herstory

coined by Robin Morgan in 1968, this term refers to all the parts of "her story" that have been left out of "his story." The word "history" itself is not sexist; the "his" in "history" is an English/American-language accident and has nothing to do with the male pronoun or with any male-based word. "Herstory" was never intended to replace or be a synonym for "history," but is used to "emphasize that women's lives, deeds, and participation in human affairs have been neglected or undervalued in standard histories" (Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women ). Eleanor S. Riemer and John C. Fout (European Women ) describe the wealth of women's writings they found in "books, women's magazines, and periodicals written, edited, and sometimes typeset and printed by women, for women.... If historians until now have not used women's own sources to reconstruct women's past, it is only because they have not looked for them." See also history, unconventional spellings.