Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Jennifer Tuttle
Jennifer S. Tuttle is the Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health at the University of New England (UNE) in Maine, where she directs the Maine Women Writers Collection (an archive within the UNE Library) and co-founded the Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies program. She has published three books on American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman along with myriad other work on the US West, archival studies, gender studies, and health humanities. Her current book project, Dora Mitchell/Dolores Michel: A Literary Biography, illuminates how one woman navigated early 20th-century California’s shifting and racialized terrain, enlarges what is considered to be Black literary women’s historical archive, and reconsiders where and how to look for Black women’s texts. Dr. Tuttle was also designated the 2021-22 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNE and was a longtime editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.
Take it away, Jennifer!
Your current work focuses on 20th century Black writer Dora Mitchell, later Dolores Michel. Are there special challenges to researching women of color, who in some ways have been doubly erased from history?
Yes indeed. I am writing a literary biography of Dora L. Mitchell (1891-1970), a Los Angeles fiction writer, journalist, screenwriter/scenarist, and playwright who often self-obscured through racial passing under the name Dolores Michel. Certainly, one challenge is in tracing her family history, for her mother, Medora, was born with slave status in Virginia; Medora’s father was her and her mother’s enslaver. Abler pens than mine have written about the myriad ways that enslavement disrupts familial self-knowledge; I am still unable to verify even who Medora and her family’s enslavers were, in part because of the reductive and dehumanizing ways enslaved people were listed in antebellum records (if they appeared at all). Added to this are the facts that Medora’s mother did not apparently know how to write and so had fewer opportunities to leave any record of her life, while Medora herself refused to speak of her early life in slavery (“When in a hangman’s house, don’t speak of rope,” she would say).
Another challenge, one that is not unique to women of color but is exponentially worse for them, is the ephemerality of sources; as I often say, most traces of Mitchell’s life and work have quite literally crumbled into dust. Women like Mitchell—Black women, to be sure, but also other women of modest means—simply had less access to high-profile, high-status, and thus more visible and durable publication venues, rendering their work less findable in the historical record. Consider the venues of Mitchell’s creative output. She wrote for the silent film industry as a translator, scenarist, continuity writer, and screenwriter, yet I have been able find barely a hint of this work. Not only were such writers rarely if ever credited, but nitrate film was highly unstable and brittle, and much of it—especially the inferior stock Black-run studios were forced to use—simply has not survived the ravages of time (added to the fact that materials from the Black film industry were less valued and so have not had access to the same preservation resources). I mean, Mitchell wrote the original screenplay for, and assistant directed, one of the earliest westerns by a Black woman—The $10,000 Trail in 1921—and neither the film nor the screenplay is known to be extant. The loss is staggering!
The print venues for her work were equally vulnerable. First, she wrote for pulp magazines—publications that were ephemeral by design. They were made of cheap wood pulp paper and intended as a form of mass entertainment that was assumed to be expendable. Pulp magazines have also long been held in low esteem, so they were rarely kept. Today they are unevenly archived and very difficult to find.
Second, in 1923 Mitchell published a short story in the California Eagle, LA’s preeminent Black newspaper. Many of its issues have been preserved, but the physical pages are rare and often damaged; the microfilmed issues are more widely available, but some are in quite dreadful condition and partly illegible. Finding and making sense of Mitchell’s short murder mystery, called “The Shadowed Witness,” was therefore a challenge. The relevant issues (the story appeared serially over 3 weeks) had been microfilmed decades ago and are now available, thankfully, on Internet Archive and Newspapers.com. However, the scans are both misdated and mispaginated in ways that actually obscure more than they reveal. Untangling those errors took a really long time and required that I use internal evidence from each newspaper page to figure out what its proper date was. (Shameless plug: you can now read the story in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 39.2 [2022], 93-131.)
Third, Michel co-wrote two plays in the 1930s, and at least one of them was performed in a Hollywood little theater (i.e. a small, experimental community theater), but the plays themselves are missing. I only know of them because Michel and her co-authors copyrighted them (though the Library of Congress discarded them years ago, not recognizing their historical value).
