The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  I should like to hold my knight

  Naked in my arms at eve,

  That he might be in ecstasy

  As I cushioned his head against my breast . . .

  Fair friend, charming and good,

  When shall I hold you in my power,

  And lie beside you for an hour,

  And amorous kisses give to you?

  Know that I would give almost anything

  To have you in my husband’s place;

  But only if you swear

  To do everything I desire.27

  Clearly women like Beatriz de Diaz, the twelfth-century Provençal lady who wrote this song of love and lust to her troubadour lover, declined to accept any definition of their bodies as disgusting, or any interference in their right to think for themselves. In a direct attack on the notion of women’s worthless physicality, the queens of courtly love like Eleanor of Aquitaine succeeded in establishing women’s higher value through their spiritual qualities of constancy and devotion. The fact that this was a real challenge to the power of men and not simply a courtly game is attested by the number of real-life incidents in which a husband, driven by rage against his wife’s ‘court’, and with no evidence of adultery or misconduct, killed her troubadour.28 Safer under the circumstances were the ‘queens of love’ who relied for their music and poetry on one of the numerous women troubadours known to have plied their trade throughout Europe, or on poets like Marie de France whose lyric and narrative genius influenced the whole course of European literature.

  With the advent of the Renaissance, attitudes towards women softened yet further, the tenor of the new approaches quite at variance with the strident hysterical abuse of the old. For the first time in history a proto-feminist, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, was prepared to argue against the doctrinal diktat of male supremacy; his book, provocatively tided Of the Nobility and Superiority of the Female Sex (1505), roundly challenged the authority of the Bible on the inferiority of women:

  Adam means Earth; Eve stands for Life; ergo, Adam is the product of nature, and Eve the creation of God. Adam was admitted to the Paradise for the sole purpose that Eve might be created . . .29

  Von Nettesheim was not preaching to deaf ears. Other men of influence were raising their voices in defence of woman and her right to share in the new bounty of humanist learning and thought. The Italian nobleman Castiglione, diplomat, cosmopolitan, and author of that bible of the age, The Courtier, summed up the new zeitgeist in one sentence: ‘The virtues of the mind are as necessary to a woman as to a man.’30

  As literacy spread like bushfire in comparison with the speed of its growth in previous centuries, numbers of women for the first time grasped the pen and with it its power to define. Small wonder, then, that there were many old scores to settle. As in these extracts from the leading women writers of sixteenth-century France, a principal grievance was the custom of enforced marriage, indeed husbands themselves:

  The old man kissed her, and it is as though a slug has dragged itself across her charming face . . .

  . . . He resembled not so much a man as some sort of monster, for he had a huge heavy head [and] a very short fat neck perched atop miserably hunched shoulders . . . from his belly there issued a fetid breath, through a putrid, black, sunken mouth . . .

  The moment they come home they bar the door [and] eat most untidily . . . in bed they wear great nightcaps two fingers thick, a nightshirt held together with rusty pins down past their navels, heavy wool stockings that come halfway up their thighs, and as they rest their heads on a warmed pillow that smells of melted grease, their sleep is accompanied by coughs and emissions of excrement that fill the bedcovers . . .31

  The final vignette, for all its racy colloquialism, was written by a woman more famous for her lyric gift, the brilliant Louise Labé, poet, linguist, musician, horsewoman, and leader of the ‘Lyons School’ of writers where she reigned supreme as France’s greatest lyric poet of the age. As this shows, within an extraordinarily short time of obtaining access to the world of letters, women were displaying an often dazzling versatility and intellectual power. Foremost among these pioneer feminist intellectuals was Christine de Pisan, the fifteenth-century Italian scholar equally distinguished in history, philosophy, biography and poetry. Though lionized by kings and enormously successful in her own time, Christine never abandoned her loyalty to her sex, seeking to restore women’s past achievements to the historical record and tirelessly defending women ancient and modern against the woman-haters who attacked her in person and the sex in general indiscriminately. Christine’s most passionately held belief was in women’s right to education, which she argued with the clarity that made her quoted and translated for generations to follow:

  If it were customary to send little girls to school and to teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences. Indeed, maybe they would understand them better, for just as women’s bodies are softer than men’s, so their understanding is more sharp . . . There is nothing that teaches a reasonable creature so much as experience of many different things . . .32

  Christine’s cool lucidity was in marked contrast with the angry heat of her opponents. The intensity of the struggle in which she became embroiled indicates the deeper importance of the issue of learning for women. For this was no academic squabble; it was the redrawing of the battle lines. Where previously the division between the knowledgeable and the uninformed had been between rulers and ruled, it now reformulated along the sexual divide. With the emergence of the modern world, learning unfolded as the high road to freedom and the future. Study therefore took on a new, post-medieval significance – with the rebirth of learning it was seen less as a passive act of contemplation, more as the deployment of an intellectual tool-kit for dismantling the deus ex machina to see how it worked. The new humanists, flushed with the joy of self-discovery, could spend many a happy hour on the great question of ‘what a piece of work is man’. They did not, however, view with the same unalloyed enthusiasm the prospect of a woman approaching them with her spanner in her hand.

