The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  7Diner, p. 6; Gould Davis, p. 140; Boulding, pp. 193–4.

  8For a discussion of the surprising range of privileges these women could command, see Julia Leslie in Holden (q.v.), pp. 91–3.

  9Leghorn and Parker, pp. 204–5.

  10Armstrong, p. 122.

  11MacCurtain and Ó’Corrain, pp. 10–11.

  12Anne J. Lane (ed.), Mary Ritter Beard: a Sourcebook (New York, 1977), p. 223.

  13Russell, p. 362.

  14Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1986).

  15Angela M. Lucas, Women in the Middle Ages: Religion, Marriage and Letters (1983), pp. 38–42.

  16Lucas, p. 141.

  17De Riencourt, p. 167.

  18The Lawes Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632), written by the anonymous, ‘T.E.’, p. 141.

  19Paradise Lost, Book IV, 635–8.

  20Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft, (1965), p. 54.

  21Jean Bodin, De La Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580), p. 225.

  22Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. B. Nicholson (1886), p. 227.

  23O’Faolain, pp. 220–1 and p. 224.

  24Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (1984), p. 143 and p. 53 – see pp. 51–5 for the story of this attractive and generous personality.

  25Hughes, p. 94.

  26Margaret Wade Labarge, Women in Medieval Life (1986), pp. 3–4.

  27Raymond Hill and Thomas G. Burgin (eds.), An Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours (1941), p. 96.

  28Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (1956), p. 96. Note that the radical assertion of courtly love that women’s love was certainly as strong as men’s, and usually stronger, was still a live issue in the nineteenth century – see the climactic Chapter 23 of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), and Henry James’s Lord Warburton in Portrait of a Lady (1881): it’s for life, Miss Archer, it’s for life!’

  29Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology (1946), p. 91.

  30O’Faolain, p. 202.

  31The first extract was written by Hélisenne de Crenne, author of the first psychological novel in French, Les Angoysses qui procèdent d’Amour, contenant trois parties composées par dame Hélisenne de Crenne laquelle exhorte toutes personnes a ne pas suivre folle amour (Painful Tribulations occasioned by Love, comprising three parts composed by Lady Hélisenne de Crenne, who exhorts everyone not to follow the madness of love) in 1538. The second is taken from Jeanne de Flore (pseud. Jeanne Galliarde), Contes Amoureux, touchant la punition que fait Vénus de ceux qui condamnent et mésprisent le vray amour (Amorous tales, regarding the punishment by Venus of those who condemn and scorn true love), addressed ‘to noble ladies in love’ in 1541. The third comes from the Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Debate of Folly and Love) by Louise Labé. All are cited by Evelyne Sullerot in Women on Love: Eight Centuries of Feminine Writing (1980), pp. 92–3.

  32Christine de Pizan, Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. B. Anslay (London, 1985), Bk. I, Ch II.

  33This and a large number of similar views are expressed by the Abbot Antronius in Erasmus’ dramatized colloquy on reactionary and progressive attitudes to women’s education – see Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. N. Bailey (3 vols, 1900), II, 114–19.

  34Agrippa D’Aubigny, Oeuvres Complètes, E. Réaume and F. de Caussade (Paris, 1873), I, 445.

  35Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers (2 vols, 1753), I, 84 ff.

  Chapter 7 Woman’s Work

  1For Joan of Arc, see Marina Warner’s splendid Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism (1982). Other dates and events are taken from The Times Atlas of World History.

  2For Parnell, see Burford, p. 74. This is of course a pseudonym, ‘Parnell’ being a recognized name for a prostitute and ‘Portjoie’ boasting of her professional ability to ‘bring pleasure’. For Eva, see MacCurtain and Ó’Corrain, p. 22.

  3W. I. Thomas, p. 124.

  4The working women of Greece are described by Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Demosthenes, Xenophon and many others; those of Rome by Ovid, Horace, Plautus, Martial, etc. For a useful digest and list of source materials, see the Oxford Classical Dictionary, pp. 1139–40. A fascinating discussion of the women musicians of ancient Greece is to be found in Yves Bessières’ and Patricia Niedzwicki’s, Women and Music, Women of Europe Supplement No. 22 (Commission of the European Communities, October 1985); figures taken from p. 9.

