My Lady of Quality’s diary entry today is actually a copy of a letter from Ms Wilmot, written from the home of the Russian Princess Dashkow. (Who is, probably expressed in something closer to the original Russian, “Princess Ekaterina Dashkova”.)

The Princess had spent considerable time in Britain, arriving first in 1770:

“Her interest in the country was enhanced by the fact that two of her brothers, first Alexander and then Semion Vorontsov, were both Russian ambassadors in London. She travelled from London through South England to Bath and Bristol and then back through Oxford, which was described in her article The Travels of a Russian Noblewoman Around Some English Provinces. This was published in 1775. … Her Edinburgh salon and meetings with William Robertson, David Hume, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith were described in her Memoirs.”

And it turns out she is one of the most prominent women in Russian history, (yes shame on me for not knowing) and there was recently an exhibition dedicated entirely to her.

Yekaterina Dashkova comes through as Russia’s first female manager of the first order. The documents speak of the appalling state the Academy of Sciences was in after Razumovsky – ramshackle buildings, destitute academicians who, not unlike their counterparts today, went unpaid for years. It turned out that the princess was capable not only of poring over the works by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, but also had enough financial acumen to let all the empty basements as storerooms, solicit patrons’ help in instituting scholarships, and simply keep the books of so enormous an establishment as the Academy of Sciences. Among the items on display there is also Princess Dashkova’s chief producer oeuvre – the six-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language compiled within a mere 11 years (cf. the 50 years Italians spent on a similar job)

As usual, however, it was her looks rather than her brains that some men were concerned about. Diderot wrote in his diary that she was “not beautiful at all; she is too short; her forehead is big and high, her cheeks are swollen, the eyes are neither large nor small, the nose is flat and lips are full; she has no waist; the princess has no grace and no nobility…”

And surprise, surprise, history, and the gossipy editor of Miss Frances Williams Wynn’s papers, were more interested in linking her to the sexual slurs around Catherine the Great. “She was popularly supposed to have been entrusted with the momentous duty of subjecting the empress’s male favourites to a kind of competitive examination or qualifying test; whence her name of l’eprouveuse, which was also given to another lady who succeeded her.”

The Princess’s translated memoirs were republished in 1995, reviewed here. Also on the web there’s a letter about one of her visits to Voltaire.

I try to often celebrate women’s achievements on this blog, but today am moved to celebrate another female success – this time an equine one.

Makybe Diva, a seven-year-old mare, has just won her third Melbourne Cup in succession – a feat never accomplished before. If you’re not Australian, it is hard to explain just what this means – this is a combination of fottball’s European Cup and the American World Series in terms of its impact on the country – they say the country stops for the Cup, and that’s very nearly true.

When I lived in Oz a flutter on the Cup was the one bet a year that I’d place – just for interest, and I always backed the mares (and did quite well out of it – albeit that serious horseracing types would tell me it was a silly strategy). Unfortunately I stopped the habit a few years ago!

Mares tend to be retired young – since the number of progeny is far more limited than stallions’ – it is great that Maybe Diva has been allowed to recognise her full potential. And for those who like the compare human and animal athletic abilities to justify claims about men’s “superiority”, it is an interesting lesson. And she’s even being compared to Phar Lap.

Feeling tired and sentimental, so I almost shed a tear over The Happy Feminist’s paen of praise to her mother. (Excellent blog on many topics, BTW.) Her mother made one huge, enormously brave step, then otherwise fulfilled all of the gender norms.

And of course it left me thinking of my Mum, and how different she was.

Mum, when I was a small child kept the house spotless – and even ironed our underpants, something I finally talked her out of doing when I was in my early teens – but absolutely hated doing it. She did it because she thought she had too.

And she was a dreadful cook, a job she also hated. In my memory – although I’m sure this wasn’t actually true – every meal consisted of cheap steak fried to the consistency of leather, lumpy mashed potatoes and frozen corn and peas. It is no wonder Kraft macaroni cheese was my favourite meal.)

