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.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Angela Mace Christian
Dr. Angela Mace Christian is a writer, lecturer, and pianist working in the field of music history. She specializes in music, culture, and society of the “Long Nineteenth Century”(1789-1914). Christian’s work focuses on the life and work of Fanny Hensel (born Mendelssohn), and her research interests include the Mendelssohn family and their circle, early nineteenth-century piano music and German art song, and issues of style and influence, gender, society, and kinship. Dr. Christian received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Music from Duke University, and her B.Mus. in piano performance from Vanderbilt University. She has given 600+ lectures in university classrooms and conferences in 7 countries, and she has published books, essays, articles, encyclopedia entries, and blog posts on Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
Take it away, Angela!
Are there special challenges in writing about a woman whose biography is overshadowed by that of a famous man?
Absolutely. And the biggest battle ground is in my own thought process. Like so many pianists before me, I discovered Felix Mendelssohn’s music as a teenager. I was an avid reader, so I read all of the biographies of Felix I could get my hands on. Larry Todd’s authoritative biography of Mendelssohn did not yet exist, of course, so I only encountered Fanny as a shadowy figure in Felix’s life. I vividly remember performing Felix’s Lied ohne Worte, op. 85 no. 4 for a regional competition; in the edition I was using, the work had the title “Elegie” and I imagined that Felix had written it for Fanny after her death. Little did I know that the work was neither written after Fanny’s death, nor given a title by the composer! So, from my earliest engagement with the Mendelssohn family, Fanny was an amorphous figure, standing completely in the shadow of her brother. I think this is true for many people who often don’t even know that Felix had a sister, much less one so talented and highly accomplished.
Many years later, in graduate school (by then a Ph.D. candidate writing a dissertation on Fanny), I read Virginia Woolf’s seminal A Room of One’s Own in which she posits the existence of a sister for Shakespeare. She very well could have existed and could have been just as talented – or even more talented than – her brother William, but we will never know because society had no use for lower class women who wanted to create. It barely had any use for upper class women who wanted to create. By Fanny’s time, this had partially changed due to the Enlightenment and nascent ideals of equality in the education and treatment of women. But still, Fanny had to fight a very hard battle to fulfill her creative calling. And much of her battle was in her own mind, just as mine is, to convince herself that the rewards of her creative endeavor were worth risking her family’s name and her place in society. As a child, she was rigorously discouraged from any public display of her talents, but was able to cultivate them highly in the private sphere. As an adult, she struggled with seeing herself as worthy of public interest and downplayed her skill, like many women did. Even when her husband and friends begged her to publish something, still she resisted, claiming that she was “as afraid of her father and brothers at age 40 as she was at 14.”
So, I find myself consistently needing to stop and think carefully about if what I’m thinking is based on a long-held assumption about the relationship of a female artist to her brother, or whether what I am thinking is an objective analysis of evidence. I find that this issue crops up frequently when analyzing the music. It is incredibly tempting to compare the music of Felix and Fanny, because it truly does share a sort of genetic fingerprint. I find that many of us also fall into the habit of comparing composers to everyone who came before them; it’s hard not to, especially when a composer like Beethoven was very much alive and working when Felix and Fanny were teenagers. It can even be completely appropriate for some works, such as Fanny’s “Easter” sonata. But what if we didn’t compare them? What if we dug into the music of Fanny, just like we dig into the music of Bach or Beethoven or Brahms? What could we find that we’ve missed? What happens if we truly level the playing field, take gender and kinship out of the equation, and approach the work of art head on, regardless of its composer?* That’s incredibly difficult for me, since I do primarily write on the social context around Fanny, with a special interest in kinship, but it might be the best way to overcome those inherent biases in our minds and the historical record.
How do you define women’s history?
Women’s history is the history of all humans. It just hasn’t been written or acknowledged until more recent times because, as we know, those who hold the power get to write the narrative. It’s incredibly frustrating to think about all those centuries of brilliant women who contributed in endless ways to the formation of our world who we can know nothing about. And even more frustrating to think about all the brilliant women whose contributions were never made because they were (and still are) denied access to even basic education.
For example, a high class, educated woman in 19th century Western culture (like Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and her mother, Lea) could be in charge of running a large home, which could include managing staff, the household budget, menu, care and education of children and elderly parents, and social calendar. In this era, the business was the family, rather than an unconnected corporation, so it was crucial to make these connections in the social, private realm – the domain of the women. Thus, a woman could enable her husband’s business success by hosting social events with strategically seated guests, by carefully choosing discussion topics, or by matchmaking. These tight-knit family structures and social calendars also allowed young women to absorb the education and intellectual pursuits of the men around them (or in some cases, exceptionally talented mothers or aunts). Some of these young women were encouraged not only to observe, but also to take part in the advanced pursuit of knowledge or skill. These are the women we know about – Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Caroline Herschel are both excellent examples – but still we know the struggle even they faced. Imagine the struggle of the intelligent women who did not have access to the “right” circle of people, but still managed to glimpse the possibilities. These are the women lost to history.
Today, two centuries later, we still struggle to ensure that all women get the education and opportunities they need to add their voice to the historical narrative. But I believe that we are starting to do a better job of calling out the inherent bias in the historical narrative not just in academia, but also in popular culture. That movement and the opportunity to take part in it extends to people – women and men – of all races, national origin, sexual identity, and religion. We still have a lot of progress to make, of course, but I am encouraged that I can now purchase books for my child that portray heroines with all shades of skin color that made history from the jazz club to moon. Now THAT is a giant leap for mankind.
