It’s been said that there is nothing new under the sun. And so we find ourselves reliving ancient narratives – stamping out women’s names, work, faces, even extinguishing their very lives. This frightening theme keeps washing over me in rough waves, from the annals of history, through the truth of fiction, and in breaking news that’s all too real. Perhaps this current moment is but a pendulum swing in the wrong direction that will soon right itself. But how long shall we wait? In some cases, women are lost for decades and even centuries before they return to visibility.

Here I’ve collected some striking examples I’ve encountered recently, in my reading life, news consumption and research, spanning centuries yet all part of a singular story.

Nisaba, the Forgotten Sumerian Goddess of Storytelling (from Elif Shafak’s novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky)

Orwell’s Wife, the Lost Muse (in an article in Time Magazine by author Anna Funder)

Trump’s Dark Deletions (various news sources & research)

Corporate Complicity to Obey in Advance (various news sources & research)

Frightening Femicide in Mexico (various news sources & research)

Depiction of the Sumerian goddess Nisaba, on a vase fragment, circa 2430 B.C.E.

Nisaba, the Forgotten Goddess of Storytelling

Long, long ago in a land far away, the Sumerians revered a singular goddess who wielded a golden stylus and tablet. Her name was Nisaba, and she was the goddess of writers, of storytellers, of scribes. So vast was her influence that scribes signed their engravings “Praise be to Nisaba.”

Before reading Elif Shafak’s sweeping, lyrical novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, I had never heard of Nisaba. Of course, I hadn’t studied much about ancient Sumeria, but even if I had I might have only encountered Nabu, a male god of writing, rather than Nisaba. She was so thoroughly erased and replaced by a masculine figure, that she was effectively blotted out of history.

In the novel, the forgotten goddess is described thus: “Nisaba is born of the union of heavens and earth, realms that seem so different and distant that it may not be clear what they have in common, and thus her gift—the art of writing—will always represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries.”

In the book, her memory has recently been revived in the most unlikely place, a tattoo shop called The Forgotten Goddess in present-day London, thousands of years and miles away from her birthplace. An Irish tattoo artist devoted to the study of cuneiform, the oldest written language, plies her trade exclusively in these geometric forms, many of which are lines plucked from the world’s oldest written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

How was such a hugely significant figure so effectively erased? Men threatened by a woman’s evanescence (a fictional female, no less) rewrote her story. It happened gradually, over years, a steady erosion. They didn’t kill her off, they sent her word by word into the anonymous background, recasting her in a support role, all the while elevating a superior male to sit on her vacated throne. Before long, scribes were mandated to sign their work “Praise be to Nabu.” To credit Nisaba for her inspiration became first a punishable offense, and then not even an option within living memory.

The disappeared Eileen O’Shaughnessy, as depicted in a story about her husband’s thorough erasure of her in *The Guardian*.

Orwell’s Wife, the Lost Muse

Author Anna Funder recently wrote in Time Magazine about the brilliant Eileen O’Shaughnessy who was married to George Orwell. Here’s how Funder writes about her: “Never heard of her? That’s because Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s name, along with her enormous contribution to Orwell’s life (she saved it) and work (she helped make it) have gone down the patriarchal memory hole. In Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, I explore just how a woman so crucial to a man’s life and work can be erased from the story while she is alive, and then, after she dies, from history. “

Why is it, she asks, that it’s so important in our culture to disappear women from the story? “Turns out, it’s how patriarchy creates itself. Erasing women makes men into the main characters in life and in history, and women into supporting cast, or caste.”

O’Shaughnessy graduated from Oxford with a degree in literature, and studied under famed British author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. She was the main breadwinner, and worked during WWII at the Department of Censorship in London. As Funder tells it, the idea for Animal Farm was likely not Orwell’s, but his wife’s. He wanted to write an essay critical of Stalin, but she advised him it would never be published. “So, the couple began an animal fable instead, a book unlike any other he had written before, one imbued with O’Shaughnessy’s wit and whimsy, and her acute sense of other people. Orwell’s publisher and friend of the couple, Fred Warburg, was astonished by Animal Farm. ‘How this writer of rather grey novels, with heroes embodying some aspect of his personal character, had suddenly taken wings and become – a poet,’ he said in his memoir. Warburg simply could not fathom. ‘There was,’ he writes, ‘after all, little in Orwell’s previous work to indicate that he was capable of this supreme effort.’

Too often, the miracle of the man and his masterpiece is achieved by making a woman disappear, even as she’s standing there, probably serving them dinner.”

