The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Yet there were ways round this. Women could apply for individual licences, they could learn from one another like Trotula’s ‘Ladies of Salerno’ or from the barber-surgeons who operated without university restriction, or they could move to a more hospitable locale. By a devious blend of these techniques, and with the stiffening of a fair dose of female grit and gumption, certain women succeeded even in the darkest times in ensuring that medicine was never wholly a male monopoly. Between 1389 and 1497 in Frankfurt alone, for instance, there were fifteen licensed women doctors in practice, including three Jewish women who specialized in Arab ophthalmology. In the fifteenth century, German women were presenting medical theses for higher degrees at the universities, and in the sixteenth, a Swiss midwife-surgeon perfected new techniques of Caesarean section which in the hands of male surgeons had made virtually no progress since the days of the eponymous Julius.

  This woman, Marie Colinet of Berne, was also the first to use a magnet to extract a piece of metal from a patient’s eye, a breakthrough technique still in use today. (This successful innovation was subsequently attributed to Marie’s husband, even though the only record of the operation was her husband’s description of watching her perform it.) In Italy, too, while some universities had followed France’s lead and barred women from attending, in the fourteenth century Bologna had appointed Dorotea Bocchi to succeed her father as professor of medicine and moral philosophy. Bologna also struck a famous blow for women by appointing 25-year-old Maria di Novella as professor and head of mathematics at the same time. The university’s continuing tradition of medical women is demonstrated by the death there in 1526 of the first known woman pathologist. By tireless experimentation this pioneer had developed a revolutionary technique for withdrawing blood and replacing it with coloured dye, thus allowing the circulatory system to be studied in great detail. ‘Consumed by her labours,’ as her grieving fiancé recorded, she died at only nineteen.28

  Women’s contribution to medicine remained however a flickering light, whose fitful gleam was always liable to hostile challenge. The only work to which women could lay a solid and inalienable claim, as the modern world took shape, was the work that could not be done by men, work that demanded the possession of a female body, breasts and vagina, for the fulfilment of the conditions of contract. In practice, this meant acting and whoring: and it is no coincidence that throughout their history the two have so frequently been confused.

  Of the two, acting initially represented no small triumph for women, since their employment in many countries broke down a rigid historic convention that the female parts in drama were always performed by males, a custom dating back to the very dawn of sacred drama among the Greeks. The transition to female participation had not been painless. The first women to appear on the London stage, a troupe of touring French actresses, brought the city to a standstill, and caused a national scandal. Frothing at the mouth, a leading Puritan, William Prynne, recorded the event:

  Some French women, or monsters rather, in Michaelmas term 1629, attempted to act a French play at the playhouse in Blackfriars; an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than whorish attempt, to which there was great resort.29

  Prynne was not alone in his view. The French actresses also failed to win the approbation of the international drama critics of the London mob, and they were ‘hissed, hooted and pippen-pelted from the stage’.

  More damaging than a few flying apples, however, was the immediate and lasting connection of this new profession for women with that traditionally hailed as the oldest: prostitution.30 Women living independent lives, not married unless it suited them to be, earning and spending their own money, exhibiting their bodies to the gaze of any common stinkard who cared to put down his tuppence at the door – what could they be but whores? When the actress was also passionate, self-willed and autocratic, when she was known to the town as the Earl of Rochester’s mistress but was clearly mistress of no one but herself, then the attribution was certain. The fact that Rochester’s ‘mistress’, the celebrated Elizabeth Barry, created more than a hundred leading roles during her stage career never distracted public attention for long from her equally vigorous and varied sex life; and when, in a performance of The Rival Queens, Mrs Barry was so transported by emotion as to stab a real-life rival in the back, causing grievous bodily harm to Mrs Boutel’s stays, all that the public saw was a bawdy-house brawl, with two town trulls fighting over a customer.

  Elizabeth Barry and the other first-generation actresses were women on a frontier every bit as much as their American sisters who had the courage to ‘go West’ a couple of centuries later. Other women pushing back the artistic frontiers during the English Restoration, along with Barry, her rivals and colleagues, were those who for the first time succeeded in obtaining payment for something women had always previously done without charge: intellectual work. Among the millions of women who have ever written or wanted to write, the name of Aphra Behn rises supreme. Not the ‘first woman writer’ of the modern period – the peerless American poet Anne Bradstreet who wrote under the considerably more difficult conditions of colonial settlement and eight children antedated Aphra, as did others – but the first woman known to have made a living as a professional writer, selling her work and supporting herself on the proceeds of it. During her creative career of almost twenty years, this bold and brilliant woman, ex-governess, former spy and world traveller, conquered the theatre, previously an all-male domain; she wrote ten plays in the 1680s alone, in addition to several long narrative poems, five translations from French, and five novels, thereby laying claim to another ‘first’, the first novelist in English. Of course, they said she was a whore.