  For women still denied the right to public space, one obvious solution was to resort to private work – and for a sex so constantly berated for being stupid, it would have been only logical to look to education as the remedy. But this would be feminine logic, and as such held no power to persuade the masculine mind. Much genuine thought and effort, in contrast, went into confirming and maintaining the pristine condition of women’s ignorance, which also had the beneficial side-effect of confirming the original diagnosis: ‘Books destroy women’s brains, who have little enough of themselves.’33

  The Chinese, with the invention of writing, had created also the Mandarin class to administer it, rather than allow the powerful weapon of literacy to fall into unhallowed hands. In a hollow historical echo of this process, Western societies from the early centuries of the second millennium all found their own techniques for ensuring that the ‘new learning’ did not penetrate the great under-class of the female sex. The Reformation therefore did not reform very much at all for the women: the Renaissance was no rebirth for those born already into the wrong bodies. The novel creed of humanism now reversed the original act of creation – where previously God had created man in his own image, now man was busy making a god of himself. This inevitably called for some refurbishment of woman to make her a fit companion for such a piece of work. Her task was not to fret after her own intellectual desire, but to study to become a perfect partner and consort. ‘Accomplishments’ thus smoothly supersede any idea of personal achievements, and tailoring herself to the procrustean bed of marriage became a woman’s highest imperative. What price learning for women in the face of all this?

  The continuing conviction that women had no place, function, future nor hope outside marriage accounts for the strength of the resistance of education for women, even after the ‘glorious dawn’ of the Renaissance. F
or a woman could have no use for it, in the role to which God and nature had called her – there were no economic advantages in educating women, since they could never earn a living by their brains, and there was every chance of direct economic disadvantage, since an educated woman could so easily price herself out of the marriage market. Even if she succeeded in securing a husband, her marriage could be poisoned from the start: the French historian Agrippa d’Aubigné was not the only sixteenth-century father to sympathize warmly with his daughters’ desire to study with their brothers, while fearing the ‘bad effects’ of this, ‘contempt for housekeeping . . . and for a husband less clever than oneself’ and as a result, ‘discord’.34

  The risk of learning, then, was that it promoted a woman beyond her ‘place’, and the most violent of the responses to educated women were clearly designed to return them to that black hole. The Italian classicist Nogarola, hailed as ‘the Divine Isotta’ for her intellectual brilliance at eighteen, had only two years to enjoy her work before she was subject to a brutal reminder of her sexuality; in 1438 she and her sister Ginevra, also a famous scholar, were falsely accused of promiscuity and incest. Broken, Nogarola abandoned her studies, fled Verona, and lived thereafter in total seclusion in her mother’s house, devoting herself to sacred texts. Other women like Mira Bai, the Indian poet of the sixteenth century, were persecuted for challenging social and legal regulations by moving into the public world; some were forcibly returned to the private sphere, like Ninon de l’Enclos, locked up in a convent in seventeenth-century France because her study of Epicurean philosophy showed ‘a lack of religious respect’. The English nun Mary Ward, who attempted to found an institute for the education of women (one of the very earliest proposals for a women’s college), fared even worse at the hands of the Catholic Church – she was imprisoned in a tiny, windowless cell from which the rotting body of a dead sister had only just been removed, and almost died herself as a result.

  Before her imprisonment Mary had been a great traveller in pursuit of her mission, and this in itself was problematic in an era that viewed unchaperoned women with much the same horror as masterless men. When women attempted to bring the fruits of their private study into the public arena as teachers or preachers, defying the scriptural ban against any such thing, the punishment could be savage:

  Cambridge, December 1653. Complaint was forthwith made to William Pickering, then Mayor, that two women were preaching . . . He asked their names and their husbands’ names. They told him: they had no husband but Jesus Christ, and he sent them. Upon this the Mayor grew angry, called them whores, and issued his warrant to the Constable to whip them at the Market Cross till the blood ran down their bodies . . . The executioner . . . stripped them naked to the waist, put their arms into the whipping post and executed the Mayor’s warrant . . . so that their flesh was miserably cut and torn.35

  All these were of course individual cases. But the cumulative effect of the denial of women’s right to learn, to study, to share their knowledge, even to think, was serious. The decline of the nunneries coincided with the growth of grammar schools and universities, from both of which women were barred, and which from the first jealously guarded their monopoly on knowledge: in one celebrated case of 1322, a woman healer, Jacoba Felicie, was brought to trial by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris for ‘illegal practice’. Six people testified that she had succeeded where university-trained physicians had failed, and this ensured her conviction.

