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 ?

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 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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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? :(

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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 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.

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.

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

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?

Not saying that HH is a reliable source! Just that it's more social history etc :o

LRD - is there a list of the 12 apostles in the bible? Or is it a later tradition?

I agree with you Elephants. I am sceptical about many of these historians. They are not infallible, they are humans and they quite often have an agenda and a slant that they are trying to push. They rarely give the whole story, so you have to take some of what they say with a pinch of salt.

I learned about Hildegaard but that's because I grew up there I think (not in a convent, in Belgium :o)

That timeline's really interesting claig - I didn't know that suffrage started in the 1860s!

Elephants - yes, there is a list in the Bible. But then, the Bible itself was only finalized very late on, and even the accounts of the gospel writers may not have been quite so eye-witness as they pretend!

There is so much lovely medieval imagery about Christ as a mother-figure, and there is a really common idea that the wound in his side, when he's on the cross, is a kind of womb. It's really good, experimental theology and gets written out of lots of accounts of what medieval women thought and believed.

I agree it's absolutely fascinating. It makes me realise how little I actually know about so much.