  Since the term ‘whore’ was so freely used against women who did not sell their bodies for money, it had very little power to insult the genuine ‘daughters of the game’ – taunted as such by one of the other mistresses of Charles II, the Duchess of Portsmouth, Nell Gwynn sturdily replied, ‘As for me, it is my profession, I do not pretend to anything better.’31 Despite the howls of the moralists, many women worldwide have echoed Nell’s view. Throughout history millions of women have been active in the prostitution services, not merely as the ‘poor bloody infantry’ but as commanders too: of ten brothel-owners or ‘stewe-houlders’ of the London Bankside fined by an ecclesiastical court in 1505, four were women, presiding at ‘le Hert’, ‘le Hertyshorne’ (hartshorn was a well-known aphrodisiac), ‘le Crosse Keyes’, and ‘le fflower delyce’.32 For it was a living, and one whose advantages continued to outweigh the often punitive deterrents invoked against it. One of those advantages, without a doubt, was its freedom from the constraints that respectable married women laboured under. No wives, however, saw it that way – both sides in fact scorned and pitied the other for their wretched, ground-down existence at the hands of exploitative men.

  With the hindsight of an era struggling with the impact of demands for sexual equality and economic parity, it is easy to misjudge the experience of women’s work in the pre-industrial period. Often hard, long, and demanding, it was not inherently and invariably oppressive, as the evidence of women’s active and varied roles, their vigour, competence and enterprise, abundantly illustrates. Work could in fact provide women, legally without rights or even a separate identity, with on-going outlets for their ability, and a strong measure of mobility, autonomy, equality and economic independence. While men controlled the land overall, their control did not deny women an important stake in the tilling, planting and growing that went on; and women for their part controlled the produce, both at a household micro-level, and at the macro-level of the disposal of surplus via trade or commerce. In a very real sense, therefore, man and wife working a smallholding were partners in a way quite unrecognized by the hollow letter of the law. Centred in her home, her family and her work, still at this stage a holy trinity, three in one, a woman could be proud, self-sufficient, strong and free. It all sounds too good to be true. It was. And with the coming of t
he machine age, it was to be swept away as if it had never been.

  8

  Revolution, the Great Engine

  Every revolution contains in it something of evil.

  EDMUND BURKE

  . . . at every house women and children making cartridges, running bullets, making wallets, baking biscuits, crying and bemoaning and at the same time animating their husbands and sons to fight for their liberties though not knowing whether they should ever see them again . . .

  EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AT LEXINGTON IN 1774

  For us, with heat and work, ‘tis often known,

  Not only sweat, but blood runs trickling down,

  Our wrists and fingers: still our work demands

  The constant action of our labouring hands.

  MARY COLLIER, The Woman’s Labour (1739)

  Revolutions are not to be evaded.

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Husband, home, family – for centuries, millennia even, the lives of women have revolved around this holy trinity – immediate, eternal, all-engrossing, in a safe and continuing pattern of almost changeless domesticity. Some, however, were born to the trial of times when patterns did not merely change, but collapsed into cataclysmic violence, when systems deemed perpetual melted into air, and with their solemn temples and gorgeous palaces, left not a wrack behind. At such times women faced a double burden, of bearing up to the shock of the new, while still holding together the shreds and shards of the old; while one upraised arm saluted the new dawn, the other still cradled a baby or hoed a field; and even in the midst of a revolution, there had to be food, love, warmth, shelter, light and life, or as much of each as the female fighter on the home front could muster.

  Domestic duties, though, generally proved no impediment to revolutionary activity when women’s hearts and minds were enlisted in the cause. Thereafter, in war, as in work, it was remarkable how much women were able to do, and how little they were held back by notions either of bodily weakness or mental incapacity. From the first stirrings of revolutionary feeling in America, women were well to the fore, both in active engagement and in the courage of independent thought that fuelled it; in Bacon’s 1676 rebellion, a female lieutenant was the first to gather his followers together, riding up and down the back country as his personal emissary, while a second, Sarah Grendon, was personally exempted by name from the subsequent free pardon because she had been such a ‘great encourager and assister in the late horrid Rebellion’. Another Sarah, Mistress Drummond of Jamestown, Virginia, showed the spirit that animated all these women when she responded to the governor’s threats of death for her part in the proceedings by breaking a stick under his nose with the scornful line: ‘I fear the power of England no more than a broken straw!’1 After the defeat of the revolt, Sarah’s pugnacious resolve continued to be her family’s lifeline, when by the ferocity and persistence of her petitioning she finally succeeded in winning back the Drummond estates sequestered by the English Crown; just 100 years too early to witness the tables turned and the British swept into the sea.

