Rosalind Miles Quote

Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men andwomen have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rightsand wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, bothsexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed,always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor forthe white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as thesufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. Whiletheir men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape—oftenaccompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered—was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs frommoments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and toacknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be men only affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived norm. As a result, much of the so-called historical record issimply untrue.