“The Ordinary Woman Theory” by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks
An excerpt from “The Ordinary Woman Theory” by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks, published by The Paris Review.
The Ordinary Woman Theory
In fifth grade, I picked Abigail Adams from a list of American history topics because I wanted to find out what this woman had done to land herself, nearly alone, on a list of men. I soon despaired to learn that she hadn’t actually done all that much, at least not in the ways that I understood “doing.” She ran the family farm and raised the kids while her husband, John Adams, was off signing the Declaration of Independence. She followed him to France, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., then back to the farm. I chronicled these relocations, while thinking that I must be missing the point. Defeated, I turned in my report, aware that it was, as grandiose as this sounds, my first intellectual failure.
I’d gotten plenty of spelling words wrong before, but those were failures of memorization, not comprehension. That a life might be valued in terms other than battles won or lost, institutions raised or razed, was alien to me. The “great man” kind of history was the only kind I’d been taught, and the only kind I knew how to value.
I unlearned that lesson gradually.
