If you have ever worried that your path looks too scattered, too slow, or too unconventional to become meaningful, Dr. Elizabeth DeWolfe offers another interpretation: You may be building your toolbox. Beth did not begin college planning to become a historian. She started in geology, then explored anthropology, art history, astronomy, museum work, and American studies. From the outside, the path may have looked unfocused. In reality, each discipline gave her another method for asking questions, interpreting evidence, and uncovering lives that traditional history had ignored. Eventually, those tools led her to a 30-year academic career as a history professor, co-founder of a women's and gender studies program, and author of award-winning books about women nearly erased from the historical record. In this conversation, Beth and Dr. Robin Buckley explore why women are missing from history—and why that absence does not mean women were absent from the events, communities, and movements that shaped the world. Traditional history prioritized written records, wars, governments, military leaders, and powerful men. But women were often denied literacy, legal ownership, political authority, and access to institutions that produced official records. Their lives must sometimes be recovered indirectly. Historians may examine household objects, probate inventories, court testimony, medical practices, diaries dismissed as insignificant, or records written by men with their own assumptions and agendas. Through those fragments, historians can reconstruct the daily work, resistance, caregiving, healing, labor, and community-building that made larger historical events possible. Beth explains that history should be understood as the lived experience of humans—not only a list of powerful people and dramatic milestones. Her career was shaped in part by reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, which demonstrated how the diary of an ordinary 18th-century midwife could reveal an extraordinary life. The lesson was transformative: women were not missing because they did nothing. They were missing because historians had defined what counted as important too narrowly. In This Episode, We Talk About: Women missing from history and why official records tell an incomplete story Recovering ordinary women's lives through diaries, objects, legal records, and material culture Following a nonlinear career path and collecting skills across multiple disciplines Using curiosity as a guide when the original plan no longer fits Teaching young women to question accepted narratives Taking up space instead of assuming good work will automatically be noticed Women's collective action, from suffrage to the creation of the Audubon Society Living through breast cancer by focusing on what remained possible Beth also reflects on being told that a woman could earn a doctorate or get married—but not both. She has now been married for 38 years and has held her doctorate for 30. That experience reinforced something she later had to unlearn: the belief that women should remain quiet, work hard, and wait to be recognized. She learned to advocate for her scholarship, recommend herself for opportunities, promote her books, and take up space without apologizing. The episode also explores how breast cancer altered Beth's life. Diagnosed at 45, she continued teaching through chemotherapy and radiation. Rather than defining cancer as a transformative journey, she describes it as an unwanted detour—one she handled by focusing on what she could still do. When treatment made reading difficult, she bought a ukulele. Nineteen years later, she is still playing. This conversation is for the woman whose life has not followed the expected timeline, whose work feels overlooked, or whose daily experiences seem too ordinary to matter. So if you've ever felt your path was too scattered, struggled to see yourself in the stories society celebrates, or wondered whether an ordinary life can still leave an extraordinary record… this episode's for you.
