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 ?

Yes this one cuts both ways -

the 'pit brow lass' et al may be currently increasingly written out of history, and there are past scientists authors et who don't receive prper recognition - but on the other hand - sexism did do a really good job of keepin talented women down, and that does leave us with a history where you have to in many fields, the most revolutionary contributors were men. This does not man women couldn't have done the same, just that they were kept from doing so.

if i think of philosophers for instance - Nietzsche rises head and shoulders above the men of his time (IMO all of them, but you'd find few others of equal standing, Marx perhaps....) - the barriers preventing a woman of the same class attaining the same standing were hard, all-but utterly impenetrable.

To pretend one of the lady authors of the same time did attain the same standing would be a re-writing of history.

George Eliot chose that name in order to be taken seriously - it wasn't in order to get published but she knew no-one would view her work as of scholarly intention without a veil of masculinity.

sexism didn't just prevent women being recognised-it also prevented them achieving greatness.

What that shoud make us wary of, is the sttus of current female scientists and authors - why is JK Rowling never termed a 'genius'? Why are so few nobel prize winners women too? There are still barriers preventing women attinin the highest positions in academic and public life, and there is also a lack ofrecognition for what they do achieve.

EdgarallinPink

Academic Daniel Dorling has an interesting take on the Great Men. HE says that the more we learn about history, the more it becomes clear that great discoveries were just about to be discovered.
That doesn't men the men involved weren't clever or indeed geniuses, it just means that their work was based on an accumulation of other people's work, which was available to them at that time. And without the work of other people, they would not have been able to do it. So naming Great Men as unique geniuses, actually is a re-writing of history.
THere's no doubt the individual men were geniuses, but it has to be put into context.

Why is Lady Murasaki ignored when it comes to novels? She wrote the first novel I'D say that's pretty great. Doubly great when you think that she was a woman. SO women have to work quadruply as hard to receive the same recognition as men. Luckily, we are up to it.

I wouldn't say JK Rowling is a genius, though.

If you're asking about scientists, one of the problems is that although (I think) equal numbers of women start out on a postgraduate path, like every other industry, you have to work very hard to continue doing the same job after having a child as you did before it. A career break sets you back.

There most certainly are women who are ace scientists and who are well known and well respected in their fields - their recognition is lower key than we are exposed to, but it is there. Most of science is people slogging away on teeny, tiny little bits of knowledge, not headline stuff.

Gawd, I just went to look for the Nobel prize winners/nominees this year.
So far can't see a single woman.

Charlotte Bronte wrote:

"...Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because - without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called 'feminine' - we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise..."

I've just googled women doctors, because I couldn't think of a name of that famous one who posed as a man in order to get her medical degree..

anyway, I foudn a wikipedia article on women doctors thought it sounded interesting.

and I found this article written by a man who thinks women still shouldn't be trained as doctors when I was looking for information on the real life of the nurse from Casualty 1907, the one who wanted to be a doctor, but wasn't allowed.

well, 'genius' tends to be a matter of opinion.

i quite like recognising the 'larger dwarves' as twere, that stand on the shoulders of giants, those people that made those leaps of understanding that took us over borders. though it may seem at present that the big fish have already been landed in terms of scientific uderstanding, i'm sure there's more stuff out there to be explained...rambling. But i think people are unwilling to pply the term 'genius' to women, for one thing, tis a masculine term...

i haven't read The tale of Genji - does it translate as a masterpiece ?

I agree totally that Sappho deserves a greater mention, though perhaps her sexuality is also an issue in her lack of popularity.

nickelbabe - I read the article you linked to with amazement. Sadly, I expect he is not alone in his thoughts.

Did you see the "thought for the moment" on his homepage? He actually believes the justice system is stacked against men!

I want to punch him.

He's too stupid to continue his thought to its conclusion -- why send girls to school at all? This is the Taliban walking among us.

That's "thought"...

WHat a good thread.
I know someone who employed female postdocs and immediately told them 'I don't believe that women can do science well: you will find me difficult but that's your problem" and finally was done for it but you know, still continues. Since one of his female postdocs is an accredited genius I find it funny (as does she, but with provisos: he was haaaaaard work).

EdgarAllinPink Its a masterpiece insofar as it was the first ever novel, and a psychological novel at that (only seen at a much later date in Europe) and is a beautiful love story still relevant today, the way the Shakespeare's plays are still relevant today- timeless.

I have heard the term "genius" applied to women. INterestingly, Caroline Aherne, the comedian who wrote The ROyle Family and was Mrs Merton, was refered to as a genius by (male) colleagues. SO I think the term is sometimes used for women. VIrginia WOolf, Austen, are obviously geniuses

It's fascinating to read because you can feel and see the psychological processes of people in the 11th century

I once had a conversation with some very academic, bright people (I was way out of my depth, I was 19), and one of the things they hypothesized was that genius is a very masculine quality: all that selfish, slightly anti-social, single-minded purpose. It was when Simon Baron-Cohen was just starting to make a big thing about autism, talent in maths and the 'extreme male brain'.

I didn't have a lot to say then but it annoys me now that the way they'd defined genius is very much a construct of a masculine society (cf. the romantic poets yakking on about how one must be solitary to 'create'). It'd exclude people like Shakespeare or Chaucer. I do think that women are often marginalized because historically they've not been able to affect the same lifestyles that are now associated with being a genius - we expect people to be lonely and a bit anti-social, and for such a long time, it wasn't easy for women to live alone because of the way society looked down on that.

Sakura, that novel does sound fascinating, I must read it!

It's true, that's why Woolf wrote that every woman needs "a room of her own" in order to become anything.
Since having kids, I found that people automatically felt entitled to encroach on my time (MIL, friends etc). I am a creative person and I had to put a stop to it which caused a lot of repercussions and bad feeling.
I think, in most cultures, women are expected to always be "on call" for others, to be there all the time.

Rachel Cusk's "Of Woman Born" is really good for describing the way women become public property as soon as they become mothers

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.

I think Cusk's was a spin on Rich's

sorry, I mean it's called "A Life's Work- Of woman born"

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.

yes, if you've had the chance to travel, for example, or sleep around with many kinds of lovers, or what have you, you've got more "stuff" inside you to use creatively. I think the fact that women were able to write at all was amazing, considering how constrained they were.

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

YEs, I've been thinking about the "male genius trait" argument and have come to the conclusion that the discussion in itself is anti-feminist.

Think about it. In a non-patriarchal society it would be taken for granted that women and men could both be geniuses. IF women's genius wasn'T outed for some reason, people would naturally assume it was because of some particular circumstances.

Here we have the extenuating circumstances- the oppression, lack of access to education, male privilege etc etc and yet some people STILL insist on saying genius is male. WHen you think about the fact that female geniuses have indeed existed despite the oppression, one can only assume that it is women who are more naturally gifted.

BUt because I'm fair minded, and rational, I have to concede that men and women are probably equally capable of genius.

Only under patriarchy would this argument be brought up and considered "rational"!