Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Etta Madden
Etta Madden and I hang out in a lot of the same places on-line. That’s true of many of the people I’ve interviewed here on the Margins this month, but in this case there’s a twist. In the course of hanging out on line, we discovered that we also hang out in some of the same places In Real Life, though not often at the same time. Etta teaches at Missouri State University, in my home town of Springfield, Missouri, and her Facebook and Instagram posts often make me homesick for my beloved Ozarks.
Here’s the formal bio: Etta Madden is the author and editor of Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias, Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies, and An Eliza Leslie Reader, along with numerous articles on American women writers and religious and alternative communities. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia to support research for her writing. A teaching appointment from the Italian Fulbright Commission and an National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at the American Academy in Rome have fostered her current book project on 19th-century American women in Italy. Since 1995, she has been a professor at Missouri State University.
Take it away, Etta:
You teach a variety of women’s history courses. What aspects of women’s history surprise your students most? What outrages them?
Pregnancy and birth control. Seriously, I know that seems elementary, but many students often don’t understand why heterosexual relations outside of marriage were so verboten for women in much of the texts we read from the past. (I teach literature, so teach history through texts such as novels and autobiographies). I ask them to go outside the box of thinking simplistically about parents and/or religious and government institutions limiting women’s freedom through mores and laws. Asking them to consider the very real ramifications of heterosexual relations apart from marriage in cultures without access to reliable birth control—the physical and financial responsibilities of childbearing and childrearing as a result—is eye opening for many of them. The outcomes of pregnancy in cultures where women had little access to economic freedom extend beyond the woman herself to those responsible for her and for any children she bore.
It doesn’t take long for this conversation to move into other issues of women’s societal positions in the past (and in the present, of course!). Most students are aware of other cultures with different marriage and family practices—whether matriarchal or polygamous cultures or ones with arranged marriages. These “other cultures” become more closely connected to western women’s history when we begin talking what it meant for women to risk pregnancy with heterosexual intercourse or, even worse, to have it forced upon them. The case of enslaved women—Harriet Jacobs, who had relations and children with a white man who was not her master, is a great example—add another interesting layer to the conversation of “choice.” Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is one of my favorite texts to teach to raise these discussions. Since her account was edited by a popular white woman writer, Lydia Maria Child, it also takes us into other conversations about women’s voices and stories. Whose stories get told, why and how? Until the last part of the 20th century, Jacobs story was considered just another one of Child’s many fictional works.
How do your personal interests and experiences drive your research and writing on gender, especially your work on food as a gender issue?
Personal connections motivate us in our research subjects, right? I have always loved to eat and to cook—my family spent a lot of time at the table and in the kitchen. That could be the starting point for my writing about food. But it’s not that simple! As one food scholar wrote years ago, (I’m paraphrasing), many people think sexual relations are the most pervasive element of human cultures, but really, food consumption is. Eating trumps sex. Just about anyone could move from their personal experiences with food to write about it. The reality for me is that my interest in religious communities (and women in them), both arising my family background, catapulted me into writing about religious rules about drinking and eating.
Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.
Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the religious community known as the Shakers, took me by surprise. I was beginning the project that became my first book, Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies, which I dove into because of my interest in the relationship between literacy and religion. I hate to sound trite, but Mother Ann’s life story changed my life. She was the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith in Manchester, England, yet she preached from scriptures she had memorized and visions that inspired her. Mother Ann’s forceful rhetoric and charisma convinced people to follow her to America on the eve of the Revolutionary War and establish a spiritual community that continues today. The Shakers rocked the world of colonial New England and then the western states of Kentucky and Ohio in part because of their celibacy, communal property ownership, and female leadership—instigated by Lee’s teachings and example. Certainly, she wasn’t the first woman whose life story has found a place in women’s history—the medieval mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the martyr Joan of Arc, and, more recently, Mother Teresa, all come to mind.
