A telling of war that erases women from history

ALL the children in my social circle are gifted a book every birthday and Christmas. I agonise over my choices – nothing gendered but nothing they’ll reject out of hand.

Recently the job has been made easier by a glut of feminist books for girls. Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls; Until We Win.

Buying a book for a six-year-old girl last week I swithered over the Little People, Big Dreams series. Would she like Rosa Parks? Or Ada

Lovelace or Harriet Tubman?

Who would Dan Snow choose, I wonder? Going by an interview he gave, perhaps none of the above.

The historian said he was at an aviation museum with his six-yearold daughter who spotted something amiss. “My daughter... [saw] black and white pictures of Spitfire racers and she was going “boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy’”.

So Mr Snow told her women served alongside men in order to save derailing her ambitions with the “harsh reality” of the patriarchy.

There’s always someone to tell you you’re parenting wrong. No difference with Dan Snow. Not only is he doing it wrong – too lefty, too liberal – he’s also charged with being a dreadful historian, altering the facts to suit his own narrative, and insulting the men who fought.

I so clearly remember my own Second World War confusion, at school, age about six.

“My gran was in the army during the war,” I said. The class erupted, the teacher smirked. She couldn’t possibly have been in the army, the teacher explained, because women can’t be soldiers.

I was outraged, indignant. “Well, maybe she was a secretary,” the teacher said, further complicating

It is not the male pilots who are snubbed by the gender neutral retelling of history, it is the women who fought for gender parity

matters. What on earth would the British Army want with secretaries?

Gran was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, it later emerged. As a secretary. But I’d only ever been told “Your gran was in the army,” and so to my child’s mind this had meant she was doing whatever the men were doing, and why not? My mum did everything dads did – she caught spiders and changed plugs.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me gran had not been a soldier.

I don’t remember when I learned about the patriarchy but I don’t believe the knowledge of it hindered my ambitions.

Some are concerned our war dead are insulted by Snow’s altering of history. My problem with his take is thus: it is not the male pilots who are snubbed by the gender-neutral retelling of history, it is the women who fought for gender parity.

Snow has told his own version of history, and it is incorrect. At the same time, that’s essentially what history is – a telling of events by people with their own opinions and biases. It’s why so many women have been ignored or written out of history – because history has been curated, narrated, written and told by men. The presence of men in historical events is a given, the presence of women exceptional.

It sounds very much like Miss Snow has already spotted the discrepancy, with her keen observance of the lack of women in those black and white pictures. If they flew, she must wonder, then why aren’t they celebrated? There is no indignation like the righteous indignation of a child.

My hope in giving feminist books to my young friends is in igniting that powerful sense of right and wrong they have. All the women of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations and before, the women who fought to give us rights to stand alongside men, they should never be erased from the story. They deserve to be recognised and little girls deserve to have them as role models.

Inspiration and indignation are sure-fire ways to ensure change.