… but I very, very nearly have a book MS. Biggest jobs left are the conclusion (and some more revision on the introduction) and fixing the bibliography. Then do front pages, fix a few footnotes, page numbers, that sort of thing.
Oh, and decide on the provisional title. I’m right out of inspiration right now. It’s going to be something so dull…
Very light posting until next week. Lots of work, likely to be away for a couple of days, that sort of thing.
In the meantime, remember to check out the History Carnival sometime around Friday at Clioweb. (Update midday 30/3: don’t forget you still have a few hours to send your suggestions, too…)
See you soon.
I’ve mentioned Paula Petrik’s innovative use of blogs in history teaching here before. Now she’s doing a presentation (on “Crafting history for the Web”) in a session entitled “Picture This: Images, Visualization, and Design in History” at the OAH annual meeting, this Saturday (2 April), and she needs your help. There are two things you can do:
1. An exercise in evaluating six history websites, which should only take a few minutes:
According to available research, most website visitors make their decisions about the credibility or authenticity of the site in 10 seconds or less. The point of this excercise is to evaluate six sites in terms of their credibility or authenticity as a history site. Look at the following sites very briefly (no more than 10 seconds) and make your rating using the poll under the menu.
2. If you have a little more time, leave your comments about the websites at the Picture This blog. (You don’t need to comment on all six sites.)
WILLIAM BARNES: ‘Easter Monday’. [from Poems of Rural Life ... First Collection (1866)]
An’ zoo o’ Monday we got drough
Our work betimes, an ax’d a vew
Young vo’k vrom Stowe an’ Coom, an’ zome
Vrom uncle’s down at Grange to come,
An’ they so spry, wi’ merry smiles,
Did beät the path an’ leäp the stiles,
Wi’ two or dree young chaps bezide,
To meet an’ keep up Easter tide:
Vor we’d a-zaid avore, we’d git
Zome friends to come, an’ have a bit
O’ fun wi’ me, an’ Jeäne, an’ Kit,
Because ‘twer Easter Monday.
An’ there we plaÿ’d away at quaïts,
An’ weigh’d ourzelves wi’ sceäles an’ waïghts;
An’ jump’d to zee who jump’d the spryest,
An’ sprung the vurdest an’ the highest;
An’ rung the bells vor vull an hour,
An’ plaÿ’d at vives ageän the tower.
An’ then we went an’ had a taït,
An’ cousin Sammy wi’ his waïght
Broke off the bar, he wer so fat!
An’ toppled off, an’ vell down flat
Upon his head, an’ squot his hat,
Because ‘twer Easter Monday.
(From LiOn; see also Easter Zunday)
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD: ‘Hymn III. For Easter Sunday’ (1773)
AGAIN the LORD of life and light
Awakes the kindling ray ;
Unseals the eyelids of the morn,
And pours increasing day.
O what a night was that, which wrapt
The heathen world in gloom !
O what a sun which broke this day,
Triumphant from the tomb !
This day be grateful homage paid,
And loud hosannas sung ;
Let gladness dwell in every heart,
And praise on every tongue.
Ten thousand differing lips shall join
To hail this welcome morn ;
Which scatters blessings from its wings,
To nations yet unborn.
JESUS, the friend of human kind,
With strong compassion mov’d,
Descended like a pitying GOD,
To save the souls he lov’d.
The powers of darkness leagued in vain
To bind his soul in death ;
He shook their kingdom when he fell,
With his expiring breath.
Not long the toils of hell could keep
The hope of JUDAH’s line ;
Corruption never could take hold
On aught so much divine.
And now his conquering chariot-wheels
Ascend the lofty skies ;
While broke, beneath his powerful cross,
Death’s iron sceptre lies.
Exalted high at GOD’s right hand,
And LORD of all below,
Thro’ him is pardoning love dispens’d,
And boundless blessings flow.
And still for erring, guilty man,
A brother’s pity flows ;
And still his bleeding heart is touch’d
With memory of our woes.
To thee, my Saviour, and my king,
Glad homage let me give ;
And stand prepar’d like thee to die,
With thee that I may live.
(link)
JOHN DONNE: ‘To the Countesse of Bedford. Begun in France but never perfected’ (Poems, 1633)
Though I be dead, and buried, yet I have
(Living in you,) Court enough in my grave,
As oft as there I thinke my selfe to bee,
So many resurrections waken mee.
