A thread about annyoing re-writings of history

My grandmothers world has pretty much perished.....one set of grandmothers bing intellectuals trained as nurses (one went to Oxford in 1926 (Lady Margarets i think) which was prettyrare..)

they died before i was old enough to really converse with them.

sakur widows also had some level of financial independence - the 'merry widow' of Chaucer had good reason to be cheerful...

Sorry what a horrendous link! Sould have done a fancy link to it

Just managed to read the entire thread, phew. Wish I had been here when it began. Unprune- I did that with my grandmother, got her to tell us about her life and family history. It's incredible to own this tape of her history even though she is now gone.

One woman who writes some fantastic historical articles about women is called Ingrid Sharp- has anyone ever read some of her work? I think it is what has most shaped me as a feminist

books.google.de/books?id=9BD_mT783vgC&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=Dangerous+Women:+Woman+as+Sexual+Criminal+in+Weimar+Germany&source=bl&ots=Uiatb-Q9YL&sig=8D_90zZ8WSccl2bjY9IBL9SWO48&hl=de&ei=d2KvTJyKM4WTswaKg7XJDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Dangerous%20Women%3A%20Woman%20as%20Sexual%20Criminal%20in%20Weimar%20Germany&f=false

I must.
If nothing else, she speaks a sort of dialect that is dying out. I suppose because the words describe things that exist less and less, in part.

Unprune - if she's telling you lots of things it's because she doesn't want it to be forgotten. This is how women's history has always been preserved, we don't get the books and the newspaper obituaries and the plaques commemorating our lives, we get granddaughters if we're lucky to tell the stories to. Get a dictaphone and ask her about her mother, or her grandparents, and go from there.

I know - I always feel like going in with a tape recorder would be akin to walking in dressed in a black cloak and tolling a large bell
But the 'I want to write it down before it all gets forgotten' line would be good.

Unprune - can I make a suggestion re recording your grandma's memories? I agree that 'tell me about your hard hard life' would sound really patronising but IME older relations are interested in explaining the family history, who was related to who etc, and the explanatory details about what the work involved etc would sort of slot in around that.
recording would be best but just get a notebook and write things down if you can't do that, you won't regret it.

"the more i want to look at my life & cry"
I know exactly what you mean. It can be bloody depressing, can't it?

I am just totally fascinated by 'daily life'. My grandmother lived a life that doesn't exist any more. Every time I see her, she tells me more and more fascinating details (she lived in a poor NE Scottish fishing town - on the face of it, not exciting, but really interesting in terms of how you just survive). I'm desperate to sit down with her and catalogue it, but how do you do that? It's just patronising. Her life was awful, and I'm not sure she would want to remember it for me.

obviously the big things matter too, but so often they are a result of a build up of smaller stuff. then the effect they have is exaggerated.

seriously, the more i read on here, the more i want to look at my life & cry. i seriously wonder if i should bugger off to live on my own sometimes - a modern day dame julian of norwich.

ok, have now read & digested the thread.

not much to add really, have never heard of most of these women!! (v ignorant about feminism, and i went to an all-girls school)

BUT it has reminded me of one of my friends. she studies & writes about maritime history. her niche is the social impact of britain being a maritime nation. her books are just not given the same respect that the male version of history is.

this always really angers me. tbh, which political party is in power makes v little difference to me, whereas running out of bread does.

it may sound trite, but few of us are 'movers & shakers' of the world - it is the day-to-day life that matters to us. so, our version of history IS the real one, not the big events. think back to big world events that you remember - not many of them will have had much direct effect on you, yet they are the ones that get mentioned - and they are nearly all about male experiences.

i'm not sure that i'm explaining it well, but i just get so annoyed about how the focus is on 'big' things, when our daily lives actually matter so much more.

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It's impossible to say if genius is a male-brain trait, though, because you don't have two groups of people who live entirely similar lives.

If you had men and women living exactly the same lives with exactly the same demands and privileges, and the male group continued to produce more geniuses - well, that's a result.

But then (for starters) you'd have women sequestering themselves from their families in order to work, and that never plays well

one of the things they hypothesized was that genius is a very masculine quality: all that selfish, slightly anti-social, single-minded purpose.

..but this isn't actually true of most male geniuses - Socates liked to shoot the breeze, and had been a sergeant - his accomplishments were very much public, and social. the great men of the dark ages are mostly nobility - their greatness is derived from their social place and function - the romantic poets were soldiers/ sailors too and renowned social bad-boys, Netzche held daily salons and chinwagged with his contemporaries (particularly female ones) as well as doing sufficient book work to have more than most to talk about...

I think the notion of the solitary genius is modern one - we crave space, privacy, we feel we need it to be able to think straight.

The difference between men nd women has histoically been that men ot to stay in the ault domain, and sharpen their wits with other adults, whereas women were expected to the social oil (not the fire!) with adults, and spend time with children (so, plenty of answering 'why is the sky blue' but very little time to sit with delicate bits of kit disovering the Compton Scattering Effect)

Childless women, and those who had careers after their chilbearing years come in as the highest achievers.

I have so many books on my wishlist on Amazon as a result of reading this section - I just tried to add "of woman born" but it seems to have been written by Adrienne Rich. Rachel Cusk has a book along the same lines "a life's work".

I agree that women are always expected to be "on call" for others, all that interruption and trivia takes up headspace which could be applied to creative work. Also we are under pressure to spend a great deal of time and energy on presenting ourselves well.