The historical record was shaped by people and institutions — predominantly male — who had their own reasons for emphasizing certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of subjects.

Stories about military campaigns, about political power, about exploration and conquest — these were the stories that the institutional structures of historical record-keeping found worth preserving.

Stories about women surviving extraordinary conditions, managing household crises, enduring poverty and violence and displacement — these were less likely to be found in official records, less likely to be written down by the people who produced the documents that survive, less likely to reach the historical record in any form.

Marguerite de la Rocque’s story survived because it was extraordinary enough to override the systematic exclusion that affected most women’s experiences.