  5Lewenhak, p. 33.

  6For the heavy work of women, including this portering episode, see Lewenhak, pp. 49, 77, 88 and 122–3.

  7Erasmus, Christiani Matrimonii Institutio (1526); O’Faolain, p. 194.

  8Lewenhak, p. 111.

  9O’Faolain, p. 272.

  10Jean de la Bruyère, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. J. Benda (1951), p. 333.

  11Klein, p. 9.

  12Jacques de Cambry, Voyage dans la Finistère (1799); O’Faolain, p. 272; and statistics of labourers’ pay, pp. 266–7.

  13For women’s much lower wages, see A. Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century (1909), p. 131 and Alice Clark’s magisterial survey, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), pp. 65–6.

  14J. W. Willis Bund, Worcester County Records, (Worcester, 1900), I, 337.

  15O’Faolain, p. 273.

  16M. Phillips and W. S. Tomkinson, English Women in Life and Letters (Oxford, 1927), p, 76.

  17Lewenhak, pp. 42–3.

  18Proverbs, 31, 13–27.

  19O’Faolain, pp. 265–6.

  20Libro di Buoni Costumi (The Book of Good Customs), ed. A. Schiaffini (Florence, 1956), pp. 126–8.

  21Gies, p. 60; and see Patricia Franks, Grandma Was a Pioneer (Canada, 1977), p. 25.

  22Le Grand Aussy, Voyage d’Auvergne (Paris, 1788), p. 281.

  23Edwardes, p. 250.

  24Lewenhak, p. 124.

  25Le Livre de la Bourgeoisie de la Ville de Strasbourg 1440–1530, ed. C. Wittmer and C. J. Meyer (3 vols, Strasbourg and Zurich, 1948–61), I, 443, 499, 504, 822, 857, 862, 1071.

  26With very rare exceptions: one woman from the North of England, Mariona Kent, rose to become a member of the council of a guild, the York Merchant Adventurers in 1474–5. In other guilds women could occasionally inherit a membership from a deceased husband, and even more interestingly transfer that coveted membership to a second husband, but such membership never gave women the full rights and privileges enjoyed by men. France and Italy boasted some all-women craft guilds, but their influence was necessarily limited.

  27Diane Hutten, ‘Women in Fourteenth-Century Shrewsbury’ in Lindsay Charles and Lorna Duffin, Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (1985).

  28Margaret Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the late Nineteenth Century (1986), pp. 54–7.

  29J. Q. Adams, The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert (New Haven, Oxford and London, 1917), p. 69.

  30Society, especially that section of it writing books about prostitution (see The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution by Lujo Basserman, 1967, and The Oldest Profession: An Illustrated History of Prostitution by Hilary Evans, 1979, and many others) insist on calling this the ‘oldest profession’ of women. It is a perfect paradigm of the degradation of women that the exact opposite is true. The oldest profession of women was the priesthood, when they served the Great Goddess and later her phallic supplanters. Prostitution by contrast did not evolve until the stage of urban organization. The idea that the first real employment women ever had was to minister to the needs of men makes, however, a very satisfactory historical fiction.

  31Hilary Evans, p. 73.

  32Burford, p. 115.

  Chapter 8 Revolution, the Great Engine

  1Roger Thomson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (1974), p. 106.

  2Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character 1775–1883 (Chapel Hill, North Carolin
a, 1979), pp. 30–1 and pp. 35–6.

  3Sarah’s poignant and expressive letters are discussed by Robert Middlekauf in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763–89 (New York and Oxford, 1982), p. 537. Sarah was luckier than many women – the husband for whom her ‘heart aked’ finally came home to her and their children, in one piece.

  4Royster, pp. 296–7.

  5Royster, p. 166.

  6For the record of the women’s activity, and further discussion, see William P. Cumming and Hugh Rankin, The Fate of the Nation: the American Revolution through Contemporary Eyes (1975), pp. 28–9.

  7For Lady Harriet Acland, see Mark M. Boatner, Encyclopaedia of the American Revolution (New York, 1973), p. 4. Baroness Riedesel wrote her own story in what has become an invaluable source book, The Voyage of Discovery to America (1800). ‘Pitcher Molly’ Hays is described in Cumming and Rankin, p. 215.

