p. 20 Sophie was the youngest child of William Gomm Jr and Marie Jeanne Poggenpohl. Gomm’s father was a prosperous cabinetmaker in London whose rococo designs remain of interest to art historians to this day. William Jr however was the second son and stood to inherit little. In 1750 he left for Russia where, due to changes in custom fee payments, British businesses enjoyed significant commercial advantages. Gomm quickly rose to prominence in St Petersburg, but risky ventures like the export of Ukrainian tobacco kept him constantly only a step away from insolvency. Luckily the merchant came under the patronage of the wealthy and well-connected Count Peter Shuvalov, and in 1754 obtained from him the timber export monopply over the vast region around Archangelsk… Gomm married Marie Jeanne, the daughter of his fellow contractor at the Russian court, Friedrich Wilhelm Poggenpohl.”

“In 1780s, Gomm was hired as a member of the British embassy in St Peterburg and later moved to be a secretary at the embassy in The Hague. .. his oldest son, also named William, served as a lieutenant colonel in Great Britain’s 55th Regiment during the French Revolutionary Wars and in the West Indies. He eventually became a baronet. Marie’s first cousin, the celebrated British field marshall Sir William Maynard, married the granddaughter of Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn. Jane, the oldest Gomm sister, served as governess to King George III’s daughters.

Sophie Gomm was the youngest child, well educated and attractive, so when the 36yo Charles von Bruhl appeared in St Peterburg he quickly fell in love, despite her being two decades his junior.. Their first child, Marie, was born on June 3 the following year in Warsaw, where the family had stopped on their way to Saxony.”

p. 36

“Marwitz bore witness that both Bruhl girls excelled in their studies of history. Marie indeed remained a passionate scholar of the past, to the point that later in her life friends like August Neidhardt von Gneisenau would acquire history books as presents for her. She had artistic talent and knowledge in the visual arts… the Bruhl’s family actively supported Maries’ proximity to important and educated ladies in Berlin. Where others keenly attempted to limit theitr daughters or young wives’ interactions with literary women – the most notorious case being Freidrich Wilhelm II’s disapproval of his wife Louise’s friendship with Caroline von Berg, the Bruhls encouraged Marie’s interaction with Madam von Berg and her daughter Louise.”

p. 45 “Thanks to the previous generation of socially and intellectually ambitious women, Berlin now boasted its own popular salons. With their emphasis on emotions, intuition, and fantasy, all traits perceived as primarily female, the literary movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism women a chance to grow into an active and integral part of the literary society. Marcus Herz, the husband of the first Berlin salon hostess Henriette Herz, famously said once when asked about a poem from Goethe, “Go to my wife; she knows the art of how to explain nonsense.” … in their early 1800s version, the literary gatherings contrasted so sharlpy with convention that they had an almost revolutionary character and thus attracted significant attention.”

p. 101 “Clausewitz’s conclusion about what constituted an exceptional human being ran in the opposite direction of the romanticist notion of Kraftmensch: “Therefore we would argue that a strong character is one that will not be unbalanced by the most powerful emotions.”

p. 222

“The official obituary in Berlin’s Statszeitung on November 22, anonymously published but in all probability written by their close friend Groben, presented a long account of Clausewitz’s achievements as the soldier’s soldier, fighting since boyhood and then participating “in that colossal battle at the gates of Moscow” [Borodino}; as a talented staff officer “at the side of the greatest commanders”; and as an influential instructor in military theory for young officers. Marie must have been intimately involved in the creation of this text not only because of her close relationship with Groben but also because the last passage hinted towards the manusceript of On War and her intention to publish it soon… bringing forward his achievements and then emphasising the groundbreaking characters of his general theory on war, would be Marie’s way of dealing with the challenges ahead.”

p. 224 “Despite relying on her brother Fritz in the beginning, and later involving in the process two close friends, Franz August O’Etzel and Carl von Groben, Marie Kept … tight control over the manuscript of On War. … ultimately presided over and carried out the editing process.”

p. 226 Facing just the beginning of such controveries in 1834 [over the relative power of military and political decisionmaking] Marie indeed encourgaed critical examination of the text, but she emphasized that such endeavours should not aim at a plain rejection but should search through vidorous debate to “convey the truth,,, that was the author’s goal above all… Just like the man she loved and supported for three decades, she embraced and upheld the descriptive character of his theory. But in doing so, Marie actually went one step further than Carl. He argued that the treatise should help understand war but not prescribe how to win one. … Marie suggested that particularly the unfinished character of the work, with all its deficiencies and conflicting ideas, should provoke debate through which an understanding of the complex phenomenon of war would emerge.”

p. 227 In early 1832, Maries assumed the new position … chief lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, the king’s daughter-in-law. The new post guaranteed her financial security, enormous social visibility, and tasks she enjoyed but which also put great strain on her time and energy … p. 228 In the “Preface” of On War Marie actually due attention to her position by describing the “new and valued task” of caring for and educating the little Prince Freidrich Wilhelm, Augusta’s son and later Emperor Fredirich III…. enjoyed her own independent rank at the court that was higher than all other ladies (ranked after the titles of either their husbands or fathers) and it put Marie right after the members of the princely family she served.”

p. 229 “Augusta was a well-educated, energgetic and open-minded woman, interested in fine arts and most of all politics (during the tumultuous days of 1848, the liberal faction actually considered the possibility of installing her on the throne as her son’s regent.)”

p. 232 From the beginning, Marie envisaged On War as a text to be read and debated well beyond the professional military audience… sent copies to members of the royal family … the poet and sloniere Sophie von Schwerin received one and praised Clausewitz’s clear language and ideas illuminating the complexities of war and politics.”

Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”

p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”

p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.

Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”

p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.

p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.

Maria Sibylla Merian

p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”

p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”

p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”

p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”

p. 64 “Sensing victory, Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani penned an opinion piece that – of all places – found space on the editorial page of The New York Times on February 20, 2020. He was a “specially designated international terrorist”, according to the FBI, with the US Department of State offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that would bring him to justice. While aply arguing that “Everyone is tired of War” and “that the killing and maiming must stop”, he hinted at Taliban readiness for making the compromises necessary to develop a consensus on the form of the future government of Afghanistan. The deliberate choice of words, such as making a commitment “to working with other parties in a sonsultatiuve manner of genuine respect to agree ona new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded” clearly sounded democracy-leaning to those who had no clue about Taliban ideology. References to a “right to work” and a “right to education” for women sounded equally empowering. Separately in Doha negotiations, Taliban leader Shahabuddin Delavar had provided categorical assurances about permission for women’s education and work. Kabuil was stunned; but they were now yesterday’s men.”

p. 89 “Of the 33 cabinet slots, 30 had gone to Pashtuns and only two to Tajiks and one to an Uzbek, making it obvious that the Taliban’s idea of diversity was almost meaningless.”

p. 48 “Women not protected in the higher reaches of society met secretly in restaurants and bars, travelled by train and hired cans, and frequently risked exposure, if not legal punishment, should they reveal their sexual orientation through dress of publicly demonstrated erotic attachments. … The Marquise de Belbeuf became an object for woman-haters, who considered her perverse and degenerate. Adopting male dress and forms of behaviour, the marquise reversed the premises by which patriarchal society functioned, assuming for herself male pivileges and power … On 3 January 1907, the Marquise de Belbeuf and Colette were very nearly arrested for enacting a scene of lesbian love in a pantomime skit at the Moulin Rouge…. the mime portrayed the awakneing of a mummy from her eternal sleep by the kiss of a former lover. The scene incited a near-riot in the theater, making it necessary to call in the police. Future performances of the play were banned by Lepine at the request of the marquise’s ex-husband; Willy, Colette’s estranged husband lost his position no the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and the two women were forced to stop living openly together.”

p. 99 For women, America was a particularly oppressive environment, and amond the expatriate women were those who took up Edith Wharton’s ‘argument with America’ on the ‘woman question’ finding in their personal sense of alienation from their native land important literary themes.”

p. 101 Janet Flanner’s only published novel, The Cubical City, recreates the cultural life of New York in the 1920s… the t hematic concerns of the novel turn on American sexual puritanism – in particular its double standard of behaviour for men and women – and it contrasts life for a modern woman set ‘in the midst of a mechanical civilisation (New York City) with that of ‘ancient females who in small select numbers had received in absentia grain, praters, milk, worship of hyacinth buds placed on credulous rural shrines… “for thousands of years the concernrated aim of society has been to cut down kissing. With that same amount of energy … society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”.. reflects her determined effort to break free of midwestern puritanical thought.”

p. 139 In 1937, “writing from Budapest following her trip to Salzberg and Vienna, Flanner commented almost as an aside that ‘history looks queer when you’re standing close ot it, watching where it is coming from and how it is being made.” .. It was precisely her avility to capture the ‘queerness’ of history observed close up, her instinctive knowledge of ‘where it is coming from and how it is being made’ that is revealed in retrospective reading of the Paris Letters.

p. 188 “Stein distinguished herself by making herself appear to be a man… Once her liaison with Toklas was established, Stein made the following remark in her notebook: ‘Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussie, perhaps.” (A Different Language, 136, fn 31)… Unable to step outside the heterosexual cultural imperative, Stein clothed her homosexuality in heterosexual forms.”

p. 194 Adrienne Monnier – “An unabashedly feminist analysis of women’s relation to books, ‘Les Amies des Livres’ examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman’s work rather than of leisure: ‘Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious”.

p. 217 “the misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard who was – briefly – Louis Aragon’s mistress. “…Women plated a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrillling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes.The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or uppper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate.”

p. 243 Djuna Barnes “poetry did not seem to follow the currenst of the most recent American and English poetry – and there is no reason why it should have … her interest in earlier historical periods and to the use of outmoded and antiquated verbal forms. But Barnes was also at work reconstructing the ‘abandoned traditions’ of woman’s culture. This effort simultaneously searcged for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced… Barnes’s work has fallen prey to the same set of received notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein: both women have been chastised for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to maste the Modernist enterprise.

p. 268 Natalie Barney “saw in English culture and extreme form of patriarchal power and described England as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men”. (Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 15)

p. 400 “The thirties has been defined as a ‘masculine decade’, a male preserve in which narrowly defined class distinctions exluded ‘issues of gender and sexual politics’. The collective experience of this generation of writers was masculine, its participants products of the English public school The Auden Generation, like the men of Bloomsbury, shared preparatory and public school experiences, were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and were predmoinately homosexual.

p. 401 “homosexuals of the period defined themselves against a romanticized image of the rugged and heroic young men who died on the battlefields in World War I…. feared a failure of courage and conscience, imagined war as the ultimate ‘Test’ of masculinity, and dreamed of ways to escape the death sentence meted out to those who passed the ‘Test’.”

p. 411 Woolf saw in the Fascist state a more violent and indoctrinated form of the patriarchal dominance already at work in Western society, a force that associated the female with weakness in order to keep women (and other marginal elements) outside the societal power structure. As an alternative to the masculine values enforced by the Fascist state, Woolf proposed in Three Guineas that women establish themselves as a Society of Outsides, defining the goals of freedom, equality and peace in terms radically different from those established under state patronage.”

p. 415 Natalie Barney shockingly racist, anti-Jewish views

p. 419 Nancy Cunard “began her work as a journalist at the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, reporting first for the Associated Negro Press at the League of Nations. During the Spanish Civil War she wrote for various British publications, including the Manchester Guardian, the most prestigious of the pro-Republican English papers, and practiced a form of activist jounalism more common roday than in the 1930s… also took an active part in relief work,”