  At the entry of the human race into the modern age, then, educational chances for women in the brave new world were strangled at birth. With the simultaneous demise of the convent movement, there remained no place of women’s learning for studious young girls to join, no pool of older, educated women as teachers, and no escape route from men, children, diapers and domestic servitude. The new knowledge stirring was not for women. It is one of the ironies of the emergence from the Dark Ages and the world renaissance of learning that, while it freed women from some of the darker fears born of men’s ignorance, it merely served to confirm others. Woman might no longer be stigmatized as a vagabond vulva or captious, capricious, capacious cunt; but she still came forth with all the dignity of one of the favourite freak shows of the Middle Ages, the acephalous monster exposed to public scorn at a fair. ‘Women do not grow worse by being educated,’ pleaded Christine de Pisan. But until this was generally recognized, all that women could do was to tend their husbands, houses and babies – and wait.

  When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture her gift had put her to. Indeed I would venture that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  III

  Dominion and Domination

  ‘O come and be my mate!’ said the Eagle to the Hen;

  ‘I love to soar, but then

  I want my mate to rest

  Forever in the nest!’

  Said the Hen, ‘I cannot fly,

  I have no wish to try,

  But I joy to see my mate, careering through the sky!’

  They wed, and cried, ‘Ah, this is Love, my own!’

  And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.

  CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, ‘Wedded Bliss’

  7

  Woman’s Work

  Real solemn history I cannot be interested in . . . the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all.

  JANE AUSTEN, Northanger Abbey

  Women have worked, constantly, continuously, always and everywhere, in every type of society in every part of the world since the beginning of human time.

  HEATHER GORDON CREMONESI

  An African woman, asked why her husband walked unburdened while she carried the load, replied, ‘What would I do if we met a lion and he was carrying the load?’ We asked, how often does he meet a lion? How often does she carry the load? What does she do if she meets a lion – while carrying her load?

  DIARY OF AN ENGLISH MISSIONARY

  In 1431, convicted only of wearing men’s clothes, Joan of Arc was burned to death in France. In the next decade, the Chinese were decisively thrust out of what then became the timebomb of Viet Nam and African architects and masons began to work on the great wall of Zimbabwe. By the mid century, the English had been driven out of France, Gutenberg was presenting Europe with the first printed book and international scholars were hastening to the pride of the Songhay empire, the University of Timbuktu. But the Portuguese were already casting eyes of greed and envy on African splendour, and elsewhere, too, imperialist expansion was the order of the day; in South America the Incas gobbled up lesser kingdoms to feed their hungry altars, while the Ottoman Turks casually terminated the Byzantine empire with the founding of their own, and Ivan III threw off the Mongol yoke to make himself the first tsar of all the Russias.1

  As the century turned, the world was registering Columbus’s discovery of the New World; less than twenty years later, the first black slaves were en route to America. Other voyages of discovery (Vasco da Gama, Magellan) were echoed on land by explorations of the interior frontiers (the Renaissance, the revolt of Protestantism). Together these produced the first permanent colonial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, one point of stability in a world turned upside down: elsewhere, the Portuguese swept through Africa like bush fire, destroying every civilization in their path, while England fell to Puritans and levellers, and killed its king. In India another great empire, the Mughal (Mogul) dynasty, crumbled like its African counterparts with the death of Aurungzebe in 1707 while further East the might of the Manchu succeeded in establishing the last great dynasty of China’s hist
ory.

  Throughout all this women everywhere tended their children, milked their cattle, tilled their fields, washed, baked, cleaned and sewed, healed the sick, sat by the dying and laid out the dead – just as at this moment some women, somewhere are doing to this day. The extraordinary continuity of women’s work, from country to country and age to age, is one of the reasons for its invisibility; the sight of a woman nursing a baby, stirring a cook-pot or cleaning a floor is as natural as the air we breathe, and like the air it attracted no scientific analysis before the modern period. While there was work to be done, women did it, and behind the vivid foreground activities of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due.

  For the unremarked, taken-for-granted status of women’s work applied equally to their lives, and both combined to ensure that what women did went largely absent from the historical record. Official documents might carefully note the annual output of a farmer, for example, his total of meat, milk, eggs or grain, without ever questioning how much of that was produced by his wife’s labour. The question itself would not apply – since the wife belonged to her husband by every law of the land and by her own consent too, then her labour and the fruits of it were also his. Consequently the idea of a separate reckoning would have been laughable. By definition, then, the only women whose activities were so recorded were not typical of the working majority – widows, for instance, seeking legal permission to carry on the trade of their late husbands, or deserted or runaway wives forced to fend for themselves. A women’s history must seize with delight on the rare moments when a survey of property held in a bishop’s name throws up a thriving bawdy-house keeper like Parnell Portjoie, with her neatly named ponce Nicholas Pluckrose in 1290, or the equally enterprising Eva Giffard of Waterford – this fourteenth-century Irishwoman entered a sheepfold by night and tore the wool off twenty sheep with her bare hands, to sell or spin as her own – but these women were exceptional.2