That thankfullnesse your favours have forgot
In mee, embalmes mee; that I doe not rot;
This season as ’tis Easter, as ’tis spring,
Must both to growth and to confession bring
My thoughts dispos’d unto your influence, so,
These verses bud, so these confessions grow;
First I confesse I have to others lent
Your stock, and over prodigally spent
Your treasure, for since I had never knowne
Vertue or beautie, but as they are growne
In you, I should not thinke or say they shine,
(So as I have) in any other Mine;
Next I confesse this my confession,
For, ’tis some fault thus much to touch upon,
Your praise to you, where half rights seeme too much,
And make your minds sincere complexion blush.
Next I confesse my’impenitence, for I
Can scarce repent my first fault, since thereby
Remote low Spirits, which shall ne’r read you,
May in lesse lessons finde enough to doe,
By studying copies, not Originals,
Desunt cætera.
(from LiOn - couldn’t seem to find a free access version…)
GEORGE HERBERT: ‘GOOD FRIDAY’ (1633)
O my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy bloud?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell?
Shall I thy woes
Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one starre show’d thy first breath,
Shall all thy death?
Or shall each leaf,
Which falls in Autumne, score a grief?
Or cannot leaves, but fruit, be signe
Of the true vine?
Then let each houre
Of my whole life one grief devoure;
That thy distresse through all may runne,
And be my sunne.
Or rather let
My severall sinnes their sorrows get;
That as each beast his cure doth know,
Each sinne may so.
Since bloud is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloudie fight;
My heart hath store, write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sinne:
That when sinne spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, sinne may say,
No room for me, and flie away.
Sinne being gone, oh fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sinne take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.
The next History Carnival will be at Clioweb on 1 April. As ever, please send your suggestions for inclusion (your own writing or that of others) to your dashing host, Jeremy Boggs, email: jboggs AT gmu DOT edu (and put ‘History Carnival’ or something similar in the title). If you’re not sure of the criteria for inclusion, visit the carnival homepage.
And I’m not quite sure of the date of the next one, but don’t forget The Carnival of Bad History, if you’ve been debunking myths and setting the record straight recently.
I got me an Easter egg. All mine! All mine!
But I can’t remember when I last had one. So it’s a special treat.
It’s not easy to type with chocolate on your fingers, you know.
Volcanoes, slugs and comets: rare scientific books at UCL. (Hat-tip: C18-L)
(PZ will love some of these pictures. ‘Cute’ and ’slug’ are not words you’d [correction] anybody except PZ would usually expect to see together, but… And look!)
Yesterday was World Water Day; well, I probably wouldn’t have known either except that Google had one of its cute themes again.
So, did you know that there’s a field of water history? I did, because one of my colleagues has done really interesting research about public health and the politics of water supplies in 19th-century Wales, and the first international Water in History conference was held here in Aber.
Which is a pretty appropriate kind of place for it. We get about twice as much rain a year on the west coast of Wales as they do in south-east England (Met Office statistics: our nearest station (Trawscoed) 1961-90, annual average rainfall 1174mm; Greenwich, London, annual average in the same period: 586mm).
But hang on, you might be asking, what is Tryweryn? What is we have to remember?
A few miles south of Aberystwyth on the road to Aberaeron, there’s an old, crumbling wall painted with the words Cofiwch Dryweryn (an older picture, much less dilapidated). It’s a home-made memorial to the flooding of a village and a valley in the 1960s in order to create a reservoir that would supply English city-dwellers, and the campaign against the project; it was not the only such case during the 1960s, but it is probably now the best known. And the widespread outrage caused in Wales by the reservoirs contributed to the growth of Plaid Cymru and the Welsh nationalist movement.
The building of large-scale reservoirs in Wales (often - but not always - to supply English areas) had begun in the late 19th century. The largest, at the turn of the 20th century, was the Elan Valley, in Radnorshire, built to supply the rapidly growing population of Birmingham. The dams built there represented major feat of engineering. (Losses and gains: the Elan Valley now is an important wildlife reserve.)
And these projects were tiny in their impacts compared to recent and current projects around the world today. The problems driving many of those current projects are the same, though: pressures of growing populations in need of water (and, these days, electricity). Which is still not much consolation for those on the receiving end.