Among this circle of notable women, however, Ann Lee turned my world upside down because she was a smart leader yet deemed illiterate. And, sadly, she is now little known. As I began to study her, I learned of and wrote about numerous other women in colonial and nineteenth-century America who were similarly influential: Jemima Wilkinson (founder of the Society of the Universal Friend), Elizabeth Ashbridge (a Quaker itinerant), Rebecca Cox Jackson (an AME visionary in Philadelphia who became a Shaker), Julia A. J. Foote (an AME Elder and evangelist). Learning about how these women came from humble beginnings yet found their voices and made an impact on society—especially on other women—motivated me to write and to speak up and out.
Voice and vocation in these women’s lives (although they all followed spiritual callings) has driven me to explore women whose callings are more secular. American women following their vocations to travel to Italy in the 19th century are the focus of my current book project. News correspondent Anne Hampton Brewster, translator and poet Caroline Crane Marsh, and education activist Emily Bliss Gould all left extensive written records of feats they accomplished abroad that have fallen under the radar of women’s history. As writers, these women remind me of the importance of daily writing, both the behind-the-scenes private words we generate and the smaller versions that make it to the public. They all become part of the record of the social fabric that creates history.
My question for you: Since Women Warriors details the stories of figures across centuries and around the globe, and the Heroines of Mercy Street zooms in on a much narrower time and place, I am curious about how you go about determining a frame for your projects. What thoughts do you have about differences between framing a single-subject book and one that focuses on several women? How does the more wide-ranging breadth influence the research and how you tell the stories?
First, I think you may be giving me more credit for a conscious process than I deserve. At some level, I believe that stories choose us. And once a story has locked on to your imagination*, part of the work is finding the frame.
That said I would argue that Heroines of Mercy Street and Women Warriors are more alike than their scope would suggest. Both books talk about groups of women and both books are built around a structural spine so they are more than simply a series of mini-biographies all in a row. In the case of Heroines of Mercy Street, that spine is two memoirs written by women who nursed at Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria, which was the setting for the PBS drama Mercy Street. Between them, those memoirs gave me a story to follow through the course of the war and touched on all the big issues I needed to discuss.** Women Warriors is organized around a series of themes dealing with the reasons women have historically gone to war, how those reasons relate to women’s roles as daughters, wives, mothers and widows, peacemakers, prostitutes, poets and queens–and what happens when women step outside those roles to take other identities.
Which brings me to your question about the research. While some of the women I wrote about in Women Warriors also left memoirs about their experiences, most of them did not.*** In fact, the sources for many of the women I wrote about are limited in scope and of questionable accuracy. Which means I spent a lot of time talking about sources, and the problems with sources, and the patterns that appear in how the sources talk about women across time periods and geographical boundaries. And I occasionally got testy about it.
Want to know more about Etta Madden and her work?
Check out her website: https://ettamadden.com/
Check out her Goodreads page: Etta M Madden
Follow her on Facebook: Etta Madden Author
Follow her on Twitter: @ettamadden
Follow her on Instagram: @ettamadden
*And by your, I mean my, as I so often do.
**Obviously I was very lucky that those memoirs existed. But if they hadn’t existed, I’d have found a different way to write the book.
***And those that did were often unreliable narrators.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Jane Austen scholar and roller-derby bad-ass Devooney Looser.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Paige Bowers
Last year I interviewed Paige Bowers about her biography of French resistance fighter Geneviève De Gaulle. This year I delighted to have her back to talk about women’s history and her next book, Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, The Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering—another biography of a woman we should have heard of. It comes out on January 12, 2021, and I am eager to get my hands on a copy.
Paige successfully navigates the world between journalism and history with curiosity, intelligence and a strong narrative voice. In addition to writing biographies of fascinating women, she is a nationally published news and features writer whose work has appeared in TIME, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, People, Allure, Thomson Reuters, Glamour, Pregnancy, AirTran Airways’ Go, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and Palm Beach Illustrated.
Take it away, Paige!
