A thread about annyoing re-writings of history

I used to love history at school :(

When I realised as a teenager that I wasn't being told anything about what women had been up to for the last few thousand years, it kind of discredited the whole subject for me. I mean, if the books and curriculum can leave out something as obvious as the activities and lives of half of the population (and I knew there were interesting women as had read about them in e.g. horrible histories), then why would I think they were a good or reliable source?

(Meant to say: this is a religion that particularly emphasises those images!)

It's odd, isn't it ... Mary Magdalene seems like such a big part of Christ's ministry, and then we know the disciples were meeting at women's houses .... but then there's a silence about women having active roles in the Church.

Something that I find scary, is that some people in my DH's religion genuinely believe that the reason women must fit in with certain gender roles, is that they are not as close an image of God as men, because Jesus was incarnate as man. Yes - that's the Jesus who bleeds, whose body is painfully broken open in order to give new life to people, who is seen as mother-like in His devotion. Er ... right.

I think it must have been the church, but I'm not sure. Apparently women had more freedom in Rome than in Greece, but it was still a patriarchal system.

But that distinguishedwomen site is really good, and the woman who compiled the site says that her curioisity in the subject began when she discovered the 12th century Hildegaard of Bingen, who was a Christian mystic and is a saint and wrote all sorts of learned works.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen

So this is definitely a vast unknown subject that we are not really told about. It must be that our most popular historians have chosen not to pay much attention to womens' contributions.

god this is an interesting thread.

I'm trying to think of point at which mass rubbings-out of women in history could have been done. Or big influences that could have led to it.

Couple of suspects:

• The Roman empire which was AFAIK exceedingly macho and didn't have much time for women or anything other than military might.

• Major monotheistic world religions (I'm looking at you Judaism/Catholicism) which wiped out the female godlike figures and stamped an imprint of "manmade" on the universe. Why does the Catholic church have such a history of woman-hating?

I wasn't thinking of Anne Boleyn so much - more about the 18-19th centuries. Mary and then Bessie were on the throne after Henry VIII died after all :)

Lady, to be fair, it sounds as if Anne Boleyn did quite a lot more than embroidery and ventured her opinion quite a lot! Henry wasn't remotely inclined towards Protestantism until she suggested it might give him the way forward. And quite Anne of Cleves certainly put her opinions forward.

SGM - that explanation gets it exactly. The implication that, silly woman, if only she hadn't died, she'd have saved so much of the trouble of Henry's reign.

this is quiote an interesting timeline of 300 women who changed the world from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

www.britannica.com/women/timeline?tocId=9404138&section=249211

and another site on distinguished women and their contributions by different subjects
www.distinguishedwomen.com/index.php

women were second-class citizens in Greece and Rome and throughout most of our history, and yet there were women who did manage to overcome that and succeed as writers, philosophers, mathematicians etc. It would be interesting to know more about their struggle and how they managed it in a time where all the cards were stacked against them.

Oh I agree E&M. I always feel very sorry for them - trapped in a gilded cage, not allowed to do much beyond embroidery, not allowed to venture an opinion.

I think it's cos she's the "good wife" SGM, and so has not required any further praise over the years. She was young, didn't cheat AFAWK, gave birth to a son and then died without making too much fuss - perfect. Why gild the lily by adding that she was clever? :(

But even the rich or literate women who do get talked about, do not get their cleverness or achievements recognised.

Many of them are called mad, like the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish, or Julian of Norwich, who if male would surely be discussed as a philosopher and religious thinker.

Women have always worked. Every single generation of women in my family over the last 150 years has had a job of some description, even if it was looking after the family's smallholding while juggling the children.

I did social history for my degree and a lot of the issue is that because women weren't (generally) in positions of power and our history is largely oral it got written out of the history books. So the only women you ever hear about are the titled ladies who wafted about and their maids, housekeepers, scullery maids, nannies, nurses are just overlooked like mere accessories.

There must be a cut-off point somewhere, claig. Romans?

Btw on a cheerier note, I was just reading the wikipedia article on Sappho and came across this fascinating fact: "The Suda is alone in claiming that Sappho was married to a "very wealthy man called Cercylas, who traded from Andros" and that he was Cleïs' [her daughter's] father. This tradition may have been invented by the comic poets as a witticism, as the name of the purported husband means "prick from the Isle of Man."

SGM- I'll raise you Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon and all the Tudor princesses/ queens.

I was going to mention Rosalind Franklin as well - there's a really good book about her and how she was written out of history but I can't find it now.

I don't understand how women's contribution has been downplayed when right back in the 7th century BC, in Ancient Greece, Sappho, was recognised as possibly the greatest of lyric poets and Plato and many others praised her work as magnificent. This all seems to have been airbrushed out of history at some later date, who by and at what stage, I don't know.

I am learning so much from this thread.
Bit gutted that E.F.Benson thought Branwell wrote part of Wuthering Heights - I liked E.F. Benson.

I had no idea there were women scribes or illuminators, so Wolf Girl is not a million miles from the truth then?

There is a real cognitive dissonance, or rather a lack of joined up thinking about these things.

"Women went out to work for the first time in the 1950s" type statements are so common.

Yet everyone (who cares about history at all) knows or can easily envisage/remember reading or seeing about women being cooks, housemaids, housekeepers, factory workers, goose girls, flower sellers, wet nurses, farmers, dairymaids, journalists etc.

But somehow no-one sees a contradiction between that knowledge and the assertion that women weren't working.

That ideal of the woman in the home is really really deepseated isn't it.

part, even, not party.

Stewie, it's not true war is 'masculine'. That's a relatively modern construct. There were medieval women who fought as the last line of defense, and died. Women have been party of war for centuries, as camp followers, or auxiliaries who primed muskets or prepared weapons. It is only relatively recently that women were actively prevented from entering onto the battlefield.

Yes, elephants, exactly! Women are not a case alone, that we ought to point and stare at.

I think much damage is done by that glib quip: 'A woman preaching is like a dog dancing. It is not done well; but one is surprised to see it done at all.' The same attitude is applied to women reading, even though in the period I deal with, many women would have been considered the main 'readers' of the household. It was thought that women should read prayers on behalf of their husbands, so the men did not need to use books, but their wives did. It is, of course, only a different kind of sexism, but it is very annoying to be told constantly that women did not use books.

Our modern society measures success in terms of literacy and education very often, and yet we also seek to belittle women's achievements in these areas, because it is easier than admitting that women were literate and educated, yet still discriminated against by society.

There seems to be this mindset that whenever a woman does something that has historically, or culturally, been associated with men, that this somehow diminishes this activity, therefore the contribution of women has to be downplayed or disregarded.

To go back to my earlier example: the fact that Valentina Tereshkova, a woman, orbited the earth in her little spaceship, does not detract from the achievements of other Soviet men who orbited the earth in their little spaceships, unless you're an insecure historian.