We could just get to introducing ourselves, but the spirit and intent of Ask Historians is to provide context … So, context incoming.

"Placing Women in History: Definitions And Challenges” by Gerda Lerner arrived on the scene in 1975. Recognized as one of the foundational texts of a then nascent branch of history known as “Women’s History”, she laid out how a consequence of traditional approaches to the historical record meant women often went unremarked on. Not that our words, labor, ideas, and work were unremarkable but that the men writing about history saw our presence as background noise to the “real” history their fellow men were making.

Lerner wasn’t the first to recognize it but articulated that when we envision the past as a place dominated by men, it’s that much harder to envision an equitable future. Since then, in ways big and small, historians of all genders have worked to push, prod, and encourage the field to approach the historical record in a more thoughtful, and more complete, way. With varying levels of success, they have helped their fellow historians move from framing women as someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter to attending to their full humanity, agency, and experiences.

The field of women's history reminds us that in order to tell the full story of the past, we need to consider the actions of all people. And the work truly means all - Women. Men. Nonbinary people. Girls. Trans women and men. Black, Indigenous, multiracial women. Women of color. White women. Women with developmental disabilities, women with physical disabilities. Women sex workers and women rulers. Everyone in between. All.

Telling more complex, more accurate histories, though, is only part of the work. Another essential part is setting the record straight about who does the telling. Many women historians write about topics generally thought of as “about women” such as fashion, pregnancy, or feminism. Many women historians write about history topics generally thought of as “about men”, including wars and armies. Women historians write about whoever we want and whatever we want -- in short, we write history.

Today, groups like Women Also Know History (#womenalsoknowhistory) encourage the public and media to use women experts when talking, writing, or learning about history (and avoiding the dreaded manel.) From their website, “Women Also Know History is inspired by and indebted to Women Also Know Stuff, an initiative to bring attention to the work of women Political Scientists.”

And in the spirit of the WAKH project, we wanted to formally introduce ourselves as women moderators, historians, and members of the AH community.

Making the decision to identify oneself on Reddit as a woman can, on its face, seem like an easy decision. However, it’s worth stating explicitly that it is a complex decision to identify as a not dude on here. Each of us, including some women members of the mod team who made the perfectly reasonable decision to not be part of this post, have been misgendered. We routinely see or experience gender-based insults. We, and the non-women mods, have had to deal respectfully with users who suspect there’s a woman at the other end and use that as an argument for why they were right, and we’re wrong. Users have even used our fields of study as insults, as if the history of things mostly associated with women is less worthy than the history of things mostly associated with men. Basically, it sometimes sucks when people on the internet know you’re a woman.

However, it’s sometimes not that bad. Like when we get to metaphorically stand up to say, “Hi, I’m a woman,” and know there’s some woman or girl out there reading our words, who needs to know that history is for her, too. She’s seen male-gendered names on the cover of nearly every book in the “History” section of her bookstore or on her textbooks and she knows how many of them are biographies of men. When we write as women historians, we model she can read history, she can write history, and she will be memorialized in history.

Not only are we modeling women as historians through writing on the sub, in many ways we also model women as historiographers through our volunteer work as AH mods. In the most basic sense, this manifests itself in our fulfilling the basic moderation requirements of the sub along with the other non-women mods; however, as female moderators we are also able to - and often take the opportunity to - not just keep an eye on the content that already exists, but try to cultivate the content that we want to exist. We can highlight questions that celebrate under-explored and under-represented topics by flairing them with Great Question flairs; we can recruit brilliant women podcast and AMA guests to share their expertise; we can share in Meta threads and Methods posts the vision that we have for what this sub can be: open and welcoming to all, whether in or out of Reddit’s target demographic, and giving voices to a wide variety of historical experiences and perspectives.

We are women who love history.

In the comments below, five women members of the all-volunteer moderation team have shared our thinking about posts we’re proudest of, the ones we best liked writing, posts we wished we could edit but can’t cause that door has closed, or general observations on the sub. Feel free to say hello or share your favorite post!

Women of the AH Moderation Team:

• Cait, AKA u/SunAgainstGold
• Cassidy, AKA u/Mimicofmodes
• Hannah, AKA u/hannahstohelit
• Jennifer, AKA u/EdHistory101 (Formally u/Accountabillibuddy)
• Sarah, AKA u/SarahAGilbert