History Forgot Women on Purpose

History loves a straight line. A great man. A breakthrough. A name worth memorizing.

What it doesn’t love is the mess behind it.

Because if history were honest, it would have to admit something uncomfortable: women have always been there. Not at the margins, not as helpers, not as footnotes—but as builders. And they were forgotten deliberately.

Take technology. Long before “tech” became a male-coded word, women were its backbone. The first computer programmers were women. Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm in the 19th century, imagining computing beyond arithmetic when most men were still figuring out machinery. During World War II, women known as “human computers” performed complex calculations that made modern computing possible.

And yet, when programming gained prestige and profit, women were pushed out. By the 1980s, coding was rebranded as a male domain. Same work. Different narrative.

That pattern repeats everywhere.

In medicine, women were midwives, healers, herbalists for centuries. They carried generational knowledge of anatomy, childbirth, and care. When modern medicine professionalized, that knowledge wasn’t honored—it was criminalized. Thousands of women were labeled witches and executed across Europe. Their crime wasn’t superstition. It was expertise outside male institutions.

In science, Rosalind Franklin’s work was essential to discovering the structure of DNA. Her data made Watson and Crick famous. She died without recognition. They won the Nobel Prize.

In sociology, Harriet Martineau translated and expanded the work of Auguste Comte and laid foundational theories of social analysis. Her name is rarely taught. His is unavoidable.

In literature, women have always written. Often under male names. Sometimes anonymously. Always cautiously. The Brontë sisters were advised to publish as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell because female authors were not taken seriously. Jane Austen published anonymously. Even today, studies show books by men are more likely to be reviewed, taught, and remembered as “universal,” while women’s writing is categorized as niche.

Men write humanity.
Women write “women’s issues.”

That distinction alone erases half the world.

Art follows the same script. Museums are filled with paintings of women—but rarely by them. The Guerrilla Girls famously pointed out that less than 5% of artists in major modern art museums are women, while over 85% of the nudes are female.

Women were muses. Subjects. Bodies.
Not creators worth archiving.

And then there’s the most invisible contribution of all: labor.

Women didn’t just participate in society—they sustained it. They raised children, fed families, cared for the sick, preserved culture, passed down language, rituals, values. Entire civilizations survived because women absorbed the unpaid work that made life possible.

Economist Marilyn Waring exposed this in her book If Women Counted, showing how national GDP calculations exclude unpaid labor; work overwhelmingly done by women. The result? An economy that pretends care doesn’t exist, while collapsing without it.

History didn’t forget this labor because it was insignificant.
It forgot it because acknowledging it would disrupt power.

Because once you admit women carried societies, the myth of male self-sufficiency falls apart.

What makes this erasure especially effective is how it continues today.

Women are still praised for “managing the home” while men are credited for “building the world.” Women’s skills are reframed as instinct rather than intelligence. Cooking becomes domestic duty, not chemistry. Childcare becomes natural, not developmental psychology. Organization becomes personality, not logistics.

The kitchen remains the most effective containment strategy history ever invented.

Even now, women enter every field—tech, politics, art, academia—and still shoulder the majority of domestic labor. Data from the UN shows women perform over 75% of unpaid care work globally. Progress didn’t remove the burden. It just added another shift.

And when women succeed publicly, history still hesitates to remember them fully.

Their stories are framed as exceptions.
As inspiration.
As sidebars.

Never as the main text.

There are books that exist precisely because this erasure was not accidental. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez documents how data itself is male-biased, leading to systems that fail women by default. Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici traces how the rise of capitalism depended on controlling women’s bodies and labor. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf asks a question that still hasn’t been answered: what would women have created if they had space, time, and recognition?

The answer is obvious. We already know. We just don’t teach it.

History didn’t forget women because they weren’t important.

It forgot them because remembering would force a rewrite of everything we think we know about progress, genius, and who “built” the world.

Femonomic isn’t interested in adding women back as a footnote.

It’s interested in exposing the system that erased them in the first place.

Because once you see that forgetting was intentional, you stop asking where women were.

You start asking who benefits from pretending they weren’t.