Early this semester, I was thrilled to sit down with TNS Professor of Women’s Studies, Gina Walker, to discuss her digital platform The New Historia. Launched in March 2022, The New Historia describes itself as “a network of global researchers painstakingly recovering women in history, a dynamic growing collection of schemas that document individual female figures, and a platform for creative collaboration, communication, community building, and the creation of new knowledge ordering systems.”
In this conversation, we dive into Feminist Historical Recovery, new translations by New Historia scholars, the biographer Mary Hays, the ancient author Enheduanna, and opportunities for independent studies programs.
12th Street: I had such a great experience taking your class History, Biography, Fiction: Parallel Lives last term, it’s wonderful to see you again. Thank you for meeting with me today.
Gina Walker: I welcome the opportunity, thank you for coming.
Street: Considering the work that The New Historia tackles, what is history to you?
Walker: History, to me, is a moving target. We know now (though we didn’t when I was a student) that women have always been deliberately left out of the established cultures of teaching, learning, and new knowledge production. For example, in 19th Century BCE Turkey, which was then Anatolia, women did not collaborate on the corporate history. But the designated “learned” men of the time wrote it for the sovereign. And so that’s the history we have of Anatolia.
History—with a capital “H”—itself is a construct; a knowledge-ordering system; a system of organizing information (old as well as new) devised by men, for men, about men, and that inscribes certain human activities that have been gendered male. For example, war. War is both an action and a human concept that produces masculine virtues. Like valor. And so, the really difficult thing that we have to do is not just add women in—we need to figure out ways to actually change the structures and the values that are written into human accounts of the past. Have you read Christine de Pizan’s late 15th Century The Book of Peace?
Street: *shakes head*
Walker: You haven’t read it because it’s only just been translated by a New Historia scholar into English. It turns out when Machiavelli, one of the great shaping minds of the Renaissance (and after) was writing his work, The Prince, he read and used some of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of Peace. Now, we say, really? He doesn’t cite her. The work of what I call “Feminist Historical Recovery” demands a kind of intense concentration. There are reams and reams of paper, print, and digital texts about a figure. But how do you organize that through a feminist prism?
Street: Through schemas? I see the platform is largely based on this approach. How might you define the schema in the context of The New Historia?
Walker: The New Historia schema is designed to emphasize the feminist elements in an individual woman’s experience, unlike traditional historical biographies which are gendered male. We recognize that girls and women weren’t part of the established cultures of learning until the mid-19th Century, so we pay close attention to the always idiosyncratic training that a woman could access throughout her life. This, in turn, affected her ability to participate in the male “republic of letters.” She would likely have had limited contacts with influential men who were interested in promoting her as a critic or producer of new knowledge and her productions often would attract criticism because they are different from the genres of music, art, treaties, and science that men learn and practice. We include a category for “controversies” because women are frequently caught up in defending their right to engage in the public arena and are accused of plagiarism. In other words, the schemas as a growing collective demonstrate that in the past women were silenced, defamed, and the knowledge they produced was misappropriated, condemned, and forgotten. This is the work of The New Historia: to summon women deliberately left out of history and discover them and the shards of information about them that can be found. As more and more female actors are made visible, another narrative of the human experience emerges that is more inclusive, accurate, and just.
Street: Can you tell me about a recent project The New Historia is working on?
Walker: Yes. We always have more questions. I’m meeting tomorrow with two of our scholars because we’ve come up with what feels like an emergency. I asked two scholars to help. One is a dazzling scholar working on the recovery of women philosophers, and the other is a younger French scholar, who has tried to bring all of Christine de Pizan’s designs, voluminous number of manuscripts, unfinished texts, and imagery together. I thought this situation needed both kinds of expertise. They’ve done a magnificent schema, but it’s pages and pages and pages. We really have to think about whether we want to be encyclopedic or not, which we don’t.
Street: Why don’t you want to be encyclopedic?
Walker: Because it presumes that knowledge can be complete—that knowledge can be finished, and that there’s not going to be anything more to learn about this figure. And I know that’s baloney when it comes to women.
Street: How did you get into what you call Feminist Historical Recovery?
Walker: When I was in graduate school (I got a Master’s at Columbia after I graduated from Barnard), I really wanted to work on Jane Austen. I went to see the Graduate Student Advisor at Columbia who was a much older man with a big beard that he spoke through. When I said I wanted to work on Jane Austen, he said, “All you Barnard girls want to work on Austen—there is nothing to be learned.” So he sent me to the 18th-century Pro-Seminar. The professor assigned to me the newly recovered journals of the 18th-century biographer, James Boswell. He wanted them considered through the prism of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, rather than Freud’s theories. I learned a lot, but it wasn’t what I wanted to learn.
