Women’s stories are different
The novelist E.L. Doctorow once spoke of the difference between history and historical fiction. As I remember it, he said, “History is what happened. Historical fiction is HOW IT FELT.”
That’s one big reason that women’s history is so appealing to me. Most of the history I learned in school was treaties, battles, dates and names. Boring.
Doing research on women from the mid-1700s, for my novel, brought me in touch for the first time with women’s history, which was so much richer. Women’s stories were much more personal: challenges, obstacles, joys and disappointments, all kinds of feelings practically overflowed through their narratives.
How things felt was the main thing for the women who were speaking to me from decades and even centuries in the past. Who would not love stories like these? They became the inspiration for much of the plotting and the characters in my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, and for the sequel I’m now writing.
It will be interesting to see how many more stories about women are discovered in the coming years. Women have brought something special to American history that the textbooks have long ignored.