Recovering Mitchell’s life and work, then, is tricky because so much of her creative output is susceptible to dismissal, decay, and destruction, but it is every bit as worthy as better-preserved, more highly regarded work, and it is that much more valuable because of how illuminating it can be for our historical understanding. Darnell Hunt has noted that California and Los Angeles have had a formatively Black presence for hundreds of years, yet that Black heritage is largely unacknowledged; uncovering more stories like those of Mitchell and her family (who did not follow the archetypal South-to-North trajectory but instead settled in California) fills gaps in African American history as well as the history of the US West. And just as African Americans are underrepresented in California history, so Black women writers are an underappreciated and underdocumented part of California’s literary heritage, and Mitchell is part of that story. Her life and work are part of women’s history, California history, and American history, after all. The challenges in finding her are greater, but that makes the rewards of doing so greater still.
Speaking as scholar of women writers, what is your favorite research tip for people doing work on historical women?
I have been doing this kind of work for my entire career, and there was a period of time when I thought I basically understood what it entailed, as I had lots of experience finding archives that held materials relating to the women writers I was investigating and really making great use of those holdings. How wrong I was! It was only when I started working on Dora Mitchell, someone who has no archival presence, whose papers were not saved, and who was nearly invisible in the historical record, that I understood how spoiled I’d been while working on well-documented women. Much became newly clear to me. Here are just a couple of the things I have learned.
Court records are immensely valuable, the more acrimonious the better. For my Mitchell book, I am writing about three generations of women: Dora herself, her mother, Medora (Reed Thompson) Mitchell, and her grandmother, Louisa Reed. Early on in my research process, before I knew anything about Medora’s mother, I found the record of Medora’s first marriage to James Thompson (Dora was the child of her second marriage to Peter Mitchell). In this record, Medora listed her mother’s name as Mary, so that shaped my research going forward, and it was basically a dead end for me in trying to understand Medora’s history. Some months later, I tracked down the court records relating to Medora and James’s divorce. Because the divorce was not amicable, depositions were required, including one from Medora’s mother, whose name, it turns out, was not Mary but Louisa. (This, of course, signals another well-known principle of historical research: Sometimes the records are wrong.) For reasons that are not yet clear, on her first marriage certificate, Medora had (thought-provokingly!) listed John and Mary Reed, her former enslavers, as her parents.
Because of Louisa’s dictated deposition, which constitutes the only known written record she left of her life (she seems to have been illiterate, as she signed her name with a cross), I was able to learn not only her actual name but also a great deal about her and Medora. Louisa, who along with Medora and her siblings had self-emancipated from slavery, accompanied Medora and James when they moved from Boston to Denver, so she was able to provide a wealth of biographical detail that would otherwise have been lost. In these legal papers, there was also another deposition that served as a character reference from one of Medora’s clients (she ran catering and laundry businesses out of a shed in her back yard). Had the divorce not been so fraught that such depositions were required, very little would be known about these women’s lives, and we would have no trace of Louisa’s voice.
Historical research is not linear; recursiveness is key. So often with historical research, we can be looking right at a key piece of information, but because we lack other information, we pass right over it. This is why it is important, I have learned, to revisit our sources frequently. For my Dora Mitchell project, Louisa is Exhibit A for this hard-won piece of methodological insight. Before I found those court records, I had located Medora, James, and their daughter Beatrice on the 1880 Denver Census and noted that they were living with a white family for whom Medora was a domestic servant. But it was months later, after I learned Louisa’s real name, that I happened to go back to that census sheet and noticed that Louisa was employed in the same capacity by a next-door neighbor! So much about Louisa (when she came to Denver, where she was living, what she was doing, and how she remained connected to her family) is revealed in that census, and I had been looking right at it for months without knowing what I was seeing.
This same principle was borne out in an even more symbolic way in the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. In the early months of my research, I was thrilled to track Dora’s burial place to Angelus-Rosedale. Soon enough, I found her sister, Maude, along with their parents. During my first year working on Dora, I visited their graves to pay my respects. After that, many months passed, and eventually I learned Louisa’s name, after which I realized that I had literally been standing at Louisa’s grave (she is next to Medora and Peter) but had not seen her. My eyes had seen the headstone boldly declaring her name, tangible and solid, having stood for more than a century. I myself had stood above her remains. But still, because I would have been looking for Mary, I could not see Louisa for who she was; she was invisible in Dora’s story and illegible in the historical record that I was trying to reconstruct.
So many traces of these people’s lives have been lost; that I well knew. But what I also came to understand in a really visceral way, as Louisa’s prominent headstone and census entry suggest, is that even when historical records do exist, historians may lack the information they need to actually recognize them for what they are, and we don’t always even know it. These experiences have taught me that I need to revisit sources on a regular basis, because sometimes I will see things in them that were not legible to me before. These women humble me as a scholar, in the best possible way. They demand persistence, recursiveness, and the interrogation of assumptions, and they are totally worth it.