What Mum would really have liked to do – at least in my early youth – was drive racing cars. She once, famously, beat a famous Australian racing driver in a hill climb, and I suspect given the opportunity she could have been very good. Of course, however, that wasn’t going to happen – indeed I can’t even think of a female racing driver today.

And what she gave me, above all, were two things:

1. A determination to do my own thing. She hadn’t been able to escape to independence, but she wanted to ensure I had every opportunity to do so. (She was probably five years too young. The middle Sixties in Australian suburbia were still “the Fifties” in cultural terms, and a young woman with little education striking out on her own would have been almost unimaginable – and economicly probably extremely difficult, if not impossible.)

2. She refused to put any burdens on me; to make any claims on me. She consciously and explicitly didn’t demand payment for the sacrifices that she’d made for me. Mum thought emotional blackmail was a hideous thing. (An awareness of this issue makes me wonder about these career women who “give it all up for the children” – so beloved by the media. What will they ask of their kids in return?)

P.S. I was reminded in writing this post of a lovely blog I found via Tim Worstall’s Britblog roundup this week. Super Woman’s Super Blog is written by a manager of a newsagency in “in a desolate seaside town” in the UK. And, reading between the lines, she was the total driving force in it raising more than £1,000 for charity.

It reminds me too of Mum’s work in various school Mothers’ Clubs. Their members did all the work for fetes, tuckshop rotas and similar, but when it came to visiting dignitaries etc, the males who headed the Parents & Citizens Association would be trotted out to collect the glory.

It is nearly here; on Wednesday, the second Carnival of Feminists will be on Personal Political.

And that’s Wednesday Australian time, which means there’s less than 24 hours to get in your nominations for feminist posts of all descriptions.

The guidelines: “The carnival aims to showcase the finest feminist posts from around the blogosphere. As you can tell from reading entries in the first edition, ‘feminist’ has a broad definition and subjects can range from the very personal to the traditionally political – and anything in between. There should be some sense that a post addresses women’s place in the world.”

(I’d add too that posts celebrating women’s lives and positive contributions to the world are most welcome.)

Email nominations to susoz.au (at) gmail (dot) com. Please put  ‘carnival’ in the subject line.

Be there, or be square … as they used to say in my school days.

… all that pointless packaging, all those little-used, little-wanted appliances, all those plastic, throwaway toys go into the ground and can be forgotten, can’t they? Ah, it seems, no …

Today’s landfill regulations, ranging from liner construction to post-capping oversight, mean that disposal areas like WMI’s GROWS are potentially less dangerous than the dumps of previous generations. But the fact remains that these systems are short-term solutions to the garbage problem. While they may not seem toxic now, all those underground cells packed with plastics, solvents, paints, batteries and other hazardous materials will someday have to be treated since the liners won’t last forever. Most liners are expected to last somewhere between 30 and 50 years. That time frame just happens to coincide with the post-closure liability private landfill operators are subject to; 30 years after a site is shuttered, its owner is no longer responsible for contamination, the public is.

Presumably the same thing is being done in Britain, a particular worry on a small, crowded island.

And there’s an air of inevitability about Britain spending £20 billion on a replacement nuclear weapon system. This is to maintain Britain’s “independent nuclear deterrent – except it is actually entirely dependent on the US, so where’s the independence?

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is doing its best.

Writing history without any sort of theoretical framework tends to produce what might be called the David Starkey outcome – everything that happens is the result of personal idiosyncrasy and chance. But the current academic fashion – to use theoretical jargon to obfuscate rather than communicate – has produced a problem with books that do have theories about why things happen: an apparently unbridgeable gap between serious academic public and the general reader. This results in texts designed to be read by an audience of at most a few score, with other interested bystanders standing around the edge of the opaque whirlpool, plunging in to the elbow occasionally, in the hope of extracting a nugget from the morass.

