What was the name of the female scientist who pioneered the mRNA research behind the success of recent COVID-19 vaccines? Who was that 16th-century catholic nun from whom René Descartes stole the evil demon thought experiment that secured his place in public memory as the father of modern philosophy? I doubt you remember either woman. Their names appeared recently in newspapers, on social media, and within academia. But recalling them is difficult. Seldom have women thinkers been more acknowledged and lauded than today. But how many of their names have we retained in our memory?
The mechanisms of collective forgetting are fascinating and important. Our practice of writing genealogies determines who gets remembered, and who doesn’t. It is also haphazard. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, if our lines of transmission remain co-opted by strategic omissions, the selective erasure of names will continue. Many names that have faded from history were women’s. That’s no coincidence. Women aren’t just missing. They have been made absent, as the historian David Noble argued in A World Without Women (1992)…
https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-women-philosophers-often-erased-from-collective-memory
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