During and beyond Women’s Month, celebrating women should extend to the kinds of stories we tell about women. These stories should reflect the diversity of their lived experiences, the multiplicity of their work, and the varying ways women express their individual thoughts and perspectives.
In A Dialogue, a 1974 book by James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (being a transcript of a now viral conversation the two had in 1971), Baldwin stated that ‘The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produce them.’ While this is a noble task, I think it is a challenging one—especially for me, following the years I have spent studying history.
Three years into my undergraduate studies in history, in 2017, I was aware that the next step to getting a Bachelor of Arts degree was to complete a compulsory research project. I spent months thinking of a topic to write on. My favourite thing about history has always been that it accommodates a variety of themes from both distant and recent past. So, I had options.
Then I asked myself, why am I studying history if my hometown has no ‘documented’ history?
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