Shelf space matters
Deep thoughts upon a walk through the bookstore, looking for the ladies of US history
This is a picture of the U.S. history section in my local bookstore. If you look closely you might be forgiven for thinking that American women are a recent invention. In this generous amount of shelf space devoted to over 250 years of American history, almost all the books were about men or wars or men of war. Women are only occasionally represented in the form of first ladies or witches.
Think about what this tells us about what women did, the lives they lived, the contributions they made.
I’m not going to entirely blame the bookstore. One thing I’ve noticed as I go down the rabbit hole of studying historical women is that biographies about them are few and far between. If you are lucky there is one biography of a particular woman, and if you are really lucky it is recently published and in print. It’s not for lack of interesting women or material about them.