When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. âThis is often considered to be manâs first attempt at a calendar,â she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. âMy question to you is this â what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is womanâs first attempt at a calendar.â It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked womenâs contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and menâs place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Milesâs book âThe Womenâs History of the Worldâ (recently republished as âWho Cooked the Last Supper?â) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. Theyâre not all saints, theyâre not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.
Sandi Toksvig (via murmurrs)
