Another Starkey soap opera…

Here we go again – David Starkey attracts lots of publicity for his new TV programme on Channel 4 by attacking anyone (but mainly women) who are able to see further than his myopic, narrow idea of history. For him ‘proper history of Europe before the last five minutes…is a history of white males’ and today’s history is becoming dangerously ‘feminised’.

Starkey goes on to complain that  ’our new world has a set of prejudices’. Yes David, absolutely right…. and misogyny seems one of yours.  But this belittlement of anything connected with women (he infers women’s history is ’soap-opera’ – a loaded word!) is not new but has been identified as representative of a certain type of masculinity (as gender historians may well tell him).  In the nineteenth century, male scientists and scholars fought to keep women out of their learned societies because to have women members or fellows would ’trivialise ’ their organisation and lower its status … turn it into a soap opera perhaps?  Starkey seems to connect historical authority with maleness and wants to keep it that way.

Women historians have done a splendid job of rebutting  his arguments, see June Purvis on guardian online. Anyone on Facebook can join the HerStoria campaign to create a reading list for David Starkey to inform him about women’s history, as he does seem somewhat confused about what it is. In the meantime, thousands  more people now know that his programme starts tonight …. I wish I was as good at publicising HerStoria magazine!