Falling Short

I was at a conference in Washington D.C. this past weekend, doing a presentation about leadership with two women I work with at our university. We started with talking about stereotypes of leadership, then moved into discussion about famous leaders. We asked people to yell names out, and we got the usual subjects. "FDR!" "Nelson Mandela!" "Malcolm X!" "George W. Bush!" Last one aside, I can understand why the people mentioned came to mind-they're great, inspiring, inspirational men . I eventually said to the group, "I'm a little upset about the gender slant we have here-aren't there any female leaders anyone can think of?" And the responses included Oprah, Evita Peron (isn't it really Eva? I thought the Madonna movie made it 'Evita'), Mother Theresa. And that was all. And I couldn't help but think that I am failing, that feminism is failing, that our educational system is failing women.

Why is it that a room full of students from amazing institutions (Princeton, Cornell, Dickinson, etc) can barely name any females that they see as leaders? And why, when their omission was pointed out, were they still hard-pressed to mention more than three women? Not only the lack of names on this list bothered me, the choice of the women leaders mentioned bothered me. While I admire Oprah and the work she has been able to do and the good that she does in our society, is she a leader in the same way that Golda Meir was? While Mother Theresa was an amazing, compassionate caretaker, was she really a leader in the way that Victoria Woodhull was? And Evita/Eva Peron, while a leader, was leader because she was the First Lady of Argentina-her husband was the actual President.

I just am having trouble comprehending and understanding why this is the case. History was written by men, this is true, but within that history amazing women did lead, in in so doing, changed the world. Why don't we know more about them? It's so irritating to me that a class with women prominently featured has to be known as something like, "Feminist perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement," or "Women in the Sciences," as if the Civil Rights Movement wasn't strongly driven by women, and sciences haven't always had women. It naturalizes the notion that women are anomalous in these periods of history, or in certain fields, and their presence needs to be studied separately from the actual history, or the actual stories, because they were only peripheral characters in the formation of history.

It becomes an act of defiance and bravery when a professor or teacher dares to treat men and women as equal players in history. Same as with racial minorities. I will love the day when Women's History Month and Black History Month are eliminated from our calendar and our lexicon. When that happens, it will be because we no longer need them. Teaching history will become women's history, Black history, Asian history, Latino/a history, Native history, LGBT history. Because history is all of our stories.

"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."