Opinion: The real history of women wouldn’t look quite so nice on a tote bag
A long time ago in England, a warrior queen called Boudicca ransacked the legions of Rome. She was strong, she was beautiful, and she apparently had a chariot with scythes sticking out of the wheels. When I first heard Boudicca’s story at the age of 8, I wanted to be just like her, or at least like her pictures: strong, resilient, with shiny hair streaming in a supernatural breeze of self-belief.
We have inherited a decluttered version of women’s history, optimistic and neatly folded, discarding everything that does not serve the way we want to see ourselves in a society where strong men scream their way to power and strong women are supposed to pick up the pieces.
All history, especially the sort of history that gets trotted out during these designated months, is an artifact of curation, polished and mounted on the mood board of the age. But the truth is that women’s history includes long, bloody centuries in which our bodies were the property of our fathers and husbands, when we routinely died in childbirth, when we could be raped and beaten with impunity, when we were denied education and political suffrage.
That’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, and “strong, resilient” women aren’t supposed to make other people feel uncomfortable. The backlash to the #MeToo movement demonstrates the fact that when women speak honestly about what has happened to us, and about what has been done to women and girls over guilty centuries of violence, men often react as if we have burned their cities to the ground.
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