All Women Have a Past: Reconstructing Women in the Historical Imagination
Channel: AskHistorians
Date: 2021-10-21

Women’s lives have long been the subject of overexcited imaginations. Whether they seek to vilify or romanticize, the sensationalized ways in which women have been represented and remembered rarely does justice to the historical reality, rendering them as one-dimensional caricatures rather than rich, complex characters in their own right. While historical and literary representations of women tend to center around the home and gendered notions of women's roles, in reality women have always been at the center of political and military histories. This roundtable uncovers the stories of elite women such as queens and spies for whom such shallow misrepresentations have become the norm, showcasing how historians now seek to reconstruct the fullness of their lives.

Learn more about this roundtable at https://www.askhistorians.com/2021-roundtable

This roundtable includes a live, concurrent chat with the panelists right here on YouTube!

Featured in this panel are:
"Wicked Queens: the Afterlives of Isabeau of Bavaria, Catherine De’ Medici, and Marie Antoinette" by Cassidy Percoco
"Churchill’s Angels? The Female Agents of Soe’s F Section in Popular Memory and Culture" by Dominic Webb
"Kept in the Dark:  What Is the True Story of Women of Power in Pre-conquest England?" by Annie Whitehead

Moderated by Daniel Howlett

This panel is part of the AskHistorians 2021 Digital Conference. For more Conference content, please go to: https://www.askhistorians.com/2021-digital-conference

Land Acknowledgement:

The AskHistorians Digital Conference (AHDC) Organizing and Diversity and Inclusion Committees acknowledge that the AHDC 2021 is being produced in and viewed from various locations across the world. Many of these locations include lands that are the ancestral, unceded, and treaty territories of Indigenous Peoples from Turtle Island, Abya Yala  [ab-EE-ah ee-AH-lah], and the Americas in their entirety to the traditional lands of Indigenous Peoples in Sweden, Australia, and across the globe. We acknowledge that these lands have been stewarded by these Indigenous communities and nations since time immemorial and we offer our gratitude to these Peoples. We, moreover, recognize that, five hundred years later, settler colonial nations continue to benefit from the brutal realities of genocide and forced removal that enabled the original settler colonizers and conquistadores to seize these lands.

The AHDC organizers acknowledge both the land upon which we are virtually hosting this conference, those lands from which the conference is being viewed, and the deep-rooted and long-lasting wounds caused by white imperialism and settler colonialism. The harmful effects of these actions continue to hurt Indigenous communities across the world. We recognize the responsibility we have as historians to amplify Indigenous Voices and speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves. We also acknowledge that while we pursue this goal, academia itself has often been at the forefront of colonial domination and must therefore reckon with its own injustices. Understanding this, we have chosen to make a donation to the Indigenous organization, Forest Peoples Programme, in an effort to give back to Indigenous communities around the world. While we appreciate that Indigenous political, trade, and kinship relationships extend beyond the geographic boundaries that we commonly assign to distinct communities and nations, we would like to particularly acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples upon whose ancestral lands the AHDC 2021 has been produced or hosted as follows:

Haudenosaunee
Manahoac
Onʌyote'a•ka (Oneida)