Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with the Creative People Responsible for The Dead Ladies Show
March 8 is International Women’s Day,* which makes it an appropriate day to interview the three people behind the Berlin-based The Dead Ladies’ Show, which celebrates amazing women of the past with live-on-stage history storytelling and a monthly podcast. I am a huge fan of their work. In fact, attending a live performance of The Dead Ladies Show in Berlin is high on my bucket list.**
The show is put together by an international and multilingual crew:
Dead Ladies Show co-founder Katy Derbyshire (UK) is a renowned translator of contemporary German fiction and now publisher at V&Q Books. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was nominated for the MAN Booker International Prize and won her the Straelen Translation Award. She also teaches translation and co-hosts a monthly translation lab in Berlin.
Dead Ladies Show co-founder Florian Duijsens (NL) works as a writer, editor, and translator, and teaches at Bard College Berlin. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Quarterly Conversation, and Asymptote, among other publications, and he has also moderated literary events at Soho House, ICI Berlin (Institute for Cultural Inquiry), ILB (The Berlin International Literature Festival), and LCB (Literarische Colloquium Berlin).
Podcast creator and producer Susan Stone (US) is an award-winning freelance radio, print, and online journalist with a focus on culture and storytelling. She spent a decade on staff at public radio network NPR before receiving a Bosch Fellowship to come to Berlin. Susan has since contributed to NPR, Los Angeles Times, WWD, and BBC among others. She is a regular member of the RIAS Media Prize jury, a consultant for the schreiben & leben project from Lettrétage, and is currently producing podcasts with Human Rights Watch and V&Q Books.
Take it away, y’all:
The show is an interesting mix of women most of us think we know something about and women very few people have heard of. How do you choose which women to include?
Katy Derbyshire: We don’t! Or we don’t choose all of them. To begin with, we asked people to volunteer to present women they admired or were fascinated by, setting only three rules: They had to have been dead for at least six months, they had to have identified as women – and there were to be no fascists (that was to field the endless Leni Riefenstahl proposals, being based in Berlin, but it has proved a useful guideline in other cases too). Now that we have funding most of the time, we invite a broad range of presenters and let them choose who to talk about. When one of us hosts presents a dead lady, we try to fill in any gaps that have come up, or we have special themes: women of Berlin, women for whom migration played a role in their biographies. But sometimes we’re just as fascinated by a particular woman and are simply driven to share her story.
The Dead Ladies Show is both a live performance and a podcast. That’s an unusual combination. Did you plan on doing both from the beginning?
Florian Duijsens: For a show that had its origins in a tipsy dinner when Katy and I took turns reading each other the work of miraculously funny women of yore, we already thought it was an exciting reach to bring that to a Berlin stage, so to have our audience remain loyal and even grow, and our invited presenters (often former audience members!) bring stunning stories about their favorite women to vivid life was already a great treat, let alone our concept spreading overseas and across the continent to New Zealand, the US, and Belgium—a podcast was never even a glimmer on our minds. It was our fabulous podcast producer Susan who started recording the shows soon after we started, and who crafted and fine-tuned not just the recordings, but even our live presentations, making sure they are just as entertaining and enlightening to the people not with us in the room. Having actual warm-blooded humans in the room, however, has always been so important to us, and I believe those little sighs and big guffaws Susan captures on mic really communicate the communal aspect of our whole project to the podcast’s listeners—so we can’t wait to get back on our (outside, socially distanced) Berlin stage again sometime soon this year 🤞
What are some of your favorite podcasts about women, history, or women’s history?
Susan Stone: People sometimes ask us, “What about a Live Ladies Show?” So my response to them is to recommend the fantastic podcast The Last Bohemians, which started in 2019, and is currently in the middle of its second season. The show profiles unorthodox women who weren’t afraid of behaving badly or breaking new ground, and are still doing it later in life — like 87-yr-old Molly Parkin, a fashion editor, painter, and erotic novelist who got her first real kiss from Louis Armstrong, or punk artist and activist Gee Vaucher or playwright and critic Bonnie Greer who grew up on the South Side of Chicago and is now a British institution with an OBE.
I don’t listen to too many general history or, to be honest, women’s history podcasts, as I tend to go for the investigative genre as a casual listener. But I really have loved some episodes of Throughline from NPR (shoutout to my ‘alma mater’ – I worked at NPR for 10 yrs), especially the one on American preacher The Public Universal Friend, which is a nice companion to our show on the Chevalière d’Eon. And the crew at What’sHerName are some of the nicest people in podland; I even appeared on one of their episodes, The Ancestors, talking about my grandmother, who went from being a young championship highland dancer in Glasgow, Scotland to becoming the postmaster of a tiny and wild Florida town called Rattlesnake after emigrating to the US.
