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Thoughts on Women's History: 2004 Online Women's History Month.

© Dr. Gillian Polack

Women's history is a joy and a frustration. There are so very many ways of seeing our past, and of reaching into women's history to understand it.

Many public statements on the history of women tell you to look into your own past and into the lives of a few famous women. This is important, but it is by no means everything.

What else is there? Women are diverse and our history is full and exciting. This article focuses on just some of the people and thoughts on women's history being raised during this year's Women's History Month in March.

One of the big attractions of the past is that it includes stories. Stories of individual women, of groups of women, of occupations and culture.

Some of the best stories are told by fiction writers. This is obvious - because who tells a better tale than a professional tale teller? When we talk about women's history, however, we mostly tend to talk about the scholarly approaches, and not the fictional. The obvious can be forgotten.

Yet there are special skills involved in telling the history of a particular woman fictionally. It can include some very tough decisions. How do you decide, as a writer, where to put your own thoughts in and how far to stick to the historical record? What if there is not much in the way of historical record? What do you invent - and how do you decide where invention stops?

Precise historical data is scarce for many of the great women of history and almost all of the less great women. We often only know what happened to them when they were in trouble or got others into trouble, when they enter the historical record by dying horrendous deaths or by telling tales on their friends. We know more about the women of Salem for the short period of the witch craze, for instance, than we know about their fellow women in towns a hundred miles away where there were no accusations and no hangings and no horror.

The issues raised by the nexus where history and fiction meet, and the special problems of telling the stories of our historical women in a fictional form has attracted a particularly good panel of online presenters this March. We have readers and fans of historical fiction, we have writers, we have a re-enactor, a publisher and a professional historian.

Representing readers, we have an international fan club - all addicted to the historical fiction of Sharon Kay Penman - every one of them an avid and intelligent reader. They all care about the past and its portrayal intensely. For two years running they have presented the most popular online discussions in Australia during Women's History Month. This year they are taking a narrow focus, and will look very specifically at the presentation of Medieval Women in modern fiction.