Chelsea Swan

Women’s history of the world. As a person who has gone through the education system, reading men’s books, history and achievements, and looking at their art it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking they did it all. As you delve deeper and find out more you realise a whole ton of achievements were stolen from women, that they did a whole bunch, against the odds. They had to fight harder and be smarter and then get fucked over, but it was still their achievements. But young people even now are given a version of history, one that is male and tokenistic and crates the one in a million narrative that women just haven’t, that young girls could not possibly find a role model, someone of intelligence and strength and creativity on which to base their lives trajectory. If they are found they are hard sought out, not in the mainstream media or in the education system but found accidentally. They are almost unnoticeable. This book is great because it gives women a history, not male, their own, in a way that only men had previously had, it reminds women that they have had a major place in history which has been entirely hidden and repressed in the education system. They were not always subservient, or second to, or had to fight, that they did matter, they did achieve, that they drove history forward. The book also analyses why women were side-lined and the rise of male prejudices, as well as the theory’s that arose as the facts on women’s ‘natures’ and ‘proper desires. “In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not ruled by whales?” Women have changed the world. Someone’s just forgotten to write it down. How can we be wholly and truthfully ourselves when our history is absent, shaky, altered. When you look at the biological dominance of women, their strength, the origin of religion being female, it is easy to believe that we could have been the dominant race, as it says in the book, perhaps cruelly, men are the biological and religious afterthought. Would we have been as kind to them? I sadly think not. When I think of how women treated slaves, I believe it is any kind of power and domination that can make a person do the cruellest thing. lately I have been thinking that it is in fact power in general that I am against. Adults against children, men against women, colour against colour. I can’t deal with how dark we can be inside. I do see feminism as the fight for equality but also believe that our domination over nature and the planet might end the world before it becomes a place of freedom. Virginia Woolf saw patriarchy aa interlinked with war. The treatment of women and people of colour is linked to our treatment of the planet and in general we need to just chill the fuck out on needing to win and control and dominate. I am worried. I made myself sad now.