Why “Great Woman” History Fails—and What to Do Instead

A practical guide to doing women’s history right.

A few years ago, a new teacher took over the Women’s History course that’d been teaching at a university. She asked if she could see my lectures for some context on building out her own and I agreed, I’m generous like that. Her response to my carefully researched and planned lectures was:

“I am trying to make sure I make this class about women in history, whose struggles and accomplishments speak for themselves, and not a class focused on feminism.”

Now, you might ask, had I made my course just a long list of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Judith Butler essays? No, no I didn’t. In fact, I think I only ever assigned a single chapter of Friedan the entire course and the only time Butler came up, it was because a student mentioned them, but what I did do was consciously place the women I spoke about into the context of their time…which usually involved a bit of discussion about the world they were living in and the systems they struggled against.

And that was too much feminist theory. Apparently.

That sentence is the Rosetta Stone of how women’s history gets flattened into a Great Woman Theory: a tidy parade of heroines where “accomplishments speak for themselves,” as if those accomplishments weren’t forged in resistance to laws, customs, and institutions designed to keep women silent. Women’s history without feminism is like teaching marine biology without mentioning water.

Today’s rant/lesson is about why the “Great Woman” approach is seductive, why it fails, and how to replace it with history that actually explains the world.

The Great Man Theory, Gender-Flipped

Nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle argued that history is the biography of “great men”—singular geniuses steering the ship of time. You already know the vibes: Napoleon, Churchill, Lincoln stride across the stage while everyone else fetches props.

The Great Woman theory is the uncritical, gender-flipped version. It says: “We’ll do women’s history—but we’ll just list some extraordinary ladies (Cleopatra! Joan of Arc! Marie Curie! Rosa Parks!) and keep the rest of the syllabus exactly as it was.” It’s a familiar classroom and media pattern:

• A short “Women’s Unit” in March, with five famous names.

• Posters of “Girls Who Changed the World” (no notes on who tried to stop them).

• Biopics that chisel a single heroine out of a movement of thousands (then roll credits).

It’s not wrong to teach about remarkable women; it’s wrong to pretend their stories float in a vacuum. The “accomplishments speak for themselves” line ignores the chorus of laws, economies, religions, customs, and threats shouting over them.

The Great Woman approach promises a feel-good, low-conflict syllabus: Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Rosa Parks, a sprinkling of quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt, roll credits. Students leave inspired; nobody has to argue about patriarchy or policy, no one has to think critically about the world they live in or the systems that shape that world. The problem is that personal courage doesn’t repeal property law. Charisma doesn’t desegregate a bus system. Genius doesn’t secure lab funding when women can only be hired as a secretary.

Telling history through a handful of heroines does three quiet but serious things: it converts structural oppression into background noise; it turns outliers into explanations; and it lets the status quo masquerade as “neutral.”

What gets lost when we only teach the outliers

Context, ordinary lives, and the mechanics of change.

When Marie Curie becomes the story of women in science, we don’t just shrink the field—we erase the scaffolding: universities that excluded women; networks of mentorship women were barred from; family labor that fell almost entirely on women’s shoulders; journals and prize committees controlled by men. Curie’s achievements are extraordinary. The gates she had to kick in are a part of the reason why they are so extraordinary.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. If we teach Rosa Parks as a lone seamstress who happened to be tired one day, we erase the years she spent as an organizer, the Black women’s clubs that sustained the movement, the carpools and childcare that kept a 381-day boycott running. If we celebrate a “first female CEO” and stop there, we’ve printed a press release, not written history. Progress isn’t a person; it’s a set of changed rules.

Most importantly, the highlight reel pushes most women offstage. Servants, seamstresses, domestic workers, farmwives, enslaved women, migrants, sex workers—women whose unpaid and underpaid labor made economies function—become footnotes, if they appear at all. But the kitchen, the nursery, the market stall, the textile floor: those are archives. Ignore them and you’ve sidelined the majority of women’s historical experience.

Feminism isn’t a “bias.” It’s the method that makes women’s history legible.

“Not a class focused on feminism” frames feminism as an optional add-on—like glitter. In reality, feminism is the analytic toolset that lets us see how and why women’s lives took the shapes they did. It asks obvious, necessary questions: Who had power? How was it enforced? What did law, church, school, wage systems, and empire do to structure women’s choices? How did race, class, sexuality, and disability change the answers? Who resisted, how, and with what coalitions?

Without those questions, “accomplishments” don’t speak for themselves. They sit there, decontextualized, implying that barriers didn’t matter or barely existed. With those questions, a life becomes a lens, not a legend.

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A Quick Field Guide: Are You Accidentally Doing Great Woman Theory?

• Your syllabus has a “Women’s Week” instead of women threaded through every week.

• Your slides feature quotes from queens and scientists, but nothing about servants, seamstresses, street vendors, or enslaved women.

• You assign Hidden Figures but don’t discuss segregation, federal contractor hiring practices, or the Black women’s clubs that incubated that talent.

