Category Archives: Women’s history

Books Women's history

Women of the Revolution

November 13, 2008 – 10:09 pm

When it comes to most of the major events of history, you have to go looking for the women, have to hunt in the darker corners of the archives, seek their behind-the-scenes presence. That's not, however, the case with the French Revolution. From the legendary revolutionaries Theroigne de Mericourt and Olympe de Gouges, who had hoped that the new regime would extend some of the rights now being given to men to their wives and sisters, to the tricoteuse watching heads roll from the guillotine, women's role was very public, if very controversial, and anyone who's studied the Revolution at even the most basic level will have some sense of it.

But there's far, far more to know – and for an overview you couldn't do any better than Marilyn Yalom's Blood Sisters: Women of the French Revolution. She's collected all of the revolutionary memoirs of women known, and sorted and sifted them into one neat, accessible volume. Yalom provides a certain amount of academic framing for this, noting particularly the way in which women jump from the personal to political and back again, giving equal importance to each, while also often putting themselves into the background and their male relatives (whose defence is often the putative aim of making a record). But mostly she simply lets the women tell their stories, while providing enough context to explain and amplify them.

The aristocratic women are here. There's the Duchesse de Tourzel, the famously level-headed and sober figure from the mad court of Versailles who was on the fateful flight to Varennes that sealed the fate of the royal family. She was an acute observer; as Yalom records, she noted that as the family was returned to Paris: "Following the order of Monsieur de La Fayette, everyone had his head covered, he had also enjoined them to remain absolutely silent to show the King, he said, the feelings his trip had inspired. His orders were so strictly observed that several scullery-boys without hats covered thei heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs.

And almost at the other end of the social scale, yet servant too at the very end to Marie-Antoinette was Rosalie Lamorliere, a humble servant who told her story to one of the queen's early biographers. Yalom notes that here is a simple but seemingly honet witness who "spares us nothing — neither the queen's last bowl of soup not the vaginal hemorrhaging to which she was subject".

So too are the Revolutionaries– Madame Roland, who in the five months in prison before her execution wrote, Yalom says, "the work that would become the most famous eyewitness chronicle of the Revolution", to Charlotte Robespierre, who late in life wrote a hagiographic memoir attempting to exonerate and explain her brother.

But as so often it is the humbler stories that are really gripping. I found most powerful, and astonishing here that of Renee Bordereau, whose life was preserved in a "47-page poorly printed pamphlet" (which might so easily have been entirely lost). As Yalom says, in translation, where the French genderised language is lost, you might think this was a male tale:

Arriving near the Loire, I destroyed five of my enemies, and finishing off the day, I broke my sword on the head of the last one… Seeing only one horseman near me, I doubled back to our army. I alone, killed twenty-one that day. I'm not the one who counted them, but those who followed me, and if they hadn't said so, I wouldn't have spoken about it myself.

It sounds like grandiose boasting, yet Yalom reports there are multiple corroborations of the tale, including in two of the other accounts that she records of the extremely vicious "Vendee Insurrection" (which occurred when this isolated, traditional region refused to accept Revolutionary rule).

And this was not some hardened to insensitivity soldier: Bordereau reports the killing of four republicans one day after seeing "one of them had a child of about six months stick on his bayonet with two chickens." An image that she later repeats as obviously haunting her. She survived the war, Yalom tells us, was imprisoned by Napoleon for six years, and did not gain her liberty until the return of Louis XVIII in 1814, when she was also granted money.

It's a story that begs for a grander telling, a complete book, for Yalom has space for little more than a taster. But for an overview for women in the Revolution, this is a great start – a guide to further reading. And if you want to feel like you've got a decent historic grasp of the Revolution, you certainly can't leave out women's place in it.

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Books Women's history

Milton, mmm

October 20, 2008 – 11:14 pm

Over on Blogcritics I’ve a review of Neil Forsyth’s John Milton: A Biography. Decent enough short popular history, pity its subject is such an unpleasant misogynist chap.

