In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf writes:

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The Washington Post announced Monday they are launching a new “for women by women” website called The Lily, named for the first newspaper “devoted to the interests of women.”

It’s no secret that journalism has long been, and continues to be, far more closed off to women than to men. A now-retired female investigative journalist once told me that when she was working at the New York Times in the 1970s and 80s, if she collaborated with a man on a story, the story could only be double-bylined if it ran on the front page. Otherwise, her name would be dropped, as editors felt a man needed the byline more than she did.

In her post introducing The Lily, editor-in-chief Amy King acknowledged that “these days, publications for women are not so novel.” She’s right: See Jezebel, New York Magazine‘s The Cut, Racked, Bustle, Broadly, The Establishment, as well as the the newsstand stalwarts Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Glamour — many of which now go beyond the realm of beauty and fashion. The history of specific sections for “women’s interest” is grounded in revenue-grabbing, as Jacqui Shine noted for the Awl in 2014 in her epic history of newspapers’ style sections.

Joseph Pulitzer is credited with developing women’s news largely as a means of attracting new readers and, in turn, new advertisers…

Ishbel Ross, a reporter who also wrote the first history of women in journalism, said that Pulitzer’s women, like everyone in his newsroom, were expected to ‘get a good story or die.’ What’s more, they also ‘had to show their feelings in their reporting.’

Even the most successful women working in journalism had to write to these conventions, fashioning themselves as stunt girls or sob sisters.

As Shine notes, female journalists are expected to not only get a good story, but bare their own inner emotional workings to, in Woolf’s words, reflect “the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

On Twitter, the economics reporter for the Houston Chronicle published a thread questioning the Washington Post‘s decision to compartmentalize reporting on women’s issues, as well as its sponsor, JP Morgan Chase.

She was not alone.

Still, others argued that as women in journalism remain sidelined, specific outlets for and by them are helpful. Particularly at a time when even our lawmakers are inclined toward misogynist internet usage, amplifying women’s voices and journalism in the interest of women can only be positive.

In a Poynter profile, Lily editor-in-chief King argued that her critics are mistaken. The Lily, she says, is “not a women’s page or section or vertical in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s an attempt to take the news the Post produces and repackage it for a different audience on distributed platforms.” King’s explanation seems to frame The Lily more as an exercise in finding sustainable business models for journalism, similarly to how Joseph Pulitzer saw journalism by and for women as an economic opportunity. Poynter writes that King hopes The Lily “will offer lessons for how the Post can reach other demographics that it’s not currently reaching.”

Reality is always ambiguous, and that is something stories do not want to be.

In real life, people are riddled with conflicting motives, emotions, and ideas. We can both love and hate our families with equal intensity. We can make choices not for one reason, but for a multitude of reasons, sometimes in opposition to each other. Our identities are inevitably, and infinitely, hyphenated.

Stories, by their nature, tend to resist ambiguity. A story is a kind of model of the world, a map rather than the terrain, and therefore they tend toward simplification. This is especially true in journalism, which in its most basic form asks “what happened?” with the expectation that there will be a single, knowable answer.
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Yes, it was only last week—nine days to be exact, but who’s counting?—that President Trump committed the historical equivalent of hurling a live grenade into a crowd when he ventured into an improvisational analysis of the Civil War during an interview on Sirius XM radio. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?” he said to the interviewer. “Why could that one not have been worked out?” It was a comment that poked the bee’s nest of public opinion and pushed the Civil War back into feverish public debate.

It’s been easy to dismiss President Trump’s comments as ignorant non-sequiturs or a childish attempt to divert attention from more pressing political issues. After all, there’s an entire field of inquiry devoted to asking exactly those questions about the Civil War, and scholars have devoted their lives to that question—but given Trump’s staunch anti-intellectualism, it’s not really surprising that he’s never bothered to notice. “Donald Trump has always acted in the moment, with little regard for the past…” wrote Marc Fisher in the Washington Post a day after the firing of FBI Director James Comey. But the Civil War, it seems, is an endless trauma to American democracy. As the republic reconsiders it again and again, it continues to mirror our understanding of the country we currently live in.

