erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. It’s no longer universal for women to give up their names but still rare to pass them on if they’re married, one of the ways women vanish or never appear.
So much was so absent that its absence was rarely noted, the lack built into the current arrangements and the possibility that things could be otherwise. Many lists of the missing have been augmented in my lifetime; we still fail to perceive voices, assumptions, positions that we will recognize in times to come. We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak, or we say disappeared, which presumes that the person, place, or thing first appeared. But there are so many things that were never murmured, never showed up, were not allowed to enter rather than forced to exit. And there are people who showed up and spoke up who were not seen or heard; they were not silent, not invisible, but their testimony fell on deaf ears, their presence was not noted.
When I was young, human beings were routinely described as mankind, and mankind could be described as a singular man, and he, and even men in liberation movements—Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin—fell back on this language, because the absence of women was so absent from our imaginations that few noted that it even could, let alone should, be otherwise. The 1950s brought books like The Family of Man and LIFE’s Picture History of Western Man; the 1960s a conference and book titled Man the Hunter that all but wrote women out of evolutionary history; by the 1970s we got a long BBC series about The Ascent of Man. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women.”
This had real consequences. They are endless but a few come to mind: heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died; crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival, and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of younger British schoolboys, was also often cited as an example of how humans behave. If men were everyone, then women were no one.
When I was young, nearly everyone who held power and made news was male, and pro sports, TV sports, meant men’s sports, and many newspapers had a women’s section about domesticity and style and shopping that implied that everything else—the news section, the sports pages, the business section—were men’s sections. Public life was for men, and women were consigned to private life, and wife beating was described as a private business though it was legally a crime and crimes were the public’s business and the law’s. Andrea Dworkin, whose radical feminism was shaped in part by an early marriage to a murderously violent man, said, “I remember the pure and consuming madness of being invisible and unreal, and every blow making me more invisible and more unreal, as the worst desperation I have ever known.”
It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.
4
I carried other weight. I had and still sometimes have a sense of dread that held down my sense of hope and possibility, a sinking feeling that was a real sensation of heaviness