Many of us are familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about historical women. What type of sources are available in the Maine Women Writers Collection?
The Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC) is a pretty amazing place. It was founded in 1959 at what was then Westbrook Junior College by English professor Grace Dow and teacher and administrator Dorothy Healy. Grace had the brainstorm to establish a collection of Maine women’s writing before it was lost to history, and Dorothy--dynamic, committed, and well-connected (also possessing the energy of 10 people)--worked with her to make it a reality.
In this day and age, this achievement might not seem unusual or significant. But consider the state of things in 1959. This was the year that:
- Alaska and Hawai‘i entered the union as states.
- The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York.
- Mattell introduced the Barbie Doll.
- The proportion of women among college students was 35%--down from 47% in 1920.
- Women could still legally be paid less than men for equal work and suffer other employment discriminations. The EEOC did not yet exist.
- Roe v. Wade (may it rest in peace) was still 14 years away.
- Women could be denied credit on the basis of sex, or required to get a husband’s approval before they could get a credit card in their own names.
- There were no women on the US Supreme Court; that would take another 22 years
- The Second Wave of the Women’s Movement had not yet begun, and there was no such thing as Women’s Studies.
- And as literary critic Elaine Showalter has put it, in this period of American history, “with a handful of exceptions,” women writers were “ignored, ridiculed, or scorned.”
There did not exist, then, anything like the MWWC in the scale of its vision, to acknowledge the crucial importance of women’s lives and work to a regional culture like Maine’s. Women had long been collecting and documenting their work, and there was a smattering of local initiatives in other states, but what Grace and Dorothy created and quickly grew was special, and it has only grown in significance since.
One of the things I love most about the MWWC is that our holdings include both published work and unpublished material, such as letters, photographs, diaries, and scrapbooks by authors who may be world renowned, locally known, or anonymous. Among high-profile writers, we have a vast collection, for example, relating to Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), full of treasures including early and ardent letters exchanged with Annie Adams Fields, childhood essays, even a porridge bowl; a rich array of the Honorable Donna M. Loring’s (1948-) papers, documenting her important work as the Penobscot Representative to the Maine Legislature along with other aspects of her life and career; and the only known image, a daguerreotype, of early novelist Sally S. B. K. Wood (1759-1855).
But valuable in their own right are the myriad materials we hold that document the lives of women who never sought publication and, in some cases, whose names we do not even know. For example, we have a large collection of diaries written throughout Maine. Recently, we’ve been working with student interns to transcribe some of these diaries, and the results have been fascinating. One of these belonged to Skowhegan, Maine middle-schooler Grace Hoyt, who, as tweens are wont to do, started writing her diary on New Year’s Day, 1932, and had given it up by June of that year, but not before recording her crushes and disappointments in romance (“My New Year’s Resolution is not to fight and to get done with French men”), her frequent pastime of catching “talkies” at the local movie theater, and her questioning of whether to join a particular church in town. Another is the 1896 diary of Lucy Leighton of Columbia Falls, Maine, which delightfully documents community life in her small town as well as her venture in the fall to matriculate at Westbrook Seminary, which had been coeducational since its 1831 founding. Her diary offers lots of insights into the experiences of late-19th-century women pursuing higher education. The MWWC is housed at the former Westbrook Seminary campus, which is now part of the University of New England, which makes reading this diary all the more meaningful.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to invite readers to reach out to the MWWC. We are open to all and are always happy to welcome visitors from any walk of life--community members, writers, students, teachers, scholars, and others! We also offer research support grants and an annual creative fellowship, along with creative writing workshops and other programs. We are located on the UNE Campus, in the Josephine S. Abplanalp Library, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland, Maine 04103. You can contact our curator, Sarah Baker, at 207 221-4334 or sbaker8@une.edu and visit our website at https://library.une.edu/mwwc/.
A question from Jennifer: You are an accomplished public historian who has done the crucial work of making history popular. In our current historical moment, what do we need from public historians, and what do public historians need from us?
Another tough one. *gulp*
Now more than ever, public historians need to think about what it means to be a public historian.
