User:MopTop/Erasure of women

A while back I was doing some random reading about various famous people from the Sixties, and the name Barbara Rubin kept coming up. The mentions were always tantalizingly brief, in books and articles about other people. She sounded interesting, so I looked her up in Wikipedia. She wasn’t there.

“Barbara Rubin, London, May 1965” by Allen Ginsberg, copyright Peter Hale.

An underground filmmaker and performance artist, Rubin had introduced the Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol in 1965. She had made headlines — notorious New York Times headlines — performing with the VU and Warhol. She had toured with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol had mentioned her in his memoirs, acknowledging her as a pioneer of multimedia. Yet she wasn’t mentioned in any of the Wikipedia articles about the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, or the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

She had worked closely with Jonas Mekas, founder of the New York Film-Makers Cooperative. In 1964, at a film festival in Belgium, she, along with Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, had stormed the projection booth and screened Jack Smith’s controversial film, Flaming Creatures.

“Having hidden the film in the can for Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, these three firebrands combated the police and audience alike….Unable to avoid it, the jury eventually did see Flaming Creatures, [and] awarded it a special film maudit prize…” –Marc Siegel

Mekas, on film and in print, had praised Rubin’s work, and made a short film about her. Yet she was not mentioned in any of the Wikipedia articles about Jonas Mekas, the Film-Makers Cooperative, P. Adams Sitney, Jack Smith, or Flaming Creatures.

She was a close friend of Allen Ginsberg’s: lived with him, influenced him, organized the International Poetry Incarnation for him — on a whim! Booked the Royal Albert Hall in London, called every newspaper in town, and ten days later the place was packed with 7,000 people. Yet she wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Ginsberg, or even the one about the International Poetry Incarnation.

As a teenager she made a film, Christmas on Earth, that’s been described as “among the most radical ever made”; a film that’s been reviewed, screened at art galleries, and written about by film scholars; yet, in an encyclopedia that includes articles about individual episodes of sitcoms, there was no mention of the film.

This was not a case of non-notability. All of these events and relationships had been documented — in the news, in academic writings, in biographies. I’m sure if you asked the editors of those related Wikipedia articles, “Why didn’t you mention Barbara Rubin?” they would say, “It didn’t seem important.”

There’s something about that word, important. When I was four, I used to imitate my father by sitting at a table, shuffling papers, and saying in a stern, deep voice, “I’m doing important work! Very important work!” I had no idea what he did at work all day, only that it must be very, very important because he did it.

According to Wikipedia’s guidelines, editors are supposed to maintain a neutral point of view. What they mean by this, of course, is that an encyclopedia is not the place for screeds or spam. If you say something in a Wikipedia article, you should be able to back it up. But even working scrupulously within the guidelines, drawing on reliable sources, there’s a lot of room for different points of view. What’s important? What’s worth writing about?

Since I took up Wikipedia-editing as a hobby, I've noticed how women tend to get erased from history. In some cases, it's because they ended promising careers as soon as they got married (e.g. Rose M. M. Pitman). But in others it's just...weird. For example, the New England School of Law started out as a law school for women. The whole reason for its founding in 1908 was that there were so few options for women who wanted to pursue a law career. It was named the Portia School of Law after the character of Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, who disguises herself as a male lawyer so she can defend Antonio. Isn't that interesting? Yet Wikipedia editors wrote a history of the New England School of Law that didn't begin until 1926, when male students were admitted.

I don't mean to pick on Wikipedia editors, who after all are taking their cue from the source material. I'm just saying I think erasure is a real thing. Keep it in mind, and you'll start noticing it here and there.