“If a man is a writer,” Barbara Tuchman said, “everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say, ‘This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it’s not professional.'”
When she died this year, Barbara Tuchman had won two Pulitzer Prizes and had, at the age of 77, yet another book, The First Salute, on the bestseller lists. But Tuchman was still very much a part of the locked-door theory of education and knowledge. She didn’t have a Ph.D. She had used that time slot in her early life to marry and have three children. By this activity, she had rendered herself invisible to the history establishment. She worked steadily, did reams of research, wrote marvelously readable books, but the more she did, the more “they”—the guys inside the ivy-covered walls—couldn’t or wouldn’t see her.
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