Writing women back in to history is not an easy process. There’s a lot of fairly Freudian stuff to move through, every time. I catch myself dismissing their contribution, often having not even considered it, or at least not by the same yardstick as I use for the (Great) men. 1/

I went through the process again this week, with Nora Chadwick. I’d collected NC’s works over the years, and shelved then in my ‘popularist’ section, where I keep the largely historicist works - she published with Pelican, pah. I’d categorised her that way for 20 years. 2/

Wasn’t until I rewrote a bit of lecture & realised 75% of those in that category were women, that I thought back to how I’d inherited that mindset. So many women scholars were taught down to me as ‘mad’: Gimbutas, Hawkes, Ross. That misogyny’s *how* we set about erasing them. 3/

And there I’d been, uncritically repeating that mid-late 20th century mindset to my own students. For 20 odd years. 4/

A contextual re-reading showed a more than respectable grasp. So I moved her. She doesn’t deserve to be written out - she popularised the field. I put her instead with Terence Powell (who incidentally got plenty wrong). 5/

It takes a lot to write women back in to our disciplinary histories. There’s an awful lot of unlearning to do. Mostly about what it is that constitutes ‘Great’ and how it needn’t necessarily exclude feminine characteristics (in women and men, and everyone in between). 6/

The same’s true for other sections of our society. If POC or working class diggers aren’t in the history books, it isn’t because they weren’t in our history. And it’s our job to work hard to find their stories & make them visible, because, be sure, they were deliberately erased.