• You teach “first female X” headlines without asking what rules were preventing women before them, who changed them, and who got left out of the victory.

If three or more of these are true: you’re running a highlight reel.

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What it looks like when we put context back in

Consider five familiar topics—now taught with some actual historical bite.

Joan of Arc and the rules of gender.

Yes, a teenage visionary led armies. But her trial hinged on clothing and authority: cross-dressing laws, church courts, and politics of legitimacy. Her courage and her execution make sense only against the institutions that policed gender and power.

The Lowell mill girls and early industrial capitalism.

Recruiting New England farm daughters wasn’t benevolence; it was labor strategy. Boardinghouses enforced “respectability,” wages reshaped marriage prospects, and women built a print culture that sharpened class consciousness. This isn’t a cameo; it’s the plot.

Rosa Parks and the infrastructure of a movement.

The boycott worked because women ran the logistics—funds, carpools, childcare. It’s not just a brave individual; it’s a community that transformed a seat on a bus into a lever on a city.

And for some extra context, throw in the story of 15-year old Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for the same crime, 9 months before Parks and for the sake of respectability politics (she was an unwed pregnant teen girl) was never the face of a movement.

Reproductive politics from Comstock to the Pill to sterilization abuse.

Margaret Sanger alone gives you a heroine. Add obscenity laws, clinic raids, eugenics boards, and the sterilization of Puerto Rican, Black, and Indigenous women and suddenly you’re teaching power, not personality.

“First Woman to ___” headlines and the ladder.

Representation on the top rung means little without examining the ladder: hiring rules, pay scales, childcare policy, harassment redress, and who gets pushed off the rungs first. Otherwise we mistake a PR milestone for systemic change.

How the highlight reel keeps sneaking back in

It’s encouraged by the way we package history.

Textbooks sprinkle a handful of women into sidebars while the main narrative—wars, elections, trade—remains masculinized. Women’s History Month becomes an Instagram carousel of “sheroes,” no mention of wages or law. Biopics streamline collective struggle into a single protagonist because complexity kills a three-act arc.

So what does real women’s history look like?

It looks like systems, intersections, labor, coalition, and backlash—with individuals woven in as guides, not as explanations.

• Systems. Start with the rules: coverture and marital property, guardianship, credit access, apprenticeship gates, immigration regimes, church courts, poor laws. Track how they changed, for whom, and when.

• Intersections. “Woman” is not a single category. The story of “women” in 1920 is different if you are a white suffragist in New York, a Black teacher in Mississippi, a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, or a Diné weaver. Map it.

• Labor. Follow paid and unpaid work. Who cooks, cleans, births, nurses, and cares? Where is that labor counted—or erased?

• Coalitions. Movements move history: unions, women’s clubs, churches, mutual aid, consciousness-raising groups, reproductive justice networks.

• Backlash. Every gain has a counter-move. The reaction is part of the story, not a footnote.

• End with material consequences. Don’t stop at the applause line. Ask: “What changed in law, in budgets, in bodies, in time use, in pay?”

In practice, that means re-threading women into every unit—Empire, war, science, economy, culture—not quarantining them in a March module or a sidebar on page 148. It means moving from “ten women who changed the world” to “women situated inside the legal, economic, and cultural forces she confronted—and who was left out of her victory.”

If you write, teach, or make media—five habits that change the story

1. Lead with a structure, not a star. Open the week with coverture, factory rules, or segregation; then use biography to show how people navigated and contested those systems.

2. Make intersectionality non-negotiable. Map how race, class, sexuality, and citizenship status rewire the same policy for different women.

3. Follow the documents of everyday life. Pay stubs, court dockets, midwives’ ledgers, union minutes, parish registers, censuses, women’s advice columns, cookbooks, and parenting manuals. That’s what “facts speaking” actually sounds like.

4. Treat logistics as political. Car pools, childcare, kitchens, sewing rooms, neighborhood committees—these are engines of change, not background décor.

5. Teach the backlash on purpose. Put the countermovement on the timeline so students see the cycle: gain → reaction → new strategy.

Do that, and your classroom—or your article—stops being a museum of inspiring exceptions and becomes an explanation of how power moves.

Why This Matters Right Now

The political result is not benign.

We point to a few high-profile women—on courts, in cabinets, in boardrooms—and declare sexism over while reproductive rights contract, care labor collapses, pay gaps persist, and backlash organizes. The “great woman” frame provides easy cover: if a woman can sit on the court, run a company, or lead a nation, then the system must be fine.

You can showcase “women whose struggles and accomplishments speak for themselves.” But unless you teach why they had to struggle, who enforced those barriers, how they organized, and what materially changed for everyone else, you’re doing hero worship—not history.

Women’s history without feminism is a highlight reel.

Feminist history is the playbook, the rulebook, the scoreboard, and the ownership structure of the league.

Don’t just show the stars. Teach the whole game.