HowlRound Theatre Commons: “Why is this the only way we learn women’s history?” This question was the last note I scribbled in my notebook while watching Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me at New York Theatre Workshop this past October.
Though broad in scope, this is an intensely personal question for me. I’ve spent the last four years studying the history of female solo performance in America, and I’ve often wondered why it took writing a dissertation on the topic to learn anything about women’s political, cultural, and social history in the United States.
2 comments:
I thought this article was very interesting, and made the very good point that women’s history is rarely discussed. I have definitely experienced this erasure of history in my life. I always found it very interesting that, even though I went to an all girls high school, where we were always taught to be confident, we never actually talked about women’s history in the United States and in the rest of the world. I think the play presents in a very real way how much the constitution of the United States excludes women and how hard it is for women to be able to connect with the constitution. It can be hard to value the ideals of a country if one is completely erased from the founding texts. I think that this play does a very good job of pointing to subtle ways that women have to defend themselves from people’s judgment and how it can be hard to discuss certain topics, like abortion, for fear of people’s opinions and the way that women are viewed in American society.
I realize that, as a graduate of a women’s college, I have had a different education than most. But the premise of the article, that we do not learn women’s history unless we seek it out, feels faulty to me. Certainly, we learn partial truths, and sometimes we are taught things that are completely biased or flat out wrong, but we do learn women’s history. I guess what I am getting at is that the author of the article was looking for a specific version of women’s history, and she thinks she got that from What the Constitution Means to Me. As is often said, history is written by the victor, and in this case the victor is, broadly, white men. I think the author was looking for the version of history written by the oppressed party, and she found it in this play. But it does seem that the play is biased towards personal stories, a personal history rather than a generic history. Perhaps the specificity is what makes it more true.
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