Understanding the Past for a More Tolerant Future

By Sarah Brophy

For too long, history research has been dominated by male voices and perspectives, a trend that has largely neglected the rich and diverse lives of women. This is clearly seen in what portions of archived documents that have been ignored and overlooked. Every historian strives to analyze documents with as little bias as possible, but it’s impossible to truly divorce oneself from their own experience, culture, and beliefs. This is part of the reason there are many different interpretations of history as a whole and individual events.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned in pouring over digitized and undigitized sources that I have seen in other academic papers is how much historians must comb through to get pieces of text that directly relate to their work. This means that historians, myself included, must quickly discern which portions of documents are pertinent to their research. Especially when one only has a short amount of time in an archive, fascinating, important details of history fall by the wayside. Looking at these documents with a fresh set of eyes allows untold stories to see the light of day and integral parts of women’s history that have previously been overlooked shine through.

My current research focuses primarily on intermarriage in Nazi Germany with an emphasis on Aryan women’s experiences and the Nazi regime's reaction to their marriages. Marriage has served as a way to control women in many societies and religions, but it also gives women the chance to form their own households and shape the next generation. Marriage is also one way women defied the cultures they came from as they married outside of the dominant social class, religion, or race, as seen in my research with Aryan women marrying Jewish men in Germany, particularly in the 1930s.

At first glance, this research undoubtedly appears to be extremely niche and isolated from the bigger picture. I would argue that this research is integral to understanding how the Nazi regime sought to control women belonging to the in-group and provides insight into how other regimes and governments aimed to do the same. Historically, women have been seen as the bearers of the future and hold the most responsibility for raising their children. This means that controlling women and, by extension, their children is of the utmost importance to many societies. Marriages between different ethnic and racial groups have been an issue that often turns violent for thousands of years, particularly when a woman of the dominant culture wants to marry outside said culture. To this day, interracial and intercultural marriages are taboo in some societies and outright unaccepted by many. These difficulties have evolved over time, making understanding the past key to unlocking a more tolerant, bright future.