As I playwright, I'm kinda like a colander, you know, that thing you use to drain spaghetti.... a lot of things come at me but most of it drains away.  What's left is what I write about.  On a personal level, the things that were too big to get through the holes aren't' necessarily big or important to anyone but me. It's personal and subjective... my own private little bunch of tea leaves for me to read.  

But I think the same process applies to the topic of Women In History:  most of the history of "women in history" has been drained away.  What's left  is the stuff that was too big to get through the holes. So we know about Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Amelia Earhart, Hillary Clinton, the first women on the supreme court,  Martha Stewart, etc.; you get the picture.  

Since I'm personally very aware of this process, my "inner collander" fits very well into that big "historical collander" ( I'm sorry, this metaphor is running amuck). 

In my play, CHARM, I wrote about a woman who was  a very significant and influential writer/thinker/journalist  in her time ( the 1840's). Her name was Margaret Fuller. She was what we would call today a nonconformist who wrote and spoke about how women should be "allowed" to ask more of themselves, spiritualy, physically and intellectually. This was a groundbreaking idea at the time and caused quite an uproar. (You were supposed to think  of yourself as selfless wife and mother, and if you couln't  do that, then go to your room and think of yourself as a spinster.)  

When people saw the play, they kept asking me, why haven't we ever heard of Margaret Fuller before? Good question. Because she got through the holes iin the collander of history.  Margaret Fuller was unique, but there are untold numbers of women who did extraordinary things in the past that we don't know about.  There are also untold numbers of relationships between men and women that had and continue to have profound effects on historical events.  (See Shakespeare) Yet we still see history as a story about events with men in the leading roles.  That's why we have to set aside a special month to recognize women in history.  And why I feel such drive to write plays with women in leading roles.