After I finished my thesis, which he liked (though I didn’t) I had a final interview and he said to me, “You can certainly do a PhD if you want to, but you are really too pretty to bother, go home and get married.” So, I cried all the way back to Brooklyn on the subway. And I applied to NYU. There, luck happened. The man I was sent to was a man named Professor Kenneth Neill Cameron. He was the founding director of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Private Library. It’s now part of NYPL in the research division. When Cameron heard that I wanted to work on Jane Austen, he said, “You can certainly do Austen, but go to the Pforzheimer Library. Tell them I sent you and ask to see the works of Mary Hays.”
And Hays was a fascinating, very complex read. She was a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, and she knew the French revolutionary women. Nobody had done much work on her. I uncovered a cache of manuscripts. In 1803, Hays published Female Biography; or, memoirs of illustrious and celebrated women from all ages and countries in six volumes. It was the first biographical history of women in English by a named woman, severely criticized by men for including “impious women,” and included 302 figures from biblical times to Hays’s contemporaries. Jane Austen read it—and I suspect was influenced by it. It sold widely. Hays’s accounts of individual women became the standard for biographical references, but of course without her name.
*Walker pulls out a stack of hardcover manuscripts, beautifully bound in dark cloth*
And in this bag, I have a gift from a former student. And those are the volumes here, yep.
Street: These are gorgeous books. What kind of work did you end up doing on Hays?
Walker: They’re very expensive. Anyway, in 2009, I was asked by the editors of the Chawton House Library Editions to produce the first modern scholarly edition of Hay’s texts. Supported by New School students and scholars from around the world, we formed The Female Biography Project and worked virtually for four years. More than 200 scholars from eighteen countries and 134 institutions participated. The first three volumes were published by Pickering & Chatto in 2012, the next three in 2014. As Editor, I read every annotation—there were hundreds—and as I read, I realized that the new scholarship that the specialists provided were telling another version of the past that complemented, contradicted, and corrected the stories we know as History. In other words, a system of knowledge by, about, and mostly for men. Working with a cohort of contributors, we published two more books about what I call “Feminist Historical Recovery,” which has been a neglected global initiative for at least sixty years.
Street: Wow. That’s a tremendous amount of work. Out of all the women you’ve researched and highlighted so far, is there one in particular you feel especially inspired by?
Walker: Well, thank you for asking. One of the women, and she’s not in Hays (nobody knew about her until an excavation of the city of Ur done in the 1900s) was named Enheduanna. She is a figure everybody should know about because we believe that she was the first human author/compiler to speak in the first person—“I, Enheduanna.” Using the first person voice reserved for kings was radical. She left us her texts in cuneiform from the end of the second millennium BCE. She had an image made of herself and tells us a little about her life. And I will take this chance to call everybody’s attention to the Morgan Library’s new exhibition featuring Enheduanna, “She Who Wrote.” The exhibit opened on October 13th after three years of delay because of COVID. I hope everyone will try to see the exhibition. It is the first one in the four thousand years since Enheduanna lived and wrote. The New Historia has also published a schema on Enheduanna.
Street: Is The New Historia planning any up-coming events where students might become more involved with the project?
Walker: Well, we want to, but we’re chronically understaffed. We want people to collaborate with us. And I am happy to give students independent study credits to work with me and The New Historia. This is an absolutely unique way to learn about and contribute to this very large effort to change the gendering and the structures of history. It’s also a chance to engage with scholars from all over the world from all disciplines who are doing the work of Feminist Historical Recovery—which interestingly, has been going on for at least sixty years but receives almost no attention as its own enterprise. It’s a way to work with us to try to figure out how to make this knowledge accessible in classrooms at every level, and even to novelists and film producers. These are stories that can change a young person’s life.
Street: What kind of work might a student complete while pursuing an independent study with The New Historia?
Walker: We always need more schemas. If a student was interested in producing one or more, I would suggest one or two scholars for them to collaborate with, so they can include the latest research on the figure. We also need a steady stream of editorials on a wide variety of topics. Please see the Editorial section of the website for examples of what we have published; more intriguing pieces are coming soon. We are eager to have creative work because our job is to make women visible in every way possible. And I want to say one more thing.
Street: Go ahead.
Walker: Supreme Court Justice, Judge Alito, says he can find no evidence in the Constitution for the right to abortion. It really catapults us back into a level of misery, and death, that we thought we had advanced from. To me, that is absolutely an admission of the invisibility of historical women.
There have always been abortions. But it has never been part of what is studied as History. So, of course he doesn’t know. We don’t know. But we need to know. Women must be present in every decision and every attempt to come to a decision that human beings make. I don’t see The New Historia as window dressing. To me, it is absolutely an attempt to recreate the bedrock, so that women who have been busy every minute of every day, and every millennia, are represented.
Street: Thank you for talking to me today. This is a huge project and seems connected to your heart as well. It’s very exciting.
Walker: Thank you. It was wonderful to talk with you, too.
If you would like to know more about Independent Study Program opportunities with The New Historia, please contact Gina Walker at her faculty address: walkerg@newschool.edu. If you are interested in suggesting schema, editorials, or other kinds of material, please write to Anne Comer, The New Historia Administrator, at hello@thenewhistoria.org.