A big issue with the way that progress is perceived and perpetuated is that people will just flatten the past into the bad times and current day as the good times where all problems have been solved, which more often than not erases a lot of people from the equation.

A moment I think about a lot was during a class on contemporary US literature the post war/beat era came up and someone started talking about how male dominated the era and etc, and our professor just started rattling off names of female writers of the time