feminish

This time last year I was in an old French farm building with a few dozen brown-robed nuns. Improbably enough, we were playing a game of aerial apple-bobbing, eating copious quantities of luminous green cake and carving out the innards of apples to make jack o’ lanterns.

This year it’ll just be the Patterner, the screech owls and me. And we’ll only be playing with pumpkins if we finish wood-chopping in time. This is our first axe-session of the Winter in an effort to keep the indoor temperature above freezing tonight. Tea and jumpers can do a lot, but sizzling trees can do more. The un-doing of nature in a fireplace is quite something to behold: no wonder the flames are so bright and so hot - it’s the unpacking of year upon year of sun-drunk rain-watered hard-earned Tree. It took a long time to get there, the tree. And it takes me hardly any time to explode it into flames.

But this hallowe’en I want to follow Heart’s lead over at Women’s Space/ The Margins, and remember all the thousands of women who have, for many hundreds of years and in many countries across the world, been hounded down and murdered as Witches. From 1487 there was even the Malleus Maleficarium, the ultimate comprehensive witch-hunters’ handbook. In Europe, the women who were hunted were the wise women - the women who knew how to heal with herbs or how to abort with them; the women who kept themselves to themselves and simply chose to live alone and assert their independence; or those who were what we would nowadays probably call ‘mystics’. It was these women who were rejected by their communities - and who, when times were hard and spirits angry, were bound to ducking stools, thrown into water in full-kirtle, hanged or tied to a stake and burned. In my own native East Anglia, the hunting-ground of the 17th Century self-styled “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, on one occasion one hundred women were executed after a trial at Bury St. Edmunds, who was responsible for perhaps 60 deaths across the region [updated]. (( You can see images of various 17thC English witch-hunting pamphlets and read extracts put online by the University of Sydney Library. )) Many of the scenes in The Witchfinder General (1968) (”15th best horror film of all time”) are hauntingly familiar; they are the landscapes of my childhood.

I aspire to be open-minded and non-fearing in the face of strangers who choose an unusual way of life. I hope to be fearless and non-judging before those who are anti-social or loners, those who are mystics or, more simply, those women who are wise.

In memoriam.

I slinked off into retreat last Friday, down at a medieval priory west of London. The stone floors were cold and the gothic arches reassuringly old. Time slowed and I played with acorns.

The priory is empty of nuns. They have died, as humans do, and have not been replaced. The last two survivors are seeing out their dusk in the almshouse wing. But the energy of the female spiritual life is still there: bells in just the right place; carriage clocks with fairy-like rings; and a total absence of dust - as though the stones remember the centuries of unrelenting female labour dispelling it.

I noticed two framed tablets hanging in one of the narrow red-and-black tiled corridors. Yellowing paper squares had been pasted one-by-one into the frame, each bearing testament to the death and life of one of the sisters. Where monks might have carved stone slabs or wooden plaques, the modest sisters here had a bit of paper and glue. Spaces have been left at the end for those yet-to-die; there’s sign of tipexing and re-gluing. I immediately thought of the immense old-style library type-writered catalogue books, which end up extending to impractical numbers of weighty, frayed volumes (now it’s all just stored in zeros and ones to be flung at us through LED screens at the tap of a finger).

Here was one entry in the frame:

CECILIA
OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

ELEVENTH AND LAST MOTHER

ORDER II

12 FEBRUARY 2004 AGED 89 YEARS

IN RELIGION 64 YEARS

There was also “Hope of the Precious Blood” (9th Mother) and “Priscilla Lydia, Foundress and First Mother”, who died in 1876.

Powerful words.

These women didn’t seem so very far away after all.

I’m not sure how this one crept up on me silently, but -

Today is the British Library’s “One day in History” Day.

They’re calling for as many Brits as possible to write about their day today and submit their account online, creating “a mass blog for the national record”. The British Library have already started publishing people’s entries here, and have committed themselves to preserving everything they receive for ever and ever. I suppose the only question is whether humans will expire before their hard copies do?

So, email your friends and get on the phone to your Mum and Dad and see if you can persuade them to write a few words and post them up. After all, if you’re reading this you must think blogs are even just a teeny weeny bit worthwhile.

But if it doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can always shimmer over to Clioweb which is hosting the latesd all-singing all-dancing History Carnival. The Aztecs, the Athenians and the Australians all get a look in - and it’s all the more fascinating for its lively crop of women’s history (including one or two numbers by Yours Truly).

Ever idly wondered what a woman might have been writing in her diary on this day in, say - 1920?

I just found Harvard’s Open Collections website, where they publish primary-source documents from their collections - 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs. If you go to the diaries page you can see women’s journals opened at today’s date (updated daily).

I read what was written on this day by a farmer in 1887 ( “…rained quite a shower after dinner”), a schoolteacher in 1906 ( “…took a bath. Mended.”), a secretary in 1914 ( “…stayed in bed and fooled until 8.30″) and an actress in 1920 ( “…we saw Cohan’s opening - “meanest man in the world”).

Vicarious and addictive.

Technorati tags: women’s history, historical documents, women, diaries, history

It is a bright clear day today, and cold. A different day from the grey, heavy, wet ones that’ve been shrouding us for a while.

It’s the kind of light that shimmers the dew on the grass, shows you the dirt on the floor and catches a very particular angle on the windowpanes, suddenly revealing a mysterious film of dust-grime you can bet your bottom pound sterling wasn’t there yesterday.

