feminish

I’m trying to write a post about French women’s critical role in the French Revolution.

In particular, I want to tell you all the story of the seven thousand women who, on one rainy day in October 1789, rallied together and marched (pulling two huge cannon, empty of ammunition) to Versailles palace to demand bread from the king and his return to the heart of the capital. They succeeded and, while thousands were encamped within and without the palace overnight, the King finally agreed to the crucial revolutionary document: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and conceded to return with his family under guard to Paris.

I’ve been trying to write a simple narrative account: the kind that I wish I’d been taught at secondary school; the kind I wish made it into historical documentaries on BBC2 of a weekday evening.

But the thing about history, or the thing about women determinedly writing women’s history, is we make things complicated. And our readers are particularly harsh. Suddenly there are lots of questions:

Does it really matter that it was women who went to get the king, and not men? (And why didn’t the men go with them? Or, more precisely, why didn’t they let men join them?)

Did they march as women or as hungry mothers desperate to feed their starving children…. and is one any less important than the other?

What about the 20,000 armed guards who came to join them late that night, the men who formally presented their petition, the men who in all the scuffles killed some of the king’s guard? Surely they get the credit for the kings capitulation? Of course, the status quo is of men getting the credit as historical actors, so we suffer the burden of having to specifically justify why women, in any given case, can claim agency for themselves.

Or was it the dramatic power of the extra-ordinary women’s protest what really clinched this key revolutionary step: the King conceding to the People, dropping his resistance, and surrendering himself bodily to their guard?

Well, I’d like to know. And I want my fellow women to know too. As Adrienne Rich said, ” What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, … a knowledge of women’s rebellions and organised movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished? … I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance or ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.”

Unfortunately there ain’t much online, and my old notes on the topic are, erm, a little bit wanting…. But I’m going to do my best to write you something. Just because, in the big scheme of things, it’s really important: it’s the slow-burning women’s revolution.

UPDATE: To find outmore about women’s history blogging, have a look at this link-packed post at the History News Network.

I’m trying to write a post about French women’s critical role in the French Revolution.

In particular, I want to tell you all the story of the seven thousand women who, on one rainy day in October 1789, rallied together and marched (pulling two huge cannon, empty of ammunition) to Versailles palace to demand bread from the king and his return to the heart of the capital. They succeeded and, while thousands were encamped within and without the palace overnight, the King finally agreed to the crucial revolutionary document: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and conceded to return with his family under guard to Paris.

I’ve been trying to write a simple narrative account: the kind that I wish I’d been taught at secondary school; the kind I wish made it into historical documentaries on BBC2 of a weekday evening.

But the thing about history, or the thing about women determinedly writing women’s history, is we make things complicated. And our readers are particularly harsh. Suddenly there are lots of questions:

Does it really matter that it was women who went to get the king, and not men? (And why didn’t the men go with them? Or, more precisely, why didn’t they let men join them?)

Did they march as women or as hungry mothers desperate to feed their starving children…. and is one any less important than the other?

What about the 20,000 armed guards who came to join them late that night, the men who formally presented their petition, the men who in all the scuffles killed some of the king’s guard? Surely they get the credit for the kings capitulation? Of course, the status quo is of men getting the credit as historical actors, so we suffer the burden of having to specifically justify why women, in any given case, can claim agency for themselves.

Or was it the dramatic power of the extra-ordinary women’s protest what really clinched this key revolutionary step: the King conceding to the People, dropping his resistance, and surrendering himself bodily to their guard?

Well, I’d like to know. And I want my fellow women to know too. As Adrienne Rich said, ” What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, … a knowledge of women’s rebellions and organised movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished? … I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance or ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.”

Unfortunately there ain’t much online, and my old notes on the topic are, erm, a little bit wanting…. But I’m going to do my best to write you something. Just because, in the big scheme of things, it’s really important: it’s the slow-burning women’s revolution.

UPDATE: To find outmore about women’s history blogging, have a look at this link-packed post at the History News Network.