Not much is known about this bright and sparkling woman, quite accomplished in her own right. All of her ambitions and strivings fell secondary to her husband’s, from completing an advanced degree to fighting over the single lamp in the run-down cottage she and her husband shared. Along the way, she worked in various capacities, from running a grocery to a red-pen-wielding editor. Her life was cut brutally short all too soon, when she died at age 39 during a botched hysterectomy, leaving her 10-month-old adopted son and her husband behind. Some scholars believe Orwell’s 1984 was inspired by a poem she wrote titled “End of the Century, 1984.” Of course, her husband gave no credit to her if that was the case.

To put her erasure in context, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and O’Shaughnessy died that same year. Funder’s book was published in 2023, and I’m only learning of it now. Effectively, that renders this woman completely invisible for around 80 years, nearly a century. Compare that to her husband, whose name is likely known in every American household.

The question becomes, to me, one of tolerable endurance. How long are we willing to be cast into the shadows, into oblivion? Further, although O’Shaughnessy’s name may be solidifying to a small degree, how many other women are lost forever, written out of history or never having even made it in, with no chance of return?

From the ACLU’s site, on a page about its continuing efforts to uphold women’s rights.

Trump’s Dark Deletions

The news has been a flood of undoings – what’s been cut, things taken away, years of progress abruptly reversed in the service of a series of lies. That there is a “better time” to go back to. That our government agencies are riddled with fraud, waste and abuse at a scale that equals two trillion dollars. (This last is laughably disprovable as DOGE itself quickly slashed its goal to $1T, then to $150B.)

One particularly disturbing element of these efforts is the erasure of any “DE&I” language, individuals, research, funding… etc. This includes minority people, LGBTQ individuals and yes, women. As Anna Funder writes, “When the Trump Administration orders the erasure of women it is doing overtly something that is usually, in patriarchy, done underhandedly.” Thus far, this erasure is widespread and eerily quiet. Occasionally, an egregious erasure makes the news, but a lot goes away without notice. When I first started looking into the scope, I asked Microsoft CoPilot for help in research, including a list of 50 women who have been erased. It returned with 5, and said it couldn’t help with a complete list because the records are erased from the Internet. Later, I asked ChatGPT, which luckily had more luck in retrieving details. Again, though, there is no comprehensive list, no documentation of what’s been erased. It can be found, reclaimed – but it will require a massive effort.

Here are 10 records of significant women or groups of women we know have been deleted:

Rose Ferreira – A former NASA intern whose inspirational story was removed from NASA's website following DEIA content purges.

Jessica "STING" Peterson – An Air Force flight test engineer who discovered that articles highlighting her contributions and challenges as a woman in the military were deleted. Business Insider

Nicole Malachowski – The first woman in the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration squadron; her biography was deleted from the Air Force website. Wikipedia

Lisa Jaster – The first female Army Reserve graduate of Ranger School; her profile was removed from Department of Defense websites.

Jeannie Leavitt – The first female fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force; her profile was removed from military websites.

Saleha Jabeen – The first Muslim woman chaplain in the U.S. Air Force; her profile was removed. Wikipedia

Khady Ndiaye – The first Muslim woman chaplain candidate in the U.S. Army; her profile was deleted.

Bea Arthur – Actress of Golden Girls fame, and Marine Corps veteran; her military service profile was removed.

Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) – Content about this group of WWII female pilots was deleted.

Indigenous Women in Military History – A history of indigenous women fighting in wars throughout American history was deleted. Wikipedia

My question is – how long are we willing to tolerate their invisibility? If we are indeed experiencing a brief pendulum swing that arcs back in the next presidential election a few years from now it will be but a blip in the fullness of time. But if history is any indicator of what could happen, these women and other minority figures could be wiped from our collective memory for decades or a century, like Eileen O’Shaughnessy. One hopes it wouldn’t be possible for them to experience Nisaba’s fate, for their accomplishments to be rewritten to the glory of straight white men, but who can say for sure?

It is hopeful that these erasures are being tracked, and the information recaptured and republished elsewhere, it seems mainly on Wikipedia at this point. As citizens, we can submit a Freedom of Information Act to retrieve what has been deleted. Some of the deleted information has also been reinstated following public outcry, as the result of journalists bringing attention to the deletions of people like Jackie Robinson and groups like the Navajo Code Talkers.

I’m choosing to use my voice to shine light on what’s been lost, and to urge us all out of complacency as we watch from the sidelines.

