Archiving Women, on Full Global Spectrum

Titles of Suppressed Histories presentations, or: Whatever happens, keep going!

Adding to the event flyers in my previous post, I’d like to share some photos of the Suppressed Histories slideshows up to about 2002. After that, sea changes in technology forced me to migrate over to digital formats (a process that is far from complete, with most of the collection still unscanned, to say nothing of labeling, formatting, and configuring into digital talks. But this will give you an idea of the volume of the collection (mostly in 140-slide carousels).

The photo below shows the overflow: many of these slide boxes contain Part II of various shows (most presentations had more than the 140 slides that fit in the trays); or they contain new slides waiting to be integrated into the carousels, or into future presentations; or duplicates, or unused slides. Beyond that are many file cabinets containing hard copy images, maps, and articles, photocopies, notes. And of course the digital archives, which have grown by leaps and bounds in the past 25 years.

In the 21st century, all these visual talks had to be converted into digital form. Those shown above date to before 2002. After that, another hundred followed, as powerpoints and videos of webinars. Those shown below are only titles for international-spectrum shows on particular topics. There’s a much larger number of regional presentations, not included here, though maybe I’ll post them another time).

Deasophy: Goddess Wisdom

The Cosmic Weaver

The Goddess Veiled

Sacred Signs

Sacred Dance

Breasts!

Sacra Vulva

Lesbian Heritages

Healers in Mexico to the Caribbean to South America

Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire

This last one doesn’t exist yet as a visual presentation yet, but the subject is very important. Old-school academia insisted that patriarchy was baked into human nature, and had always existed. For a long time, many feminist scholars bowed to this idea, and treated matriarchy as a “utopian golden age fantasy.” (For example, Sherry Ortner argued against it in Women, Culture, and Society (1974), but later recanted; however, an extreme allergy to “matriarchy” persists, in part from ignorance of Indigenous history.) Anyhow, patriarchalization is a historical process, a series of cultural buildups, layered and entangled with other systems of domination. I’m not suggesting some new evolutionary schema with “stages of development,” because there is no single pattern of patriarchalization. Certainly patterns of male domination can be identified: the core principle being colonization of female bodies for sexual control, reproduction, and labor, upheld by violence, law, and custom. But that doesn’t happen in the same way in all places, and the chronology of these devolutions varies wildly. Human history is far more complicated than that. I talk about these issues in an
audio post on Historical Processes of Patriarchalization that is available to paid subscribers here (though the written prelude is visible to all).

Speaking of paid subscribers, my thanks to all of you who have signed up for that so far. I intend to provide more special content for you. including soon, my three part video on The Potency of Old Women. You can also see it stream on demand through my online course platform, along with some written content I’m in the process of rolling out. The first part on the Cailleach is already up, and more is coming on Old Woman in megalithic traditions in western Europe and Kore.

And there will be much, much more coming. This is medicine we need to fight patriarchy and fascism…

All images and videos ©2026 Max Dashu