Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Lisa Levenstein
I discovered historian Lisa Levenstein while listening to one of my favorite writing podcasts. (#AmWriting with Jess and K.J. for anyone who’s interested.) Her work sounded fascinating. As soon as the podcast was over, I did a little research, decided that her work sounded even more fascinating than I originally thought, and immediately sent her an invitation to be part of this series.*
Lisa is Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at UNC Greensboro. She is the author of the award-winning A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (UNC Press, 2009) and They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties (Basic Books, 2020). Lisa’s research has been supported by long-term fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is a founding executive board member of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, the Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of UNC Press, and co-host of the podcast Collegeland.
Take it away, Lisa:
You write about women who are not generally included in the history of feminism. How does the addition of women of color and working class women change our understanding of the feminist movement?
While the media has often characterized feminism as a white middle-class women’s movement, women of color and working-class women have been working to advance feminist goals for just as long as white women. When we include a broad range of actors in our histories of feminism, we can better understand the breadth and goals of the movement. In the 1990s, activists insisted that every issue was a feminist issue–from environmental justice to labor rights. They fought for reproductive justice and welfare rights while protesting against police brutality and free trade. Feminism in the 1990s was a broad umbrella thanks in large part to the efforts of working-class women and women of color.
When did you first become interested in women’s history? What sparked that interest?
I was a history major in college but did not get exposed to women’s history until a course I took on European women’s and gender history in my junior year. The professor, Carolyn Dean, taught us about how gender ideology was deeply ingrained into all aspects of politics and culture. Although the course focused on Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it fundamentally altered my understanding of contemporary politics and culture in the US. When I realized that one course had changed how I read the newspaper, watched television, and debated with my friends, I was hooked.
Unlike many of the people I’m interviewing, your work deals with the recent past. Are there special challenges to researching and writing about women in the periods you study?
Writing about the 1990s was a joy because I could interview people about their lives and work. But writing about living people who were part of the same movement is tricky because they each have their own recollections of specific events. After hearing several different versions, I tried to compare the information in the interviews with the available primary documents. But here again, the benefits of researching the recent past (there are a plethora of documents) also posed a challenge. There are so many available accounts of the events of the 1990s that it’s hard to know when to stop researching. To make things even more complicated, in the 1990s, the Internet was starting to become a force in people’s lives, and many feminists were very active online. Fortunately there have been efforts to catalogue early webpages and many of the activists I studied printed out their e-mail messages, leaving a paper trail for historians. I’m not sure how we will track the correspondence of our current generation, since most of our email is privately stored on our computers or in cyberspace. Many of us also interact with other people on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Skilled archivists are tackling these questions but I suspect that the digital age will pose unique challenges to future historians.
Question for you (I will continue the theme :-): Is women’s history a feminist project?
The short answer is: yes. But I suspect that you were looking for something a little more substantive here.
Actually, Lisa answered this for me. One class on European and gender history taught her how deeply gender ideology is interwoven into not only our understanding of history, but into our understanding of how society works. In fact, interwoven is too mild a word. Gender ideology is a Gordian knot of knowledge, beliefs, and habits. Every women’s history class, every book about a forgotten woman from history, every article that reveals a woman whose name was left out of the story helps loosen that knot just a little bit.
*Moral of the story for any writers in the audience: Being a podcast guest is definitely an effective way to reach potential new readers.
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Want to know more about Lisa Levenstein and her work?
Check out her website: https://lisalevenstein.com/
Listen to her podcast: https://www.collegelandpod.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @lisalevenstein
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with author Mary Cronk Farrell, who writes about little-known women in American history for a young adult audience. (Catch ‘em while they’re young!)
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed forgotten female photojournalists, cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, and the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography. If that sounds like your bottle of beer, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b (When you subscribe, you’ll get a link for a very cool downloadable timeline of the Roman emperors and the women who fought against them or supported them, which I created with the people behind The Exploress podcast.)
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Nancy Goldstone
I first discovered Nancy Goldstone’s work when I read The Rival Queens for a Shelf Awareness review. I’ve been a fan ever since.
Nancy has a passion for medieval history and old and rare books. She is the author six works of historical non-fiction about powerful and often overlooked women in European history , including most recently Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots. (FYI: She also writes books with her husband about their experiences in the world of rare and antiquarian books.)
Like many of us, Nancy didn’t take a straight path to her writing life. She graduated with honors in history from Cornell University in 1979 and received her MA in International Affairs from Columbia University in 1981. Immediately upon graduation she embarked on a hilariously brief career trading foreign currency options, an adventure which was chronicled in her first book, Trading Up: Surviving Success as a Woman Trader on Wall Street.
Personally, I’m pleased that she found her way to writing about remarkable women who helped shape history.
Take it away, Nancy!
You write about women who were powerful in their own time, but who are largely overlooked today. Why do you think we tend to forget the roles women play in history?