Water supplies and sanitation are crucial global issues. Millions of people live with water shortages; it’s expected that the problem is only going to get worse. Water has been a contributing factor in conflict and war in the past; there are growing fears of severe water wars soon to come. Water is political.
Cofiwch.
Super Action Toy Blair! (Hat-tip: Making Light. There are more where that came from, by the way.)
Am I right in thinking that Charles I’s 1631 Book of Orders is not online anywhere? If anyone has seen it, or even some extracts, please let me know…
It’s over 80 years since Alice Clark wrote what is recognised as a classic work of women’s history: Working life of women in the seventeenth century (1919). However, it’s spent long periods since then out of print - and it’s out of print again at the moment (as far as I can tell), despite having been republished by Routledge in 1992 with a splendid new introduction by Amy Louise Eriksson. There was also a 1982 edition introduced by Jane Lewis and Miranda Chaytor, and a 1960s reprint of the first edition. I thoroughly recommend it, but you’ll have to try the library or hunt down a secondhand copy, I’m afraid.
In addition, there’s very little about Clark online (she is mentioned here), which is my excuse for writing this. I have a soft spot for Alice Clark (not least for her maxim that “those who don’t make mistakes don’t make anything”). This was her only book. She wasn’t a conventional academic historian; rather, a feminist and businesswoman whose life encompassed many other activities and who only began historical research at the age of 38. In fact, she was a member of the Clark family, who were Quakers, of shoemaking fame (you know, those horrible sensible shoes you wore as a kid because your mum made you, except they recently got all trendy and cute).
Born in 1874, she was strongly influenced by the ‘first wave’ of feminism, particularly by debates about female economic dependence and ‘parasitism’ on men and its negative effects on women and society as a whole. She also needs to be understood in the context of early 20th-century concerns about the social effects of industrialisation and pioneering sociological investigations into contemporary conditions of the poor, and increasing interest in what was then called ‘economic history’ (it would now be termed social history). The contribution made to that historiography by women was subsequently ignored by many historians; feminist historians have in more recent decades worked to reconsider their significance.
Indeed, women were significant participants in what we might justifiably call the ‘first wave’ of (academic) social history in the early 20th century, only some of them writing women’s history. For its practitioners, it was just as important as the predominant political histories of states. But both social history and women’s history remained at the margins of the discipline.
This was in part because many of the practitioners were at the margins, or ‘amateurs’ working outside academic institutions, to which women were only just being admitted. Some universities were more welcoming than others. The London School of Economics was co-educational from its founding in 1895; women as both staff (including history professors such as Lilian Knowles and Eileen Power) and students constituted a significant minority presence. It was prepared to include unconventional students like Alice Clark, who was probably attracted by its concerns for contemporary social policy issues as much as the space it gave to economic history.
But before she went to the LSE, she spent much of her adult life (despite long periods of illness) working in the family factory, starting with an informal apprentice, to become a director in 1904. She was active in the suffrage cause, as a Liberal and on the Friends’ Committee for the Relief of War Victims. She originally took up a studentship to research women’s history in 1913 during one of her enforced breaks for illness, and completed her research after the war. After Working life of women was finished, she returned to the family business; she died in 1934.
She began her book with a forceful rejection of any notion that women were “a static factor in social developments” and therefore unimportant in historical study. On the contrary, she argued, they changed considerably over time with changing environments, and those changes require careful study because of the close bonds between women and men and women’s (indirect) social and moral influence. And she saw the seventeenth century as a period of profound change in English women’s lives; not perhaps in terms of most women’s actual experiences of change so much as in underlying trends - the forces represented by ‘capitalism’.
She used a wide range of sources (most of them in printed editions rather than directly in the archives): letters, diaries, wills, account books, magistrates’ wage rate assessments, parish records, guild and municipal records, tax returns, workhouse records, as well as prescriptive literature, pamphlets and literary sources. They were often quoted at length, employing a technique of building up a larger picture through details about and by individuals.
She traced a three-stage process of change in the organisation of work, particularly affecting women:
1. “Domestic industry”: all production takes place within the family, which is entirely self-sufficient.
