Women’s History Month is an annual observance celebrating the courageous women — the suffragists, abolitionists, labor leaders and more — who fought for the universal social, political, and economic rights.

Despite the progress that these visionaries have achieved, there is more work ahead to knock down the barriers. For the March edition of the BlueStocking, we highlight two figures on campus who, in different aspects, excel in their field: Dr. Jaclyn Sumner of the History Department and Head Basketball Coach Alaura Sharp.

History has been regarded as a male field for scholars and writers for centuries, so we asked Dr. Sumner for her perspective in this male-dominated field.

Why women’s history, Dr. Sumner? Why would you consider that it is important to dedicate a whole month to focusing on women’s history?

Almost all of history has been about and for men. We must take time to acknowledge the contributions that women have made to history and the writings and research of women historians today because, for so long, women were just not included in the conversation. We don’t know oftentimes what people who identify as women thought about certain events in history because nobody thought it was worthy of recording their thoughts and opinions, the least we could do is take a month out of the year to try to rectify that and acknowledge it.

Despite the increasing number of female history majors, female faculty members in history departments are far fewer than their male counter- parts. What are your thoughts on this?

My personal experience reflects this. I had no female advisors as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Representation matters because you are much more likely to have a more unbiased and comprehensive historical perspective if you include people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, and everyone whose voices were diminished for a variety of reasons. When you start having those people tell history you’re going to have a much fuller picture of what happened.

Some people argue that one of the reasons that holds women back is that “there’s an implicit association linking history with masculinity”; what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, like the Roman Empire that everybody is talking about. Historically, that’s always been true. Think about the sources that are available to us: they’re almost all written by men. I think that that’s the issue; history has always been written by men about men, so of course it’s seen as something that’s deeply masculine. It’s our job to fix that, and the only way we’re going to do that is by working the archives, trying to find sources as best we can about and for women.

When you look at what male historians are writing, it is the grand revisionist world reviews or the classic WWII history; meanwhile, a lot of books written by women are about women. Why do you feel female writers were left with such a small scope of fields?

There’s always going to be a human tendency to try to investigate topics that you can relate to. That’s why you get a lot of males in academics who are not very fun to work with because they see themselves as being as important as these great emperors in history, which is gross. Women are more likely to research women be- cause they can relate to their stories more. The goal of a historian is to present a story that is as unbiased as possible; but at the end of the day, interesting and relatable content prompts us to learn. Usually, it is something that we can relate to. However, that’s not always the case; my book, for example, has nothing to do with gender and rather talks about an indigenous person in Mexico in the 19th century.

My book is not about women, it’s not even about gender in that sense. I wanted to write it because it was what I was interested in, and I thought it was important.

Lastly, what would you say to those female students on campus whose goals are to get into Ph.D. programs in humanities departments?

I would say, talk to me. Talk to other women right in the field because talking to women is going to provide a different perspective than talking to men, and no offense to the five other wonderful men that I work with in my department; they’re just not going to have the same experiences as women.

Talk to other women in the field; talk to other female graduate students, because those experiences are going to be informative for the future generation of women who want to go into the field of history.