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Books Women's history

The women are always there…

September 27, 2008 – 12:13 pm

Of the 105 trades listed in Rose de Chantoiseau’s 1763 almanac of Parisian workshops, approximately two-thirds included widow mistresses…textile-type trades, such as bonnet makers, embroiders and drapers, included a large percentage of widows. However, several surprising trades included a large number of widows, such as glaziers, mirror-makers and book dealer-printers.
(From From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law, Janine M Lanza, p. 129.)

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Books Feminism Women's history

What happened to 2m ‘surplus’ women?

September 25, 2008 – 8:39 pm

I should have loved Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out. I love reading about, and then getting to write about in reviews like this one, women pioneers, women successes, women who beat all of the odds. And there are hundreds of stories like that here: Beatrice Gordon Holmes, suffragette, founder of the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists, and tremendously successful city businesswoman; the middle-class young lady Victoria Alexandrina Drummond, who against fervent opposition became a marine engineer and in 1940 worked her ship to safety and won the Lloyd's war medal for bravery at sea; Mary Milne, who became matron of St Mary's Paddington, known, unusually for a woman in that role, for her sympathetic handling of trainees and junior staff.

But there are two reasons why, while glad to have read it, I thought that Singled Out was as a book something less as a whole than the sum of its parts. One isn't, perhaps, Nicholson's fault. She charts, fairly enough, the astonishing public hostility against these women – the Daily Mail figures prominently here; Lord Northcliffe, its owner, publicly referred to "Britain's problem with two million superfluous women". Plus ca change… Then there are authors such as Walter M Gallichan, who in The Great Unmarried (1916) wrote of the "modern woman":

Ideas are seething in her busy little brain. She is desperately intellectual. One day she tells you that she is prepared to die for the cause of Women's Suffrage. Next week she will be immersed in economics, or vegetarianism, or free love… 'I don't mean to marry,' she says, with a ring of disdain/ 'I want to live my own life…. She tried to disguise her sex attractions by dressing dowdily, neglecting her hair, wearing square-toed boots, and assuming inelegant poses.

It is souring to read such stuff; women being blamed for being in circumstances that were no choice of their own (they hadn't even had the choice of the politicians who took Britain into the war). You can't help getting angry (and reminded of all of the similar junk still thrown around today, often in the same places). Maybe there needed to be a taster here, but perhaps there's more than is needed.

The second problem is clearly Nicholson's – one of structure. There isn't a very clear one: we swing back and forth from the working classes to the privileged, revisit some women several times, such as the hugely impressive archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson and the writer Vera Brittain, but I never really had a sense of where we were going, or why. And I'm not quite sure why we have to visit the horror of the trenches in the first chapter. Certainly, this was reflected back to the women, but surely that could come through their stories, rather than the men's.

Nonetheless, there's a lot to admire here – and particularly the oral histories, which Nicholson has captured at the last possible moment (many of her interviewees being around the 100 mark). She's great at painting short pictures of ordinary, extraordinary lives, such as that of Olive Wakeham, born in 1907, who spent much of her career as a nursery nurse, since her family couldn't pay for teacher training, was the centre of the lives of many of her 28 first cousins, then ended up as president of the Devon County Association for the Blind, and an MBE.

Then there's Evelyn Symmonds, who got her first job in 1922 at the age of 14, in the Post Office making her a "Civil Servant", a source of pride, then she was gradually promoted, passing exams despite very basic education, and after 30 years was an executive officer in the Accountant General's Department, retiring at 60 after 45 years in the post office. She told Nicholson: "We used to on holidays and please ourselves. We had good money, and I loved my job. I've thoroughly enjoyed life, I must admit…"

And the stark facts of the story are powerful in themselves. In 1911 there were already 664,000 more women than men in Britain – because girl babies are tougher and men were more likely to emigrate to the colonies. And in 1917 you can only admire both the courage and the clearsightedness of the senior mistress of the Bournemouth High School for Girls who stood before the assembled sixth form and told them: "Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. Nearly all of the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can." By the 1921 census her words were born out – there were 19,803,022 women in England and Wales and only 18,082,220 males. And this in a world where at the turn of the century less than 30% of women had jobs – and virtually all of these in the traditional housework, childcare or factory roles.