  When the American Revolution formally broke out, much was made of women’s eagerness for the fray. Every nubile female colonist was supposed to be agog to see all the menfolk in arms, and scornful of shirkers: the New-York Gazette of 2 October 1775 ran the story of a group of young girls at a quilting frolic who stripped a young ‘Tory’ loyalist to the waist and tarred and feathered him with molasses and weeds. Other apocryphal accounts told of women forming military-style companies, putting on uniform, or showing ‘masculine valour’ at moments of crisis. Women themselves made the requisite heroic noises: Eliza Wilkinson spoke for many a valiant widow when she wrote to urge all wives to volunteer their husbands, for ‘if I had one who refused to enter the field for his country’s cause, I believe I should despise him from my soul.’2

  Despite the evident propaganda value of these broadsides, they did not convince one and all. Sarah Hodkins was a 25-year-old mother of two, her second baby only newly born, when her husband enlisted in the militia besieging Boston in 1775. She could not reconcile herself to his absence, writing ‘I look for you almost every day, but I don’t allow myself to depend on any thing for I find there is nothing . . . but trouble and disappointments.’ Sending sarcastic regards to his commanding officer – ‘tell him I have wanted his bed fellow pretty much these cold nights’ – she reproached him for leaving his wife and children: ‘I have got a Swete Babe almost six months old but have got no father for it.’3 Above all, Sarah exerted all the pressure she could muster to prevent her husband from enlisting for another three years, for reasons clearly apparent from this demand of the Connecticut Courant of 8 September 1777:

  How is it that the poor soldiers’ wives in many of our towns do go from door to door, begging a supply of the necessaries of life . . . and are turned away, notwithstanding the solemn agreements of the towns to supply such?

  For one loyal soldier, it was eventually too much. In 1779 Sergeant Samuel Glover, a veteran of engagements at Brandywine, German-town and Stony Point and unpaid for fifteen months, led a mutiny of ‘his Brother Soldiers’. He was shot. His widow petitioned the American Assembly for relief, demanding ‘to ask you, what must be the feeling of the Man . . . with Poverty staring him in the face and Injustice oppresses him and his family?’4

  Wives like these knew that if they lost their husbands they lost not merely a partner, lover and friend, but their very prop and mainstay. For some, however, there would be a chance of marrying again, and colonial widowers were breathtakingly brisk at securing new wives before their beds had time to grow cold behind the dear departed. For a mother old enough to have sons of military age, though, there could be no replacing a darling boy, and conflict on this score ran high. In the famous Livingston family, when an aunt opined that ‘it was no wonder Mr Washington was so weak, since Gendemen did not order their Sons into the Army’, and told her nephew in front of his mother that he should enlist ‘whether his Parents consented or not’, ‘there arose’, wrote an observer with masterly understatement, ‘a little Sharpness among the Ladies.’ What Mistress Livingston had to fear is all too evident from this army chaplain’s record of the last words of ‘a youth, dying of his wounds’ after the battle of 13 September 1776:

  Will you not send for my mother? If she were here to nurse me I could get well: O my mother, how I wish I could see her, she was opposed to my enlisting, I am now very sorry, do let her know I am sorry.5

  This is not to underestimate the strength of American women’s commitment to the ‘glorious cause’, which depended upon their active support in a wide number of ways. Their agreement to the 1769 boycott of all English tea, luxury goods, silks, satins and broadcloth was crucial to the early resistance – at one level, it was the resistance – and their efforts alone supplied the consequent shortfall: the women of Middletown, Massachusetts, wove 20,522 yards of cloth in 1769, while Lancaster in Pennsylvania topped even that with 35,000 during the same period. The American men were well aware of the power of ‘the female artillery’. During a later wave of boycott activity, when the ‘goodwives’ of Edenton in North Carolina took ‘the earliest known political activity of American women in the American colonies’ by organizing a formal resolution to implement the decision of Congress, their action was widely praised and publicized.6

  Nor was the women’s activity all of the distaff and tea-table sort. When hostilities began, so did the examples of female heroism on both sides. Among the British, Lady Harriet Acland, wife of the commander of grenadiers in Burgoyne’s offensive in the summer of 1777, won undying renown when her husband was wounded and taken prison in the battle. Commandeering a small boat, she sailed down the Hudson by night under sniper fire, penetrated the enemy defences, and at daybreak ventured into the mouth of the American guns to demand her husband. Even more astonishingly in view of his terrible injuries (John Dyke Acland had been shot through the stomach and both legs), Harriet not only kept
him alive through the hazards of the return journey, but nursed him back to full health.

  No less resolute was Baroness Riedesel, another British commander’s wife. Arriving in America with three daughters under five, the Baroness nevertheless stuck by her husband’s side despite all reversals; once she had to save her daughters’ lives by hiding them beneath her own body under direct fire, and on another occasion she kept them and the rest of the British survivors alive for six days without food in a cellar awash with excrement before relief arrived. Women were involved, too, in the fighting itself. The Republican heroine Mary Ludwig Hays had already won the nickname of ‘Pitcher Molly’ for her courage in bringing water to the cannoneers at the height of the battle. When her husband, a barber-surgeon turned artillery sergeant, was struck down, Mary took his place at the cannon, where her coolness passed into legend. After a cannon ball passed between her legs, tearing away her petticoat, she merely looked down and ‘observed, with unconcern, that it was lucky it did not pass higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else; and so continued her occupation’.7