Women's History - Perpetuation of inequity

Actually picking random women like that and claiming them as special or downtrodden is not at all what womens history should be about. To claim that these women were special for running their deceased husbands business is to completely overlook the fact that women have been running their dead husbands businesses since the beginning of civilisation. The widespread image of women in the past seems for many people to be of complete submission,* and in this light the example of one such businesswoman might be shown as an exeptional individual, but in fact she probably was not. And to proclaim her as being so obscures a proper view on the position of women in the past in general. Womens history should not be about one individual or another, only to abuse this information to show how badly male written histroy has treated them.

It should be about a wider perspective on women in the past. Women tend not to feature on a large scale in the histories and stories of the past, but we can safely assume they were there, and we can safely assume that if women were there, they got their noses into it...  The aim of womens studies is to draw a realistic picture of the function and place  of women in society. And because not all that much was written about them, this could be hard to reconstruct, which is why womens history can be so interesting.

Aelf raises a lot of points, we seem to thing that Victorian morality, culture and values were the ones followed throughout, when this was clearly not the case.

And the thing is to say that women history has been "ignored" is somewhat off the mark, and also insulting to the fairer sex, since it implies that women are so weak and pathetic that their contributions can easily be co-opted or ignored, which is clearly not the case. The thing is that modern (that is western post 1970's) feminism has a concentration on "womens achievements" which although laudable forgets the fact that in many cases the womens accomplishments were celebrated for the mere fact of being, rather than being done by women as such, and it also dose not stand up to scrutiny since than you have the countless examples of womans work being celebrated, like Emily Dickonson, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Sarah Berendt, Catherine De Medici, Catherine the Great, Nur Jahan, Razia Sultana etc.