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Carnival of Feminists History Travel Women's history

A marvel of prehistory, the Tende museum

September 25, 2008 – 12:41 am

Only one hour by a slow train from Vintimille, just across the border in Italy, you’re in another world – Tende, which has a very Alpine feel (it seems that everyone under the age of 60 in the town wears walking boots, and looks like they use them in anger). And the tourist office boasts pamphlets about what to do if you encounter a guard dog with its flock.

tende france

It doesn’t feel very French – perhaps not surprising since it was Italian until after the Second World War. It seems it has always been an amazing area – so close to the Med yet so cut off from the world. In the 14th century, I learnt from the display in the tourist office, muleteers brought salt trains through the valley of the Roya up to Piedemont. The Duke of Savoy, Charles-Emmanuel I, improved ties between Nice and Piedmont, allowing for other forms of transport.

But what’s really amazing about the place, and what took me there, were some 40,000 carvings, all around the tallest mount here, Mont Belgo, the bulk of them made between c 3,200 and 1700BC. That’s inspired the local “Museum of Marvels”, where most of them have been moved for safekeeping.

tende museum

There’s a big, detailed display on Otzi, the Austrian ice man, who at 3,300BC almost touches on the period of the carvings. The museum isn’t big on lots of the media claims about his death, saying firmly “we have no idea about the circumstances of his death, although he did have human blood on his jacket and on the blade of his knife and and an arrow in the left shoulder” – circumstantial evidence about which a certain amount of speculation might be reasonable. What’s fascinating is how carefully tailored to their characteristics his skin clothes are. So his hat and the soles of his shoes are bearskin, loincloth and shoe uppers deer, leggings and jacket goat, and he wore a calfskin leather belt and carried a quiver of chamois strung with linden fibre. You feel that there was a reason for each of those choices. And he stood 1.6m tall and weighed about 40kg (which makes us all look pretty darned fat today – although I suppose you wouldn’t want to carry too much extra weight if you spent your life tramping around these mountains.

Then you get into the rock carvings themselves, which are spectacular, although when I look at them I was reminded of the theory about the Lascaux and similar cave paintings – that what mattered was the creation, not the actual existence of the work (quite a lot cut over the top of older work, or are created very near it but in no apparent relation to it.

I also have some problems with the interpretation of the museum. In its words: “In the early bronze age a division of labour probably led the men of the village to become responsible for the worship of the gods, hence the Mt Belgo carvings, since they visited the sacred mountains when taking their herds to alpine pastures.”

Sorry, but I really can’t see where the evidence is in this statement. Sure that’s what happened in historical times, but why assume that’s the case thousands of years before?

And there’s more. The museum identifies four types of carvings from this period: horned figures, geometric designs (identified usually with fields), anthropomorphic figures, and weapons (useful for dating by means of their shape – and the one that look remarkably like a golf flag is actually a halberd, which I will believe).

And it also suggests in at least one place that all of the figures are male. Sorry, but if you look closely at this one (which just happened to be one of the postcards I bought), this is clearly a female figure.

And you can differentiate male and female quite clear (although quite a lot have no sex organs). Now I’m not going to venture into guessing what that means, but I do think it shoots some holes in the museum interpretation.

Despite that, however, it is a very fine, fascinating display (although being quite new again plagued by the French habit of leaving you stumbling around in the dark when not immediately in front of an exhibit – and rock carvings certainly don’t need to be protected from light.)

The museum does also ventures into the ethnographic, covering the transhumance lifestyle followed until early in the 20th century. And it has the inevitable recreation of a 19th-century shepherd’s house “the walls painted blue to keep out insects”. Huh? Can anyone explain that one?

And there’s also a spookily effective mannequin with a holographic face telling old mountain stories about witches, foolish shepherds and the like, in four languages, which is rather fun…

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Books History Women's history

A woman of Byzantium

September 15, 2008 – 7:56 am

It is normal for an author to flatter their readers, to treat them as people of high knowledge and intelligence – why else would they have chosen the book? So it is a bit of a surprise when Judith Herrin begins Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by explaining that she was inspired to write it when two passing workmen knocked on her door and asked “what is Byzantine history”. All they knew, she explains, is that it “something to do with Turkey”.