As I was sweeping I noticed how short I was. Nothing particularly remarkable, I just noticed that, well, I’m quite close to the floor. Which is obviously a relative thing. Quite literally relative, given that all of mine are over 5ft9.

My first thought was of being the odd one out. My second was that in fact I embody the height of my two grandmothers, and that I’m the only grandchild to do so. I even thought, for perhaps the first time, Thank goodness I’m short: a little more of them is continued, a little less is lost.

Talking of grandmothers, and losing things…

I’ve promised a post on why it matters that, once upon a time several thousand women in Paris embarked on an unprecedented political act of force and power. Does it matter that we have collectively forgotten? And why should we care anyway?

I did a wee bit of arithmetic and reckon that, give or take a few young and old pregnancies, I had approximately 768 great-great-great-great-great-great-great(and great-) grandmothers (assuming 2 generations were alive simultaneously) of adult age in 1789 when thousands of women marched on Versailles and (in a manner of speaking) captured the king.

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On the 5th October precisely 317 years ago today, several thousand women in Paris embarked on an unprecedented political act of force and power. Their ‘march on Versailles’ through the pouring rain finally compelled France’s beleaguered King to accept the people’s will and submit himself to their armed guard. It was the beginning of the end for the French monarchy, and the start of a Revolution worthy of the name….







What? Really?, was my first reaction when I learned about women’s extraordinary political radicalism in the ‘October Days’ of 1789. How come I’ve never heard of that before?! Such a powerful women-only political protest, wholly unprecedented in our history, with immense ramifications for France, the French Revolution and European democracy - and nobody told me?!

As I mentioned before, pulling together an outline of what happened with nice pix and primary sources was shockingly hard. Where are all the women’s historians on the web? And why do we need women’s historians to do it well anyway? What about the rest of ‘em?!

But I’ve been encouraged by Sandy D. and inspired by the women’s history snippets of Ms Natalie Bennett. And I know well that a 21st Century lass needs, “as a self-conscious, self defining human being 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” (Adrienne Rich):

So, I’ve just posted:The March of the Women, 5 October 1789: what happened?, which includes an In-a-nutshell background to the March.

Coming up tomorrow: Women marched, so what? Did it make a difference and why should we care?

I’ve written some brief background words below. You can also see my post: The March of the Women 5 October 1789: Did it make a difference and why should we care?

A narrative account of the events of 5/6 October 1789 in Paris
(using primary sources where possible…)

At 7 o’clock on the morning of the 5th of October 1789 about 2000 women forced the doors of the Town Hall in the heart of Paris.

Furious at the continued scarcity and expense of bread (a dire situation that had hardly improved in the three months since the National Assembly was set up to solve the crisis), they determined to take matters into their own hands. The women seized bread, weapons and cannon from the Town Hall, and began to throw out papers and files to burn:

[Monsieur Maillard, an influential member of the new people’s National Guard,] found some [women] forcing the downstairs doors and others snatching papers in the offices, saying that that was all the city council had done since the revolution began and that they would burn them… he urged them to keep calm, but these women kept saying that the men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they (the women) would do better. While he was in the courtyard, he looked around and saw a large number of men go up, armed with pikes, lances, pitchforks, and other weapons… [They] took all the arms they could find and gave some to the women. He then received word that a number of women had arrived with torches to burn the papers in the building, so he [Maillard] dashed out and flung himself upon them (there were but two) as they approached the City Hall, each bearing a lighted torch; he snatched the torches from their hands, which nearly cost him his life, as they were intent on carrying out their design.
[Taken from the witness statement of Stanislas Maillard, leading member of the National Guard, given to the 1790 Paris commission investigating the October Days 1789]

It wasn’t just the 2000 women at the Hotel de Ville who had been driven to act. In fact, as the French historian G. Rudé describes, women were rallying together all over Paris:

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… one can do nothing other than preach freedom, and freedom again, and we must overturn every barrier, smash every artificial bottleneck, for it is wiser to trust in the voices of desire that rise in the human bosom, even when they express themselves in untoward ways, than in pre-conceived and falsified theories. Whatever brings splendour and joy to a woman is the right way for her, however crooked her path may seem, and in the end the goal is to guide to maturity the woman within, in other words to reveal her most secret gift of life.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) The Humanity of Woman: an outline of a problem, France 1899. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer in A History of Women in the West Vol. IV.

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:

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My fairly obsessive trail to uncover (and photograph!) the first appearance of the word feminist (as feministe in France, and feminist in Britain) continues.

I can now tell you that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “feminist” first appeared in print in Britain in 1895, in book review in the Athenaeum on April 27 1895 (no.3522, p.533). The review was of The Grasshoppers, a novel by ‘Mrs Andrew Dean’, the pseudonym for one Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, who wrote 35 novels between the 1890s and mid-1930s.

‘Feminist’ was used by the Athenaeum reviewer to describe a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence”.

The Oxford English Dictionary dated the first use of ‘feminism’ in Britain to 1895 and ‘feminist’ in its adjectival form to 1894. [Although this suggests there must have been another appearance of ‘feminist’ before the Athenaeum review - I’m working on it!] The word didn’t escape inverted commas in the dictionary until 1898. Feminist as a noun only dates from 1904 - year after the popular novelist Sarah Grand had coined the phrase New Woman to describe the new generation of women who sought independence and refused the traditional confines of marriage.

(I found this all out following references in Susan Faludi’s Backlash and playing around with a Google Books search.)

See also: feminish » Feministe, feminista, feminist: origin of the word feminist.