Today, Rigel Ailur talks about her love of history despite a history of bias, amnesia, and erasure of women inventors, warriors, teachers, and scientists.
I absolutely love and adore history.
Even more than I love history, I loathe and despise sexism and the patriarchy. (I know, right? Not the least bit shocking to anyone even slightly acquainted with me.)
It makes for an ironic combination, but perhaps not quite as contradictory as one might think. Plus, the former can be an excellent antidote for the latter if/when people pay attention.
Students of history can’t help but taint the past with the present. Some people try much more diligently than others to remain scientific, scholarly, and objective, but the degree of effort and of success varies wildly. Others—dating all the way back to ancient Egypt’s pharaohs—try to erase and rewrite history. Sometimes malice motivates them. Other times, genuine ignorance—and/or a lack of open-mindedness, perhaps—causes myriad false assumptions. The more we learn, the more we need to revise accepted historical “fact.” Archeological/anthropological news (how’s that for an oxymoron?) constantly reminds us that we need to review our assumptions and reject false conclusions.
Recent discoveries show us that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not have what we considered the ‘natural’ division of labor, with men doing all the hunting and women all the gathering. It now appears than plenty of women joined in the hunting.
Graves with weapons and other martial artifacts automatically indicated a male decedent. Closer studies now show us otherwise. We now know that Vikings in Scandinavia, Samurai in Japan, and warriors of the Russian steppes—to name just a few examples—included plenty of women. According to some accounts, Mulan led the emperor’s army for over a decade. The Agojie, the women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey, likely inspired the Dora Milaje in the Black Panther. Artemisia I of Caria, Queen of Halicarnassus, Kos, Kalymnos, and Nisyros, commanded a fleet of five ships in the Battle of Salamis.
Even recently, women’s names are frequently left off the research papers they contributed to—and restored only after they loudly complain. Plenty more examples of erasure exist. Hedy Lamar is known for her beauty, not for inventing the science that makes the internet possible. Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a revolutionary astronomer and astrophysicist, received no credit at the time for her groundbreaking work on hydrogen and the composition of stars—or for breaking glass ceilings in academia as Harvard University’s first woman professor and first woman department chair. The women mathematicians vital to NASA’s Apollo program didn’t get their due respect until decades after the fact—and then, only thanks to a movie.
Speaking of movies, and the sexism and amnesia rampant in Hollywood: Actors such as Kathryn Hepburn, Betty Davis, and Maureen O’Hara led movies in the 30s and 40s. Mary Pickford even founded one of the studios. Yet women never got paid as much as men (and still don’t), and somewhere along the line, the executives decided that ‘women’s films’ didn’t make enough money. Wonder Woman earned over $800 million, yet people claimed Captain Marvel would surely flop. After Captain Marvel made over $1.1 billion, people still claimed ‘no one’ wanted to see the sequel. The Marvels didn’t do as well—sequels rarely do, regardless—but I wonder how much damage the intense sight-unseen criticism did. It doesn’t help that the movie industry is in chaos right now and, in addition, has not recovered from the damage done by Covid. Nevertheless, Barbie pulled in wonderful numbers. Somehow, some people insisted on calling that ‘an exception.’ Funny how many exceptions one can find if one looks.
Which also applies to history in general. Patriarchy notwithstanding, women have always broken the mold and risen above. In every single era and every culture across the world, women defied tradition and overcame mores when they acted as scientists, teachers, and—not least of all—warriors. There are, however, other ways to fight and to influence.
Fatima El-Fihriya founded a university still home to one of the oldest libraries in the world at the University Of Al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco. Recently, Dr. Emily Wilson did another translation of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. Although dozens and dozens preceded hers, men wrote all of them. Not only did her translation return to the meter of verse intended to be read out loud, it restored much nuance that was sometimes lost, as well as not shying from an unflinching depiction of the slavery and class distinctions of that era.
Virtually everyone knows the name Albert Einstein. Few realize that his first wife the brilliant physicist Mileva Marić—arguably even more of a genius than he—worked with him on a number of his papers. Many recognize the names Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Robert Schumann, as well they should. Sad to say, very few know about Fannie Mendelssohn, Maria Anna Mozart, and Clara Schumann.
All these ‘exceptions’ intrigue me and inspire the imagination. So many women throughout history have accomplished so many extraordinary things that the truth truly is stranger than fiction. Still, fiction can draw people’s attention to those examples and many more, hopefully in a way that is every bit as fun and entertaining as it is thought-provoking and challenging.
With only two volumes—so far—the HERitage anthologies barely scratch the surface of the vastness of history. But they are an absolute blast to read, and a joy to write for. Readers thus far are loving them, so here’s hoping their reach continues to expand—preferably exponentially. The more people who delve into the messiness and contradictions of history, the better to acknowledge that the entire population—not just the male half—builds civilizations, and to encourage studying and reviewing history with a much less biased eye.
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The author of twenty-seven novels and more than ninety short stories, Rigel Ailur writes in almost every genre, but predominantly science fiction and fantasy. Her novels include the Vagabonds’ Adventures action thrillers, the Sorcery & Steel fantasy series (with Laura Ware), the science fiction series Tales of Mimion, and the galaxies-spanning A Little Piece of Home. Her short stories appear in the long-running Brave New Girls young adult anthology series and several other anthologies including the IAMTW’s Turning the Tied and Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. She writes for adults, teens and middle grade. In nonfiction, she contributes television reviews to the Outside In series and to the SciFi Bulletin online. Most importantly, she dotes on her astronomically adorable feline kids. For more information visit: https://www.BluetrixBooks.com/
