We’re pretty sure that someone did say this, if you control history then you control the present. Which is true of both sides of this little argument here:
History lessons are too focussed on men fighting on the battlefields while women are “pushed to the side”, campaigners have said, as they launch a new project to teach children about female pioneers.
Ahead of the centenary commemoration of the end of World War One, the initiative will encourage schools to tell the stories of inspirational women who contributed to the war effort.
Well, OK, why not? The idea that all women, forever, were home bodies isn’t true. It’s also not true that that is the only choice available today. So, rationally, yes, why not tell of, in an earlier war, Florence Nightingale? She had an immense influence on the society around her after all.
One bit does puzzle:
The Big Ideas Company, which has received funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for the project,
Why them? Couldn’t they find anyone in Education stupid enough to splash out on this?
The worry here is, of course, that by being partial about the history taught to people they will change the present. That would be true of either side, those who say that more inspirational women should be talked of, or that fewer. Both are starting from the assumption that to change what the people believe about the past is to change that future. As with Paul Samuelson, who insisted that he cared not who ran the country as long as he got to write the economics textbooks. Much more power that way.
The probably correct answer is that we tell people what that past really was like. It’s not that women were condemned to the household. There were two factors. In those millennia when it was physical strength being paid for in the labour market men quite naturally earned more. Further, in order to have a decent chance of grandchildren, the very point of this life exercise, a woman would need to be pregnant or lactating much the bulk of her adult, fertile, life. Given the necessity of a split in labour within the household we can see how this would go therefore.
This really only started to change in the late 1800s and is somewhere near complete much more recently, perhaps from the 1970s. Yes, that late, and why don’t we tell people about it? Point out that this capitalist free marketry is the most feminist socio-economic system yet?
Ah, yes, we remember. Because that’s not the lesson desired at all, is it?
Women have never been pushed to the side when teaching history. For good or for bad women aren’t as prominent in history as men so you won’t hear as much about them.
I remember learning a disproportionate amount about Queen Elizabeth I in school; it was never really about her being a women so much just more about it being incredibly interesting, the Spanish Armada and what-not.
The problem is that men and women have very different interests. Men, you know, kill people. Sometimes foreign people. Women sit around and b!tch about each other’s frocks. Sometimes foreign frocks. Which means that if you focus on the teaching of women’s history – written by the feminised harridans of academia, supported by the feminised eunuchs the Department of Education and taught by the feminised “teachers” of the school system – you are going to have a lot of b!tching about frocks indeed. See Alison Weir for instance. I could hardly think of anything better to put off boys from… Read more »
More bullshit femmi-marxist propaganda.
Of course the FFC, rather than being smart enough to cut the budget for ALL the CM agit-prop being spewed , is likely on board with the shite. Because she is useless WOMI BluLabour trash who is full of Marxist feminist lies even if she probably too thick to correctly identify the source of the garbage she spouts.
Indeed.
The purpose of the exercise is to disrupt the culture. It’s not about women.
Seem to recall that the Ho Chi Minh trail was largely operated, maintained and kept open by women, without which the North Vietnamese Army would have ground to a halt.
A bit like how the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the people act being all about how it have women the vote, and how all men over 18 also got it has been pushed to the sidelines?
18? 21, rather.
Ah yes, my mistake.
And akcherly, women (who passed the property qualification) got the vote in the 1860s. 1918 was PARLIAMENTARY sufferage (for women who passed the property qualification).
It’s from 1984, of course, but I suspect Tim knew that :).
It’s actually a mashup of ‘1984.’
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Everyone knows about Rosie the Riveter, the sudden assembly-line inductee who helped America build undreamed-of amounts of ordnance to send to Europe during WW2. However, we have just been through Black History Month, pretending that a population that spent the first half of its time here in chains made a lot of history, and apparently we are now in Women’s History Month, eventually letting each month showcase one of the Democratic Party’s coalition of separatist victim groups. On the other hand, London has arrived first at a celebration of LGBTQ “history.”
Black Africans had no written language. “Black History” is an oxymoron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsibidi
apparently not true, though I am not aware of any great histories published in it.