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Your experience has been dissimilar from mine. A high level of interest in history is pretty rare in general, but personally I have encountered as many women who are really into history as I have met men who are really into history, and none of those men or women are ideologues. It seems to me that history has a relatively low gender gap compared to many other intellectual disciplines and that female writers about history are just as likely as men to be drawn to history by the wonder of contemplating different worlds rather than by any sort of political ideology. It is true that there are thousands of feminist history books written by women, but there are also thousands of Marxist history books written by men. Are women really more likely than men to look at history through an ideological lens?
Another thing which comes to my mind: aren't women the main consumers of historical dramas in both text and visual form? I do not think that most of them read those books and watch those shows because they want to get enraged by the lack of feminism in previous time periods. They read and watch them because they find themselves captivated by them.
In short, I question the idea that women in general engage with history mainly through leftist ideology. It has not been my experience. By the way, my personal experiences on this topic come from living in highly leftist-voting areas of the United States.
It is hard for me to understand why anyone at all, of either gender, would answer anything other than "now". And as a big history buff, the more I learn about history, the more strongly I feel that I would rather live now than in any previous historical era.
A female history buff here. I agree that "female writers about history are just as likely as men to be drawn to history by the wonder of contemplating different worlds rather than by any sort of political ideology". I personally love that about history. When you get far enough back things just were a certain way and no one tries to get all moralistic about it.
From watching Youtube historians, I do sometimes feel like women feel pressured by modern politics to make asides ("of course this is only what the white women of a certain class were wearing") but women feel more social pressure from negative comments, in general, I think.
There might be an illusion that women want to analyze history from a Marxian/feminist lens but that is what academia has done to the humanities and scholars having to be careerist to survive, it doesn't seem to permeate voluntary history enjoyment at all.
Yes, this.
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