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 ?

Yeah. My mate had the opportunity to design her own curriculum for the module she taught last year. She did several texts written by women (as well as the 'normal' ones by men) and a couple of the male students were really annoyed as they felt they hadn't signed up to do 'women's history' and didn't like getting such a 'partial' sense of the period - fortunately some of the women came right back pointing out they hadn't signed up to do 'men's history' and didn't fancy studying just men's texts!

I like the sound of your DH, SGM!

LRD - I really love the (old, but how old?) imagery that associates Jesus with the mother pelicans, who they believed pecked their own chests in order to feed their young on their blood. Never thought about the wound in the side.

WRT disciples, presumably if women had travelled with him (rather than staying at home and waiting for a visit) they would have been assumed to be no-good vagrant prostitutes anyway wouldn't they.

Actually that's exactly what happened with MM isn't it? I remember reading that the whole prostitute thing was just later slander - what does it actually say about her in the bible that gave that impression? (sorry to ask loads of questions!)

There was a great series by Bettany Hughes on a while ago about this - did you see?

LRD/SGM - good for your students/DH! Can't believe the "partial sense of the period" thing - what on earth did they mean?

Elephants - I don't know how old the pelican imagery is, but it is certainly well-established in the period I study (after 1100). I suspect it's in the early Church Fathers, but I could be wrong.

The thing that is insidious and irritating, is that people often re-write history in order to give them excuses for the present, so they say that the medieval Church was very sexist. And, well, it was: but not entirely, not uniformly. So we shouldn't look back at it and smile at how far we've come, which people are tempted to do. It's that idea that women should be grateful for incremental progress - but not too fast, not too much!

I tried recently, at a conference, discussing a text known to have belonged to a husband and wife, as if the wife were the primary reader. It was really interesting to see the responses.

An uncle of mine worked as a locum straight out of medical school in a Yorkshire mining town, and while he had enormous sympathy for the miners -- he was there just before the general strike broke out in 1926 (uncle was turned into quite a socialist by his experiences in Yorkshire), he had more sympathy for the wives, and recounted the filling of tubs of hot water with buckets of water carried by the women from outdoor pumps down the street and the backbreaking work everyone in the community had to do just to live day to day. You don't hear much about the mining town women and the hardness of their lives. Medical statistics make for grim reading though.

Where I come from the women were "bal maidens" whose job was to "dress" the ore from the mines. Basically this meant breaking up rocks with big hammers, and sorting through the resulting gravel, washing it etc. Back-breaking work.

Basically nearly everyone has always worked bloody hard, the difference is no-one tries to tell us that men didn't work before the 1950s. But the hard labour of centuries and centuries of women - it's just written off. Because they weren't important, their work wasn't important.

I was always taught at school that most women have worked throughout history but I live in a place where most women work now. The stay at home thing is only something that people used to do if they were very rich (just like now).

This thread went in a brilliant direction, ! [could have been bad]

DId you know that the first novel ever written was by a Japanese women in the eleventh century. NOt only is it the first novel, but it's a psychological novel, of the kind only seen in Europe at a much later date. NOt only that, but it's a beautiful love story, still relevant and riveting today, so timeless, really... Her father educated her, bless him.

I do think it's done on purpose. My friend recently was telling me about a website where you can get books online. "Any book you like, almost" We looked for Mills' Emancipation of women and it wasn't there. It could be an accident, but there was lots of other Mills's there of less significance. PAtriarchy either regards these things as insignificant or realises how precarious male dominance actually is, and needs to reinvent the wheel for every generation

sorry, the novel is "The Tale of Genji"

oh, another very annoying thing about the fact women's labour was ignored is that they were paid a pittance compared to men. So really they were working quadruply as hard. They also had the double burden.

All this historical stuff is another reason why I find it so when people tell me that e.g. the modern pay gap is a myth. There's a massive history of women being paid less - either overtly or secretly - so why is it such a radical notion that it's still going on? Has history suddenly come to an end?

Likewise with tolerance for e.g. spouse/partner rape cases. Mention that courts/police don't take it seriously and you're a radfem conspiracy theorist, but it's not even 20 years since it became illegal in this country.

People seem to want to be blind to history, maybe because the evidence of patriarchy is written all over it.

It's difficult to get your head around it isn't it. IT's so not an accident that patriarchy exists. IT's deliberately created in an evil way.

actually that's quite a reassuring thought. Men have to keep trying their hardest to stop the cracks of patriarchy from widening so it doesn't all come crumbling down around them. IT's already started to crumble. It's though, because women simply do not want to impose harm on men as a class the way men want to to women.

You're obviously not taking my trebuchet plan into account, Sakura.

I've not got an academic background regarding women in history, but I find this topic so very interesting - nowadays, I've found that whenever I want to find out about any period in history, it's the working class that fascinates me most - the ruling classes are always mentioned, so the "traditional" roles of women IMO are confined to the ruling clases traditional roles for women - in the working classes, the workload was always so much more equally spread.
If you actually dig (as I can see so many of you have!), women do just as much as men, and in a lot of societies (thinking mediaeval and pre-industrial-revolution, in this instance) especially in the countryside and villages, the women ruled. All of the social life in the villages was controlled by women, and most of the organization of the workforce was done by them too. The work in the fields wasn't always done just by men - the women and girls who didn't have babies worked just as hard in the fields and mills as the men did - I can only see the difference in men and women when you take the babies into account. As soon as the babies were toddlers, the women would go back into the fields (the villagers who had their own babies seem to have taken it in turns to look after the littlies)

I was just looking for information on the role of women in the Crusades, and there's a quite an interesting article (have only skimmedit, though) on women having to defend the homes and livelihoods when the men went off to the battlefields
Women and the Crusades

That's like Russia throughout history up until today. LOADS of Russian men have died in wars, from cold, from alcohol. The women basically run the show by themselves, apart from the elite men of patriarchy who reap all the monetary rewards for their labour