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And now, welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with clips today from GERD A learner,

Arthouse, Giovanna Margot, Counter-Spin, the Tom Hartman program, AJ Plus,

Upwardly, Blazing Green, Laura Fondre's, Making Contact and Last Week Tonight.

Why is understanding our history so important for us as women?

Well, understanding our history is not just important to women.

It's important to everybody. It's true. We define what our goals are and what we think is possible

to reach in our lives by the stories we inherit about people who came before us, who are like us.

But unlike peasants or unlike working class men,

the story of women's contribution has never been coherently told until now, until feminist scholarship

is filling out the gap there. And so what I wanted to do was to tell this generation

that is now teaching and also that are now the students, that first of all, nobody gave us anything.

It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me, to 72 years of unbroken organizing

grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law.

It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy.

And so the first thing, rule one, nobody gave us anything. We had to fight every inch of the way for every advance.

And against constant resistance, it wasn't like you once fought a battle. You fought the battle that the story of women should be told.

For example, I taught at Sarah Lawrence College, which was at the time predominantly a woman's college.

And when I proposed to teach course in women's history, they said, who needs it? We're a woman's college.

Everything we do is women's history. And I said, not at all, because you're always telling it from the male point of view, from the male gaze at women.

And the real story is that despite these hundreds of years of discrimination and oblivion, women persisted that they have a story.

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