The blame for this wave of women everywhere lies with us, the old feminist historians.

On the same topic:

I must confess: I'm fed up with these women popping up everywhere . Yes, I, a veteran feminist and historian to boot, who a thousand years ago was among the first to advocate for women's history, to say that all of history needed to be revisited, remembering that women existed too. I even confess to having belonged to the most advanced current of historians, the one that even said it wasn't enough to add women to men's history, but that history needed to be rethought from women's perspective, that is, as women had experienced it. And this, I want to point out, was well before, long before, the birth of woke thought.

But now, faced with the constant barrage of history books – more or less serious – that reveal how both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower were actually built by the wives of the engineers who designed them and not by the engineers themselves, now that it seems that always and everywhere women have been the backbone of every innovation, of every enterprise, that they have been the protagonists of everything even if we have naturally forgotten them, now I feel suffocated and even slightly nauseous .

At the forefront of the events most reinterpreted in this light is the Resistance. For years now, the Resistance has been a field plowed almost exclusively to claim that it was primarily carried out by women, even though in reality the books that follow one another to prove it are largely heirs to the early, distant works written by the two authors who dedicated themselves to research of this kind, Annamaria Bruzzone and Rachele Farina. Today, they are so forgotten that even the title—The Silent Resistance—that they once gave to their book has been stolen. Finally, it's noteworthy how today's historical flood is also accompanied by a substantial narrative in an almost romance style intended to confirm the new vision of the world, with partisan protagonists who are consistently brave and courageous as they should be . And it must be admitted that sometimes fiction is better than history.

What's new, in fact, is that today there's almost no difference between history books featuring women—the vast majority—and the protagonists of novels and romances; all women, always fearless in fighting for their own freedom, for their own affirmation, little susceptible to the sirens of love (since men, as is fitting, are always and in any case patriarchal). But it wasn't like this; it wasn't to dispense this rosé that we designed women's history so many years ago . Just look at the three splendid profiles of women written by Nathalie Zemon Davis, so far removed from clichés and apologia. Yet I suspect that this wave of women everywhere that afflicts us is our fault, us old feminist historians. Just as our fault will be the wave of rejection that will obviously ensue, and which will lead to results similar to those to which the ephemeral but unfortunate affirmation of woke ideology is leading: a new affirmation of the hateful patriarchy.

More on these topics: