Philobiblon

Sheila Rowbotham is one of the grande dames of British feminism. When I went to a talk by her on this book at Bookmarks, the packed crowd was hanging on her every word. And she was always impressive, even when depressing as she recalled the optimism of the Seventies in contrast to the feelings today: “It seemed things were going too slowly. We thought, ‘why don’t things change quickly?’ We didn’t bargain for the fact that capitalism would go into a completely different phase; we thought welfare-based capitalism would be democratised. We didn’t believe it would be so radically diminished. … We saw women in parliament as a detail, equal pay as a detail, but the details proved to be extremely difficult.”

She added: “We’ve learned now that you can go backwards. In the Seventies we assumed once you made a gain it would stay there. … It is much harder to argue for equality in a situation where equality is not respected.”

I asked her about the current focus on porn/sexualisation among much feminist campaigning, and she responded that “selling things through sex was the route that capitalism took, and was using more and more. I don’t know how you can get that to change.” The “only alternative vision available” at present was the environmental movement she said, for Marxists had found that their assumption that the working class would resist capitalism was wrong. “The challenge is how to change society without extremely moralistic disapproval. Lots of small groups of people have been convinced but it is how to convince the mass of people now watching the World Cup and buying lots of gadgets.”

It’s an historical perspective from one who was there, and has seen a lot. It’s not, however, the subject of the book she was promoting, her new Dreamers of the New Day, which covers from the 1880s to the start of World War I, and is entirely successful in proving that there’s nothing really new under the son. The women she’s writing about lived in a very different world, but between them they thought up pretty well every revolutionary advance that we’re still dreaming about today.

What they wanted was nothing more than the abolition of gender stereotypes, something that today seems very dreamlike indeed. Who could argue with the hopes of Elsie Clews Parson, in 1914 in Journal of a Feminist:
“The day will come when the individual … [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quoota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I fell like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly… It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.”

They also wanted access to birth control and abortion – rights that women are still fighting for today — (while also – generally – rejecting Malthusian and eugenics reasoning around them). Rowbotham recounts how Stella Browne put the case for the legalization of abortion in 1915 in a paper to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, before going on to be a founder member of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936.

The wonderfully long-lived and long campaigning Charlotte Despard was a leader in setting up mother and baby clinics, beginning in Nine Elms in South London. In my local area, St Pancras, under pressure from mothers the Medical Officer for Health opened a school for mothers along with a clinic with health visitors – it was to be a model for many more. In East London, Sylvia Pankhurst and her Federation of Suffragettes bought a pub, The Gunmakers’ Amrs, renaming it the Mothers Arms, providing medicine, milk and nutritious food.

There’s also oh-so-familiar debates about childcare and how much the mother should provide. Rowbotham quotes the Greenwich Village feminist Henrietta Rodman on mothering: “The baby is the great problem of the woman who attempts to carry the responsibilities of wage-earning and citizenship. We must have babies for our own happiness, and we must give them the best of ourselves – not only for their own good, not only for the welfare of society, but for our own self expression … [but] the mother of the past has been so busy with her children that she hasn’t had time to enjoy them…The point is not how long but how intensely a mother does it.”

Housework, then as now, was another cause for fervent debate. It was in 1913 that the American socialist Jospehine Conger-Kaneteko, demanded, as women would again do in the Sixties and Seventies, wages for housework. She insisted that women’s household labour was ensuring their husbands could be efficient employees, and employers should be forced to recognise this. More radically still, in 1920, Crystal Eastman asked: “How can we change the nature of man so that he will honourably share the work and responsibility and thus make the home-making enterprise a song instead of a burden?” Rearing sons to do housework was her answer, Rowbotham reports.
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I was walking through the Morvan hills in Burgundy yesterday, as pretty well in the middle of nowhere as you can be in Europe. So while there might have been trickling streams, an ash forest, an undergrowth of holly, not “hop scrub”, and really nothing very much at all reminiscent of Australia, I still found myself reciting The Man From Snowy River (Banjo Paterson’s great coming-of-age poem), and then rollicking my way tunelessly through Wild Rover. (Lucky there really was no one within coo-ee.)

But then I got to thinking about the content of these, and why these two tales – one of a boy becoming a respected man, the other of a man who’s been sowing his wild oats coming back into the fold – are the two that have stuck with me, nearly word-perfect, from childhood. And about the fact that both of the central characters are male.

Banjo Paterson of course is the quintessential poet of male Australian mateship; I know far less well many others of his poems, and the romance of humans overcoming natural adversity might be more than a little to blame for my first degree being in agricultural science. (That and the fact I was 17 when I decided to do it.)

But then I tried to think of similar songs or poems about women overcoming adversity, about girls becoming successful women, about straying women returning to the mainstream successfully, and I couldn’t think of any.

I used to be able to recite Little Boy Lost (from dreadful elocution lessons when I was supposed to be being taught to speak “ladylike”), which has a weeping and wailing mother, and … well when it comes to traditional culture, what I learnt in my youth and stuck with me, for brave, resolute, daring, successful women, I drew a total blank.

(With the generalised exception of pony club books – a staple of my pre-teen years, and perhaps the attraction of those has something to do with the fact that girls in them are allowed to do dangerous things, to get hurt, to struggle, persevere, and triumph – not something common in other genres.)

Other than that my childish heroes were rugby league players – they were the only admired people I knew about, and my dreams were – so extraordinarily – of footballing glory (still unrealisable for the girls of today).

Yet I can think of historical female characters who’d make great bases for such a literary project. Women who hid their sex to go off and fight in wars; the biblical Judith, who killed Holofernes (but if you think of most of the depictions of her they’re not exactly positive); pioneer women of the American West … the list could go on and on, and yet somehow none of this really seems to have inspired the songs and poems that have lasted in popular culture.

So I wondered how different it is today. As my office would tell you, pop culture isn’t exactly my special subject. I thought of Lara Croft, not that I know much about her, but she seems to be a genuinely heroic female character. And after that I drew a blank.

So I wondered. Are girls today growing up (anywhere in the world) offered equivalent female coming of age tales to The Man from Snowy River? Are they offered tales of women who went off the rails, had a roaring good time, then got it back together again? (And I’m talking here primarily about pre-teens, when so much character-forming is done.) Will they be remembering them 30 years later?

First published as Book Review: Theodora: Actress. Empress. Whore. by Stella Duffy on Blogcritics

Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian, is perhaps my all-time favourite Roman empress – what’s not to like about a character who even her sworn enemy and libeller credited with saving her husband’s throne with resolute courage. So when I read good reviews of Stella Duffy’s fictional biography, I couldn’t resist.

The fact is, however, that he only major source we have for Theodora’s life is Procopius, who’s far from well inclined towards her in his Secret History, usually taken as his real views. There’s something about the slurs against her – that she was a teenage actress and whore, famous for her pornographic acts with geese – that draw questions in my mind. How is that women whom ancient (and not so ancient) historians never find their female characters just simple, garden-style sex workers, but make them always famous for their perversities?

Still, Duffy has chosen to go with the basic biographical outline provided by Procopius, and for the opening sections of the book, as Theodora is a young girl training for the Byzantine stage, then a star upon it, works pretty well.

We disappear into the back streets and sleazy alleys of Constantinople, its scents and colours, and I’ve no doubt Duffy has done her research on street names and geography. (There’s a bibliography for those who’d like to go further in non-fiction.)

And Duffy seems to capture well the mindset of a girl and a class of women who expect to have to make their own way in the world, through means that they mightn’t always like (not least for the social stigma), but are resigned to. There’s a sense here that she might have caught something real about a pre-Christian morality, although of course Christianity is fast taking hold in Theodora’s world.

The novel works less well, however, when Theodora, now a fugitive thief far from the city she calls home, hooks up with the quasi-heretic Alexandrian Patriarch Timothy, and has, she tells other characters, a not-quite Damacene conversion. She rejects as hysterics the conventional conversion narrative – liked that, for there must have been plenty of such scepticism at the time – but there’s never any real feel that sometime has changed in this character, although Duffy appears to want us to believe that it has.

Once again back in Constantinople, Duffy’s excellent on life inside the royal palace, its claustrophobia and fear, as Theodora winds her way into the life of Justinian, now heir-apparent to the aging Justin. It’s to the author’s credit, too, that she doesn’t try to make this a romance genre novel – strongly resists putting modern conventions of romance into the mind of either character.

But there’s a dryness to all of this, a dutifulness to the storytelling, that doesn’t quite grab the reader in the way this great character of history should.

The novel ends with the coronation – I can feel a sequel coming on, but I’m afraid I won’t be looking out for it. Much better try, I’d suggest, a non-fiction account of Theodora’s life.

(This novel is available in the UK, but appears as yet unavailable in the US.)

Article first published as Book Review: Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out by Malalai Joya on Blogcritics.

When I was running for the Green Party in the recent British general election, there was one issue on which I had no doubt how audiences at hustings and meetings would react positively – our call to withdraw British (and NATO) troops from Afghanistan. Surveys show around 70% of the public back that stance, and it was close to 100% of the audiences at hustings.

As I told them, I’d had in the past some doubts about our party’s policy of immediate withdrawal, having been worried about the human rights situation that we’d leave behind, particularly for women. But it was a Human Rights Watch report last year, which found 60-80% of the marriages of Afghan women and girls are forced, and learning that the brave women of Rawa are calling for withdrawal that led me to change my mind.

Having just read the autobiography of Malalai Joya, an outstanding Afghan woman MP, I’m now even more strongly of that view. (It was published in the US as A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise her Voice.)

She’s an extraordinarily brave, stalwart – and very, very young! — woman who has dedicated her life, and taken enormous risks, to speak out on human rights in her native land. And she says very clearly – and loudly and publicly in her own land, which led to her being expelled from parliament – that the people the U.S. and its allies are backing in Afghanistan are entirely the wrong people, the old warlords, many of them in her eyes (and those of others) war criminals. And she has no doubt that this foreign occupation can only prolong and amplify her nation’s problems.

Her story is an extraordinary one. Certainly, she was lucky in her parents, particularly her father, a democracy activist who moved his family around Iran and Pakistan as an exile in search for good schooling for them. (He, like the rest of her family, can’t be identified for their own safety – the name ”Joya” is one she adopted to protect them.) There must be many other potential Malalai Joyas in Afghanistan who will never get that essential foundation or confidence.

But there’s no doubt she was exceptional. Noticed as a fine teacher in the refugee camps, at the age of 21 she was sent to found an underground girls’ school in Herat by the Organisation For Promoting Women’s Capabilities. Only three years later, she was appointed to head its work in three provinces, just before 9/11. Under the new regime, despite its resistance, on her account she set up a clinic, orphanage and was able to distribute food supplies.

She must thus have been well known in the poor isolated province that was to send her, a 25-year-old unmarried woman, as a delegate to the 2003 Loya Jurga (national gathering) that was to approve a new constitution. Still standing for office, addressing a room full of women mostly older than herself, in her first “political speech” must have been quite an experience, and her delicate naivete is touching….

“I had a lot to say, and I wanted to cram those few minutes with everything I had ever done in my life, with everything I believed possible for the future, with everything I wanted for the women of Afghanistan. I stressed that I would never compromise with those criminals who had bloodied the history of our country, and that I would always stand up for democracy and human rights.

“As I spoke, I knew that my message must be getting through, because when the other women were speaking, members of the audience were chatting and making noise and not paying much attention. But as I began to speak everyone quietened down and listened. They even clapped a number of times during my speech…"

Yet, worryingly, as she made her way to the Loya Jirga, she gets strong warnings, not just from Afghans, but from UN officials, not to speak so bluntly there. She says: “Most of them seemed sincerely worried. I am not sure, but it is possible that some of them wanted to scare me into silence.”

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When you start reading Martine Segalen’s Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, you might think she’s taking on straw men. Surely no one believes any more that peasant families were unemotional, wholly practical alliances of economic value only, or that children were not loved or treated as human to quite an age, or that the views of the 19th-century folklorists about the “backwardness” of traditional cultures would be given any weight.

Then you look at the publication date (1980 in French), and the foreword by Peter Laslett which explains how Segalen set up the “magnificent” exhibition on Mari et femme dans la France rurale traditionelle in 1973, and you realize that you are reading a modern classic, a revolutionary text, one that well-deserved being translated into English.

As you get into the text you realize that it deserved to be translated not just because of the revolution in theory if helped to create, but also because it has a cracking good story to tell. One of Segalen’s main sources is traditional proverbs, sayings, rituals, and practices and what a rich storehouse they are, and often a surprising one too.

On courtship, she notes how the practices in most places – thought by the 19th-century observers to be crude, rough, even violent – were in fact a practical way for both sides of the potential relationship to test out each other. The romantic explanation (yes, the peasants did do romance) was that the force of the interaction reflected the strength of emotion, but as Segalen says, this was a practical test. “The sense of what is beautiful is guided by the essential prerequisites of a society based on manual labour applied with both strength and skill.” She quotes Henri Massoul “Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large. A ben groussiere (buxom) woman, a ben rougeaud (ruddy) man, this is the criterion of beauty.”

And she says that while in a society where words were rare and often little used, courtship often relied on gestures, and when words were used, “the metaphors were often borrowed from the world of peasant objects”. You might not want to try this Vendean effort out on your own beloved, but it certainly worked at the time: “I think you’re so lovely, my great big darling: and then you’re so fresh, that I can’t do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through.”
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The title is Austerity Britain: 1945-1951. The cover image is of a grey and dreary Newcastle on Tyne from 1950, and it weighs in at a wrist-wearying 692 pages. You wouldn’t pick David Kynaston’s combined social and political history as a non-fiction bestseller, which it was.

But you don’t have to get far into its pages to find its combination of anecdotal accounts (drawing heavily on the Mass Observation Survey) and descriptions of a society trying to rebuild itself from the ground up, compelling. In fact I found it so compelling I devoted two days of a recent holiday to little else, skipping easily through its pages.

The interest is multiplied by the fact that many of the debates that fill its pages — about the form of the foundational NHS, about the nature of a more equitable schooling system, about housing shortages and the problems of building new communities, about Britain’s economic place in the world — are being revisited today – or perhaps were never adequately solved.

Some of the stories about the NHS should be force-fed to everyone who’s now trying to dismember the fabulous free-at-the-point service provision. Kynaston reports the words of Dr Alistair Clark, an “ordinary GP: “For the first six months I had as many as 20 or 30 ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions… at least 10 who had complete prolapse of their womd, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.”

The biggest early pressures were on “drugs, spectacles and false teeth” – the first and last of these reflecting modern-day debates about drug costs and dental provision today.

The housing debate started from a very different place from today’s – in a Sunday Pictorial account of “100 Families” in July 1946, only 14 owned or were buying their own homes, but one big debate was about mixing the classes. Bevan placed much hope in this: You have colonies of low-income people, living in houses provided by the local authorities, and you have the higher income groups living in their own colonies. …It is a monstrous infliction on the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community.”

Kynaston reports that in 1946 a patchy start to housing construction, handicapped in part by a desire to build quality rather than quantity, and marked by a significant squatter’s movement, but by September 1948 750,000 new homes had been provided. But several million more were needed, without even counting the renewed impetus in the slum clearance movement.
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If you look at the subtitle of Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain, it’s clear where he’s coming from. He’s, in his own term, a radical, and sympathises greatly with those before him who he regards as falling into the same camp. The good news is, this has not destroyed his critical faculties. He’s wary of painting the present too closely on the past, of regarding former radicals as “just like us”, and keen to point out that many fond legends of the left, and the right, such as the exact place of the Magna Carta in “British freedom” (largely constructed in the 14th century, when Parliament passed six acts that reinterpretted chapter 29 far beyond its original intent and since, making, for example “lawful judgement of peer” mean trial by jury).

Vallance clearly explains his aims in the introduction for the book: “First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a ‘radical tradition’, by examining how each age has reinvented it to suits its own ends.”

Some of the names and events here will be familiar, at least in outline, to anyone with a smattering of school history: the peasants; revolt, the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes. Yet most will have little more than a sketch of these events – and often an inaccurate one.

So Vallance concludes that the Peasants’ Revolt had a different impact that suggested by the “bitter invective of the boy-king Richartd, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection”. In fact, wages rose after the revolt, many serfs were released from villeinage, rations improved,with labourers’ rations at harvest often including up to a pound of meat a day, and life expectancy rose to about 35 (higher than industrial workers in the mid-19th century). And for the first time, Vallance said, there was an awareness in the elite that the Commons had a place in public life, as the anonymous poem ‘God Save the King and the King’s Crown’ said: “The leste lygge-man with body and rent/He is a parcel of the Crown.”

But the core of this book, as any book about English radicals, is around the Revolution. and the core of that is the Levellers, subject of much historical revisionism, antirevisionism, anti-anti-revisionism, etc… This is Vallance’s conclusion: “…the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figure, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe. By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecting a simple dichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, suc as the Levellers’ various Agreements of he People, for settling the nation.” I
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, created a new sub-genre, the feminist utopia. There’s something delightfully ironic about the creation, for there’s no doubt her world, an all-female one getting along very nicely thank you, would have horrified the original creator of the form, Sir Thomas More, and indeed it initially horrified her three main characters, men of her own time, who in best traditional style, set out to explore this unknown, mysterious land.

The narrator is Vandyke, clearly the most sensible and level-headed of the three; it’s a marker of the age of the text, and its liberal origins, that he’s trained in sociology. The character who is a symbol of the “typical” man of his age, and the one who fails utterly to cope with a society where women aren’t automatically his prey, is Terry, who supplies the aircraft and the funds for the expedition into this hidden land, sealed off by a volcanic eruption some two millennia previously.

The atypical man, the one who finds himself at home in Herland,
is Jeff, the expedition doctor and science lover, the sensitive, poetic type not entirely at home in his own society.

It’s a society that’s constantly striving to perfect itself: “Moadine told him. ‘We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty’.” The society is a democracy, if rather too fond of the decisions of the elders for modern tastes.

It’s developed what Vandyke finds is an entirely acceptable science, from astronomy to physiology, but where it has really excelled is agriculture, turning its limited environment into a veritable Garden of Eden (no accident that surely), in which every tree produces a crop and lives in managed harmony with is environment. In terms of another modern genre, they’ve terraformed it perfectly.

There’s only one thing it relies on from the time before the women were left – by combination of conflict and natural disaster – on their own to cope: a few huge old buildings, including the now largely redundant fortress.

As the author surely had no choice – and really as in science fiction today the science isn’t really the point – she skips over the essential development of virgin birth. It happens, and the women, understandably enough, come to revere it, putting motherhood at the centre of their society (although later, when they understand the limits of population growth controlling it by social pressure). But there’s little focus on heredity, and no desire for personal glory in it.

If there’s one main criticism of the nature of Herland today it is that as a society it is rather too perfect, impossibly so (even the men are forced to admire the practicality and suitability of the dress – although Perkins Gilmann’s concern with this, at the start of the 20th century, is understandable enough).

The 21st-century world is rather less sanguine about the perfectibility of human nature and indeed the possibility of perfection at all – Ursula Le Guin’s utopia/dystopia The Dispossessed in being a case in point.

Yet Perkins Gilmann can be excused in this: she wrote in a more innocent age – before the horrors of two world wars – and more importantly, she wrote at a time when women were barely allowed, and by most, thought possible of much practical constructive effort at all (although then as now, women on average worked harder and longer than their menfolk with the double burden of home and employment).

She was facing a huge mountain of public disbelief, and any flaw in the world of Herland would have been a fissure of opportunity for the enemies of feminism.

Although long neglected, Herland is indeed one of the founding texts of feminism, and anyone who’s interested in being a feminist should read it – but don’t worry, it is mercifully short and to the point, not at all flowerily “literary”. Its author is non-nonsense, getting on with the job, writing for purpose, not ego, just as her characters, and so often women generally, do.

Fame, particularly for women, is a strange and unpredictable thing. For centuries, most of the great things done by women, their outstanding talents and amazing discoveries, have been forgotten and later reinvented by men, or claimed from the start by men – and often there’s little chance of this being corrected. Yet sometimes, a story is so outstanding, so surprising, so amazing, that it’s survived to be revived and propagated in an age that seeks out these women’s deeds.

Who would have predicted that Mary Anning, a working-class woman, who spent much of her life only a few pounds from the workhouse, in an obscure little English coastal town, would today be one of the most famous women of the 19th century?

An actress portraying her regularly parades around the Natural History Museum, many of her great fossil discoveries are properly labelled with her details, and now, Tracy Chevalier, well known for her Girl with a Pearl Earring (although personally I prefer The Lady and the Unicorn) has made her the subject of her latest book, Remarkable Creatures.

Like those books, this isn’t great literature, but very good reading – built around finely woven characterisation and dialogue that superbly exercises that cardinal novelist’s rule: show don’t tell.

As in all of her other books, Chevalier has clearly done her research on Anning, and her other central character, Elizabeth Philpott, a middle-class if impoverished spinster who helped Anning, while doing her own fine and important work on fossil fishes. She’s also clearly absorbed the social mores of this stiff, superstitious, class-obsessed age, and the way it was deeply disturbed by the unmistakable message that emerged as the fossil record in the cliff of the coast around Lyme Regis started to be unearthed.

(N.B. This book has not yet been released in the US, but is available in the UK.)

If the structure of their relationship – its great split engendered by what seems like an unlikely obsession with a clearly unsuitable, unlikely man – seems a little forced and artificial, well that’s the price one pays for popularising Anning’s story. (And it has to be said that for all her virtues, Chevaliers always have the whiff of the writing class about them.)

Nevertheless, if you know Anning, you should read this book – it might not teach you anything new, but it will enjoyably put flesh on the bones of her story. If you don’t know Anning, read it for the entertainment value, but also because you’ll then know about a great woman of history, and have acquired the knowledge in an entirely pleasurable manner.

Napoleon feared her, the crown heads of Europe courted her, as did the intellectual elite, she was much quoted in her own time and ours, yet Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein – generally known as Madame de Staël, was a figure who had almost disappeared into the mists of history.

How astonishing it is, that the woman of whom the French memoir writer Madame de Chastenay wrote, there were three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: “England, Russia, and Madame de Staël,” could have suffered such a fate. And Vienna, a city heavily marked by its opposition to Napoleon, would, despite the fact that she stayed there for only five months, for years after refer to 1808 as the year of Madame de Stael’s visit.

I’ve been obliquely bumping into her during my excursions through women’s history for years, but it was only when reading about her friendship with Juliette Récamier , and learning that she’s been the subject of no less than five recent books, led me to finally determine to read more.

I’d love to read all five books, but since that isn’t going to happen, I chose Angelica Goodden The Dangerous Exile, in part because it seemed to focus rather less on the romantic side of de Staël’s life, and if there’s one aspect of her I find rather repulsive, it’s her rather histrionically conducted love life.

That, of course, got her into trouble in her own time – having children to men not your spouse being rather frowned upon. Fanny Burney wrote in 1813, about her dropping of de Stael in 1793: “I had found her so charming that I fought the hardest battle I dared fight against almost ALL my best connections… She is now received by all mankind – but that indeed, she always was — all womankind, I should say with distinction and pleasure.”

That was when de Staël was in exile in England, yet for Goodden, she is always more or less in exile – fighting to be allowed to be the person she wants to be, when she’s a woman. Behind her exile the author identifies the question: “how is it possible to be politically aware, politically active and yet a woman?”

And she’s also fighting to make society correspond more closely to what she sees as positive, womanly virtues. So de Staël in the second preface to La Nouvelle Heloise, defends reading fiction as a moral activity, “believing that the novel’s presentation of intimacy fosters a sense of values that beg to be preserved in a world otherwise enslaved to the vulgar thrust of glory-seeking and self-interest”.

Mary Berry describes dining at Stael’s house in Paris with among others Recamier. The salon society of Paris, though more serious than before the Revolution, still impressed visitors as cultured and more stylish and sophisticated than London’s

“Napoleon’s empire, and with it the exclusive rule of men, had not yet begun. In the salons people still listened to music and conversed; they watched plays and talked about literature and art rather than money and other concerns of a world governed by self-interest.”

Goodden also makes it clear how the European intellectual elite valued her. Goethe was drawn to her: “There is something charming about her presence, both in the spiritual and in the physical sense, and she seemed not displeased when one showed one’s impressionability in the later respect too. How often she tried to unite sociability, well-meaningless, inclination and passion! Indeed, she once said, ‘I have never trusted a man who hadn’t once been in love with me.’”

The Queen of Prussia, Luise von Mecklemburg-Strelitz, was a passionate opponent of the French Revolution and a declared enemy of Napoleon – also considered “as beautiful as Recamier”. It was a mutual charming between visitor and queen, although it is to de Staël’s credit that she found the Queen’s reign utterly deadened by Prussian militarism. She wrote to Goethe “whatever liveliness and youth might have existed my perceptions are is virtually suffocated here”.

Goodden says her Corinne and earlier heroines “seem to epitomize the impotence of women in early 19th-century Europe, unwisely loving, caring too much, destroyed by the grief that follows disappointment, and perfectly embodying the futility of the only kind of reason credited to them, that of being able to analyse their feelings but not uproot them”.

Yet while this is often expressed in romantic terms, Goodden sees the disappointment as also clearly political. She sees this particularly in de Stael’s novel Corrinne – “the title character has broken the bounds of convention as a woman and an artist, and the art is an expression of the political state that may come to prevail in her country”. There’s implicit criticism of France here, for, as de Stael had written in De La Litterature: “As soon as a woman is marked out as a distinguished person, the general public is prejudiced against her. The crowd only ever judges according to certain common rules that can he adhered to without risk.”

Corinne was twice translated in English in the year of its publication. George Eliot admired it and Elizabeth Barrett, born the year before it appeared declared it to be “an immortal book”. Maria Edgeworth describes both male and female members of her family being consumed with grief at the unfolding of the story, during a reading that continued into 2am

The power of her pen and her tongue – and the way it was feared by Napoleon, was demonstrated in 1810. Mathieu de Montmorency spent a few days with her at her unhappy refuge at Coppet and was immediately exiled by Napoleon, her link being given as the absolute cause. Recamier also suffered the same fate. Goodden writes: “To be known to Staël was immediately to become persona non grata, however, little political influence one possessed.”

Soon after the birth of a child, in 1812 she evaded Napoleon’s spies and embarked on a two-year trip to Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Gailicia, Russia, Sweden and England. She would use her own persecution by Napoleon as an example to warn against his threat to Eirope.
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The “end of the Roman empire”: it is a popular topic, with some big questions around if: why? How? when? They’ve been some excellent, illuminated books written on it – I reviewed one of them recently – but what tends to disappear in these accounts is the real lived experience of the people of the period. They can’t have been, in their own minds, living through the end of empire – they were living their lives, dealing with the local upsets, expecting the empire which in human timeframes had gone on “forever”, to continue. It’s to attempt to get at something of that lived reality that Giusto Traina has written 428AD: An Ordinary Year At The End of the Roman Empire.

He had to find some way to choose the year, of course, and he selected this one because it marked the end of the Kingdom of Armenia, which just happens to be the author’s special subject. That’s a good start, because it gives him a entirely different perspective to authors traditionally fixated on Constantinope, Rome or Ravenna (the new western capital). Indeed, the perspective here is as broad as could be, for he follows an ancient rhetoric tradition, taking the reader on a journey around the empire, a rough circuit of the Med and beyond, extending even into the Sassanian empire, which that year seized the previously independent Armenia, and along the Silk Road.

He also tries not to look forward, to view the trajectory of everything as heading towards fragmentation and collapse, which of course it wasn’t: something seemed at the time to be coming back together quite nicely after the disaster of the sack of Rome in 410. And although the sources seldom allow us to get down to fine detail, he notes that for most people, these events were irrelevant to their time:

“…the life of a typical community as governed by liturgical and civil calendars and, of course, the ubiquitous seasonal rhythms of the rural economy. For many intellectuals of the time, the calculation of time seemed an inappropriate concern, whose elimination was prompted by the anxiety of the times…the man who was buried in Apamea of Syria in a Christian sepulchre dated to the early fifth century must have requested the ancient pagan motto that appears on its threshold… “Are you rushing? – I am. And where are you rushing? – To this place.”

One man who had no choice but to rush in 428 was Flavius Dionysius, with whom we start our journey. He is starting out from Antioch, HQ of the Roman army in the east, leading an important and complex diplomatic mission to meet a Persian delegation. But he’s suffering facial paralysis. (Traina suggests this might have been stress-related, since he had a difficult task, for a military man – to accept a fait accompli – the loss of independence of Armenia to Persian rule – it had been an important buffer between the two eastern giants.) As Traina explains we only know about his mission because of this, for it is recorded in the life of Simeon Stylites – the famous pole-sitting monk (the stump of his final pole still survives outside Aleppo). The modern author has had to put together the details, for no other western source records the mission, and none pay attention to the fall of Armenia, which Traina suggests reflects embarrassment that a Christian land had been abandoned to its fate.

Flavius is handy for Traina, for no sooner was he back from this tough job than he had another delegate task, to escort the Syrian cleric Nestorius from his monastery to Constantinople, a journey that also allows the author to explore the tensions and developments of the church of the time. Simeon was an outstanding, in more ways than one (his column, from which he never descended, was 9 metres high when Flavius visited – it eventually went to 16), but he represented an extreme of religious ascetism that, Traina says, helped to cement the identity of Syria, which had been an uncertain border province, while shocking the more established regions.

That brings our journey to the heart of the eastern empire, Constantinople, and Traina visits the royal palace, where interestingly, two women were at the heart of politics. One was Pulcheria, the sister of Emperor Theodosius II, and his spiritual guide. The other was his empress, Eudocia, who was from a family of pagan intellectuals and only converted upon marriage, and had a reputation as a protector of heretics. (They had a parallel in the Western empire, the 40-year-old Aelia Galla Placidia, mother of the child emperor, a woman of uncommon political experience, who had briefly been empress in the West, was exiled to Constantinople, taken hostage after the sack of Rome and taken by the Visigoths back to Gaul, where she ended up marrying King Ataulf, who was shortly after murdered, when she returned to Ravenna.)
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“Women’s political thought”: is there such a thing? Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green have no doubt that there is, at least in the European tradition. Scanning from 1400 to 1700, the foundational period for our modern political landscape, they look at a diverse range of women, from the obvious, Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish, Marie le Jars de Gournay, to women you’d not normally think of as political theorists, from Queen Elizabeth I of England to Mary Astell.

