Women's Roots: Status and Accomplishments in Western Civilization

Women's Roots is dedicated to my father, Fredrick Ortegren, who taught me that no person is better than another. The women who scrub the office building floors deserve as much respect as their bosses who occupy the offices. He always said that human dignity depends on having choices. Only when all choices are open to them, will women achieve full personhood.

This short history book attempts to portray women's status and their contributions to the development of Western civilization from prehistoric times to the present. As the whole story cannot be told in a short survey, the scope of the study is focused on what seems to be the most representative of women in each historical period.

Heretofore almost all of history has been written by men, about actions which are important to men, and about the accomplishments of men. Women's lives have been virtually ignored. Throughout the United States, girls and boys for most of their 12 years in grades one through twelve in social studies or history lessons are required to learn almost exclusively about the accomplishments of men. In 1979, in spite of the women's movement, affirmative action programs, and publishers' guidelines, in the United States History texts, for example, for every 700 pages about men there were only 14 pages about women.

The omission of women in history is a serious void in the education of both boys and girls. It fosters an attitude that says in effect what females did or do is unimportant, an attitude that cannot help but adversely affect human relationships. This author believes that the imbalance in the teaching of history helps to perpetuate sex discrimination and it demeans girls. This book is one small effort to help balance history so that both boys and girls can Jearn about the buried history of one-half of the population.

Though this is a history of women, it includes women's relationships with men. For, throughout history and before, women have lived their lives alongside men. What women could or could not accomplish, depended on what their relationship was with the men in the society. Also, women's lives are always intricately woven into the society of the historical period in which they live. So it is necessary to have some knowledge of what was going on in the society to understand the female/male relationships in each period. Because this book includes information which may not be of general knowledge, there are numerous quotations from a variety of reliable sources to substantiate history. Nothing in this book is new. It draws from scholarly books which have been written over the years. This, however, attempts to bring it together for general readership.