Not exactly flattering to the reader, but be reassured, while at one level this might be a literary version of a popular British television show What the Romans/Victorians/etc did for us, there’s a lot more depth than that, and you’ll finish these 300-odd pages feeling educated, informed, and entertained.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Byzantium, because it has such a wonderful range of powerful interesting women, as I found some 15 years ago when I last studied the subject of its history, although the course I took then resembles some of the texts Herrin describes without approval, as being little more than a long list of emperors and battles. Her Byzantium, while broadly chronological, isn’t arranged like that, but rather list of themes and stories, which overall present a very satisfying overview.

If you’re thinking of Byzantium, then you can only think of the Hagia Sophia, and Herrin provides a reminder that it was not some late flowering of the ancient world, but the energetic burst of something new, and behind it once again was a strong woman – not (just) Justinian’s famous and much maligned empress Theodora, but a wealthy senatorial lady, Juliana Anicia, who had just built a grand church, St Polyeuktos’s, on her own property. But it was Theodora to whom more credit was due, for it was just before the great church was begun that she, ancient accounts seem to agree, stiffened Justinian’s backbone when he was about to flee before a mob riot that conveniently cleared a large tranche of the centre of Constantinople.

It supports, with its very great weight and power, Herrin’s thesis, that Byzantium boasted “a rich ecology of traditions and resources” – it didn’t just passively preserve ancient traditions, as Gibbon claimed, just waiting for the West to be ready to receive them again, but rather creatively and constructively engaged with and developed them:

It bequeathed to the world an imperial system of government built upon a trained, civilian, administration and tax system; a legal structure based on Roman law; a unique curriculum of secular education that preserved much of pagan, classical learning; orthodox theology, artistic expression and spiritual traditions enshrined in the Green church; and coronation and court rituals that had many imitators.”

And when the doomed Constantine XI in 1453 made his final desperate call to the last remnant of the empire, its capital, to resist the Ottoman Turks, he called out in Greek to his people to prove themselves true Romans – to emphasising the continuity of 1,323 years of Constantinople’s history, and much further back. But long before that, Herrin argues, Byzantium’s ability to withstand, albeit eventually in much reduced form, the shock of the Arab onslaught as the tribes burst out of Arabia, in the eighth century that protected a then ill-prepared West, which would otherwise have been overwhelmed.

But this is a book that bears its theses lightly – mostly it is just a fine collection of yarns about a great and complex civilisation over more than a millennium. And you meet a great many interesting women along the way, among them:

  • Olympias, a wealthy heiress who supported a nunnery in Constantinople late in the 4th century, which remained in existence for more than two centuries, possibly longer, and in the early 7th century the abbess Sergia wrote an account of the miraculous recovery of its relics.
  • Amalasuntha, daughter of the OstroGoth and late western Roman ruler Theoderic, who on his death in 526 became regent for her 10-year-old son, Athalaric.
  • Olga, widow of the Rus (Russian) leader Igor, who in the mid 10th century made a visit to Constantinople with an entourage of merchants, interpreters and a Christian priest. She left converted, having taken the historic name of Helena, from the wife of Constantine VII’s. This is seen as the start of the conversion of the Rus. (The Byzantines, unlike Islam, and until the Reformation, encouraged the use of the vernacular in worship.)
  • Maria Argyropoulaina, who introduced in the fork to the west, despite initial claims that they were pretentious. She had been married to Giovanni, son of Pietro II (doge 991-1008) after Venice helped Byzantium thwart an Arab siege at Bari. Sadly, although after they were married in Constantinople in 1004, returned to Venice to much acclamation and had a son, all three then perished in an epidemic.
  • Kale Pakourianos, widow of a Georgian military commander for Byzantium, who supported the Georgian monastery of Viron on Mount Athos.
  • And of course there’s the celebrated historian Anna Komnene, who has a whole chapter to herself, as a writer of a work that Herrin considers “bold, novel and surprising”. Herrin adds: “No other medieval woman, East or West, had the vision, confidence and the capacity to realize an equally ambitious project”.

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