“Can women do big history?“
Maclean’s (April 2, 2016)
MacMillan stands out in that British debate, where the Guardian newspaper, under the heading “Big books by blokes about battles,” gathered 12 female historians and five male peers to offer their thoughts on why only four female-authored books appeared among the 50 top-selling history titles in 2015. Attitudes among the men ranged from sympathetic to slightly incredulous: Simon Schama’s contribution consisted entirely of a list of 35 bestselling female non-fiction writers, not all of them historians or biographers (see Naomi Klein), but all writers who grappled with “big” topics. Mary Beard, author of SPQR, the bestselling (and brilliant) history of classical Rome, is “afraid that time and again, the man’s name signals knowledge and reliability, and the average punter will tend to trust a woman author to write about women and turn to a male author on the Napoleonic wars.” Beard’s own success she modestly ascribes to “an elegantly authoritative [book] jacket.”
MacMillan is 72; when she was a student at the University of Toronto a half-century ago, “there was one woman among the history faculty, and she soon departed for friendlier climes in the U.S.” Nor did her professors ask MacMillan—as they did the male students—where she planned to do graduate work. Yet she had no difficulty in finding jobs, publishers and sales, and has seen women increasingly flourish in her field.
In short, MacMillan finds the issue complicated. In the Massey Lectures she delivered last fall, she switched gears in her two final talks from the primary (male) actors in history—the Bismarcks, FDRs and Champlains—to the witnesses, the stories of those who recorded what they saw and their responses to it. That theme brought the historian to a new discovery. “When I sat down to make a list of characters in history who exhibited curiosity, most were women,” she said at the time. “I thought it was sheer accident, and then I began to wonder.”