ABSTRACT
Although I cannot say that I have any special competence in the history of women, I do have a commitment to writing about people who have been misunderstood or left out of the recorded past. Voltaire was only one thinker to have been appalled by how unreliable historical knowledge can be. It was he who memorably said, “History is nothing but a pack of tricks which we play on the dead.” 1 As I look back on those few events in my own experience that have mattered enough to get covered in the press, or even to appear in books, my skepticism about how history gets written has to be enhanced.
