Today is UK publication day for A History of the World With the Women Put Back In, a time-travelling tour of our planet from prehistory to present day, in a narrative which continually questions the making of history and how it was that a certain half of the population tended to get written out of the records.

Co-authored by German historians Kerstin Lücker and Ute Daenschel, the book was co-translated into English by me and Jessica West, and comes out today from The History Press.

Though we have a lot of books out there about game-changing women in history, what tends to be lacking in the UK market, at least, is longer narrative nonfiction that gives the context on why misogyny developed in so many places around the globe at once, and which questions whether it was always like that, and why certain significant women were forgotten and others made history. And when feminism started – a surprisingly long time ago! – and what the set-backs were, why it too so long for women to be granted anything approaching equal rights.

After corresponding with Ute and Kerstin for months about the translation, I finally got round to asking them about their intentions in writing the book.

Ruth (R): What made you want to write this book? What did you want to do differently to other books about important women in history?

Kerstin and Ute (K,U): Reading E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World. Like Gombrich, we wanted to write a book that both provides a ‘first history’ for young readers and includes women and the history of gender.

Actually, many of the popular books on women in history appeared around the same time our book was released, so we didn’t start with the question, ‘what do we want to do differently?’

In retrospect, we clearly had a different focus to lots of those books. That wasn’t intentional. Perhaps it just turned out that way because we had Gombrich in mind as a model. When we talk about ‘world history’, the stories of individual women get limited mention. We wanted to understand the context of women’s roles, the circumstances and the impact. We wanted to tell the history of the world from the Stone Age to the present and to consider gender relations throughout. That meant asking, ‘to what extent were women involved in events?’ And ‘what was the impact of events and developments – new religions, revolutions, etc – on the interactions between and coexistence of men and women?’

R: Though not marketed in the UK as book for young people specifically, in Switzerland it was originally published by Kein und Aber as Weltgeschichte für junge Leserinnen (World History for Young Women).

Was it challenging to write about history for a younger audience? In what way? What age range did you have in mind when you were writing? How did writing for younger readers affect the way you presented information and your argument?

K, U: We started having the age of 10- to 12-year-olds in mind and therefore decided to omit sexuality and sexual violence. This was a hard decision to make because these issues are kind of the core of the problem.

In recent years, people have been more reluctant to talk about the ‘big picture’, conscious of  the risk of bias and unfairly representing entire regions, eg. Africa, or minorities who might be sidelined or not given as much space.

But there is also an advantage when you have to narrate things as simply and vividly as possible: it forces you to think very deeply and critically about what you’re writing.

When writing the book, we imagined it as being a bit like filming a football match: you can’t show the audience everything that is happening on the pitch at one time, that would be impossible. Instead you focus in on where the action is at a certain moment. We see everyone racing to the goal. We don’t see the bored goalie at the other end of the pitch scratching the back of his head.

Sometimes we zoom right in on individual faces. Sometimes we zoom out for a view of the entire pitch. We tried to do something similar with the book, considering the expanse of global history. But even so, it was difficult always having to leave so much out.

Thinking of young readers, it was important for us to convey that there is no such thing as ‘The History’. There is no objective, true documentation of what happened in the past. History is always a collection of stories. But those stories are anchored in the context of that past era, they’re not selected at random, and it’s important to think critically about them, always correcting and re-examining the way we tell them. It’s perhaps more a question of the philosophy of history, but we think that children are as capable of understanding it as adults are!

R: What was your favourite era to write about and why? Which story surprised you most when researching? Knowing that space in the book was limited, how did you decide who to write about and who couldn’t fit in? Who is your favourite female figure from the book? Why?

K, U: It’s hard to say. Perhaps the beginning of the modern era, when Christine de Pizan really starts the debate about the ‘women question’.

It was exciting to see just how long ago people were already questioning gender relations. She wasn’t motivated by her own experience, but on behalf of her sex, on behalf of other women. Christine de Pizan lamented how women suffered in marriage, for example, though she herself had a wonderful father and later a wonderful husband, both of whom she loved deeply.

There were some surprising stories and sometimes we couldn’t tell them in as much depth as we would have liked. I’m thinking of the example of Saint Nino, the missionary who brought Christianity to Georgia. What we couldn’t fit into the narrative was that even that far back in history, the Georgians felt hard done by. The local narrative was affected by a sense of ‘It’s not fair! How come the saint who brought us Christianity had to be a woman?’

There were all these complicated explanations for it, like the fact that God had sent them a woman as punishment for being such a ‘savage and uncivilised people’. And in the 19th century there were theologians in the Orthodox Church who simply insisted that Nino had been a man!

R: What are you working on now? Any plans to do another book together?

K: We haven’t written anything together again because our careers have followed different paths. I (Kerstin) am planning a series of essays on women and history, mainly on the ideas that came out of working on the world history. Ute is teaching secondary school history at a grammar school. We still talk a lot about these issues, and just as before there is always more to think and talk about!

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Kerstin Lücker and Ute Daenschel studied musicology, philosophy, history, German, and Slavic studies, and met in Berlin as doctorate students. Week in week out, they sat together, side by side, as they wrote up their PhD theses; occasionally, they swapped laptops and discovered their writing flowed more freely in the other’s words. That’s when they had the idea of working on a book together.