Their thesis, in A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700, is that these women first of all share a consciousness of gender: “these women defend their capacity for political virtue, they argue for women’s prudence, they defend female monarchs, and they call for female liberty of conscience against the tyranny of men”. Yet, the authors have to admit their story isn’t all good news: “many are intolerant and conservative, critical of those who bring about social disorder for the sake of religious freedom and they are committed to individual virtue and passive obedience to authority”.

They divided the period, and their writers, into two broad groups: those who celebrate heroic and even actively fighting women, such as Joan of Arc, exceptional examples of their sex which nevertheless demonstrate what women are capable of. The authors broadly locate this approach in the earlier period, and identify a rival, and largely supplanting, more “feminine” model of female excellence, including in political life, dating from around the middle of the 17th century.

The authors see this as driven particularly by Madeleine de Scudery, who “was enormously influential in developing a form of feminism that became so acceptable as to cease to be recognised as feminist. Indeed, it is arguable that Rousseau’s romantic conception of the place of love in society, and his representation of feminine difference, were influenced by Scudery, whose novels he read with his father at a very young age”.

As the authors point out, there are curious parallels here with the 20th century “turn from feminisms of equality to feminisms of difference”. They agree with Joan DeJean that women in this different way maintained political engagement, but differ from her in rejecting any claim that there was anything radical or democratic about their politics. (DeJean rejects Habermas’s claim that “the public sphere” began in the English coffee house, locating its origins instead in late 17th-century France during the “battle between ancients and moderns”.)

This reflects the explanation that Broad and Green give, which is representative of the book’s approach: while this is clearly a solidly academic monograph, it is also perfectly accessible to a general reader, and it gives a delightful introduction to many interesting women of the period. It’s a pity then that it’s only available in academic hardbook, at prohibitive library prices.

Every woman (and man) should have been taught about Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies — clearly an outstanding thinker of the ages — at school. Those with a closer interest in European history should see how her influence continued after her death, particularly on women rulers. As Board and Green chart, her books were prominent in the libraries of royal and powerful aristocratic women, including Anne de Beaujeu, Anne of Brittany and Louise of Savoy, while they argue that Elizabeth I was almost certainly exposed to the books, and certainly to a set of tapestries depicting the City of Ladies, reported in an inventory of the possessions of the 14-year-old Elizabeth.

The authors are not, however, concerned only with royalty and aristocracy. There are also chapters on the women of the English civil war era (including Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Poole), Quaker women (Priscilla Cotton, Mary Cole and Margaret Fell), and the women of the Glorious Revolution (Elinor James – nee Banckes and Anne Docwra – nee Waldegrave).

Bringing all of this together, the authors conclude that the traditional account of the history of men’s political ideas as a progress towards liberalism, with feminism depicted as an offshoot of this, is profoundly defective. “Long before Descartes, Christine grounded her defence of women on her own independent reason and experience, and her influence on women is significant up until the 16th century. Seventeenth-century women’s political thought is more often opposed to Machiavelli and Hobbes, rather than built on them. Marie le Jars de Gournay defends women’s equality with men, but is influenced by Montaigne, and not by Descartes. Quaker women are egalitarian but ground this on biblical injunctions, not modern political texts. Madeleine de Scudery explores models of egalitarian love and friendship between the sexes, independently of ideas about the social contract, and while 17th-century English women do engage with Locke, this engagement is as often critical as it is complimentary.”

Furthermore, the authors say, there’s a logical, continuous tradition here: “Mary Astell had read at least some of the works of Madeleine de Scudery; Scudery herself had earlier attempted to initiate a correspondence with Anna Maria van Schurman, as well as referring to Maurgerite de Navarre, and Madeleine and Catherine des Roches. Anna Maria van Schurman corresponded with Marie le Jars de Gournay and Elisabeth of Bohemia, and she was acquainted with Christina of Sweden. Schurman had also read Lucrezia Marinella, who acknowledged Moderata Fonte and earlier learned women such as Cassandra Fedele and Isotta Nogarola. Both Fonte and Marinella influenced Arcangela Tarabotti, whose ideas are sufficiently similar to those of Gabrielle Suchon to make one suspect some influence.”

As the authors conclude, their work here is preliminary. A vast amount more research needs to be done into this almost buried and forgotten tradition. And then, maybe one day, it will take its proper place as a respected, central part of our history.

And while I’m around these fields I should also point to the excellent early modern history carnival..