exist, I'd say we have a really long way to go to say women are represented enough in our history.

The part that annoys me the most is that women have existed since the beginning of time (When ever that happened) yet there is rarely a mention of them. You know they existed because babies were born, and without women there would be no babies. I have a separate book that just gives random women's history facts called 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Women's History. Now I do admit that while growing up I did learn about important women in history, but there are not many past 1850 that you hear about. It was mainly the same ones too, Betsy Ross, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale...you know what I'm talking about. But in this book I have read about women I have never heard of, and even if their experience was small to say the least it was nice to read about it. Sometimes I learn things that were untrue from what I thought I knew, like Joan of Arc. Apparently she was burned at the stake because she was wearing pants, men's pants at that, not because of heresy.

We were taught something else in elementary school to protect us from what really was sexism and oppression because of crossing gender boundaries. Why wouldn't you want to teach what that is? That to me seems like something fundamental to teach to elementary kids, why some people get treated badly, and include women in that list since I know things like slavery are already taught as oppression in human history. Also, use the real facts. Example, Christopher Columbus did not discover America per se, he discovered the Bahamas. However I remember being taught that he did discover America. ugh.

My message today is simply, find out a story or some history about a woman. Everyones' stories are history so the more you talk to people the more knowledge you gain.