2. “Family industry” (existing alongside 1. during the middle ages into the 17th century): the family is the key unit for the production of goods for sale (or exchange). While some household members might work for wages, most of the work was carried out within the household, and its income belonged to the whole family rather than to individuals.
3. “Capitalistic industry or industrialism” (first introduced in the 13th century, but not significantly expanding until the late 17th century): production takes place outside the household, controlled by the owners of capital while labourers receive (and compete for) individual wages.
Different groups of women were, however, affected differently by these changes:
1. “Capitalists”, including both the aristocracy/gentry and nouveau-riche;
2. The “common people”, small farmers, independent tradesmen/artisans etc (whom Clark saw as both the largest group and the most vigorous and worthy)
3. Pitiful “wage earners”, trapped in poverty, a small but growing group.
Among women of the first group, activity and hardiness gave way to idleness, pleasure and parasitism; equally affected but in a very different way were women of the wage-earning group who were dependent on incomes insufficient to support families. Women who had worked in higher-status, economically rewarding crafts and trades and professions were increasingly squeezed out by demands for capital and/or specialist training, and forced into insecure, low-paid and low-skill sectors. Everywhere, she argued, the consequence was the diminishment of women’s roles and status within the household and with it their influence on society in general, as this period saw a fundamental transition from a society which did not rigidly distinguish between domestic occupations and other work settings, to the modern division between ‘home’ (for women) and ‘work’ (for men).
So, what do historians make of it 80+ years later? It would be surprising, really, if 3 decades of research since the 1968 reprint had not led to considerable modification of Clark’s work (she herself foresaw the possibility of it being discarded “when a deeper understanding of history becomes possible”). In some ways, it remains virtually unrivalled as a broad-ranging survey, since recent research has tended to be more specialised and narrowly focused. Many modern historians of work, including women’s work, would not argue with Clark’s broad conception of economic life and production. Research has more than demonstrated the key importance of the household and domestically-organised production in the early modern economy and society (and Clark was right: the ‘housewife’, whether you think of her as parasitic or an essential, unpaid service worker, is a modern invention). And her book, with its remarkable range and imaginative use of source materials, continues to stimulate research and ideas.
However, it’s agreed that her chronological framework was unsatisfactory and too simplistic. A number of developments she associated with the seventeenth century (such as the ‘masculinisation’ of professions like midwifery, and the removal of most production from the domestic environment) properly belong to the later 18th century or even later. She equated ‘capitalism’ with ‘industrialism’, but the former undoubtedly preceded the latter by some centuries. Further, subsistence household economies were already extremely rare by the 17th century.
Clark’s pessimistic view of modernisation has been criticised in view of long-term continuities in women’s work (low-paid, unskilled, casual, etc), and her emphasis on capitalism as the primary driving force with overwhelmingly negative effects has been challenged. Capitalism, from ‘putting out’ industries to the new factories of the 19th century, could equally offer women new working opportunities. The average differences between men’s wages and women’s wages have remained virtually unchanged since the middle ages. The single line downwards from a past ‘golden age’ has been rejected. Equally, though, its opposite, ‘whiggish’ celebratory accounts of ‘progress’ for women into modernity, are treated with much more caution too. Clark’s research reminds us that there are alternative, more sobering, interpretations.
Reading
Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century, intro and ed by Amy Louise Eriksson (3rd edn, 1992 [1919])
Judith Bennett, ‘ “History that stands still”: women’s work in the European past’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988)
Maxine Berg, ‘The first women economic historians’, Economic History Review XLV (1992)
Maxine Berg, A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889-1940 (1996)
Lindsey Charles and Lornal Duffin (eds), Women and work in pre-industrial England (1985)
Michael Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979)
Michael Roberts, ‘Women and work in sixteenth-century English towns’, in Penelope Corfield and Derek Keene (eds), Work in Towns 850-1850 (1990)
Olive Schreiner, Women and labour (1911)
Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres: a review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal 36 (1993)
* For those with access, Alice Clark is in the Online DNB *
(And after all this activity in the last couple of days, I think I might just go into blogging hibernation for the rest of week…)
Some women have never lacked historians: usually unusual women of high social status (who had some influence on the ‘male’ political world): queens, mistresses of kings, that kind of thing: what Gerda Lerner called ‘compensatory history’. The goal of women’s history as practised today, however, is to attend to and assert the validity of the experiences and roles of many kinds of women; to challenge perceptions that these were somehow a) ahistorical (biologically determined, therefore unchanging) and b) unimportant, not Real History.