Rebecca Krug’s Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England is a delightful departure from this trend. It sets out its theoretical grounding in a couple of pages in the introduction. This is practice theory, which, Krug says, “by focusing on the relationship between structure and individual … allows me to consider women’s involvement in literate culture less as a matter of violation (or oppression) and more as a process of negotiations and adjustment”.*

She uses this theoretical basis, lightly but clearly, and with far less jargon than is common practice, to address four individuals or groups of medieval women and their encounters with the written word: Margaret Paston (the gentlewoman from the family whose letters have survived in surprising profusion), Margaret Beaufort (mother of Henry VII and patron of Caxton), the women Lollards at Norwich (who Krug says may not have been as “literate” as is commonly claimed), and the Bridgettine nuns at Syon Abbey (looking particularly at their personal ownership of books and what this implied about their relationship with them).

Krug presents Margaret Paston as a woman of impeccably gentle origins marrying (having been chosen at least in part for that status) a family that suffered from a hideous taint in medieval terms – that they might not have always had the same status, that one of the recent Paston ancestors had married a bondswoman (serf). Because of this her husband, John, a lawyer, was particularly keen to find and use written evidence to “prove” the family’s status, finally confirmed in a proclamation by Edward IV recorded in 1466.

It was through him, probably, that Margaret was introduced to the practical use of writing, particularly letter writing, although she could not – probably – wield a pen herself. (But as Krug makes clear this was no particular handicap. Even fully literate men often used scribes – the mechanical process was not the important part of the exercise.)

And she thus learnt to use letters in a particular, quasi-legal way, that suited her audience, John, who was for months at a time in London while she was in Norfolk running the family estates. Krug analyses the letter in which Margaret comments on her first pregnancy – not communicating the news, which John already knew – but telling him to proclaim it to the world by wearing a ring with the image of St Margaret, traditionally associated with childbirth, and also noting that her mother-in-law had told local important people. “The letter functions as a witness to her social importance, a document that shows her husband the manner in which she reinforces his success visibly and publicly.”

But, “later in her marriage, Margaret claim to employ direct quotation less in simple praise of her life and more to validate her understanding of situations. For example, in a 1449 letter written to John, she told him that Lord Moleyns had threatened to kidnap her if John refused to give up his claims to the estate at Gresham, where Margaret was staying. To ground her report in reality rather than exaggerated fear for her own safety, she notes that Lord Moleyn’s men said that her kidnapping “xuld ben but a lytell hert-brennyng” to John.” … If her behaviour looked ‘feminine’ and hasty, her letter demonstrates that it is, in fact ‘masculine’ and judicious.”

But Margaret was left a widow, and their son, John II became head of the family. And she suddenly ran up against a new audience. Krug explains:

“Margaret’s authority depended ultimately on her husband’s willingness to accept the validity of her interpretations, and her understanding of literate authority was ultimately based on a misrepresentation of her social position: she came to believe that her literate authority was a natural property of her person, rather than an ‘effect of the network of social relations” … Margaret [was forced ] to confront the family-dominated basis of her literate practice.”

Her son became head of the family, but she controlled estates, and revenues, that would only pass to him on her death. And there was a further source of conflict. She’d learnt from her husband to place great store on written evidence, in a very lawyerly way, but their son, growing up in the royal court, had “witnessed the manner in which the Yorkist government made its decisions on the basis of royal favour rather than by judicious consideration of evidence” had a different approach.

So on August 21, 1449, in a castle under siege, Margaret wrote, under the shadow of overflying crossbow bolts, to her son to demand that he ask a high official to send “wryting” to guarantee the family’s “lyfes and ther goodes”. He responded three days later saying that the obtaining of letters and the saving of the estate were two entirely separate things. She wrote back accusing him of “dysworschep”, denying that she wrote “fabyls and ymagynacyons” and resolutely affirming that she would continue to write.

She had stopped being a witness in court, and started to assert her own authority. Yet in one letter she also conceded that she could not do things that a man could do.

