800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  Dusty sidewalks, rubbish strewn everywhere, people milling about amongst cows, dogs, even pigs. Erratic driving with horns hooting, motor rickshaws, taxis colourful but tatty buses and lorries crammed with people. Brown eyes staring at us with curiosity, need and sometimes bewilderment – sometimes friendliness and interest. Chai shops and wallas squatting selling anything that’s saleable, dusty grey-looking beings, thin and wrapped in rags, sometimes carrying bundles on their heads. Motor scooters with whole families, perched precariously on top. Colourful saried women, men in groups, talking, laughing, sometimes holding hands. Little stalls with charcoal burners cooking dosas, samosas, iddlies and of course large aluminium kettles filled with hot tea, milk and loads of sugar – Ahh, that famous Chai, one taste and memories come flooding back. Smell of urine, wood smoke, sewerage beedies and the sweet air of a hot climate.

  I feel a happiness well up inside and a smile transform my face. I’m just happy to be back in India, I really don’t know why I love it, it’s a total affront to my western conditioning – our slightly uptight, neurotic, prepackaged, tidy and neat and usually subliminally negative approach to life. It’s hard for me to fathom why I feel so much at home here, but I recognise the feeling after a few hours. I realize how, on some imperceptable level, I find it a strain to live within the Western psyche, where somehow we’ve forgotten to be what we are, possibly through so much emphasis on individuality which always gives the result of isolation. We finally make it to the Karmarpa Institute.

  Sister Thanissara

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Later, in November that year, she describes a meeting with the Dalai Lama in India.

  Dear Friends,

  At 12 o’clock a message comes that we’re to go to H.H. residence. We have to fill out a form, have our passports checked, then be searched. Finally we’re allowed to go up to his reception room, with a group of Westerners. There’s also a group of Western monks and nuns. H.H. Dalai Lama comes in and smiles at us all with that real friendliness he has. He sits and talks with us for 1½ hours about, answering questions on Dhamma [Buddha’s teaching]. He talks on karma, overcoming depression and fear, meditation on the mind, and especially about realizing the ‘natural mind’ when thought, memory and future expectation cease. That its own nature remains pure in spite of the reflections of all types of phenomena.

  This is the way to realize Shunyata, where the mind is like a multidimensional infinite mirror which is empty of any particular quality. He said this state needs to be realized more fully. The Tibetans call this natural mind, when realized, the Clear Light, and that its nature is peaceful, blissful and the source of Bodhi Citta, the heart of compassion. I find this similar to our understanding. They have practices of realizing this ‘natural mind’ when entering and leaving sleep consciousness and also during the death process. I think in our practice we can develop this, moment by moment when we abandon self view or when we practise non-attachment to the ephemeral world of samsara [suffering].

  He was also asked whether all religions lead to enlightenment. He replied that only those where the total eradication of ignorance was the result. He said people don’t want to face emptiness so there’s subtle grasping and therefore ignorance. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear H.H. reflecting on Dhamma. He likes to back his reflections with logic, sometimes his thought processes would get quite technical and involved. I wondered how much the group really understood of what he was talking about. Nevertheless everyone enjoyed his presence. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to make our offerings. I have him a photo of the community and explained we were disciples of Ajahn Chah, he seemed very interested. Also I gave him a personal gift of the lovely butterfly cup. He blessed the holy relics we’re carrying and all the holy bits and bobs that people have given me.

  My respect and love and gratitude to you all, Sister Thanissara.

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Ten

  Illness and Ageing

  Women’s medical knowledge was more frequently appealed to in the past than men’s. Wives such as Margery Paston were asked for remedies by their family. Nuns such as Hildegard of Bingen were famous for preparing herbal remedies for their community. Women acted as midwives until men proclaimed themselves as experts even in this field in the nineteenth century.

  Women studied medicine and acted as surgeons in medieval Italy, but were increasingly marginalized by university faculties of medicine. In the nineteenth century, just as men were taking over every area of medical treatment, by demanding paper qualifications, a few thoughtful women were reacting against male textbooks. Male books included the invaluable knowledge that women must be mad if they wanted sexual pleasure (because they could not feel it) and that they were aged by the time of the menopause. An American reformer, Eliza Farnham (1815–64) proclaimed the far more optimistic and verifiable view that the menopause offered relief from the burdens of maternal labour.

  These letters are remarkable for their constructive common sense, based both on observation of women and respect for the ways in which natural forces can be used to help tackle disease. Hildegard’s Book of Herbal Remedies is eight hundred years old, but still efficacious today. Her female preparedness to study the best usage is seen also in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s approach to smallpox vaccination. She implemented this on her son, three centuries before its widepread use. Her open mind realized that study of other cultures can teach us a great deal. Many lives would have been saved if only doctors had listened to her. She and Hildegard advocated a gentle balanced use of body and nature which is continued in the letter of the Buddhist nun, written in 1990 during illness in India.