I don’t think we forget the roles women play in history. I think we never learned anything about them in the first place! That is because for centuries the study of history was dominated by men who, let’s face it, (1) weren’t all that interested in researching the lives of women and (2) tended to believe that men did everything anyway. It’s changing now as more and more women come into the field but in my opinion we still have a long way to go. For example, there’s a lingering prejudice in the field of European history that women did not really wield power, that their role was mostly to bear sons, and that other than that they were more or less considered part of the interior decoration of the castle. Elizabeth I is the great exception to this, of course—a new book, documentary, film, or series seems to come out about her every year. But there were so many other women just as important as Elizabeth I, who no one has ever heard of! Women of great courage and ability, whose lives and accomplishments are absolutely integral to understanding the signal events of their time. Those are the women I want to learn about. And I am thrilled to report that I have found them in every century.
If you could pick one woman in history to put into every high school textbook, who would it be?
I can think of so many women who deserve a place in school textbooks but I am going to go with Yolande of Aragon, 15th century queen of Sicily, duchess of Anjou and Maine, and countess of Provence, only because the Joan of Arc story is so well known, and to study Joan without Yolande is like omitting Abraham Lincoln from a survey course on the Civil War.
Just to recap quickly, Yolande of Aragon was the dauphin’s mother-in-law during the second half of the Hundred Years War. After Henry V walloped the French army at Agincourt in 1415, the English invaded and occupied all of western France, plus the capital city of Paris. The dauphin Charles was subsequently disinherited, and Henry went on to marry Charles’s sister and to declare himself king of both England and France.
But the dauphin did not give up. Forced to flee Paris, he regrouped his forces south of the Loire and declared war on England. Luck was against him, however, and he lost battle after battle. He began to doubt whether his cause was just, whether he really was the legitimate heir to the throne. Then, in 1428, the English, determined to break through the barrier of the Loire and take over the rest of France, launched the siege of Orléans, Orléans being one of the cities still loyal to the dauphin. And it was at this point that Joan of Arc miraculously turned up unannounced at Charles’s court, convinced him she was a messenger from God, gave him the courage he needed to fight back, and went on to lift the siege, beat the English, and lead Charles to be crowned king at Reims, thereby returning the rightful heir to the throne.
Except that it wasn’t just Joan’s voices that got her an audience at court. Although she was unaware of it, Joan had quite a bit of help from Yolande. It was Yolande who ran her son-in-law’s council. It was Yolande who pawned her own silverware to pay for the army and supplies necessary to lift the siege of Orléans; it was she who brought in new diplomatic allies and recruited the most experienced warriors to lead the French military effort against the English. Most significantly, it was Yolande who, in a brilliant political move, stepped in and secretly recruited a mystic (Joan) to help jolt her son-in-law out of his psychological paralysis when Charles (who was after all only in his twenties, very superstitious, and so vacillating that he made Hamlet look decisive) refused to give the order to fight back and instead openly debated fleeing to Scotland.
There’s much more—Yolande was hands down the most competent politician of her time (or of any time for that matter)—but what I really love about her is that she did this all so deftly, and hid her tracks so well, that for the next 600 years every historian and writer who looked at these events, including some of the greats like George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain, totally swallowed her cover story because it was obviously far more likely that angels would come down to earth to direct the course of a battle than that a fifty year old woman with decades of political, diplomatic, and administrative experience, would actually be running the show.
What’s your next book about and when will we see it?
My next book is about Empress Maria Theresa, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and three of her daughters: Maria Christina, duchess of Teschen and governor-general of Brussels; Maria Carolina, queen of Naples; and the world-famous Marie Antoinette, doomed queen of France.
I have known for years that I wanted to write about Maria Theresa. In fact, I have been building up to her. Maria Theresa was the only female ever to inherit the vast Habsburg empire in her own right. However, no sooner did she come into her birthright at the age of 23 than she was attacked by an overwhelming consortium of European powers who, believing her weak because she was a woman, intended to divide her lands and subjects among themselves. This turned out to be a big mistake. Despite her youth and inexperience, Maria Theresa managed through intelligence, hard work, and sheer determination to overthrow her enemies instead! Who would not wish to tell that story?
In this book I also had the chance to write about the whole tumultuous, wondrously transformative eighteenth century by following the lives of three of Maria Theresa’s remarkable daughters as well. And one of those daughters was Marie Antoinette, the most notorious queen in history! That was irresistible.
Although it is true that Marie Antoinette’s story has been told many times, I am very glad that I had an opportunity to research it myself. Before, so much of hers and Louis XVI’s behavior seemed inexplicable to me. This is my sixth book of European history; one by one, in chronological order beginning with the thirteenth century, I have meticulously examined a slew of royal courts. The rule of almost every king and queen I have ever written about has been threatened. And yet nowhere but at the court of Louis XVI had I encountered a sovereign who did not at least try to send his wife and children away to safety. Even Charles I got his wife and all but two of his six children out of England! And this was only one of a multitude of behaviors that I found puzzling. Happily, as a result of my research, I believe I have discovered the answers to all of my questions and can help illuminate the mystery and add greatly to our understanding of these key historical figures.
