Who Gets Written Down

As Women’s History Month arrives, I often think about the simple mechanics of record-keeping. Who wrote the documents? Who had access to paper? Whose voices were deemed worth preserving?

So much of women’s history exists in margins: in recipes, in clothing seams, in side notes, in oral traditions passed down at kitchen tables. The absence in official archives is not evidence of absence in lived experience.

When we write women back into history, we are not adding something new. We are correcting a lens. And sometimes, shifting that lens changes everything.