Taking History Out of Context

There are three questions students of history should always ask:

1. What’s the context?
2. What’s the context?
3. What’s the context?

Yes, I know, it’s a play on the old real estate joke (location, location, location), but the importance of understanding how a quote or an event sits in terms of what’s happening around it cannot be overstated. 

I could now summon all-too-common examples of people cutting and pasting selective quotes from the Founders about religion or passages from the Quran about jihad.

But those are third-rail topics that always trigger intense argument. Instead, I’ll illustrate my point with something seemingly benign that I heard today on the radio while driving into work. It was one of those “On This Day in History” items:

On Feb. 15. 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Well, isn’t that nice? And taken out of context, it suggests that women “made it” long before they actually did. It also suggests that it all came about because those great defenders of rights, Rutherford B. Hayes and the members of the 45^th Congress, decided to do the right thing. When we take our history in little doses of factoids doled out like pieces of candy, we lose the facility for critical questioning that is essential both to understand history and to be effective citizens.

And here’s a short list of facts that might be considered alongside the item above:

• The law passed through the singular efforts of Belva Ann Lockwood, who lobbied Congress for five years to get it passed.
• When Lockwood completed her studies at National University Law School (now George Washington Law School), the school refused to grant her a diploma because she was female.
• Earlier, in 1870, Ada Kepley became the first American woman to graduate from law school. Although she had a diploma from the Union College of Law (now Northwestern), the state of Illinois denied her a license to practice law. That law wasn’t overturned until 1881. Not one to be defeated, Kepley went on to earn a Ph.D. as well.
• In more progressive Iowa, Arabella “Belle” Mansfield became the first American woman admitted to the bar, in 1869.
• And just because a handful of women were fighting incredible opposition to work as lawyers doesn’t mean women even enjoyed the vote. In 1872, the year before Belva Lockwood finished law school, Susan B. Anthony was arrested in New York for voting—illegally, of course—in that year’s presidential election.
• It would be another 40 years after Hayes signed this bill for ratification of the 19^th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote.
• Women wouldn’t be admitted to Harvard Law School until 1950.
• The first woman wouldn’t be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court until 1981.
• Of the 112 justices who have sat on the Supreme Court, 108 have been men.
• According to the American Bar Association, only 32 percent of all attorneys in the United States are women (as of 2008), and they earn, on average, only 77.5 percent of the typical salary of a male lawyer (in 2004).

And that is context.

Costello is director of Teaching Tolerance.