Still, it should be remembered that women’s history is not something invented in the 1970s. (At Oxford University around 1960, a young early modernist, Keith Thomas, offered a series of undergraduate lectures on the history of women. His colleagues found the idea bizarre; the students stayed away in droves. Yet it must have seemed practicable to him - and he was prepared to try.)
To stick with research since the 19th-century emergence of the academic discipline of history, the ‘first wave’ of western feminism was accompanied by important work on the history of women in the early 20th century: in Britain alone, for example, work by Eileen Power (medieval history), Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck (women’s work), Ray Strachey and Sylvia Pankhurst (the women’s suffrage movement). Yet much of this was neglected for decades until the take-off of women’s history associated with the ’second wave’ of feminism and, more broadly, with the expanding horizons of history writing from the 1960s. That brought research on an unprecedented scale, and with larger ambitions to achieve a fundamental rewriting of all History.
There have been a wide variety of approaches to the history of women, and nearly all have had to grapple with particularly acute problems of evidence and interpretation: discovering new or neglected sources, approaching old ones in new ways, often borrowing methods and techniques from other disciplines. The growth of social history, another challenge to the primacy of political history narrowly defined (states, rulers, governments) cannot be disentangled from this; it offered new methods and perspectives, and often emphasised subjects of key importance to women’s history. (This was true in the early 20th century as well as the 1960s and 70s, although what we’d now think of as social history was then usually called economic history; this was long before the statisticians got in on the act.)
Some key ’second wave’ pioneers of women’s history, like Sheila Rowbotham, were socialists as much as feminists. But the relationship was not always an easy one; social history could all too easily continue to marginalise women. Labour history, for example, could be overwhelmingly masculine, narrowly focused on institutions; defining ‘work’ and ‘labour’ in particular ways, this kind of labour history tended to overlook the vital contributions of female labour, the variety and significance of the paid work that women have always done, and to entirely exclude any consideration of their unpaid work. And the relationship between Marxism and feminism was strikingly summed up as an unhappy marriage.
An important strand in women’s history has documented their struggles to win admittance to the ‘public sphere’ and to be placed on equal terms with men when it came to legal status, work opportunities, voting rights. This is a key constituent of what was dubbed ‘herstory’: retelling history from women’s perspectives, aiming to recover women’s experiences, ‘women’s cultures’, to document a distinctive female past. Women had been, in Rowbotham’s words, Hidden from History, and it was time to put that right. It’s still going strong too! And it was, and still is, also often about personal reclamations of history far beyond the academy.
Still, while it went far beyond the biographical ‘women worthies‘ or ‘compensatory history’ type of approach, herstory still tended to focus on histories of exceptional women, forms of rebellion against patriarchal norms, whether ‘public’ political activism or ‘private’ feminine desires and friendships. And how were ‘women’s worlds’ to be related to the world of mainstream history? It was not so clear how this approach could (on its own) ever be more than a supplement to Real History, all too easily ignored or, at best, accorded a token presence around the margins.
There was another problem. Who were these ‘women’ in ‘women’s history’? White, middle-class women? Women are not all alike (and no woman is only a woman). What of the influence of class, race, religion, nationality, sexuality, other social/cultural group identities, on women’s historical experiences?
The identification of these issues fostered the rise of ‘gender history’. Gender, it needs to be noted, is a concept that can be used in more than one way. Sometimes, it can simply refer to studying the relationships between women and men, and the ways in which ‘gender roles’ are socially conditioned. But there is a more theoretical/intellectual history approach, associated with ‘poststructuralism’, and perhaps most famously formulated by Joan W Scott, who argued that gender was a key ‘category of historical analysis’, and that it was vital to study how ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ were culturally constructed in relation to each other in different societies. The category ‘women’ itself had to be deconstructed (as did that of ‘experience‘).
The enquiry was no longer so much ‘What did women experience, and what did women, do in xth century in y culture?’ but rather ‘How (and by what processes) in xth century in y culture did gender help construct distinct masculine and feminine meanings and identities?’ [link may be dead: try archive version if it doesn't work]
This was both stimulating and controversial, for much the same reasons that poststructuralist or postmodernist theories applied to history have been stimulating/controversial more generally. But it was, perhaps, felt to be particularly threatening to a field of history that was relatively new and politically engaged:
The deconstruction of the term ‘women’ and the emphasis on the differences between women at the expense of what they have in common, denies the existence of women as a political category and as a subordinate class.
