Patrimony and matrimony: proposing a new historiography of Western culture

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, women's and gender studies have brought to the field of Western historiography (as well as numerous proofs of women's contributions to culture, obliterated or distorted by official historiography), a very comprehensive view of exclusionary strategies, appropriation, persecution and mutilation of this matrimony, all of which aim at perpetuating the view of cultural heritage as a superior, unique and exclusively male patrimony. We urgently need the creation of a new historiography, based on an archeology of the genesis of this conventional historical knowledge, on its revision with scientific criteria, and its insertion in new historical frameworks that continually show and question, in an equal way, the patrimonial and matrimonial contributions to the history of Western culture.