The world feels like it’s gone slightly crazy right now, although in reality, it’s always been like this, at least for as long as we have recorded history in writing. Our history has made us who we are, our history has created the world we have inherited, and our history shaped the lives of our ancestors, which in turn shaped us. In our normal lives and everyday learning, we don’t tend to learn about the history of the common people. If we learn history, it is usually about the lives of the Kings and Queens and Noblemen. We have inherited a very patriarchal, misogynistic world, and this cultural view continues to affect our daily lives. Although we have made great strides, misogyny still exists, and there is still a shadow of it running through most of our lives. We don’t need to go back very far to see this play out, perhaps only to our parents or grandparents, and it was a view that existed and shaped our lives for hundreds of years, so we cant expect it to disappear quickly.
Our world continues to be run by mostly men, but our separation is perhaps a bit more hidden than before. This in turn, means that our world is designed by and crucially for men rather than women. This historical fact has affected our modern things like cars, which are designed specifically for men and tested on male crash-test dummies. It wasn’t until 2011 that a more female size and weight dummy was used, only in the passenger seat, not the driver seat, meaning that cars are made safer for men than for women. So it isn’t surprising that women are 17% more likely to die in a car crash. Pregnancy testing isn’t even mandated in government car testing, and so there is currently no safe seatbelt for a pregnant woman.
In America, only 8% of large companies are led by women, and there is likely a similar representation the world over. Work hours and work places are therefore still mainly geared towards men, ignoring the fact that women tend to also have the job of caring (either for children or elderly parents) on top of their employment, meaning that most women work much longer unpaid hours than men, it also means that they are more likely to only be able to get low paying jobs to fit in with these unpaid roles. Only 14% of the STEM industry in the UK are women. Virtial Relality, consequently is predominantly designed by men, and geared towards men and well known to give more women motion sickness because it isn’t geared towards them and their body-eye-motion needs.
The medical system, which developed and overtook women’s domestic medicine, has historically always been biased towards men. Medical education has, and still does, focus on the male body as the norm, with the female body a diviation from this norm. Medical research was done only on the male body up til 1990s, and even now that research has begun many male researchers argue that it is a waste of resources, pointless, costly and too complicated to include the female sex. However, growing evidence shows that male and female cells actually respond differently. For example, in HIV, flu, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases, women experience different symptoms and complications than men. Even though there is now (albeit still limited) research happening, women are still hugely underrepresented in clinical trials, with pregnant women being completely excluded. Even in the area of womens reproductive health, women with painful and uncomfortable conditions like endometriosis or heavy menstrual bleeding frequently find their symptoms ‘normalised’ and their ‘pain dismissed’ when speaking to their doctors.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, where the historical view and supression of the female gender continues to this day. There are many other areas across our lives that, when looked into, are geared towards men. Which, when you think about it, makes sense when we are run by a partriarchal society.
It is also important to know that even though we have made strides forward, it doesn’t mean we can’t go back. A recent example can be seen in America with a lawmaker putting forward the “covenant marriage law” whereby a couple could only divorce when one spouse proves that there has been adultery, abuse or abandonment for over a year. This harkens back to historical divorce laws, which resulted in many women staying stuck in abusive, controlling marriages, and resulted in strange historical practices like wife selling.
So I argue that it is important to look at women’s history and to acknowledge the ways that women have been ignored, denied, controlled, supressed, and belittled throughout our recorded history. It shows us what our current world is being built upon, what practices underly our current ways of living. For example, Aristotle said that women were just mutilated men, and this has underpinned our medical research and education ever since, leading to us only researching medicines on males.
It is equally important to acknowledge and remember the stories of our great female ancestors. It works in the interest of the male establishment for us to forget women’s history, to forget the struggles and achievements of the female gender, as it enables them to control the narrative and the status quo. Women’s stories have been systematically left out of our history, with only 0.5% of our written history being women’s stories.
I think that understanding our mothers’ stories helps us to understand our current world and the lives we lead. We are afterall made of these mothers and their stories.
This is why, as we reclaim the Wise Woman, we are looking at the history of women (for our context mostly in Britain), and we uncover and tell our ancestors stories and struggles. The suppression of women is one of the ways that our ancestral heritage has been hidden from us, and it is one of the reasons that we now feel like we need to look to other cultures to find our spirituality. Learning about our history is also a way to start to heal our ancestral line. To find our voice as women, we need to see how we were silenced.
Coming up … Who are the Wise Women
Rox Madeira 