Other concerns about gender history focused on the decentering of women as its subject. The history of masculinities is a fast-rising field; some (like Joan Hoff) worried that this lets men take over centre-stage again and that women’s history will get lost in the process. (I personally think that Hoff did not help her cause by calling male feminists ‘Tootsie men’.) Others disagree with those fears (I agree with them). The new histories of men are not like the old history of men; histories of women continue to be written; the boundary between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’ is not a clearly-defined one, and nor (as this blogger would attest) do these varying approaches exclude each other.
It is impossible to summarise what’s going on in women’s history or gender history right now; it’s just too vast and diverse. Just take a look at the TOCs of some main journals and you’ll soon see what I mean. I think that in my area, early modern social history, there is currently a particular interest in ‘agency’ - exploring the ways in which ordinary women lived their lives within the constraints placed upon them, survived, negotiated with the system for a better deal without rebelling against it - and how ‘practice’ related to ‘prescriptions’. We ask about both ‘experiences’ and ‘meanings’. There have been some marvellous recent studies of early modern English masculinities; of crime and gender; splendid surveys unashamedly about women; and textbooks that make no mention of women or gender in the title at all - but they’re in there.
I’ll leave you some links to explore, anyway.
And feel free to contribute in comments (or indeed to blog about this yourself?)…
… What’s the current state of affairs in your own subject areas? (Period, place etc)
… Thoughts on your own research/teaching practice
… What are your favourite books? Which do you think are the most important, must-read works for people interested in learning more about women in the past and/or about the development of women’s history? I may well put together a bibliography of some kind.
… Favourite online resources and blog posts
………
Gateways and general stuff
BBC Women’s history
SOSIG: Women’s history
History in Focus: Gender
About Women’s history
Women’s history teaching resources
Essays, debates, etc
Myth and memory: old passions, new visions
History, she wrote
The challenge of opinionative assurance
Raising Clio’s consciousness: the writing of women’s history in the US
Integrating men’s history into women’s history: a proposition
Leeds gender studies e-papers
A group of one’s own: filling the gaps in women’s history
To feel a part of history: rethinking the US history survey
Women’s History Review (all issues more than 2 years old are free to access)
Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis (by Joan Hoff)
Unravelling postmodern paralysis
Mistrials and diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff
A reply to my critics (Joan Hoff)
Women’s history and poststructuralism
Women’s history: continuity, change or standing still?
History, feminism and gender studies [try archive version if that link doesn't work]
How did Women’s History Month come about?
Intersections: gender, history and culture in the Asian context
Recovery and revision: women’s history and west Virginia
Gendering modern German history: rewritings of the mainstream
Feminist knowledge (African women’s history)
Feminist history in Japan
Bibliographies, reading lists
Short bibliography
ViVa bibliography of women’s history
Feminist history bibliography
Annotated bibliography of feminist historical theory
Women’s history bibliography
Book reviews
Writing women’s history since the Renaissance
Gender in history
Worlds between: historical perspectives on gender and class
Courses, syllabi
MA in women’s history (Liverpool)
MA in Women’s history (Royal Holloway)
Women’s history, feminist history and gender history (course unit)
… And bloggers!
Women’s History of Philosophy (Siris)
The search for agency (East Asian history) (Muninn)
This one’s for Dr Crazy (student whines spark great discussion), (New Kid on the Hallway)
Women, studying of (The Little Professor)
Isn’t it nice when you go to the office and there’s a package waiting for you in your pigeonhole, which turns out to be your article offprints. Yay!
Pity about the essays for marking lurking in there though.
Lectureship in East European/Russian history (since 1500), Trinity College, Dublin. Deadline: 1 April 2005.
Post-doc Research Fellow: Early Modern Women’s Devotional Writing, Nottingham Trent University. Deadline: 1 April 2005.
Lecturer in Early Modern History/History of Medicine, University of Leicester. Deadline: 5 April 2005.