  Sickness was more widespread among the poorer classes than the rich, though we know that many aristocrats were killed by viral diseases, smallpox, ’flu, appendicitis and illnesses which have only been conquered recently. Sewerage systems in England were only constructed in the nineteenth century, after the second cholera epidemic which affected so many middle-class families in Manchester and London. As well as disease, the poor were stricken by malnutrition and lack of decent housing.

  For all ranks, the death rate was high; mothers died as young as twenty-nine, on average, until the end of the nineteenth century. Expectation of old age was a luxury for most of the poor. Poor relief had begun under Elizabeth I, and was later replaced by the workhouse. However, working-class women often preferred to die on their own than to face the humiliation and deprivation of a workhouse.

  Literate women were relieved of that fear, but acknowledge in their writings the suffering caused by the process of ageing. Society offered little comfort to older women: either to be religious or a grandmother. Yet instead of limiting themselves to cultural role models, these letters show women using the space for spirituality in radical ways. Queen Victoria, like other grandmothers, enjoyed ordering her many grandchildren’s lives through her letters (to which most paid scant attention). George Sand rejected societal roles, both in her sex life and vigorous old age.

  Though deaths in the family were frequent in the past, and women often in charge of the laying-out of the corpse, by the nineteenth century they were increasingly excluded from the actual funeral, told they were too sensitive to bear public display of grief. Death was not the great leveller of gender. However, their letters show an ability to face up to death, and to help others to face the equally disturbing processes of ageing.

  The final part of this chapter deals with ways of facing death. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu makes typically acute, brave observations as she prepares to leave ‘this dirty world’. Over a hundred years later the feminist Harriet Martineau is equally tough in refusing facile consolation.

  THE DAUPHIN DIES

  Madame was the wife of Monsieur, the brother of Louis XIV. In these letters to the Duchess of Hanover, she describes male doctors’ treatment of illness and contrasts it with that of untrained governesses.

  10th March, 1712, Versailles

  You, too, will certainly be ag
hast when you hear how sorrow continues to smite us here. The doctors have made the same mistake again as they did in the case of the Dauphiness, because while the little Dauphin was all flushed with measles and in a sweat they bled him and then gave him an emetic, with the result that the poor child died during the operation, which shows clearly that it was the doctors who killed him. His little brother had exactly the same illness, but while the nine doctors were busy with the elder brother the younger one’s nurse shut herself up with her little prince and gave him some wine and a biscuit. Yesterday the child was very feverish, and the doctors wanted to bleed him also, but Madame de Ventadour and the prince’s under-governess, Madame de Villefort, protested vigorously against it. They absolutely refused to allow it to be done, and contented themselves with keeping the child nice and warm. He is now, by the grace of God, and to the doctors’ shame, recovering, but he would have been dead as surely as his brother if they had been allowed to have their way.

  13th March, 1712,

  Versailles I am sure there are at least a hundred duly canonised saints who were less worthy of canonisation than our late Dauphin, the second one, I mean, because, horrible to relate, we have lost three Dauphins in eleven months. One was forty-nine, one twenty-six, and the other five years old. I don’t think there can be another such instance in history. The Dauphin most certainly died of grief. He was extraordinarily fond of his wife, and it was sorrowing for her death that gave him his fever. For several days the fever ran an irregular course, but afterwards it returned every fourth day. They bled him. After his wife’s death his forehead came out in spots, which, however, did not prevent him from going out. It was not until Monday evening that he took to his bed. His skin became discoloured with many purple stains and spots, which were larger and quite different from the ordinary measles rash. They gave him stimulants and tried to make him sweat, but the perspiration would not flow freely. On Wednesday night, after everyone had gone to bed, he caused an altar to be brought to his bedroom and partook of holy communion with great devotion.

  TRANS AND ED. G.S. STEPHENSON, LETTERS OF MADAME (1937)

  THE USE OF A SMALLPOX VACCINATION

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu here admires Turkish skill in inventing a vaccination for smallpox, when it was still a killer in Europe. This letter is to a friend.

  Adrianople, 1 April 1717

  In my opinion, dear Sarah, I ought rather to quarrel with you for not answering my Nijmegen letter of August till December, than to excuse my not writing again till now. I am sure there is on my side a very good excuse for silence, having gone such tiresome land journeys, though I don’t find the conclusion of ’em so bad as you seem to imagine. I am very easy here and not in the solitude you fancy me; the great quantity of Greek, French, English and Italians that are under our protection make their court to me from morning till night, and I’ll assure you are many of ’em very fine ladies, for there is no possibility for a Christian to live easily under this government but by the protection of an ambassador, and the richer they are the greater their danger.

