Kaye Jones is „The Herstorian“, a writer and teacher of history who focusses on women from the past who were very often overlooked – as listeners of our podcast know all too well.

You can find Kaye on LinkedIn and Tiktok (@the_herstorian), and her Substack newsletter has taught us many useful things so far. She was kind enough to answer a few questions for our blog.

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Since when have you been interested in history?

I always enjoyed history when I was at school. I was lucky to have a wonderful history teacher and got to study some very interesting topics (medicine through time and Irish history).

And when did you notice for the first time that women were underrepresented in written Western history?

I actually noticed this through English literature. I read some of the ‘Classics’ when I was about 12/13 years old (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, then Of Mice and Men when I was around 14) and started to notice how the context had changed for women but the issues were largely the same, particularly around the regulation and repression of sexuality and wider social expectations. Once I’d seen that, I noticed that we never really talked about women in our history lessons, but I didn’t really get to explore that in any depth until I was at university.

Why is it that they are underrepresented?

The answer to this question is BIG and I’ll try to summarise it the best way I can. There are a couple of reasons why. First off, patriarchal culture (which is around 3000-4000 years old) reduced women’s status and women’s opportunities in society. The result of this is that women were less likely to have public roles in society and, therefore, be recorded in history books, which tended to only record big political, social, religious economic events. (However, that’s not to say that women hold important roles and didn’t rule – of course, they did). Secondly, women were deliberately excluded or marginalised, not just by men but by other women. I’m thinking here of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent American suffrage campaigner who pissed off her fellow women allies by writing a book that heavily criticised the Church, leading to her erasure from history. It is worth pointing out that the reasons for women’s underrepresentation depend both time and place, but also on other systems of oppression beyond patriarchy. Racism, for example, played a role in making BIPOC women invisible in ways that white women were not.

How could we all help rewriting the history books?

The best thing we can all do is to be critical. Approach every book with the question “where are the women?” If you can’t find women, call it out. Post about on socials, talk to the staff in your kid’s school, gift and read books that *do* centre women. Make sure, too, to think about which women are represented. Typically, it tends to be white, upper-class women who get all the press, and that’s not a solution to the problem of women’s underrepresentation. Lastly, please follow and support my work 🙂

You recently wrote about the so-called searchers – women who aided in finding “witch marks” on women’s body so that they would be condemned to death. Later on, thinking about the Nazi years in Germany, there were midwives who had too much power over unborn and newly born babies. Why is it that women actively accepted (and probably still accept) roles like these that support(ed) patriarchy and racial hatred?

Again, the answer to this is not easy, and this is why I feel that good women’s history does not shy away from the complex power dynamics that have existed between different groups of women. You definitely have to look at systems of power and oppression that have always (and continue to) pit women against each other. In some cases, women have acted against other women for economic/financial reasons. In other cases, their survival has literally depended on it. I’m not saying that to excuse the terrible things that women have done to other women, of course. But we do have to start from an understanding of the political, religious, social and religious make-up of the particular time and place.

Another topic we hadn’t heard of before we read it in your newsletter: You said that, if we finally paid more attention to women’s roles in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, we’d have to put its beginning further into the past. Could you explain that?

Yes, so the latest economic research shows that industrialisation began in Britain in the mid-17th century, which is about a century earlier than we thought. I think this is interesting because if we look at what was going on in Britain at that time, we had civil war and the Witch Trials were in full swing. So I’m curious to understand the connections between those major events. Secondly, my work shows that (most) British women have always worked outside of the home and always been involved in industry. Industrialisation did introduce many new industries and jobs and opened up opportunities to more women, but I think we should see industrialisation as a story of continuity as much as it is a story of change.

Do you have a suggestion for one of our next podcast episodes? Is there a historic woman scientist, politician, entrepreneur, athlete, suffragette, public figure, etc. that we should introduce to our listeners?

I’ve already mentioned her here, but I think Matilda Joslyn Gage would be an amazing woman to highlight. At the moment, I’m doing a lot of research around late Roman/early medieval women and there are so many interesting stories to emerge, like Cartimandua, one of only two Celtic queens we know anything about (the other being Boudicca – who is another amazing woman to highlight).

Thank you for your time, Kaye!