Academic Fellow/Lecturer in History (intellectual and /or cultural history of the Enlightenment period), University of Hull. Deadline: 8 April 2005.
Lecturer in Late Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Birkbeck College, London. Deadline: 8 April 2005.
Stipendiary Lecturership in History, Keble College, Oxford. Deadline: 11 April 2005.
Senior Lecturer/Reader/Chair in Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen. Deadline: 27 April 2005.
Theatrical patronage in early modern Europe, Keele University, UK, September 2005. Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2005.
ESSHC 2006 Elites Network, Amsterdam, spring 2006. Deadline: 1 May 2005.
Cartography and Cartographic Images 1000-2000AD: Interpreting Transatlantic Cultures and Consciousness, University of Texas, US, (date not stated). Deadline: 31 May 2005.
Tom Paine: Common Sense for the Modern Era, San Diego State University, US, October 2005. Deadline: 6 May 2005.
Children of Abraham: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era, New York, US, October 2005. Deadline: 1 June 2005.
Natalie posted last week about the ‘new’ Dorothy Sayers novel she just read. (We are both serious Sayers fans.) I commented there and mentioned my enjoyment of tacky covers on older editions of crime novels. Why not share a few favourites with you?
Still, just to start with the non-tacky: a classic green-and-white Penguin (this by Gladys Mitchell, edition of 1961, originally published 1942). OK, they have tried to spice it up a bit. “Death and disappearance in a women’s college”!
This is a bit of splendid 1970s-tacky (edn 1978; pub 1976). I don’t know what impression they were trying to give, but it’s just way off the mark. (Dunnett got quite a few howlers from her publishers in her time. Check out the German versions of the ‘Dolly’ series. Sooo bad. I want one. And I don’t read German.)
But this edition of Gaudy Night (edn 1963; pub 1935) is just an all-time favourite. (I’ve just noticed that my copy of Strong Poison must be from the same set. It’s bad, but not that bad. Wonder what the rest are like?)
Oh, they don’t make ‘em like that any more.
(Unless, of course, parody is the name of the game.)
Further cause for celebration: rerun of Buffy season 1 on channel 5.
What an excellent day.
They’re singing Delilah in Cardiff, and there are some happy people outside my windows already too.
Now here’s one I should have posted on International Women’s Day.
When Harvest comes, into the Field we go,
And help to reap the Wheat as well as you;
Or else we go the Ears of Corn to glean;
No Labour scorning, be it e’er so mean;
But in the Work we freely bear a Part,
And what we can, perform with all our Heart.
To get a Living we so willing are,
Our tender Babes unto the Field we bear,
And wrap them in our Cloaths to keep them warm,
While round about we gather up the Corn;
and often unto them our Course do bend,
To keep them save, that nothing them offend:
Our Children that are able bear a share,
In gleaning Corn, such is our frugal Care.
When Night comes on, unto our Home we go,
Our Corn we carry, and our Infant too;
Weary indeed! but ’tis not worth our while
Once to complain, or rest at ev’ry Sitle;
We must make haste, for when we home are come,
We find again our Work has just begun;
So many Things for our Attendance call,
Had we ten hands, we could employ them all.
Our Children put to Bed, with greatest Care
We all Things for your coming home prepare:
You sup, and go to Bed without Delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have
Because our froward Children cry and rave;
Yet, without fail, soon as Day-light doth spring,
We in the Field again our work begin,
and there, with all our Strength, our Toil renew,
Till titan’s golden Rays have dry’d the Dew;
Then home we go unto our Children dear,
Dress, feed, and bring them to the Field with Care.
Were this your Case, you justly might complain
That Day and Night you are secure from Pain;
Those mighty Troubles which perplex your Mind,
(thistles before, and Females come behind)
Would vanish soon, encumber’d thus with Care.
What you would have of us we do not know:
We oft take up the Corn that you do mow;
We cut the Peas, and always ready are
In every Work to take our proper Share;
And from the time that Harvest doth begin,
Until the Corn be cut and carry’d in,
Our Toil and Labour’s daily so extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to Dream.
This extract was posted for Women’s History Month 1999 at Sunshine for Women - an example of a woman’s writing (quite a lot of early modern!) was put up every day for the month. Somehow I managed to miss it when I was looking for stuff on IWD.
You can find the full text of Collier’s poem here.
