The End of Women's History Month ...
And the beginning of something bigger.
Hello and happy Thursday to you!
As Women’s History Month draws to a close, it’s a good moment to reflect on where we’re up to and, crucially, the way we do history. I’ve said it a million times (at least) and I’m saying it again: if our framework for women’s history is only commemorating individual women as exceptional, we miss the deeper truth. History as we know it is incomplete. And until we fully integrate women’s experiences, perspectives and power into the historical record, we are not doing history. We are doing fragments.
And the longer term impact of this? We fail to push the needle forward for women (and men and everyone in society since the past and present are not separate countries).
Dr Gerda Lerner, the Austrian-American pioneer of women’s history, understood this better than anyone. Her work enabled people to study women’s history as an academic discipline, but more importantly, she showed us that there are levels—stages, even—to how we conceptualise women’s past. Her four-stage model reshaped historical thinking, yet, decades later, mainstream history still lags behind.
Let me share that with you today.
Stage One: Compensatory History
The first step historians took was to identify and celebrate notable women of the past—scientists, artists, revolutionaries, and pioneers who had been erased from mainstream narratives. This was crucial work, but it also treated these women as exceptions, reinforcing the idea that history itself was still fundamentally male. For example, the (re)discovery of the working-class and disabled suffragist, Adelaide Knight, and her political work, which had been overshadowed by other, more prominent names in suffrage history.
Stage Two: Contribution History
The next phase broadens the scope by analysing women’s roles in historical events traditionally framed around men’s actions. We begin to see women not just as outliers but as participants in the structures of their time. Instead of simply discovering a woman like Adelaide Knight, historians began asking, “What role did she play in major historical movements?” Knight played a key role in organising working-class women for the cause of suffrage. As secretary of the WSPU’s Canning Town branch, she worked alongside Sylvia Pankhurst, helping to ensure that the suffrage movement included the voices of working-class women, not just the privileged few. She wasn’t just participating in history—she was shaping it. As important as this framework is, it still centres women within a male-dominated paradigm.
Stage Three: Rewriting the Narrative
This is where things get really interesting. It is no longer about slotting women into pre-existing historical frameworks—it is about reshaping those frameworks entirely. History is not just a collection of political revolutions, wars, and great men. It is the everyday realities of all people. Women were never on the margins of history; they were always part of its centre. As I reminded history teachers that I spoke to on the first day of this month, women have always been the makers and doers of history. The problem has never been their absence, it has been the absence of historians willing to see them and work with the relative scarcity of sources that they feature in.
The reason why this stage can be so tricky is because it forces us to ask entirely new questions. It’s no longer about “what did women contribute to X or Y?” It’s now about “how valid are our ideas about the past, now that we know what we know about women?”
It’s big shifts, dear reader. It’s new territory.
And I am not seeing many people talking about it, let alone doing it.
Stage Four: Transformational (or Integrated) History
If you thought Stage Three was new territory, this is something on an entirely new scale. At this stage, we don’t even need “women’s history” because everyone’s experiences have been integrated into a collective story. We have entirely rethought power, culture, society and all the events of the past. This is the ultimate goal.
And this is where my work comes in.
This is where I’m going. I don’t know how I’m gonna get there or how long it will take, or what resources I’ll need to call in 😂 but I will finish what Lerner started. IF IT KILLS ME 🤣
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, this will come as no surprise. You already know this stuff but it’s important to keep that long-term, big mission at the front and centre. This is not a side project or an academic exercise for me. I’m not playing around. The rest of 2025 will see me doing this with more intention and, dare I say it, a dollop of delusional gusto.
More to come soon.
I’ll see ye next week,
Kaye x