Question for you: You’re a historian and author who has published books about women as well as other topics. Do you see a rising interest in content about women in history? It feels like we’re getting a steadily growing stream of newsletters, books, podcasts, blogs, and even a Hillary Clinton-produced docu-series — that all take on the subject of women from history. Is there, as I hope, an untapped hunger for this material? And might there (as I hope not) be a ‘women’s history industrial complex’ in the near future?
My personal opinion—based on the way I grabbed biographies about historical women whenever they crossed my path as a child—is that the hunger for content about women in history has been around for a long time. Production of that content began to appear with the rise of women’s history as an academic field in the late 1970s. The oldest podcast on women’s history that I know of, the History Chicks,began in 2011, a few months before I started History in the Margins. In the intervening ten years, popular and academic works on women’s history has become increasingly easy to find, though we still have to fight to have women included in textbooks and curricula more than a sidebar.
I don’t think there will be a “women’s history industrial complex”. (Thank goodness!) But there is a growing “women’s history coven community”.
*Which is celebrated as a holiday in many places, but not in the United States. (My understanding is that it smelled of socialism to the powers that declare national holidays.) If you’re curious, here’s a place to get some answers: https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
** For now, I’m making do with their first Zoom show, which will be on March 11 in collaboration with StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival. Tickets are free. Info here: https://stanzapoetry.org/festival/events/past-present-annette-von-droste-h-lshoff . Not the same as being there in real life, but I am still thrilled.)
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Want to know more about the Dead Ladies Show?
Check out the website: https://deadladiesshow.com
Listen to the Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-ladies-show-podcast/id1289661254
Or on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3qIH29uWZE6D5XzNITjC5G
Follow it on Twitter: @deadladiesshow
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Kathleen Stone, talking about women who pursued professional careers in an era when women were expected to stay home.
A Brief Pause in Our Women’s History Month Celebration
I fully intended to spend Fridays here on the Margins continuing the themes of Women’s History Month. I have stories to tell you, a book to review, and a tough question to “wrassle” with. But earlier in the week it dawned on me that another, smaller celebration is on the horizon—and I’m hoping you’ll help me with part of it.
History in the Margins turns ten in May. I published my first blog post on May 11, 2011. It was a short essay titled “Why Another History Blog?” No one called my bluff, so I kept going. I’ve blogged more or less twice a week every since. (There was a rough patch in 2012 when I was writing a book on short deadline* and handout yet figured out how to blog and write a book at the same time.)
That’s roughly 1000 blog posts in the last ten years. As part of celebrating this ten-year-long conversation with you, I’m putting together a collection of the top ten posts to share with you. I have some ideas about what belongs on this list, but I’d like some input from you. If there is a post you think should be on that list—one that stuck with you because of the topic or the language or a new idea or no reason in particular—let me know.
* I wrote Mankind, the history of the world from the Big Bang on, in five months. It almost killed me.
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On Monday, it’s back to Women’s History Month, with Three Questions and an Answer with the people behind The Dead Ladies’ Show—a live show and podcast about women who did fabulous things when they were alive. I’m a fan. I hope you will be, too.
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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 issues I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and the artificial nature of the way we divide the past into historical periods. If that sounds like your slice of gingerbread, 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 Miranda Garno Nesler
Miranda Garno Nesler is unique among the people I have interviewed for this series. She is a rare books dealer who specializes in documents by women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people. When I heard her speak on the What’s Her Name podcast, I wanted to know more.
Miranda earned her PhD from Vanderbilt University and serves as the Director of Women’s Literature & History for Whitmore Rare Books. At WRB, she researches manuscript and print materials through which women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people told their own stories; and she places them with institutional clients around the globe to ensure that students and researchers can access a more diverse swath of history. She has been an invited speaker for a range of organizations including WriteGirl LA, The American Culinary Museum, The Belletrist, WhatsHerName? Podcast, and the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association of America (ABAA). Past work has been published in The Shakespearean International Year Book, Studies in English Literature, and The Journal of Narrative Theory. Her essay on the 17th century printer Elizabeth Holt is slated to appear in the collection Making Impressions: Women in Printing and Publishing (Legacy Press, 2021).
Take it away, Miranda!
When did you first become interested in women’s history? What sparked that interest?
My early education played a major role. Attending an all-women’s prep school, I was surrounded by brilliant, talented people. Our professors were largely women who’d earned advanced degrees in the 1950s-70s but had been discouraged from pursuing or were denied full time university teaching positions. More often than not, they were open about the obstacles they’d faced in advancing their educations; and they encouraged us as a student body to foster each other’s abilities, collaborate, and generally lift each other up. Despite this, we read very few books by or about women in our classes, which were still modeled on a very Euro-masculine-centric humanist model. It made me curious. We had heard the histories of our professors, but they were certainly not the first generation to fight for education or employment. What were even earlier women doing, what kinds of communities did they form together, what barriers did they face or overcome, and why didn’t we know more about them? Wouldn’t learning about them tell us something about ourselves? And if we reconsidered history with them at the center, might we better position ourselves and the women after us to be at there instead of on the margins?
