Where Are All the Women? Notability and Digital Discovery

Rebecca Northen was called the ‘Julia Child of Orchids,’ yet her story is hard to find online. Discover why women disappear from digital history and what can be done to change it.

What do Americans know about Rebecca Northen? Not very much. She has been called the “Julia Child of Orchids,” and her name appeared in dozens of newspaper articles during the mid-1900s. But unlike the celebrity chef, it is hard to find information about Northen’s life and work outside of family connections. With more than one orchid species named after her, Northen’s influence has been broad, but the woman herself has largely disappeared from historical records. How did this happen? And how many other women are like her?

This question has been asked countless times by students, historians, and others who are curious about the experience of women in American history. After all, if women are 50 percent of the population, why are there fewer stories of women in American history in comparison to men? Wikipedia is a relevant example. Women make up only 20% of the biographies found on Wikipedia English. In addition, articles about women on Wikipedia tend to be shorter and have fewer links to topics inside and outside of the platform (1). Why is that?

Notoriety vs. Notability

Until the mid-1900s, historians mostly focused on large institutions like government or religion, wars and conflict, major technological advances, and the men leading these events. To a large degree, historians did not focus on women or assigned a low value to their activities. When women appeared in historical records, there was a tendency to categorize them in three ways: their relationships to men (husbands or relatives), as highly exceptional (like Abigail Adams), or notorious (like Mary Mallon better known as “Typhoid Mary"). The experiences of everyone else were often overlooked (2).

However, notoriety is not the same as notability. Furthermore, stories of individual women become more compelling when they connect us to a history in which we can see ourselves. A range of typical and atypical stories and experiences is both more complete and relevant because we can more easily find a personal connection to the past.

Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of women’s history began challenging prior assumptions. They examined records with new questions and expanded the types of sources consulted. They went on to publish works that more fully described the social, political, and economic roles of women in American history. They also developed new quantitative and qualitative methods that analyzed public records, diaries, oral histories, photographs, and material objects (3). 

This research continues today alongside evolving digital platforms, such as Wikipedia, that shape how women’s history is shared with broad audiences. Once dismissed by many scholars, the free and open online encyclopedia has grown to be the world’s general reference library. Often a starting point for online research, Wikipedia consistently is one of the most visited websites on the internet with monthly individual visitors currently estimated at 7 billion (4). Moreover, research demonstrated in 2017 that Wikipedia and Google have become interdependent. Removing Wikipedia significantly impacts the quality of Google searches, and without Google, Wikipedia loses its primary source of traffic (5).

Since an article in Wikipedia greatly increases the discoverability of a person, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum regularly hosts edit-a-thons using Smithsonian collections and research to increase the visibility of women’s history online. Our edit-a-thons are typically theme-based or related to current museum programs. During an edit-a-thon, we introduce new people to editing in Wikipedia and support experienced editors with a worklist of women who do not have a Wikipedia page or whose page needs improvement. Multiple secondary sources for each woman are provided on the worklist to support the writing of the entries and establish notability. Since 2019, participants in the museum’s edit-a-thons (including those of its predecessor, the American Women’s History Initiative) have contributed 145K words and 966 new references with an estimated impact of 27M articles being viewed as a result of this work (6).

Wikipedia’s Notability Standard and the Secondary Source Challenge

To qualify for Wikipedia, individuals must achieve a level of notability. Wikipedia defines notability as having significant and independent coverage in secondary sources. Being found in historic records or primary sources is not enough. Qualified individuals—including journalists, scholars, curators, and publishers—must have identified and commented on those activities in a reliable secondary source such as a book, newspaper or journal article, or online publication.

Part of the work of adding women to Wikipedia is matching individuals or groups who deserve notice with their secondary sources, many of which may not appear in digital form or exist behind paywalls online. Another part of the work is to encourage the creation of scholarship and other reliable secondary sources on women. It is not very difficult to find women who have been impactful in their achievements but have yet to be fully recognized for their contributions.

Rebecca Northen (1910-2004), introduced at the beginning of the article, is an example of a woman who needs additional secondary sources. Northen was a horticulturist and author who was featured in the Smithsonian Gardens exhibition “Orchids: Hidden Stories of Groundbreaking Women.” She has been called the “Julia Child of Orchids” because her 1950 book Home Orchid Growing popularized the cultivation of orchids with home gardeners just as Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking impacted home cooks in the United States. Much of Northen’s life took place in Laramie, Wyoming, where she raised her family, developed methods for growing orchids in the home, and periodically collaborated with her horticulturist husband who was a professor at the University of Wyoming.

A simple search in a 1900s newspaper index will pull up dozens of records, most of which refer to the availability of one of her books or an appearance at an event. While the widespread appearance in the press over many years suggests that Northen is a person that merits notice, these primary sources alone do not meet Wikipedia’s notability standard. This supporting evidence cannot be included in her Wikipedia article without first being published in another secondary source. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a tertiary source that summarizes existing sources rather than a platform for new or original research.

Furthermore, Wikipedia defines notability as “significant coverage that addresses the topic directly and in detail” (7). A brief mention is not sufficient. Northen’s Wikipedia entry is tagged with a notice of irrelevant or questionable citations because many of her supporting references do not directly treat her as a topic. Additional, independent secondary sources about her life and work need to be found or created to firmly establish her notability in Wikipedia. Northen’s full story is still waiting to be told.

Increasing the discoverability of women like Rebecca Northen allows us to see history through the lives of individual people within the context of larger historical movements. So, when we talk about increased leisure time and the growth of hobby culture in the middle class after World War II, we can connect that idea to specific people, women like Rebecca Northen. Consequently, that history becomes more relevant because it becomes more personal. We think about the orchid corsage our grandmother always wore on Mother’s Day, the exotic plants that a neighbor grew inside their house, or the annual garden show at the community center and start to ask questions about the people involved and their reasons for doing these things. In asking questions, we start to discover the histories of the seemingly invisible women (and men) whose actions brought us to our current day.

Working Together to Close the Discoverability Gap

The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum leads this work by sharing new stories about women from all walks of life, expanding our understanding of notability and access to digital resources, and improving the quality of women’s biographies and related topics on Wikipedia. But the work of making women’s history visible is too large for any one museum or group of people. We all have a role to play in telling the stories of American women. Please join us in this work.

See our Events page to learn more and register for an upcoming edit-a-thon. Beginners and experts are both welcome.

Notes

1 Graells-Garrido, Eduardo, Mounia Lalmas, and Filippo Menczer. “First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media (August 2015): 171-72, is a thorough and often cited summary of the various forms of gender bias on Wikipedia.

2 See Gerda Lerner, “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History,” Journal of Social History 3.1 (Autumn 1969): 53-62, and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg,“The New Woman and the New History,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (1975): 185–98. Both authors critique the established treatment of women as subjects in historical scholarship.

3 See Kerber, Linda K., Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995):1-14.

4 Ball, Caroline. “Defying Easy Categorization: Wikipedia as Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Resource.” Insights 36.7 (2023): 3.

5 McMahon, Connor, Isaac Johnson, and Brent Hecht. “The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 11.1 (2017):142-51.

6 Numbers taken from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Campaign Dashboard on Wiki Education. Access date 10/1/2025.

7 Wikipedia guidelines on notability. Access date 10/8/2025.

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