It is not simply a matter of making the past accessible—though as I have said in other places, accessible does not mean easy. It means looking at stories we think we know from different angles and looking at stories that have been left behind, on the local level as well as on a larger scale. And now it means speaking up. Being a little louder than we might have been before. (I’m a prime example of the need to be a little bolder.)
As far as what we need from our readers, listeners, students, museum goers—and each other—we need you think about the stories we tell and what they tell us about both the past and the present. To ask us hard questions. To hold us accountable. And to tell us about stories we might not know.
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Interested in learning more about Jennifer Tuttle and her work?
Check her faculty page
Read Mitchell/Michel’s short detective story, “The Shadowed Witness” and Tuttle’s profile of Mitchell/Michel in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 39.2 [2022], 93-131
Visit the MWWC website
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with textile artist Ruth Scheuing
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Ann Foster
Ann Foster is a writer living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her research interest is in the intersection of women, history, and pop culture, especially the lives and stories of figures both well-known and half-forgotten. Ann has appeared as a historical expert on BBC radio, and her writing has been published on Longreads, Shondaland, in Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. Ann has hosted the Vulgar History podcast since 2019.
Take it away, Ann!
What inspired you to start the Vulgar History podcast? What type of stories do you discuss?
I started my podcast, Vulgar History, because I wanted an outlet to share the fascinating stories I'd been reading about in my spare time with an audience who would be interested in hearing them (my real-life friends and family, while supportive, weren't prepared to hear me monologue for 3 hours every week on my latest obsession). Before I started the podcast, I had been researching some women from Tudor history, which turned into my blogging about them. And as a fan of podcasts myself, I thought there was space for my take on these stories in that format as well.
With both my podcast and my writing, I've always felt that anyone can read up on these people on Wikipedia or in a biography. What I bring to it is my point of view, as well as my best attempts to explain it all to people without previous knowledge of the subject matter. I'm able to do this because most of the time, I also don't know these stories! So the questions I have are the questions I presume others might have, and so I always work very hard to hold listeners'/readers' hands through my retellings. You need to understand the history of ancient Egypt, the Ptolomy Dynasty, ancient Rome, and Julius Caesar, for instance, to really understand who Cleopatra was and why she matters. So I try my best to really set every story in a place and time so that we can all enjoy the shenanigans together.
I started just talking about British history, because that was my interest at the time I started the show. As more listeners came on board from many different cultures, I wanted to learn about them and share these stories as well. Most of the stories I tell are still from Western countries, because I can only read English sources and those are the ones most available to me. Within that, my guiding principles are: is this a good story with twists and turns? Can I really dig into this story and make it exciting? Am I dying to share this with someone? And when the answers are all yes, I know I've found a topic worth covering!
Rumor has it that you have a book in the pipeline. Can you tell us what it’s about and when to expect it?
Yes! My first nonfiction book is scheduled to come out in about one year, at the beginning of 2026. It's called (tentatively) Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain's Uncrowned Queen.
I want to be very clear that my book, like my podcast, is funny! And doesn't require anyone to come in with any pre-existing knowledge of British history. I explain everything in plain language, with a lot of jokes along the way.
Caroline of Brunswick was the subject of the very first Vulgar History episode, which is still my most-listened to. I fell in love with her story when I first encountered it five or six years ago, and it's always really stuck with me. I knew I wanted my first book to be about someone I'm passionate about, and she was the best choice. Part of what's fascinating about her is that she lived during the Regency Era, which is a very well-known time period from books, TV shows, and movies. In fact, she was married to The Regent himself, George, Prince of Wales! But neither of them tend to show up in these Regency-era books or films, which is telling. We like to think of that time as one with strict etiquette and very well-behaved people, but Caroline and George don't fit into that schema at all. She was known for being outrageous and intentionally shocking people with her jokes and behaviour, while George notoriously was a womanizing gambler who wasted his money on home renovations and drink.
In researching the book, I also learned more about the absolute chaos happening in England during this time period. There were near-constant riots that veered toward full-on revolution (this was just after the French Revolution, which had all the monarchies in Europe terrified they'd also be overthrown by a mob). Caroline, like Princess Diana, was at odds with the monarchy and was beloved by the everyday people. She became a sort of figurehead of the revolution, inspiring women from lower and middle classes to step up as activists in a way they hadn't before. I talk about this in the book, but in some ways, Caroline paved the way for the later suffragette movement as her supporters all wore white.
Do you think Women's History Month is important and why?
