The past decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly and popular – Hidden Figures, anyone? – works on women who made important contributions to our societies, but who have been given short shrift or left out entirely of our history books. These works are important because they right historical wrongs – such as Nobel Prizes awarded only to men, when women also contributed, here’s looking at you, Rosalind Franklin – and gives us a fuller picture of history. Having a fuller historical picture helps us to understand the present, and to imagine more inclusive futures.
But sexism does not just devalue individual women and their actions, it also leads us to devalue those things or actions which we consider feminine. Returning to the Nobel prizes, most of them are awarded in areas considered chiefly masculine – chemistry, physics, medicine/physiology and economic sciences. Two can be considered femininity-adjacent, namely peace and literature, and not coincidentally, it is in these two categories that women have been awarded the most prizes, percentagewise: 18 and 16 percent, respectively.
Why are there no awards categories in areas that are considered chiefly feminine?? Why can we, as a culture, not even imagine what such a category would be? I suggest that our culture has what I like to think of as a “sexist astigmatism” which keeps us from seeing not only women’s work in “masculine” categories, but also “feminine” endeavors themselves.
How the sexist astigmatism works
Did you know that the Stone Age might just as well be named the String Age? That is because string was invented at about the same time as humans learned to work stone. And because string allowed humans to transform sharpened stones into axes, arrows, and spears. So why don’t we call it the String Age? Or the String ‘n Stone Age? Partly because stone has survived through the ages, whereas string has disintegrated. But also due to the “sexist astigmatism” of historians. An astigmatism blurs and distorts our vision, making it hard – or impossible – to see things clearly.
It makes sense that string would have been needed to fashion many of the tools of the Stone Age – either strips of hide or twists of plant fiber – and it makes sense that both men and women would have been involved in the work of knapping stone and making string. But without batting an eyelid, astigmatic historians have assigned stone-knapping to men (I would love to see an illustration of Stone Age life with a woman knapping stone) and named the age after the masculine pursuit. While simultaneously devoting little or no thought to an essential part of the project: the string. Because for a variety of interesting and complex reasons, textile production that doesn’t involve industrialized machinery has been considered feminine and thus less important.
But why does this matter?
Until quite recently, our cultural story was that the advances of humanity from the savannah to caves and to modern day society were made by men alone. Perhaps women gathered food, cooked, and took care of the children, but that was all. Helpmeets, but not movers or shakers.
Once we begin to complete – as best we can – the task of writing women back into our cultural stories, that is, history, then we can begin to imagine futures where women contribute on an equal footing with men. And by this simple act of imagination, we double the brainpower we need to solve the geopolitical challenges of our time. Stone AND string.
If you’d like to learn more:
Barber, E. J.W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton University Press, 1991. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691201412.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New ed. London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010.
Postrel, Virginia I. The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
Sears, Neil. “Stone Age String: Unearthed, the Twine That Was Twisted into Shape 8,000 Years Ago.” Daily Mail. December 7, 2008.
Wong, Kate. "Stone Age String Strengthens Case for for Neanderthal Smarts."Scientific American, April 9, 2020.
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