History in the Making

My high school history teachers, Mr Bring and Mrs Toll, taught me all the important things I needed to know to pass the high school exam. I got a B, which wasn’t bad compared to some of my other grades, however I kinda wished I could have done better.

I didn’t choose history for higher education lessons, as everyone said it was too difficult, so I went with some different classes I knew a little better. I like history and learning about the world. But reading a play script and writing a story have always been more to my liking.

It only occurred to me recently, since I started working at the same high school I left almost a decade ago now, how little I actually learned about the world in those lessons I had as a kid.

The history teacher at my school now, a wonderful woman called Mrs Dennor, has taught me more in the last few weeks than I learned in half a decade before.

And she has such a way of teaching that holds your full attention, and even the most boring and unimportant thing becomes ingrained I your brain, not because you spend time revising but because of how well she teaches it to you.

And in her lessons, nothing is ever boring.

One such lesson I was observing several months ago now sparked a renewed interest in history and all things ancient, and led me to spending hours upon hours doing my own research, diving down imaginary internet rabbit holes and trying to connect the dots on the crime-board in my brain.

The lesson was about the Salem Witch Trials, and we briefly touched on how, historically, women have been treated as the ‘enemy’ since the Creation story, when Eve supposedly tricked Adam into eating the apple and creating sin.

Mrs Dennor mentioned that this is nonsense that church leaders have passed on for generations and generations and it is so ingrained in our society that us women always get the blame that we forget who the actual sinner was. And then we went back to the witches, who were just innocent women who were accused of something outside of their control and were blamed and killed for it.

I spent some time researching the Creation story in the Bible. Here are some direct quotes from the Genesis Creation Story about Adam, Eve, and the Snake.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

“But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.”

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

What people always seem to overlook here, is that Eve was not yet made when God made Adam promise not to go into the Garden of Eden to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve was created after, and God did not ask the same of her.

And why is it that Eve is now often blamed for Adam’s actions? He was created first, and was able to make his own decisions and choices long before Eve’s creation.

“She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”

Adam chose to eat the fruit - he was not tricked by Eve, nor was he forced into eating it by her.

And yet, since far before the creation of this holy book, us women have been treated as the enemy, as the reason that Sin exists in this world. We are blamed for the actions of men and punished unjustly for this.

If you didn’t also notice, the snake is male - “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

So in the beginning, it was not women who created sin on earth. Not even remotely. But through time and history, as many of us have learned, women are at fault and blamed for the mistakes of man.

Even in myths and legends does this carry true. The story of Medusa, for example - she was abused and defiled in a goddess’ temple, and was subsequently blamed for the man’s actions, being punished with the dreaded snakes for hair instead of being protected. Though some researchers have shown that Medusa was given the means to prevent herself from future harm, in the rest of the story she is hunted and beheaded, shown as a wicked and cunning villain, when all she wanted was safety from the men who would hurt her.

This has been seen through our recent history, too, with women like Rosalind Franklin, Alice Ball, Vera Rubin, and countless others who spend years of their lives doing important scientific research, much of which affects our lives today, and had a man take the credit for their hard work. Many of these women never got the recognition they deserved until long after they died,

It is believed by many that women are simply not smart enough to do such things and have such an important role in changing the face of the world as we see it.

This is clear when we hear that famous authors had to use a male pen name to even get considered a real author from a publisher. The Brontë Sisters wrote under the names Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell, each with the same beginning letter as their real names: Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

We can see our own history of today’s society being taken away from us.

A hundred years ago, women in England fought for the right to vote and won, changing everything for us today. We can see across the sea, hear on the news and watch the Facebook reels of how devastating the current climate is in America right now.

We’ve all seen how we have been treated through history, and we can connect the dots by ourselves and figure out what might happen next.

I think we’re lucky, in a way, that phones and recording everything is such a normal thing nowadays. Because it hopefully means that we won’t be getting erased from history any longer. It will be harder to get rid of us and rewrite what we have done and will do.

Our sisters through time have been lost, erased and trampled over. We won’t let them be forgotten.

Thank you, Mrs Dennor, for renewing this desire I had as a child to help change the world to be better.