Unveiling the Forgotten: Rediscovering Women's Roles in Historical Narratives
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The quest for an accurate history stems from the conviction that androcentric history, by definition, cannot be accurate. It will be riddled with omissions about women, but will also, in most cases, whitewash many negativities about the patriarchal past. The women studies perspective claims, quite reasonably, that a recounted past which ignores data about the female half of the population cannot be accurate. Accurate history is always preferable to inaccurate history, simply because of its accuracy. Therefore, part of the reason to investigate the history of the roles and images of women in Buddhism is simply to recount and recover what is usually not included in histories of Buddhism and thus to empower women.
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Recognizing that our record of the past is always a selection from the past, that the past is always constructed when it is recounted, feminist historians ask the embarrassing question of how scholars choose "relevant" data. Recognizing that history is never neutral and objective, but always reinforces certain values and perspectives, the feminist historian seeks a past that is not only accurate, but usable. S/he seeks historical models, often ignored in androcentric record keeping and interpretations, of historical events that empower, rather than disempower, women. Eleanor McLaughlin, writing of the same issue in connection with Christian history, states that the androgynous scholar seeks a past that is "at once responsible, grounded in the historicist rubric of dealing with the past on its own terms and usable. I mean by the search for a usable past . . . an examination of . . . history with a new set of questions that arise out of commitments to wholeness for women and for all humanity. Following from new questions, this is a history that redresses omissions and recasts interpretations."
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Since history is always a selection from the past, it can only be more or less accurate and complete. What is selected and what is omitted, the reasons for including or excluding certain data, always coincide with certain uses of the past. Feminist history is concerned both with the uses to which an androcentric past has been put and what would constitute a usable past for women. The uses to which one would want to put the past reflect one's current values. An androcentrist is content with a record that focuses on men; the androgynous scholar, on the contrary, will seek "a history that redresses omissions and recasts interpretations."
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A "usable past," is important precisely because a religious community constitutes itself by means of its collective memory, the past that it recalls and emulates. Whether or not this record is completely accurate by the standards of modern empirical history is somewhat irrelevant from the religious point of view; its remembered past is being used by the religious community to perpetuate itself. This is the case even for Buddhism, in which history is not normative or revelatory, as it is for the Western monotheisms. When the record discounts or ignores women, the community is telling itself and its women something about women's potential and place in the community. Likewise, when women studies discover a past for women, even a heroic past, in some cases, the whole community is reshaped. Therefore, the stories that people tell, the history they remember, are crucial to empowering or disempowering whole segments of the community.