Corporate Complicity to Obey in Advance

I have written previously about Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny. His very first lesson in the book continues to profoundly stick with me: Do not obey in advance. In other words, don’t anticipate what those in power want and give it to them before it’s demanded. This goes for media entities, companies, brands and individuals.

If you work at a large company, you’ve likely already observed these effects – scaled back or all together removed DE&I programs, as well as a pulling back or non-participation in outward-facing support of things like Gay Pride and International Women’s Day. Verizon, Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, Meta, McDonalds are all submitting to the current political climate. And those are just the names big enough to make national headlines.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of this are the directional decisions made on a daily basis. The content about pay equity for women that doesn’t make the cut, the social media post that doesn’t get posted about LGBTQ rights, all the inconsequential decisions that add up after a year or two to a substantial change in overall direction. Yes, Trump can order government agencies to remove DE&I content from their sites. But it is not illegal for companies to support minority rights, to stand for women’s equality. However, many of them are already acting as if they are following law – complying in advance.

23-year-old Mexican influencer Valeria Marquez was murdered in the middle of a livestream in the state of Jalisco on May 14, 2025. It’s being investigated as a femicide.

Frightening Femicide in Mexico

Do you know the term “femicide?” As a woman in the United States, I’m glad that I haven’t had to learn the definition until now, which is this: the intentional murder of a woman or girl because of her gender, usually perpetrated by a man. Literally killed solely for being a female. In Mexico, femicide has become a national crisis. TEN women are killed every day in femicides. In 2023, that added up to 852 women’s lives erased in Mexico alone.

The roots of the problem in Mexico grow from a few intertwined issues, chief among them entrenched cultural machismo, which in turn leads to a lack of legal consequences for the perpetrators. It’s the IRL equivalent to the hate-against-women being spewed through algorithmic pipelines on social media rising in popularity in the US right now.

If you’re paying attention, you can see the hate stepping free from screens into living color in all kinds of ways. One particular example is social media influencer Andrew Tate who has literally made the following horrifying statements:

Women “belong in the home,” “can’t drive” and are “given to the man and belong to the man” as “a man’s property.”
Tate has claimed that women should “bear some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted.
He has compared women to dogs and suggested that men have “authority” over their female partners.

In fact, at the end of 2024, Andrew and his brother Tristan were under house arrest in Romania awaiting trial for being part of an organized crime group, human trafficking and rape. When a judge ruled that the case could not proceed due to procedural irregularities, members of the Trump administration swooped in and invited them to Florida.

Specifically, Trump's special envoy, Richard Grenell, reportedly raised the issue with Romanian officials, and Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., publicly criticized the Tates' arrest as “absolute insanity.” Additionally, Paul Ingrassia, a lawyer who represented the Tates in a defamation lawsuit, now serves as a White House liaison to the U.S. Justice Department and has praised Tate in online posts.

Upon their arrival in Florida, President Trump stated that he knew “nothing about” the Tates' entry into the U.S.

Me as a first-time mama in 2016. In hindsight, not totally sure I was using that wrap-thing correctly…

The Next Chapter…

Given this foundation and the trajectory, it’s very likely we’re at an inflection point. When women’s significance is being erased at the same time as some are actively attempting to subjugate them and make them less human than men, that’s when violence against us can enter the realm of the every day.

We’re in the midst of a dangerous story becoming our reality. Teachers are among the first to notice the IRL influence of this digital attitude, as students increasingly joke about rape and repeat hateful things they hear in the manosphere.

It’s impossible to quantify the worth of a woman, but a few startling statistics capture this moment in time. We exist at a point where we have had momentum in making up the pay gap between the sexes, from around 60% of what men made in 1980 to 83.6% of what men make as of 2023. About 16% of wives in opposite-sex marriages are the sole or primary breadwinners, roughly triple the share from 50 years earlier (5%). So yes, we’re able to command more in the workforce, which is a huge win. But there’s another side of the coin, too.

Nearly 80% of women do the grocery shopping for their families, and mothers take on about 70% of the “mental load” for their households—tasks like planning, organizing and scheduling—and 79% of cleaning and childcare responsibilities.

How much is that work worth? One study revealed that if American women earned minimum wage for the “unpaid work” performed for their families, they would have collectively earned $1.5 trillion over the course of a year.

I suppose my question comes back to – when women are erased, what is at risk? What is lost? In the best case scenario, this is a temporary painful period which can be remedied in a few years. But how much ground will have been lost in that time? The worry is that the starting line will have been moved back, the momentum slowed. And in the worst case? If this lasts, if erasure is but the first step, and replacement is what follows?

Erasing Women’s Worth