Women Studies & Politics

How is the way we see history changed when instead of basing it on public events, institutions and themes ( politics, war, famous leaders, economics etc) we look at intimate relations among people of the past? How does this make for a history that is more inclusive of women's lives and experiences?

The way we see history based off politics, famous leaders, economics, etc changes substantially when we include the history of intimate relations among people. History of politics, leaders, and major public events are usually stories of one person and considering the fact that women weren’t involved in politics or powerful enough to play a role in major events, these stories were mainly male-dominated. When we include intimate relations when looking at history we can see that women have active roles. This allows us to see the whole historical picture of what actually occurred in the past, including the experiences of women. It is clear in the article that women were able to have some form of power in regards to their own relationship issues by taking their problems to court.

In my opinion, the way people dealt with their relationship issues back then seemed a little juvenile in the sense that they needed to take simple issues like name-calling and disruptions of the peace to court to have someone else settle it. These issues still occur today, but we have since then evolved in dealing with intimate relations, possibly because history has taught us to deal with it in a different way. This evolution of handling relationship issues is seen at the end of the article when by-laws were implemented and less charges were brought to court by women as they believed ‘public displays were damaging to female reputation’. Another thing that shocked me in the articles was that it is obvious that the behaviour of females today, mostly in regards to name-calling, has not changed since the 19th century. We would not have known this by just looking at the history of politics, economics...