I think Women's History Month is important similarly to how other commemorative dates like Black History Month, Pride Month, and Holocaust Memorial Day are important. On my podcast and in my life, I do my best to honour all kinds of history every day. But I know that most school curriculums and most popular history podcasts and TV shows highlight the history of the same wealthy cis white men and stories from history. To break through so that people know that history is so much more than the 50 white men who wind up on lists of "greatest historical figures of all time" lists means I'm always beating a drum and yelling about people like Caroline of Brunswick.
So while I'm celebrating all these histories all the time, Women's History Month is a time when a more-than-usual amount of people seek out these stories and pay attention. And hopefully some people will get excited about these stories, and maybe start thinking about what other people haven't we been celebrating. I live in Canada, which is similar to the USA and the UK in that a lot of peoples' concept of history comes from historical movies. And many of those movies were made in the mid-20th century, and therefore feature a lot of white men doing "great" things, with no people of colour shown in the background. This has led generations to assume that these monumental events occurred in times when there were only white people around, when actually it's just that the films were made during a racist era by racist people. So when we see people now correcting that by putting people of colour in historical settings, or by showing women in powerful leadership roles, there are accusations that this is misleading when it's actually being more reflective of actual history.
All of which to say: Women's History Month is very important, and it's better for people to celebrate this one month a year than never. But in my life, it's Women's History Month 24/7.
A question from Ann: What is the most interesting thing you've learned by interviewing people this year on this topic?
I always learn a lot working on this series. Stories about women I’d never heard of. Books I want to read. Ways of thinking about the work of doing women’s history, (I call everyone’s attention to Jennifer Tuttle’s very smart discussion of doing research beyond the obvious places, which will run on tomorrow.) But this year I find myself thinking a lot about Lydia Moland’s discussion of her decision to find an American woman who had faced a moral emergency in the past, her discovery of Lydia Maria Child, and Child’s conscious choice to devote her talents to abolition.
Moland included what seemed to me to be a challenge to find the philosophical core that will support you (and by you I mean all of us) in fighting against systematic evil. I am not a philosophical thinker by nature, as you may have realized in my answers to big questions in previous posts. I tend to find my answers through story-telling. But I think Moland's call to think about the big questions is an important one.
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Want to learn more about Ann and her work?
Visit her website
Listen to the podcast
Subscribe to her newsletter, Vulgar History a la Carte
Follow her on Bluesky: @vulgarhistory.bsky.social
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian and archivist Jennifer Tuttle.
Talking About Women’s History: Six Questions and Two Answers with K.S. Barton and Johanna Wittenberg
K.S. Barton and Johanna Wittenberg cohost the podcast Shieldmaidens: Women of the Norse World. Both have done extensive research in the period, and use it as the background for their novels.
K.S. Barton writes historical fiction and fantasy stories of love and adventure set in the Viking age. The author of several novels, she explores themes of family, honor, and strength all within the backdrop of Norse society. When doing research on Norse mythology for a teaching project, she discovered the Norse sagas and immediately knew she wanted to write fiction about Vikings. She has an M.A. in Humanities with a focus on literature and history and has always loved to learn about history through stories.
Johanna Wittenberg is the author of the bestselling Norsewomen Series, the story of Åsa, a real Norse queen who ruled alone during the early Viking Age. Book 7 of the series, The Irish Harper, releases in March 2025. Like her Viking forebears, Johanna has sailed to the far reaches of the world. She lives on a fjord in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, whom she met on a ship bound for Antarctica.
Take it away, ladies!
First up, K.S. Barton:
What inspired you to start Shieldmaidens: Women of the Norse World ?
I love listening to podcasts, especially history podcasts. It’s a fun, easy way to get information. However, there were no podcasts that really talked about Viking women. The only ones out there talked mostly about men, and if they did mention women, it was only in passing. The default (as it often still is in history) was from the male perspective. I wanted to do something that focused on the women of the Norse world. I wanted their stories told, and for them to be given the respect they deserve. So, I reached out to Johanna, whose novels and research I admire, and asked her to join me as a co-host. We came up with enough topics to get us started and we dove in!
How would you describe the purpose of the podcast?
The purpose of the podcast is to do deep dives into the lives of women in the Norse world. We examine the stories of Viking women from historical accounts, sagas, and archaeology. From shield maidens and queens to farmers and priestesses, we want to uncover the varied and complex roles that women played in Norse culture. We explore gender roles, war, magic, marriage and family, and even the impact of Christianization on their traditional beliefs and practices, among many others.