  8B. Whitelock, Memorials of English Affairs (1732), p. 398. The women’s petition was finally presented to the House of Commons on 5 May 1649. A decent, dignified document arguing cogently for women’s rights on the basis of both law and natural justice, it anticipates later feminist insistence that women’s rights are only the human rights due to every member of society.

  9Lady F. P. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War (2 vols, 1892), II, p. 240.

  10Antonia Fraser, pp. 192–7.

  11James Strong, Joanereidos: or, Feminine Valour Eminently Discovered in Westerne Women (1645).

  12John Vicars, Gods Ark Overtopping the Worlds Waves, or, the Third Part of the Parliamentary Chronicle (1646), p. 259.

  13Edward Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, The Parisians (1873), Book 5, Chapter 7.

  14Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution (1980), pp. 96–105.

  15Hibbert, p. 99.

  16Basserman, p. 213.

  17Edmund Burke, ‘Letter to the Hon. C.J. Fox’, 8 October 1777.

  18Basserman, p. 215.

  19Hibbert, p. 139.

  20A. Le Faure, Le Socialisme pendant la Révolution Française (Paris, 1863), pp. 120ff.

  21Marie-Jean de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Essai sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de la Cité (Paris, 1790).

  22Olympe de Gouges, Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et la Citoyenne (1791).

  23The wholly masculine tenor of Mirabeau’s meaning is clear from the context of this statement of June 1789: ‘History has too often recounted the actions of nothing more than wild animals, among which at long intervals we can pick out some heroes. . .’ (Hibbert, p. 63).

  24C. Beard, The Industrial Revolution (1901), p. 23.

  25Anne Oakley, Housewife (1974), p. 14.

  26These comments are taken from a Factory Commissioners’ report on working conditions, and from the Hansard record of the ensuing debate in parliament – see Ivy Pinchbeck’s pioneering study Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1930), p. 94.

  27Pinchbeck, pp. 195,190,188 and 189.

  28J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (1939), p. 209.

  29E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (1966), pp. 60–1, pp. 192–3 and p. 194.

  30Pike, p. 80 and p. 133.

  31The horrors of the mine work performed by the British women of the Industrial Revolution are very well documented. For the details cited here, see Pinchbeck, pp. 240–81, and Pike, 245–78.

  32Pike, p. 257–8.

  33Report of the parliamentary commissioners; see the testimony of Sarah Gooder, age eight: ‘I’m a trapper [trap-opener] in the Gawber pit . . . I have to trap without a light, and I’m scared . . . I don’t like being in the pit, I would like to be at school far better . . .’ (Pinchbeck, p. 248).

  34Pike, p. 124.

  35Pike, pp. 129–30.

  36T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830 (1948) p. 161.

  37Pinchbeck, pp. 2–3.

  Chapter 9 The Rod of Empire

  1A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (1979), p. 54 and p. 57.

  2Kay Daniels and Mary Murnane, Uphill All the Way: A Documentary History of Women in Australia (Queensland 1980), pp. 117–18.

  3James Morris, Pax Britannica (1969), p. 74.

  4Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: the Colonisation of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Vic., 1975), p. 12.

  5Dee Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (New York, 1958), p. 81.

  6Thompson, p. 84 and p. 88.

  7C. M. H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History 1788–1850 (Sydney, 1965), p. 48.

  8Frederick C. Folkhard, The Rare Sex (Murray, Sydney, 1965), p. 69.

  9Michael Cannon, Who’s Master? Who’s Man? (Melbourne, 1971), p. 55; Report of the Select Committee on Transportation (1837), evidence of James Mudie.

  10T. W. Plummer to Colonel Macquarie, 4 May 1809, Historical Records of New South Wales, VII, 120.

  11Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People 1788–1945 (Melbourne, 1946), p. 108.

  12The sufferer ‘in torments’ was Sir Malcolm Darling, Apprentice to Power: India 1904–1908 (1966), p. 26. The burra mem was Annette Beveridge, described in her son William Beveridge’s India Called Them (1941), p. 201.

  13Iris Butler, The Viceroy’s Wife (1969), p. 164.

