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History has been 'feminised', says prominent UK professor
Submitted by Broadsword on Tue, 2009-03-31 16:43
Article here. Excerpt:
'In an interview with the Radio Times, out today, Dr Starkey said: "One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre.
"But it's what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office."
...
Dr Starkey went further, by saying that modern attempts to paint many women in history as "power players" was to falsify the facts.
He said: "If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify."
For example, while he considered Elizabeth I to be a great monarch, "the way she is presented as some sort of female icon is ludicrous".'
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Comments
Fascism anyone?
The social re-engineering has begun.
"If you are to do a proper
"If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males"
Gee, that doesn't sound like anything that feminists/liberals have ever claimed...
There's a difference
Feminists/liberals have claimed this as evidence of bias. That historians filtered history through a white male lense. He's claiming that there's no bias on the part of previous historians... it's just the way it was and that now we're in fact tending to view history through a female lense and therefore are missing the forest for the trees.
I think I see your point, though. His argument could be twisted to show that there was systemic bias in favor of white men. That others didn't get a chance...
A female historian response
A female historian response with a typical reply:
"But Dr Starkey's comments infuriated historian Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which manages royal sites including the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace.
She said: 'This is misogyny. It's rude, damaging, unfair and pernicious to say that women's history isn't important and interesting.
'There is more to history than dead, powerful white guys.
'I don't like the implication that a female conspiracy has taken over Tudor history.
'Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir are beacons of hope and real role models for aspiring female historians."
'To judge Henry without his wives is nonsensical.
Henry is the most famous of all kings,
because of his relationship with his wives. Of all the kings, his story is by far the most repeated, because it exemplifies the feminist theory of historical oppression of women.