In addition to talking about the past itself, we interview the women today who study and write about the Viking Age–archaeologists, historians, journalists, and novelists. By looking at the Viking Age with a different lens and asking different questions, these women have uncovered new information and have pushed our understanding of the Viking Age into some fascinating areas.
Do you think Women's History Month is important and why?
I remember being in graduate school and a fellow student, a man, asked me sarcastically, “Why don’t we have men’s history?” to which I replied, “We do have men’s history. It’s called history.” I wish we didn’t need Women’s History Month. I wish we studied the accomplishments of women in every history class from elementary school all the way up to graduate school, but, sadly, that’s still not the case. It’s important for everyone, women and men, to understand that women play a vital role in every society and have since the very beginning of time. Women’s History Month is especially important now that there are certain forces that want to go backwards to a time when only certain people could be studied and celebrated. It’s important that women’s stories are told and their accomplishments celebrated.
And now, Johanna:
When did you first become interested in Norse history? What sparked that interest?
When I was in college, my mother, an artist of Norwegian descent, created a series of images that revived the ornamental style preserved in wood carvings and metalwork of the Viking age. These designs are now incorporated into the covers of all my books. When Mom was invited to exhibit her work in the Oslo City Hall, she took me and my sister along. She introduced me to the museums of Oslo. I spent hours in them, especially the Viking Ship museum which housed the magnificent Oseberg burial ship.
What work of women's history have you read lately that you loved? (Or for that matter, what work of women's history have you loved in any format? )
I especially enjoyed the book by journalist Heather Pringle, The Norsewomen. (We interviewed her on our podcast.) I thought I had read everything there was about women in the Viking Age, but Heather's book explored aspects I had not delved into, such as female slavery.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
The most challenging thing I find about researching historical women is all the missing, inaccurate, deleted, or rewritten information on their lives and their circumstances. Assumptions made by Victoria Era archeologists still hold sway, such as beliefs that women were without rights, agency, or power throughout history. Strong women were vilified. Misinterpretation of grave findings is common: An axe in a man's grave is a weapon, the same axe in a woman's grave is a cooking implement. It is exciting that those notions are being overturned by modern archeologists.
A question from K.S. Barton: When you started doing research into Sigrid Schultz, did you realize how timely the story is?
When I wrote my proposal for The Dragon from Chicago in 2019, I definitely pitched it as a story with resonance in the modern world, complete with “working around glass ceilings, keeping the news flowing despite tightening controls on the media, outwitting Nazis in Germany, standing up against pro-Nazi sympathizers at home, and dealing with claims of ‘fake news’ on both sides of the Atlantic, plus a little bit of a conspiracy theory.” But I had no idea how timely it would become.
A question from Johanna Wittenberg: In the introduction to your recent book, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History, you explain how you chose which historical figures to include. Can you share that criteria?
It was easy to find historical women warriors. Choosing which ones to include in the book was harder. It finally came down to three criteria: definition, diversity, and sources.
1. I went into the book with a simple definition of women warriors as women who actually fought. That definition was sufficient when looking at women who wielded a weapon, whether they dropped rocks from the wall of a besieged city, fired a musket/rifle/machine gun, or drove a tank. But once you more beyond the front line and start looking at commanders, the story becomes more complicated. After much thought, I chose to include female commanders who were the rough equivalent of what the United States armed forces calls a “combatant commander.”.
2. I wanted the book to be a true global history, so I made a real effort to include women from many times and many places. I had plenty to chose from.
3. Ultimately, my choices were defined by available sources. (When you write historical non-fiction, if always comes down to the sources.) Because I was writing a global history I had to rely to secondary sources and translations of primary sources into one of the languages I can read. There were many frustrating hints of stories that had not been translated.
In the end, I left out more stories than I included. So many stories remain to be told.
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Want to know more about K.S. Barton and her work?
Visit her website, ksbarton.com, where you can claim a free prequel to the Norse Family Saga series
Follow her on Facebook at ksbartonauthor , on Instagram at ksbartonauthor and on Bluesky at @ksbarton.bsky.social
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Want to know more about Johanna Wittenberg and her work?
Visit her website: https://johannawittenberg.com
Follow her on Facebook: Johanna Wittenberg Author
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Listen to Shieldmaidens, Women of the Norse World at https://linktr.ee/womenofthenorseworld or on YouTube
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer from Ann Foster, host of the Vulgar History podcast