A life Changing Question – Sandi Toksvig QUOTES FOR WRITERS
When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar,” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.”
It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book “The Women’s History of the World” (recently republished as “Who Cooked the Last Supper?”) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.
Sandi Toksvig
Photo credit: Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
7 comments on “A life Changing Question – Sandi Toksvig QUOTES FOR WRITERS”
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"Unputdownable" Miriam Stoppard
BRIDGET WHELAN writer 
what a incredible mind shift this brings…
An ice cold drink for the brain … so many times, in so many ways written out of history, out of activity, out of community and out of logic.
One could be cynical and point out that man needs to know which days it’s safe to come out of the bunker and ask what’s for dinner… having suffered extreme PMT I used to hoist the ‘danger to life’ flag for four days….
And there ‘s always a place for humour (as long as the right person is saying it ie you and not your husband)
we wouldn’t have got through some.of those difficult times without being able to laugh about it….
I’m sure you’re right – apart from anything esle a sense of humour also implies a sense of balance, proportion…
Reblogged this on Literacy and Me.