Listening to Women’s History
Back in 2015, I wrote my first blog post about history podcasts. I had recently become a podcast fan. I had found podcasts I loved about the craft and business of writing, with an occasional side trip into popular culture.* By comparison, the world of history podcasts was a barren wasteland.
That’s changed. And one reason it has changed is the people, mostly women, who podcast about women’s history. I introduced you The Exploress podcast yesterday. Today I’d like to introduce you to a few more of my favorite by and/or about women. All of these are in regular rotation on my laptop during the dinner cooking hour and other times when I am doing things that require my hands and eyes but only a small part of my brain:
The What’s Her Name Podcast: Hosted and produced by academic sisters Dr. Katie Nelson and Olivia Meikle, Committed to reclaiming forgotten history, What’s Her Name tells the stories of fascinating women you’ve never heard of (but should have). Through compelling interviews with guest historians, writers, and scholars,*** Olivia and Katie bring to life the “lost” women of history. (The hosts were part of last year’s women’s History series. You can read their interview here.)
The Dead Ladies Show: If I ever make it to Berlin, going to a live performance of the Dead Ladies Show is on my list. (This would take careful planning because they happen about every two months on an irregular schedule.) Covering all walks of life – from ancient mathematicians to silent-movie stars to record-breaking athletes – the Dead Ladies Show is all about women who achieved great things against all odds. (In other words, some of my favorite people) Luckily for me, the producers use footage from the live shows to create podcasts.
Unsung Sluts: Stacie Rasmussen and Tabitha Davis take a humorous and irreverent approach to feminism as they talk about lesser-known women in history. (If you object to raw language, you may find this one rough going.)
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls : This is the PG podcast to balance out Unsung Sluts: tough issues but no rough language. The show is based on Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, the best selling book series designed to help girls (little and all grown-up) to dream big.
Dolly Parton’s America : Not strictly a history podcast, or even a women’s history podcast, Dolly Parton’s America a deeply personal, historical, and musical rethinking of one of America’s great icons in nine episodes. Come to think of it, this is a women’s history podcast dang it. Just one with a very specific lens.
A lagniappe: The Year That Was looks at history one year at a time, from as many angles as possible. The podcast is currently focused on 1919, and it is consistently fascinating. This is not a women’s history podcast, but Elizabeth Lunday gets better with each episode. It would be a shame to miss it.
What are you listening to?
*Many of which are now gone, alas. Five years is an eternity in podcast years. Ultimately, podcasts, like blogs, are a labor of love. They are hard work and expensive to produce. At some point people run out of energy, money or ideas. If there is a podcast you love, find a way to support it. Even if it’s just leaving a review, sharing their tweets, or sending them a fan e-mail.**
**This is not a hint. Though I do love hearing from y’all.
***WARNING: Blatant Self-Promotion Ahead: I was a guest on their show, talking about Zenobia, the Syrian queen who conquered a big bite out of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century CE. Here’s the link if you’re interested: The Warrior.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with The Exploress
I want to make one thing clear right up front: I LOVE the Exploress podcast. I subscribe to many podcasts, but there are only a few that I support via Patreon and that I listen to as soon as an episode goes live. The Exploress is one of them.
Each season, Kate Jermain chooses a time period and then digs in “to explore not just the specific lives of fabulous women, but their world, and the myriad ways women lived in them” —a process she describes as “creative time traveling.” If you like your history smart, funny, focused, and a little bit snarky, you might want to check out The Exploress podcast.
The Exploress herself, Kate Jermain, is a writer, editor and teacher. When she’s not time traveling through her podcast, she edits and contributes to big pretty books for publishers like National Geographic.
Take it away, Kate!
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
For American textbooks, I’d pick Elizabeth Keckley. This woman spent her formative years toiling under the yoke of slavery, suffering all of its horrors. But still, no matter how many times she was told she wasn’t worth much, she built her skills as a dressmaker and use them to buy her way to freedom. She found a way to transcend the life she’d been born into, creating a new life for herself in Washington, D.C., where she became dressmaker to the most influential female political/social stars of the day. With warmth, charm, and excellent business sense, she made dresses (and became friends) with women like Varina Davis, later first lady of the Confederacy. She became the First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s best friend.