  14Eve Merriam, Growing Up Female in America: Ten Lives (New York, 1971), pp. 179–81.

  15Dee Brown, pp. 41–2.

  16Merriam, p. 195.

  17Dee Brown, pp. 51–2.

  18Butler, p. 101.

  19Butler, p. 111; Darling, p. 129.

  20Edna Healey, Wives of Fame: Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx, Emma Darwin (1986), p. 14.

  21Beveridge, p. 60.

  22M. M. Kaye (ed.), The Golden Calm: an English Lady’s Life in Moghul Delhi, Reminiscences by Emily, Lady Clive Bayley, and by her Father, Sir Thomas Metcalfe (Exeter, 1980), p. 213.

  23These lines are taken from the famous hymn, ‘I vow to thee my country’, by Cecil Spring-Rice, which performed invaluable service during the empire and the First World War in inducing young men to volunteer to be killed. Its second verse sub-sequendy afforded the title for the film Another Country.

  24Healey, p. 24. It is worth recording that Mary Livingstone was not totally submissive to her demanding husband – when he wanted to call the baby boy Zouga after the river beside which he was born, Mary refused point-blank.

  25Kaye, p. 215.

  26Kaye, p. 49; Beveridge, p. 240.

  27Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of British Empire (1983), p. 148; see also D. Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers (1965).

  28Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee (eds), The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1984), p. 15.

  29The Insight Guide to Southern California (1984), p. 243.

  30William Bronson, The Last Grand Adventure (New York, 1977), p. 166.

  31James (1962), p. 85.

  32For a discussion of La Malinche and a feminist reworking of her myth, see Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (1985), p. 245.

  33Trollope, p. 52.

  34Mayo, pp. 103–4.

  35Healey, p. 8.

  36F. Ekejiuba, ‘Omu Okwei: A Biographical Sketch’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria iii, (1967).

  37R. Miles, Women and Power (1985), p. 82; Susan Raven and Alison Weir, Women in History: Thirty-Five Centuries of Feminine Achievement (1981), p. 14.

  38Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (1976), pp. 224–5.

  Chapter 10 The Rights of Woman

  1For Cecilia Cochrane’s case, see A. Dowling, Reports of Cases argued and determined in the Queen’s Bench Practice Courts (1841), VIII, p. 630 ff. For Dawson, Addison and Teush, see O’Faolain, p. 333.

  2de Cambry, II, p. 57.

  3Louise Michele Newman (ed.), Men’s Ideas, Women’s Realities: Popular Science, 1870–1915 (New York and London, 1985), pp. 192–3.

  4Klein, p. 24
.

  5Queen Victoria’s instructions to her secretary are to be found in Trollope, p. 29.

  6Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926), p. 92.

  7Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911), p. 50.

  8Hubbard and Lowe, p. 48; and see their Chapter 4, ‘The Dialectic of Biology and Culture’, for full discussion of the idea that white male dominance was legitimately based on mental superiority, ‘one of the most tenacious ideas of the last 100 years’.

  9Darwin’s ranking of the mental faculties is discussed at length in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). For a detailed critique of these ideas and their relation to modern feminism, see the work of Rosalind Rosenberg, in particular ‘In Search of Woman’s Nature, 1850–1920’, Feminist Studies 3 (Fall, 1975), pp. 141–153, and Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982).

  10George J. Engelmann, ‘The American Girl of Today’, the President’s Address, American Gynecology Society (1900).

  11Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861); and see Newman pp. 6–7 and p. 12 for full discussion.

  12The first speaker in this House of Lords debate was the Earl of Halstead – see Hansard Vol. 175, 4th Ser. (1907), col. 1355. The second was Lord James of Hereford, Hansard (above), col. 1362.

  13J. Christopher Herold, The Horizon Book of the Age of Napoleon (New York, 1963), pp. 134–7. Strictly, the punishment for an adulterous male was to be forbidden to marry his mistress, but it is hard to see how this could have come as anything but a relief to many men. For the Code’s other specific restrictions on women, see articles 213, 214, 217, 267, and 298, among many others.

  14De Riencourt, p. x and p. 306.

  15Edwin A. Pratt, Pioneer Women in Victoria’s Reign (1897), p. 123.