Perhaps, as Jon Meacham suggested in TIME after the president’s remarks, Trump was simply looking for himself in history—a plausible theory given the president’s perennially self-centered worldview. But by overlooking the war’s relevance and refusing to acknowledge slavery’s role in its birth, the president wasn’t merely sidestepping the issue; he was using tactics similar to those employed by “Lost Cause” revisionists and Confederate holdouts for generations, in which the cause of the war is questioned, reimagined, or willfully forgotten.

Our current decade marks the 150^th anniversary of the war. Biographies, histories, and reconsiderations have come in measured steps and harsh reckonings—and discussions of memory, cause, conflict, reparation, and reconciliation have made it clear this war must continue to be discussed.

Conflicts rarely have only one cause, just as more than one thing can be true at a time. As Tony Horwitz wrote in The Atlantic in 2013 on the anniversary of the war’s start, slavery may not even have been central to Northerners’ experience of the Civil War. It was a kind of midwife, though, a stage on which a nation barely a century old played out its conflicts over sovereignty, autonomy, and national identity. Slavery as an institution concerned itself with just those questions. It used the bodies and labor of people stolen from their homes, excluded from equal society, and refused a personal identity.

In the summer of 2015, after Nikki Haley, then governor of South Carolina, announced the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol, Ta-Nehisi Coates collected the words of Confederate leaders who stated clearly that slavery was central to the identity of Southern states, which viewed it not just as an inalienable economic asset but as the very basis of white equality. The existence of slaves meant that white men could sidestep industrialized slavery of their own; the institutions’ proponents freely admitted that it upheld and enabled their quality of life.

Once slavery was abolished, the certain supremacy of Southern white men was threatened and the institutions it propped up were no longer guaranteed. The Confederate cause went from vaunted reason to fight to a heroic struggle that was snatched from its champions, spawning Lost Cause revisionist rhetoric that centralized the white Confederate experience. And as soon as the war ended, another one began, this one concerned with textbooks, memorials, and the “official” historical narrative.

Revisionists knew what they had lost. They knew that it would do them no favors to admit they had fought and lost a war over the right to oppress others. And so they turned toward telling their own story through the lens of states’ rights, a perspective that made room for the Confederacy to reintegrate into the union and still maintain face.

In documents like the “Confederate Catechism,” which was used by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1920s to mobilize and coordinate their stance on the war, slavery was cast as a mere side player in a war that was necessary for peace. History as weapon was embraced as a matter of religion. As Tracy Thompson notes in her book The New Mind of the South, the UDC didn’t just educate its own. It shaped the war’s public image through decades of grassroots organizing and struggles to include the “right” version of history in textbooks.

Trump’s no-big-dealism is a more plausibly deniable form of that same beast. Downplaying slavery, whether in textbooks that omit it or comments that ignore its existence with wide eyes, calls 150 years of historical reckoning into question without saying a word. It invites people to start from square one—sidestepping, perhaps, the abundance of historical evidence and analysis that already exists.

If Civil War history is a graveyard, it’s one still strewn with fresh graves. It will haunt us until we face it down collectively, reconciling its truths with the world we have constructed around its gates. The president is not the first person who’d rather avert his eyes than look inside—even though Trump whistles blithely by, it doesn’t mean the cemetery ceases to exist.

Further Reading:

• “What Does Trump See When He Looks Back In History? Mostly He Sees…Trump” (Jon Meacham, TIME, May 2017)
• “Right and Left React to Trump Comments on the Civil War” (Anna Dubenko, The New York Times, May 2017)
• “What This Cruel War Was Over” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2015)
• “150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War” (Tony Horwitz, The Atlantic, June 2013)
• “The South Still Lies About the Civil War” (Tracy Thompson, Salon, March 2013)