She lost her only child in the Civil War, and yet she found the strength to nurse Abe and Mary Lincoln’s child when he fell deathly ill. She spent a lot of time surrounded by wealthy white people, but she also used her position to raise money for the “contrabands” (escaped slaves) that were regularly pouring into her adopted city. Later, after Mary Lincoln essentially dragged her into a public scandal, she tried to vindicate herself and her friend by writing a memoir: something very few African American women were doing. Her story is beautifully written and incredibly unique, but it also has a lot to tell us about the African American experience at this time in history. It must have taken such bravery to write about her life so honestly. Its reception has a lot to tell us, too: white readers at the time were horrified that the ‘hired help’ would dare to air the ex First Lady’s laundry in public. Mary Todd Lincoln never spoke to her again, and this brave, amazing womAn died in poverty.
It’s got everything: drama, intense high and lows, struggle and triumph. But more than that, it’s an incredible window into a pivotal time in America’s history: those final years of slavery, the horrors of the Civil War and the uncertain period after it, and one woman’s attempts to understand and survive. Her story is both haunting and inspiring, and all young American women (and men) should learn about it.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
I LOVE telling the stories of everyday women doing extraordinary things: building bombs, sneaking their way into armies, discovering stars. It’s particularly exciting when I stumble on something I’d never heard about before in the realm of women’s history: for example, how 19th century Spiritualism gave women a chance to become influential public figures, and how they often used their positions as mediums to further the cause of suffrage. The thing I often find most challenging is trying to get at “the truth” of any woman’s story, particularly those from the ancient world. With women like Agrippina and Cleopatra, almost everything we know about them comes to us through other people; we don’t have ANYTHING that they wrote for themselves. I find it frustrating to only have the very edge of a story, unable to know for sure how much of that story has been shaped by the ancient men who told it. Though there’s fun to be had in that, too. These gaps allow me to get creative with the podcast, making up things these figures might have said. I’ve particularly enjoyed writing ancient Roman men’s dating profiles and giving ancient women witty retorts and killer one liners.
How do you define women’s history?
There are men out there who think my podcast and those like it aren’t for them. But women’s history is EVERYONE’S history. It’s just that instead of being told through the eyes and lives of men, as so much of history has been, it tries to give it to us through the women who lived it. Do I talk about periods and women’s fashion and childbirth and sex work on my podcast? Yes, and very much on purpose, because they are a part of our history—men and women—and to understand history, you can’t ignore them. I’m just trying to balance the field.
AND a question for you…
If you had to sum up one thing you learned from each of your books, Women Warriors and Heroines of Mercy Street – one central idea you took away about that time, or those women, or just women in history – what would they be?
In some ways, the two books are in conversation with each other. They are two different ways of looking at women in times of warfare.
Some of the first women warriors I learned about as a child were the women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the American Civil War. In writing Heroines of Mercy Street, I reached the conclusion that the women who volunteered as nurses in the war were far more important than the several hundred women who fought, no matter how bravely. That was true not simply for the work they did during the war, but for the impact they had on society after the war. I now believe that their work as reformers after the war is the most important part of their story.
Many used their newfound experience at organizing, and at elbowing their way through bureaucracies to help change the world. Cornelia Hancock, for instance, the young Quaker woman who found her way to Gettysburg, started a school for the children of former slaves in South Carolina. Other former nurses were active in building hospitals for women and children, reforming prisons and asylums, and providing vocational training for girls. They set up relief funds for war widows and orphans, and organized programs to settle unemployed veterans on farmland in the West. Some became active in the labor, women’s rights, and temperance movement. A few used their experience as a springboard to national leadership roles, founding groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the American Red Cross. If you look at an American reform movement in the 20 or 30 or even 40 years after 1865, local or national, large or small, the odds are you’ll find a former Civil War nurse or two in the middle of things–or in charge.
My work in Women Warriors solidified my sense that women who disguised themselves to enlist as men across the centuries are a fascinating side issue. The numbers involved are statistically insignificant in any given war. Which is not to say that looking at their stories isn’t important. The reasons that women enlisted disguised as men tells us a great deal about the economic and social constraints on women’s lives. But the main thing I came away with with a sense of amazement of how many examples of women warriors there are and how hard it is for us to acknowledge their presence.
Want to know more about Kate Jermain and The Exploress?