But while Marie Antoinette might get all the press it is her older sisters who deserve to be rescued from anonymity! They were among the most impressive women I have ever written about. Maria Christina, in addition to governing first Hungary and then the Austrian Netherlands, was a gifted artist who also managed to assemble the magnificent collection of paintings and drawings which today form the permanent exhibit of the celebrated Albertina Museum in Vienna. And Maria Carolina, the sister closest in age and affection to Marie Antoinette, was even more extraordinary—she ruled the kingdom of Naples, guided it into its Golden Age, and then fought tenaciously against Napoleon, all while being saddled in marriage to Ferdinand, king of Naples, who gets my vote for all-time worst husband ever. Maria Carolina’s hilarious dealings with her hopeless spouse were definitely among the most fun sections to write!
The book is called In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and her Daughters. It comes out in September. I love the cover, you can see it here:
A question for you: I would love to hear what you are investigating—you have kind of hinted at it and it sounds fascinating.
Allow me to introduce you to Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune:
Sigrid Schultz was the Chicago Tribune‘s Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to 1940. It was a period of big ideas and big events, and Schultz was at ground zero for many of them. She was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the Nazi menace. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front page stories, her connections in Berlin society, her colloquial command of German, and her understanding of Germany’s history and politics allowed Schultz to regularly scoop her male counterparts on major news events, including the impending death of Weimar Germany’s first president in 1925 and Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Russia in 1939. William L. Shirer, author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who reported from Berlin from August 1934 to December 1940, admitted, “No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scene as did Sigrid Schultz.”
I am deep in the world of foreign correspondents, American newspapers. Weimar Germany, “false news,” glass ceilings, American isolationism, Nazis, the Lost Generation, the rise of radio news, daily life in Berlin and the challenges of getting the news out in the face of tightening controls over the press.
And thank you for asking!
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Want to know more about Nancy Goldstone and her work?
Check out her website: www.nancygoldstone.com
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Lisa Levinstein, whose work expands the history of feminism in important ways.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed forgotten female photojournalists, cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, and the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography. If that sounds like your bottle of beer, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b
Two WASP Pilots Show the Men How It’s Done: A Guest Post by Jack French
One of the great pleasures of writing History in the Margins is the opportunity to carry on conversations with readers “off the page.” I love it when one of you expands the story with additional information or gently corrects me when I go astray. Long-time reader Jack French occasionally takes it one step further and not only shares a story with me, but allows me to share it with you. (You may remember his wonderful post on the woman who invented Monopoly. )
This is one of those times. Take it away, Jack:
Since this is Women’s History Month, I’d like to tell you about two very significant women you’ve probably never heard of before: Didi Moorman and Dora Dougherty. This duo played an important role in our eventual victory in WW II. Their story is inspiring, although history has almost forgotten them.
In 1943 when the enormous four-engine B-29 “Super Fortress” was still in early test flights, many problems with it occurred which Boeing was having trouble fixing. One main problem was engines catching fire. In February of that year, Boeing’s top test pilot, Eddie Allen, was on a test flight with 8 other crewmen when an engine caught fire, leading to a catastrophic wing failure and the plane crashed, killing the entire flight crew and 19 civilians on the ground. There were B-29 failures before but none this serious.
Word spread throughout the Army Air Corps, and its pilots started doing everything to stay out of the B-29. Its scary nick-name was now “Eddie’s coffin.” The hand-picked men who were being trained to fly this new complicated bomber were resistant to fly it and some absolutely refused to get in the cockpit. The officer in charge, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, knew something had to be done to correct this situation. His plan was bold: get women pilots to show the men this giant military aircraft was safe and reliable.
The only women pilots in the military were those of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) who were federal civilians in the ferry service who were also towing targets and instructing new male pilots. In June 1944 Tibbets recruited two WASP pilots: Didi Moorman and Dora Dougherty, assigned to Eglin Army Air Force Base in FL. Neither of these experienced pilots had ever flown a 4 engine bomber. Instead of the six month training program that male pilots received before flying a B-29, Tibbets trained the two women for only three days before he decided they were ready for their demonstration. This was because the two women were experienced, highly motivated, well trained, and unlike their male counterparts, actually followed Tibbets’ instructions to the letter.
Next Dora and Didi, with a male crew, piloted a series of successful demonstration flights out of the heavy-bomber base at Alamogordo, NM with male pilots watching on the ground. Within days, the men stopped complaining, got over their fears, and resumed training on the B-29.
On Aug 6, 1945, a B-29, “Enola Gay”, piloted by Tibbets, dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan.
Jack French is a former Navy officer and retired FBI Agent in Virginia. He is a vintage radio historian and the author of two published books on the subject. Jack is a guest lecturer whose topics include: Civil War Heroines, History of Toys & Games, and the Golden Age of Radio.
www.jackfrenchlectures.com
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On Monday, it’s back to Women’s History Month, with Three Questions and an Answer with historian Nancy Goldstone, who writes about powerful women in medieval and early modern Europe.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed forgotten female photojournalists, cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, and the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography. If that sounds like your bottle of beer, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b