Virtual Event | Celebrate Women's History Month

Of Things Not Seen: Missing Matter, Knowledge Not Yet Known

"She Who Wrote:  Enheduanna and the Women of Mesopotamia ca. 3400–2000 BC October 14, 2022 through February 19, 2023," a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, was the first to call attention to Enheduanna and other learned women of Ancient Mesopotamia. Enheduanna named herself as the first person to use the technology of writing to create autobiographical texts. She was the daughter of King Sargon, considered to have created the first empire. Sargon instituted a caste of scribes to tell the world about his victories, initiating historical writing, that is, texts by, for, and mostly about men that set the rules for making History. Literacy codified misogyny. In this talk, we will consider the consequences of how much has been silenced, erased, misappropriated, and lost of women's experience and prominence during the past 4,000 years, and call for the teaching and practice of feminist historical recovery. The intricacies of the hidden female past demand a reckoning with the cartography of History itself and the masculinist knowledge-ordering systems that for millennia have kept women’s life experiences and new discoveries from being integrated into the record of human cultural evolution.

Dr. Gina Luria Walker is Professor Emerita of Women's Studies at The New School in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College, MA from Columbia University, and PhD from New York University. Her doctoral dissertation on Mary Hays (1759–1843) won NYU’s Founders Day Award. Hays published Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries in 6 volumes (1803), the first biographical history of women by a named English woman and the first since Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). From 2009 to 2014, Walker led a coalition of 200 scholars from 164 institutions in eighteen countries to annotate the entries for the 302 women that Hays included. Volumes 1–3 were published in 2013 and Volumes 4–6 in 2014. Walker founded and serves as the Executive Director of The New Historia Foundation, Inc., an international collaborative of scholars, teachers, writers, designers, and students committed to igniting a revolution in knowing about earlier women whose lives and contributions to human culture continue to be deliberately erased, misappropriated, and undocumented. www.thenewhistoria.org