By the time I made it through college and into my advanced degree, these questions had become the ones that would shape my life and my career. My goal was to use the textual materials women made or used to learn not only about major historical “firsts” – the first woman published in England, the first paid woman dramatist, the first woman admitted to a university – but to find the stories of the women quietly and in their daily lives shaping the world around them. Curators, librarians, and their generosity in sharing knowledge of their collections made this work possible.
How did you get started in rare books?
I’ve always been fascinated by the physicality of history – how material things preserve what we think as well as how we make things, how we use things, how we share things, and what that says about us as individuals and groups. As a child, I remember buying a book of Arthurian legends from a vintage bookshop. I had been drawn to its size (designed to fit easily in a hand or a pocket, as many Victorian books were during the rise of train travel); and I loved the binding (what I now know to be a 19th century publisher’s cloth binding embossed in blind). Reading it, I loved it even more. It had previous owners’ bookplates on the front pastedown. And not only had one person left notes in the margins regarding the sources of those stories or the changes the editor had made, but another reader had left annotations responding to the first set of notes. Even though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, it was an early realization that the people who engaged with this book had become a part of its physical identity – this copy was now unlike any other. These people had also shared their knowledge with me, even though we would never meet or talk. The book as an object connected me to a matrix of other authors and other readers.
My obsession with physical texts and signs of use wove into my interest in women’s history; as time went on, I seemed to find women everywhere. Their ownership signatures and gift inscriptions in books. Lists of the contents of their libraries. Manuscripts they wrote and exchanged. Modern editions and the anthologies I encountered in school might not have women – but women had left their marks all over the world of rare books and manuscripts. Finding them meant that I could connect with them; sharing them meant that others could too. I gained a keen awareness of the fact that we can only teach or research what is accessible. In my role as a book dealer specifically collaborating with faculty and curators at their libraries, I get a chance to place and preserve this material, to give it context, to show that it matters just as much as the holdings that were previously more privileged. I get a chance to ensure that people see themselves represented and can find their history on the shelves.
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
Belle da Costa Greene. When we think about the material preservation of history and the public’s access to materials that teach it, she’s a critical figure. As the private librarian to J.P. Morgan and the first director of what is now the Morgan Library & Museum, Greene developed a world class collection, preserving rare books and manuscripts that shape scholarship and popular culture today. She overturns the myth that the world’s greatest antiquarian collections were solely built by, benefited, or represented men; and she highlights the importance of diverse people being in these positions of authority. After all, in curating the collection, which required vast insight and knowledge, Greene infused it with her own tastes, preferences, and values. She used her situation to promote the work of women intellectuals; and, likely because of her own background, she was committed to expanding public access to library holdings. Greene is also an example of the powerful and often under-acknowledged influence of Black women in America. Hers is an important story of the social challenges confronted by and the violence enacted on BIPOC communities in a systemically racist culture that privileges a homogenous, white idea of “intellectual.” Greene’s father had been the first Black graduate of Harvard; but she would eventually change her last name, restructure her personal narrative, and begin “passing” as white before taking her first major job at Princeton. It was revolutionary for a woman to rise in the ranks of the rare book world as she did – vying against wealthy men at auction, gaining their respect, dictating institutional policy, conducting and presenting research, building a world class collection. But to do so while being forced to deny part of her identity, which she feared would put her accomplishments at risk (what she called “living behind the curtain of my mind”)? Hers is a story I feel everyone should know. History-makers aren’t all one type. Some heroes make history by preserving it.
…..And a question for you. Among women living today, who is someone you believe will or should be remembered in history books, historical novels and films?
There are some obvious choices here: Kamala Harris, Hilary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But I’d like to step outside the political arena and suggest a group of women from the world of STEM: the women who worked at NASA in the early years.
One of my most vivid memories of grade school was carrying my chair to the all-purpose room to watch rocket launches. The (male) astronauts were the main thrust of the story. The engineers and scientists who made the space program possible were seldom mentioned. But when they were, I was left with the impression that they were all men. The women whose story was shared in Hidden Figures were not alone. And I know of at least one nerdy little girl who would have been happy to know about them.
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Want to know more about Miranda Garno Nesler and her work?
Check out this interview: Bright Young booksellers: Miranda Gardo Nesler
Visit the Whitmore Rare Books website: www.WhitmoreRareBooks.com
Follow her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandanesler/
Follow her on Instagram: @WhitmoreRareBooks
The only full-length biography of Bella de Casta Greene: https://www.themorgan.org/shop/books-and-media/illuminated-life-belle-da-costa-greenes-journey-prejudice-privilege
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Tomorrow it will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. But we’ve still got more people talking about women’s history from a lot of different angles next week. Don’t touch that dial!