A thread about annyoing re-writings of history

[Sakura]

Just thinking about how feted male authors/artists/scientists/revolutionaries in our culture and how female equivalents are ignored. Dworkin wrote of how good writing by women is despised, not in a romantic way, but actually despised.

I opened up Sep 27 2010 issue of Newsweek today and saw this enormous 5 page article called Men's lib. IN the first paragraph:

...As the U.S evonomy has transitioned from brawn to brain over the past three decades, a growing number of women have gone off to work....

Immediately this paragraph denies the brawn of domestic drudgery that women have undertaken, the fact that women worked in the factories for a pittance, that they were the cheap labour that drove the industrial revolution, that they did the back-breaking work of carrying water, hoeing, harvesting and cooking..that today women still get the low-status manual labour and that while men do carry out manual labour, a hell of a lot of men have kept the cushy, light, prestigious jobs for themselves.

In one fell swoop, the sentence denies Herstory with a rewriting of history. How often does this "mistake" happen on a daily basis? Does it serve to brainwash the new generation of men and women that women only started working after the fifties when men finally "allowed" them to ?

Mm, Hilary Mantel seems to be giving her some nice attention in Wolf Hall and the sequel. I thought she was just some wan lady who died in childbirth.

God, so many great women died in childbirth. It is heartbreaking to think of it. And yet somehow when this gets into the history books it makes them seem somehow weak or passive (or is that just my fucked-up perspective?) rather than just bloody unlucky.

the novelist Philippa Gregory is really good at imagining the reality of women's lives, but then she spoiled it in The White Queen by making Elizabeth Woodville an actual witch

Whyyy?

I love Theresa Tomlinson's books, which are aimed at teenage girls really but feature women working in the north of England. The Rope Carrier, The Flither Pickers etc, all about the lives of normal women and really engaging/ well written. (She also wrote The Forestwife which is one of my all time favourites, and Wolf Girl about a girl learning to be a scribe at Whitby Abbey, and The Moon Riders about fighting women in Troy)

Ooh, good thread!

Something that annoyed me recently was this:

I am learning how to teach university students, at a good, bright university. The course I sat in on was on women's writing (and women in literature) in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. The teacher was a specialist in women's writing.

Yet still, the course assumed that, before 1500, women could not read and write. This assumption was continually brought up. It's actually rubbish: in virtually all societies where some literacy is present, some women have been able to read.

It may seem like a small point, but I think it is important. These women were likely to be the most privileged (queens and aristocratic ladies), or the most autonomous (nuns, priestesses, etc.). But they could read. It is a mistake to think that women, until very recently, were cut off from education. It is, I think, a lazy excuse people make for not studying women's writing and not paying attention to women's views. People will say, 'no, there are no women writers on this course ... because women could not write'. And this is, almost always (as far as I have seen), untrue.

I would love to hear of a society in which only men could read, write, and make literate comments. I am not sure it ever existed, so why pretend it did?!

SGM - that was my favourite as a kid/teenager (along with Ballet Shoes and The Forestwife, to cover all bases).

Everyone should buy it for their DDs right now!

Elephants, I love Theresa Tomlinson! She is a wonderful writer - especially the Flither Pickers.

I was reading recently about the first female university students, in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Apparently, medics genuinely said and believe that women were not strong enough to be both mentally and physically active: if they went to university and 'taxed their minds', they would stop menstruating and their breastmilk would become too thin to nourish babies! It's amazing, isn't it?

I had thought the argument was simply that women weren't as bright as men (which is bad enough), but this argument is so much worse: even if a woman showed she was brighter than all the men, she'd still be considered selfish for deliberately making herself infertile!

Speaking of, there's a great Punch cartoon of a woman getting onto a train, with the caption, 'First class: For Ladies only'. It was the year that in all the Oxford (Cambridge?) classics students, the only person to get a first was a woman!

Are you another medievalist Stewie?

But yes: it's so annoying! At the moment I'm working on a scribe who signs him/herself 'Kate'. Because of the script, it could be the name is 'Rate' (which isn't a real name!).

Guess what gender all the scholars choose to refer to the scribe as?

Wow. I didn't know that, SGM.

Fucking hell. Sorry, but that is awful Stewie, why on earth have these people not been recognised? Actually got tears in my eyes at the thought of those women.

This is why I wear a white poppy for remembrance day.

LRD - tell me more about Kate. (What other TTs have you read?)

Elephants - I've actually only read the Forestwife ones, the three 'Whibty' ones, and the Rope Carrier. I need to Amazon the others!

Not much more to tell about Kate. It just annoys me that someone signs their name 'Kate' and scholars still say, 'hmm, must be a man. I'm sure it really says 'Rate', that makes so much more sense!'.

But we do know that women worked as scribes and in all sorts of ways in the book trade, from fairly early on. Certainly nuns seem to have copied some of their own books, and early book-making firms were very much family businesses, with everyone pitching in.

Christine de Pizan wanted her books to be done by a particular (female) illuminator she knew, since she considered this woman to be the most skillful working artist.

This is never talked about is it LRD? I had no idea even about Christine herself until last year, (then I bought her book and got a few comments on my holiday reading matter :o)

Kate - I mean that must be one of the most common medieval names for women. "Rate"? Not so much

It's like any possible excuse to credit something to a man will be taken. And if there's no excuse, well they'll just say "well it must be a man because no women could read".

Chaucer fgs was writing books for women to read, and writes about women reading and writing. So does Boccaccio IIRC. Didn't women do most of the household accounts etc, which requires literacy and numeracy? Many women were running their own businesses.

What more proof do people need? There's a real lala not listening mentality.

But then it doesn't surprise me, having done English at an Oxbridge college where "Women writers" were a topic in themselves, fit only for comparing to other women writers apparently. Rather than, say, by genre.

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.

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.

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.

part, even, not party.

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.

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.