(Does anyone have a link for the text of the poem to which this was a response, Stephen Duck’s ‘The thresher’s labour’ (1730)? Or any more biographical information about Collier, for that matter?)
I remembered to look up ‘The thresher’s labour’ anyway. While it’s in many ways a great poem about the back-breaking nature of male agricultural labouring work for the ‘Master’, this is what Mary Collier was answering:
Homewards we move, but spent so much with Toil, [150]
We slowly walk, and rest at ev’ry Stile.
Our good expecting Wives, who think we stay,
Got to the Door, soon eye us in the Way.
Then from the Pot the Dumplin’s catch’d in haste,
And homely by its Side the Bacon plac’d.
Supper and Sleep by Morn new Strength supply;
And out we set again, our Work to try;
But not so early quite, nor quite so fast,
As, to our Cost, we did the Morning past.Soon as the rising Sun has drank the Dew,
Another Scene is open to our View:
Our Master comes, and at his Heels a Throng
Of prattling Females, arm’d with Rake and Prong;Prepar’d, whilst he is here, to make his Hay;
Or, if he turns his Back, prepar’d to play:
But here, or gone, sure of this Comfort still;
Here’s Company, so they may chat their Fill.
Ah! were their Hands so active as their Tongues,
How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs!The Grass again is spread upon the Ground, [170]
Till not a vacant Place is to be found;
And while the parching Sun-beams on it shine,
The Hay-makers have Time allow’d to dine.
That soon dispatch’d, they still sit on the Ground;
And the brisk Chat, renew’d, afresh goes round.
All talk at once; but seeming all to fear,
That what they speak, the rest will hardly hear
Till by degrees so high their Notes they strain,
A Stander by can nought distinguish plain.[...]
And little Labour serves to make the Hay.
Fast as ’tis cut, so kindly shines the Sun, [200]
Turn’d once or twice, the pleasing Work is done.
Next Day the Cocks appear in equal Rows,
Which the glad Master in safe Ricks bestows.
I was delighted to find this website again (it used to be on a university server somewhere and I’d lost track of it): Irish history on the web, although bear in mind that it hasn’t been updated in a while.
Check out CELT: Corpus of Hiberno-English texts.
History of St Patrick’s Day
OK, around here it’s always women’s history month. (My MA at the University of York was in Women’s and Gender History; it seems not to be running now, although they still have a Women’s Studies MA.) Sometimes I focus specifically on women/gender; sometimes I don’t. It runs right through my PhD thesis although you won’t find it anywhere in the title or the chapter titles. And that’s increasingly true in academic history (in my period anyway), I think.
And so, I don’t take that much notice of Women’s History Month each year. (Well, look on the web, and it doesn’t get seem to get that much attention outside north America anyway.) The idea of “recognizing and celebrating women’s accomplishments” is nice, of course. This year’s theme is “Women Change America“, apparently. Hmm. And the National Women’s History Project has a press release. Feel good, sisters.
Learning about the extraordinary achievements of women helps diminish the tendency to dismiss and trivialize who women are and what they accomplish. In celebrating women’s historic achievements, we present an authentic view of history. …
Thus, women’s history becomes a story of inspiration and hope. A story of courage and tenacity. A story of promise, possibility and purpose.
I know, this is an awareness-raising thing, not an agenda for research. But me, I’m interested in women who weren’t extraordinary, too - or at least, no more extraordinary than anybody is. And it seems to me that the NWHP doesn’t really go any further than ‘celebrating’ a handful of ‘extraordinary women’ - leaders, activists, exemplars.
Which is hardly an innovative way of inserting women into history; what’s called the “women worthies” tradition has been around as long as the writing of history. (Anybody got a good link to some of Plutarch’s lives of women?) Writing biographies of exemplary or notable women is interesting and stimulating, of course. (I’ve done it here a few times, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to the rich and famous.) But it is only a beginning - and it never changed the overwhelming historiographical emphasis on men in previous centuries, so why would it do so now?
So anyway, I’m going to try to put together a few posts over the coming days about recent developments in histories of women and gender. (I might even get some modern history in, if I can remember what it looks like.)
You can help. Send your comments. Are there online resources and books that you’d particularly recommend? WHM events that you’d really like to tell us about? Classroom experiences of women’s history (learning or teaching) you want to share?
