“It is not only uncivil and ignoble, but unnatural for men to speak against women and their liberties … Men are happy, and we women are miserable, for they possess all the ease, rest, pleasure, wealth, power and fame, whereas women are restless with labour, ceaseless with pain, melancholy for want of pleasure, helpless for want of power and die in oblivion for want of fame; nevertheless men are so unconscionable and cruel against us as they suffer us freely to associate amongst our own sex, but would fain bury us in their houses or beds as in a grave; the truth is we live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms.”
(Quoted in Kathleen Jones’s A Glorious Fame – 1988, Bloomsbury.)
She’s a controversial figure – but having read this (I think the first of the modern crop of biographies, there having been several since, and a whole school now of “Margaret Cavendish studies”) — I’m definitely down on the side of she was interesting, brilliant, and no more mad than many an aristocrat. (And a lot of her odder scientific fantasies are no more curious than those held by the Royal Society at the same time – and if you’re going to be labelled as one of the inventors of science fiction, you’ll have a vivid imagination for sure.)
Jones’s conclusion is: “she possessed a great natural gift and an insatiably curious mind, both totally frustrated by the restrictions placed on her sex.” (p. 93)
And I think it is telling that Jones’ notes about the reaction to her early work — some said she was mad outright, some said she was a deluded woman, and some said they were too good to have been written by a woman and must have been her husband’s — so neatly sums up the typical ways of dismissing women’s work that all of the critics can safely been ignored.
So re-read that quote at the top, admire her, and read something of hers: I’m off to abebooks now…
And this seems a good place to point to Ada Lovelace Day, a project by which “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” And it’s already past 1,000 – but no reason not to keep going…
(I don’t participate in a lot of these web projects, since if I did I’d do little else, but historical women in science are a particularly neglected group.)
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