Visit her website, and listen to a few episodes while you’re there: https://www.theexploresspodcast.com/
Visit her other website: https://www.katejarmstrong.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @theexploresspod
Follow her on Instagram: theexploresspodcast
Visit her Etsy store for lady-centric merchandise: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/theexploress
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Come back tomorrow, when I’ll share a list of some of my favorite women’s history podcasts.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Mary Sharratt
The award-winning author of seven acclaimed novels, Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write overlooked women back into history. Her latest novel, Ecstasy, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018, Mariner Trade Paperback 2019) explores the dramatic life of composer and life artist, Alma Schindler Mahler. Ecstasy was a Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Month and a New York Post Must Read Book. Sharratt’s Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen won the Nautilus Gold Award and was a Kirkus Book of the Year 2012. Sharratt’s articles on women’s history are published in The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Catapult, and Electric Literature.
Take it away, Mary!
How would you describe what you write?
I’m on a mission to write overlooked women back into history, a task I find both exhilarating and daunting. To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover the buried histories of women, we historical novelists must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. To create engaging and nuanced portraits of women in history, we must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks.
Thus far, I’ve written about the Pendle Witches of 1612 in Daughters of the Witching Hill, revealing these much-maligned women in their true historical context as cunning women and healers. My 2012 novel Illuminations explores the life of visionary 12th century abbess, polymath, composer and powerfrau Hildegard von Bingen. In The Dark Lady’s Mask, I delve into the life and work of Aemilia Bassano Lanier, England’s first professional woman poet and possibly Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. My most recent novel Ecstasy is drawn from the life of composer and life artist, Alma Schindler Mahler, a woman, who in my opinion, has been unjustly dismissed and vilified.
My aim is to shine a light on overlooked women, to take them out of the margins and place them center stage. To make their lives and work accessible and relevant to contemporary readers.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Unfortunately we, as writers, can run into problems when we present a view of historical women that challenges common misperceptions. On the one hand, readers and critics are justifiably skeptical about novelists who present plucky historical heroines with attitudes that feel too contemporary and thus anachronistic to their time and place. On the other hand, if you sit down and do the research, you will discover that every epoch had its radical voices, movers and shakers, extraordinary women who rocked the establishment. Think of Sappho, Hypatia, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I of England, Aphra Benn, Anne Bonny the Pirate Queen, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Parks, to name a few. Too often readers and, unfortunately some reviewers, appear to have a distorted and uninformed view of women in history and seem too quick to label any strong heroine anachronistic, even if the author has backed up the fiction with considerable research.
My hope is that as more authors delve into the lives of historical women and present them in all their nuanced glory, public perceptions on women’s history will undergo a long overdue sea change.
What’s your next book about and when will we see it?
My next novel, Revelations, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Spring 2021, is a trip back to the late Middle Ages. Revelations should be of special interest to fans of my 2012 novel, Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen. Here I return once more to the realm of the female medieval mystics. Revelations is the story of the intersecting lives of two spiritual women who changed history—earthy Margery Kempe, globetrotting pilgrim and mother of fourteen, and ethereal Julian of Norwich, sainted anchorite, theologian, and author of the first book in English by a woman, Revelations of Divine Love.
Imagine, if you will, a fifteenth century Eat, Pray, Love.
In addition, I am also collaborating with composer Sarah Kirkland Snider to adapt my novel Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen into an opera, entitled Tongue of Fire. The opera will debut at the Prototype Festival in New York in January 2021.
My question for Pamela: If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
This is always tricky, because high school history books tend not to get into a lot of detail. (Or at least they didn’t when I was in high school.) So I feel that it is not enough to pick a woman who should be better known, but one who played an important role in a major event—a role that changes our understanding of that event when they are included.
One example would be the women who flew airplanes for the United States as part of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program. They were not allowed to fly in combat, but they trained male pilots who later served overseas, they transported planes of all types for military use within, and they served as test pilots for new airplanes. Their service made it possible for the United States to build a functional military air force, and consequently helped end the war more quickly. (And as so often happened, they were treated badly by the government after the war. But that’s a story for another blog post.)
Want to know more about Mary Sharratt and her work?
Check out her website: www.marysharratt.com
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Kate Jermain, the host of The Exploress, one of my favorite women’s history podcasts.