We may not have bravely led others across the
country like Sacagawea, Narcissa Whitman, and Mother Joseph Pariseau. We may
not be actively fighting for women’s rights like Abigail Scott Duniway had. Just
because we aren’t the Emily Carr of our time, doesn’t mean we are less than
extraordinary. Even if we are not seen as influential leaders, women throughout
history have shaped their communities and fought for the protection of their
families. These contributions are important and should not be undervalued. Not
everyone needs to be the superhero. Using her three decades of research and
teaching experience, Sue Armitage wrote about “the famous, the forgotten, and
all the women in between” in her new book Shaping
the Public Good. Today she expresses her personal reasons for wanting to
write about women who were more than just “ordinary”.
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I wrote this book for many reasons. One was because I was tired of reading about extraordinary women. It seemed
that every time I read about a woman in newspapers and magazines, or saw one
introduced on television, she was always
exceptional, indomitable, courageous, spunky, etc, etc. You may say that is
just customary praise, but it seemed to me to separate exceptional women from
the rest of us, seeming to imply that ordinary women can’t and don’t do
anything worth mentioning. So I thought I would try to look at ordinary women
and what they had done and what difference they made.
I also wondered why, in spite of the importance of women in
our daily lives and politics, it is still rare to find any but the most truly famous
women in standard history books. This was my second reason: I wanted to see more women in the history books. I
thought if I wrote a history of ordinary women and how their lives connected
with those of others, I could make it impossible for professional historians to
continue to ignore women in history and I could make sure that the general
public would not continue to regard achieving women as unusual.
Although the basic idea was simple, trying to figure out how
to actually do it was a longer
process. In academic circles I am
known as a western women’s historian, and I knew that although we talk about “the
West” as a whole, in reality it is made up of a number of subregions with
different geographies and histories. I didn’t want to write about all of them, so I picked the Pacific
Northwest. That was one of the easiest choices I had to make: I was living in
the Pacific Northwest and had already spent a few years learning about its
history (and of course wondering how it might change if women were included). I
began by reading the standard regional histories with a critical eye. I rapidly
discovered that women weren’t in the older books at all, and in the more recent
ones, they were “pop-ups”—little cameo biographies of famous women-- rather
than figures integral to the narrative. I also discovered that Pacific
Northwest Indians doubly shared the fate of the pop up women: featured in the
opening chapter, briefly mentioned in chapter two as they were confined to
reservations, and then disappearing until the final chapter where Indian
revitalization might be briefly mentioned. I decided that my book would concentrate on women of all
races throughout, and that the story of regional Indians would be in every
chapter (a goal that I almost achieved). Although I didn’t realize it at the
time, these two basic decisions transformed the book into a wider, more
inclusive regional history than has previously been written.
My overall goal was to write a continuous narrative about
women of all races throughout the entire period of Pacific Northwest history,
from the first inhabitants to the present day. With that aim, I began
collecting books and references about women in the Pacific Northwest. I have to
admit that I was amazed at how many books and articles about women have been
written in the past thirty years. Finding material on Indian women, and other
women of color, was much harder. Nevertheless, I did my best to find and read
it all and to shape what I had learned into a continuous story. That may sound
simple, but it wasn’t, because as women’s lives shaped the narrative some
familiar eras became less distinct than standard histories claimed, and others
took on more importance. Perhaps the most surprising example was the continuity
I saw in women’s lives between the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War
II, which are usually treated as very different eras. At both times, the vast
majority of women were at home, spending their time trying to figure out how to
feed their families. Yes indeed there were women shipyard workers and members
of the military, but they were only a small percentage of all women. In other words, whatever a woman’s hopes
and aspirations might be, most found that their families needed them to fulfill
the most basic domestic role—feeding their families-- during the entire 15 year
period from the onset of the Great Depression to the final victory in World War
II.
I wrote and revised, wrote some more and revised some
more, sometimes in response to the criticisms of reviewers, sometimes when I
discovered new sources. I wrote a
chapter at a time, trying to describe the activities of different women during
that time. I didn’t have an overall plan, nor did I have a clear idea, until
almost finished, what it all amounted to.
What it amounted to is largely spelled out in my conclusion:
the existence of a female historical tradition that most women are unaware of,
a distinctively female style of history making rooted in cooperation with other women, and the
realization that the reality of women’s historical activity in the Pacific
Northwest has been hidden in plain sight all the time. And finally, as my most
recent reviewers have pointed out, that in my attempt to write a comprehensive regional
women’s history, I have in fact written a history of all of us who, as the
Schitsu’umsh people said, are “the ones that were found here.”