  Those dreadful stories you have heard of the plague have very little foundation in truth. I own I have much ado to reconcile myself to the sound of a word which has always given me such terrible ideas, though I am convinced there is little more in it than a fever, as a proof of which we passed through two or three towns most violently infected. In the very next house where we lay, in one of ’em, two persons died of it. Luckily for me I was so well deceived that I knew nothing of the matter, and I was made believe that our second cook who fell ill there had only a great cold. However, we left our doctor to take care of him, and yesterday they both arrived here in good health and I am now let into the secret that he has had the plague. There are many that ’scape of it, neither is the air ever infected. I am persuaded it would be as easy to root it out here as out of Italy and France, but it does so little mischief, they are not very solicitous about it and are content to suffer this distemper instead of our variety, which they are utterly unacquainted with.

  Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation. Every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated, people send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox. They make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross, but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm which is concealed. The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day and are in perfect health till the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize ’em and they keep to their beds two days, very seldom three. They have rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark, and in eight days’ time they are as well as before the illness. Where they are wounded there remains running sores during the distemper, which I don’t doubt is a great relief to it. Every year thousands undergo this operation, and the French ambassador says pleasantly that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of anyone who has died from it, and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son.

  I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too beneficial to them, not to expose to all their resentment the hardy weight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps, if I live to return, I may, however, have courage to war with them. Upon this occasion admire the heroism in the heart of your friend, etc, etc.

  ED. R. HALSBAND, THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1965)

  She carried out her decision and had her son vaccinated a year later.

  PREPARING FOR THE LAST JOURNEY

  The year before she died, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to Sir James Stewart, vividly depicting the trials of infirmity. Lord Bute is her son-in-law.

  Venice, 12 April 1761

  Sir,

  Though I am preparing for my last and longest journey, and stand on the threshold of this dirty world, my several infirmities like post horses ready to hurry me away, I cannot be insensible to the happiness of my native country, and am glad to see the prospect of a prosperity and harmony that I never was witness to. I hope my friends will be included in the public joy; and I shall always think Lady Fanny and Sir James Stewart in the first rank of those I wish to serve. Your conversation is a pleasure I would prefer to any other; but I confess even that cannot make me desire to be in London, especially at this time when the shadow of credit that I should be supposed to possess would attract daily solicitations, and gain me a number of enemies who would never forgive me the not performing impossibilities. If all people thought of power as I do, it would be avoided with as much eagerness as it is now sought. I never knew any person that had it who did not lament the load, though I confess (so infirm is human nature) they have all endeavoured to retain it at the same time they complained of it.

  Yo
u observe justly there is no happiness without an alloy, nor indeed any misfortune without some mixture of consolation, if our passions permitted us to perceive it. But alas! we are too imperfect to see on all sides; our wisest reflections (if the word wise may be given to humanity) are tainted by our hopes and fears: we all indulge views almost as extravagant as those of Phaeton, and are angry when we do not succeed in projects that are above the reach of mortality. The happiness of domestic life seems the most laudable as it is certainly the most delightful of our prospects, yet even that is denied, or at least so mixed ‘we think it not sincere or fear it cannot last’. A long series of disappointments have perhaps worn out my natural spirits and given a melancholy cast to my way of thinking. I would not communicate this weakness to any but yourself, who can have compassion even where your superior understanding condemns.

  I confess that though I am (it may be) beyond the strict bounds of reason pleased with my Lord Bute’s and my daughter’s prosperity I am doubtful whether I will attempt to be a spectator of it. I have so many years indulged my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I am unwilling to return to crowds and bustle, which would be unavoidable in London. The few friends I esteemed are now no more; the new set of people who fill the stage at present are too indifferent to me even to raise my curiosity.

  I now begin (very late, you’ll say) the worst effects of age, blindness excepted: I am grown timorous and suspicious; I fear the inconstancy of that goddess so publicly adored in ancient Rome and so heartily inwardly worshipped in the modern. I retain, however, such a degree of that uncommon thing called commonsense not to trouble the felicity of my children with my foreboding dreams, which I hope will prove as idle as the croaking of ravens or the noise of that harmless animal distinguished by the odious name of screech-owl. You will say, why then do I trouble you with my old wives’ prophecies? Need I tell you that it is one of the privileges of friendship to talk of your own follies and infirmities? You must then, nay you ought to, pardon my tiresome tattle in consideration of the real attachment with which I am unalterably, sir, your obliged and faithful humble servant,