This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 16, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When we evaluate women and other groups as historical actors reducing their role to mere interactions with the state, does

them a tremendous disservice. Anthony Comegna, assistant editor for intellectual history at

Libertarianism.org, comments.

Before we started recording, we were talking about what makes important women in history, important women in history.

And for a lot of historians you noted that it sort of goes back to

women suffrage or agitation for women's suffrage. of to look at the history of important women, especially important

Libertarian women.

Yeah, I mean, really, that point is not limited to women either.

Part of the problem with historians is that we so often get tunnel vision into the sources

that we forget that the sources themselves are extremely limited, that they come from a very

small portion of the population, and that if all we do is

look at the written sources, the written record, we really don't capture much about

broader society. So many people are left out of the written record, their experiences might as well not exist.

Well, Lysander Spooner famously argued that women should not be allowed to vote because nobody should be allowed to vote.

Well, you know, I think that it's unfortunate that women's history is so often relegated to the battle for suffrage and then after the battle for

suffrage because it basically erases everything else about women's lives

everything else about what they find important, what they value, what they work toward every

single day, how their daily actions add up to what we call history, what impact they have

on the world aside from when they cast their ballot.

Really it denigrates all of us though to boil us in our actions down to mere politics.

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