Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

58 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?is the History we write, and that depends on who writes it? Heretofore,men have written History, giving us a masculinist account of the past;now women are free to change that version of History to make it morewomen-centered.It is now common practice in high school textbooks to revise Historyin ways that attribute to women a political and cultural importance theysimply did not have. Overt revisionism is rare. More often, history isdistorted and the importance of women is falsely inflated without directlytampering with the facts. High school history texts now lavish attentionon minor female figures. Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who alertedcolonial soldiers in a failed attempt to cut off the escape of a Britishraiding party, gets more space in America: Its People and Its Values thanPaul Revere. In the same textbook, Maria Mitchell, a nineteenth-centuryastronomer who discovered a comet, gets far more attention than AlbertEinstein. In another popular high school text, there are three pictures ofCivil War nurses but none of General Sherman or General Grant. 16One of the ways human agents transform the course of history is bymaking war. The preeminence of men in war seems inescapable. But thefeminist philosopher and transformationist Elizabeth Minnich maintainsthat women have played important roles in decisions about war and inwar itself.Women have been part of and actively opposed to war throughoutthe ages and across cultures. Women have fought; women have triedto stop the fighting; women have been on the front lines as suppliers,as nurses, as spies; and have worked behind the lines ascooks, secretaries, seamstresses, drivers, experts in language; to keepthe country going. . . . Without women ... no war could ever havebeen fought. 17Minnich does not give examples, but where historians have overlookedor airbrushed women out of significant roles they played in war, she isright to demand a truer and more complete picture. However, she alsoimplies that a fuller picture would reveal that women's role in warfare hasbeen pivotal. In fact it would not; no amount of supplementation canchange the fact that women's roles in war have been relatively minor andtheir occasional protests against war have generally been unavailing. Norwould it be right to deprecate the importance of war as a factor in historicalchange; it remains true that war—conducted almost exclusively by