I’ve gone into this tale in some detail both because I find it fascinating, but also because it shows the way in which Krug teases out the changing social circumstances in which Margaret finds herself, and the ways in which she was able to work within, and, most importantly, change them by her own actions. She was neither, as some gross analyses would have her, a servant of the patriarchy that oppressed her, blinkered by false consciousness, nor a rebel against that patriarchy, but one person whose gender, family position and personal relationships all effected her interactions with the world around her, while it changed according to the actions she chose.

I won’t, however, deal in the same detail with the other sections of the book, lest this post go on forever! On Margaret Beaufort one key point is her sponsorship of Caxton’s translation and printing of the romance Blanchardyn and Eglantine. Her engagement with the text is usually described as political, but Krug argues that before her son’s accession Margaret saw it as an idealised version of the world, exposing “the dangers of political factionalism but then affirming the ultimate safety and success of its hero”. By the time she had it translated in English it was “commemorative: she herself came to read the romance as a text in which she could already see (and perhaps believed she had always already seen) Henry’s accession of 1485.”

But she also sponsored Latin texts that she probably only at best partly understood, and Krug argues that these had a ritualistic meaning. Engaging with the text, by reading or following while someone else read, had a protective function. Further, by reproducing and spreading texts, she was creating communities, of scholars and laypeople.

This is, Krug says, curiously like the Lollard women of Norwich (on the absolute opposite side of the religious controversies of the time). Clerical critics of vernacular texts thought they were revealing hidden knowledge that should be reserved for priests, which is, Krug suggests, particularly attractive as an idea to academics today, since their own social practices value texts for similar reasons (as “proof” and “data”.)

“We have assumed that we know, without question, why someone would want a translation of a text … in describing the literate practice of the women Lollards in Norwich circa 1430, this chapter shows how demands for vernacular texts emerged from the sense that engagement with the written word constituted spiritual identity. … reading was certainly about learning but that learning was spiritually formative and not strictly rationative.” Having God’s work in your heart and in your home – and particularly in a communal space within that home that you shared with others, as more important than understanding it. (This reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu and his Algerian tribespeople using a strange, imported object – spoons – to “bring rain”.)

The final purpose of Krug’s work is to try to understand why a question at the centre of scholarship about 15th-century medieval women in England: why, when more and more were exposed to literate culture, and could read and write (if only by use of a scribe), did they not produce literary or religious texts?

Krug’s answer? They may have indeed at times been stopped by lack of access to formal education, social mores or family restrictions, but additionally, and probably more importantly, this was for many not the most important use to which they could put their literacy skills. “Even if they might have imagined that literary writing would be useful, they were already busy with literate activities that seemed, to them, more obviously beneficial.”

In Syon Abbey, the nuns, as, Krug reports, exposed by their controversy over their accusation of the “heretical” text of John Ryckes’s Image of Love, had come to be trained to think of reading as a way to experience God. “They were of course cautioned to read and perform the liturgy ‘accurately’, emphasizing bodily obedience, but at the same time they were encouraged to distance themselves from other people and concentrate on books.” (Rather than images, which were for less, lay, folks.) If you think you’re experiencing God through reading, how can writing be better?

But even if you are not interested in the broader academic questions, or the theoretical route by which answers are reached, this is a wonderful book to read to grasp the place of writing in the lives of the women it portrays, in a world so very different from our own – a truth that Krug is keen to emphasise. Yet this is the time in which women were, I would argue, through this engagement with the written text, beginning the long, tortuous climb into the public world that is (more than ever before) open to us today.

This is not, as academic books go, hideously expensive, and I would hope – probably against hope – that an affordable paperback might be forthcoming.

(There’s another review here.)

*Declaration of interest/bias – this theory, in a slightly different form, is one of the bases of my thesis in mass communications. And while I’ve come across many social theories in my time, while tripping lightly through the study of politics, sociology, history and related disciplines, it is the only one that I’ve ever felt came close to approximating to lived realities.