How did you get interested in Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel?
I became interested in Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel through the music of her brother, Felix Mendelssohn. Looking back, I’m a little annoyed that that’s how it happened, but given that I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, without access to the resources I have now, I can’t fault myself too much! I played a lot of Felix Mendelssohn as a high school piano student, and then played his Variations sérieuses, op. 54 in my Junior piano performance degree recital at Vanderbilt University, The Blair School of Music. That performance was the beginning of my serious engagement with the Mendelssohns; I embarked on a senior project on Mendelssohn’s music, and used the Variations sérieuses as my jumping off point. I remember clearly going to the library to find the “M” section in the library. It was on the very bottom shelf, so I sat down cross legged on the floor and pulled every book available on Mendelssohn off the shelf. Among them was the new critical biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). That moment, and that book, changed the entire course of my life. The critical approach, new evidence presented, and heartfelt treatment of Mendelssohn and his music captivated me. I went on to apply to Duke University for their Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Music specifically to work on Mendelssohn with the book’s author, R. Larry Todd.
When I arrived on campus to start my Master’s course work in the Fall of 2006, Larry was already starting to draft his new biography of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel; he felt compelled to do so because as he was writing the biography of Felix, it had become clear to him, and to anyone who read that book, that Fanny was on every page of Felix’s life. As I started to read Larry’s drafts and listen to Fanny’s music, I became increasingly drawn to her story and her work. I could not believe that this woman, about whom I had previously known so little, had done so much in her short life – over 450 works completed!
And so it was that I became increasingly called to take up the work of women’s history and to champion Fanny in particular. The resources were only just coming more fully to light, there was still a lot to discover (like the long-lost autograph manuscript of the “Easter” sonata!), and there was room for making new observations. All that made Fanny the perfect subject for a dissertation. I decided to examine the relationship between Fanny and her brother and try to determine what belonged to Fanny and what belonged to Felix. In the end, I realized that approach was the wrong angle. I found instead that Fanny and Felix were indeed unique and separate composers, but that neither would have existed without the other.
I’ve been incredibly privileged to spend almost half my life now working on Fanny and her life and music. I hope a new generation of performers, scholars, and music lovers growing up now, will find that Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel is not a surprise, but rather a standard part of their lives. The Mendelssohn family more broadly presents an incredibly rich tapestry of possibilities for scholarly exploration, ranging from Enlightenment Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to 200+ living descendants of the family. The international scholarly and performing community surrounding this family is just as wonderful; it’s an open, supportive and sharing community, dedicated to advancing the state of knowledge on the Mendelssohn family. There’s still much to do, so come on over to the world of the Mendelssohns and stay a while!
Angela asks a question in return: What do you see as the most encouraging trend in research on women in music? How does that reflect, or not reflect, broader developments in the non-academic or non-musical world? (For example, women running for US President, more and more women being named CEOs of large corporations, etc.).
I will be honest. I know almost nothing about research on women in music, so for me the most encouraging trend is that such research is being done. It is exciting to learn that the musical equivalents of Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister in fact existed and prospered against the odds.
The fact that Angela and others are bringing such women out of the historical shadows is clearly related to the broader interest in researching women’s lives, both learning more about women who have been lost to history and questioning why they were “lost” in the first place. (After all, this isn’t like losing a sock in the laundry. People made, and make, choices that result in women, and other marginalized groups, being dismissed, ignored and forgotten.) The broader interest in restoring forgotten women to history is intimately intertwined with growing opportunities for women in the world. It works both ways: seeing what women have done in the past makes it easier to believe women can do more now and opening doors in the present make it easier to ask questions about what women have done in the past.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when you put half the populations back into history, you get a very different story.
*Pamela butting in: Angela throws down the gauntlet here for all of us who deal with women’s history. What would we learn if we take gender out of the question when looking at a woman’s work? It’s hard for me to even picture it in the case of most of the women I write about, because their battle to do the thing in the face of opposition is as much of their story as the thing itself. It’s a fascinating question. (Brief pause while I make notes for a future newsletter.**)
**You didn’t know I also have a newsletter? Take a look at a recent edition: In which I write a dud and consider the nature of dud-ery
Angela shared several useful links for anyone interesting in learning more about Angela and about Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel
Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (Mendelssohn Society)
http://www.mendelssohn-remise.de/
The society for the study of all members of the Mendelssohn family, based in Berlin, Germany. They direct the Mendelssohn-Remise, an intimate museum and event venue at Jägerstrasse 51, one known site of the Mendelssohn family bank. They host a rich array of events related to the Mendelssohns and their circle, as well as supporting the broader musical and scholarly community in Berlin. Their website offers many resources on the family in both German and English.
Not Another Music History Cliché!
www.notanothermusichistorycliche.blogspot.com
Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason (†2020) finds articles about classical music that contain debunked myths and cliché descriptions. [Pamela again: Things have changed since Angela got me this information. The first blog post that appears on the site is a farewell. I was stunned. consider yourselves warned. ]
www.angelamacechristian.com
My scholarly website, where the visitor can download my performing version of the “Easter” Sonata for free and read about its discovery.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historical novelist Mary Sharrat.