Herstory

Herstory is a term for history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. The principal aim of herstory is to bring women out of obscurity from the historical record. It is a neologism coined as a pun with the word 'history', as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as 'his story', i.e., from the masculine point of view. (The word 'history'—from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, or historia, meaning 'knowledge obtained by inquiry'—is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.) This movement has led to an increase in activity in other female-centric disciplines such as femistry and galgebra. Herstory is a term for history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. The principal aim of herstory is to bring women out of obscurity from the historical record. It is a neologism coined as a pun with the word 'history', as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as 'his story', i.e., from the masculine point of view. (The word 'history'—from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, or historia, meaning 'knowledge obtained by inquiry'—is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.) This movement has led to an increase in activity in other female-centric disciplines such as femistry and galgebra. The herstory movement has spawned women-centered presses, such as Virago Press in 1973, which publishes fiction and non-fiction by noted women authors like Janet Frame and Sarah Dunant. Robin Morgan, in a book of her selected writings states that the debut of the word 'herstory' was in the byline of her article Goodbye to All That, in early 1970, in the first issue of the 'underground' New Left newspaper Rat after it was overtaken by women to clean it of sexism. She writes that she identified herself as a member of W.I.T.C.H., decoding the acronym as 'Women Inspired to Commit Herstory'. In 1976, Casey Miller and Kate Swift wrote in Words & Women, During the 1970s and 1980s, second-wave feminists saw the study of history as a male-dominated intellectual enterprise and presented 'herstory' as a means of compensation. The term, intended to be both serious and comic, became a rallying cry used on T-shirts and buttons as well as in academia. In 2017, Hridith Sudev, an inventor, environmentalist and social activist associated with various youth movements, launched 'The Herstory Movement'; an online platform to 'celebrate lesser known great persons; female, queer or otherwise marginalized, who helped shape the modern World History'. It is intended as an academic platform to feature stories of female historic persons and thus help facilitate more widespread knowledge about 'Great Women' History. Christina Hoff Sommers has been a vocal critic of the concept of herstory, and presented her argument against the movement in her 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism?. Sommers defined herstory as an attempt to infuse education with ideology, at the expense of knowledge. The 'gender feminists', as she called them, were the group of feminists responsible for the movement, which she felt amounted to negationism. She regarded most attempts to make historical studies more female-inclusive as being artificial in nature, and an impediment to progress. Professor and author Devoney Looser has criticized the concept of herstory for overlooking the contributions that some women made as historians before the twentieth century. The Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that analyzes and tracks trends in language, named herstory the third most 'politically incorrect' word of 2006—rivaled only by 'macaca' and 'Global Warming Denier'.