Your forthcoming book is a biography of Raye Montague, the first person to design a Naval warship by computer. How did you come across her story? Was your experience of writing her story significantly different that writing about Genevieve De Gaulle, who was the subject of your previous book?
My agent, Jane Dystel, gets all the credit for coming across Raye’s story. Jane saw Raye on “Good Morning America” one day and approached the family about doing a book. After that, she approached me about helping Raye write a proposal, and then her memoir. In truth, I was an intimidated at first. I was never much of a math and science student, so the thought of writing about those subjects, early computers, and the particulars of ship design was unbelievably scary to me. But I was captivated by Raye’s story and didn’t want it to be lost to history, so I committed to the project. It didn’t hurt matters that Raye and I had a good rapport, and she was such a funny, lively storyteller. That’s a dream, right there! As far as I was concerned, I could do the extra work figuring out the finer points of ship design as I went. And I did.
With my first book, I was unable to meet Genevieve de Gaulle, who had passed away at least a decade before I wanted to write about her. So I relied on some of her papers, and interviews with family and close associates. On the other hand, with Raye’s story, I had her there, telling me the stories of her life, making me laugh, at least for a time. Unfortunately, she passed away just as a publisher became interested in her book. So we shifted the project from a memoir, to biography, and I spent the next year working closely with Raye’s son, David, in sifting through her papers, conducting interviews, and crafting the narrative of her remarkable life.
How does your experience as a journalist inform your work as a biographer?
I started devouring biographies at a very tender age, long before I had any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Journalism and history aside, the simple truth is that I’ve always just been very curious about other people — who they are, where they’re from, why they’ve made the choices they’ve made, what their dreams are, what their regrets are, how they’ve overcome hard times, and so on. I feel like we can learn so much by asking people a bunch of questions and sitting back and listening to how they respond, or sifting through their letters and journals to see what they really thought about a given event. At least that has always been the case for me. I tend to get pretty excited about the stories I find, and I’ve been fortunate to write for organizations that have supported this lifelong enthusiasm. I’d like to believe my curiosity and passion come through when I write. Hopefully readers pick up on it, and get as excited by these lives as I do.
What was the most surprising thing you found doing historical research for your book? And when will the new book come out? Because some of us (and by that I mean me), are eager to read it. (And yes, I know that’s two questions masquerading as one.)
There were a handful of truly surprising things I discovered as I went through Raye’s papers and interviewed people in her circle, but I’m reluctant to give too much away before the book comes out! I will say that Raye was a woman of tremendous focus who overcame all manner of odds to accomplish her dream of becoming an engineer. Her perseverance and resilience are truly awe-inspiring, and it’s lives like hers that have paved the way for women to have a seat at the table in a way they hadn’t before.
I can’t wait for readers to meet her. The book comes out from Chicago Review Press in January, 2021!
My question for you: I find your footnotes so entertaining. When did you start writing such fun footnotes and why? Do you think more people need to loosen up in their footnotes? Who writes some of your favorite footnotes and why? (I realize that’s a couple of questions masquerading as one, but two can play that game.)
I started writing chatty footnotes that function as asides to the reader in graduate school. And since no one stopped me I kept doing it, first in my blog posts and later in Women Warriors. I’ve always seen them as a way to share my own reactions to the story I’m telling, whether it’s a snarky aside, outrage, or just a thread I want to follow. A woman who was in the audience at a talk I gave recently said it better than I can: she said they made her feel like she was having a conversation with me about the book. That made me very happy.
As far as other people’s work goes, if a footnote with their personal voice feels natural to them, I would encourage them to go for it. Even if you decide to take them out later, it’s a useful way to explore what you think.
My personal favorite writer of footnotes today is Benjamin Dreyer. His footnotes in Dreyer’s English are an appealing combination of intelligence, attitude and intimacy with the reader.
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Want to know more about Paige Bowers and her work?
Check out her website: http://www.paigebowers.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @paigebowers
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Join me tomorrow for three questions and an answer about women’s history, food, and sexuality with literary scholar Etta M. Madden.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Sets of Three Questions and an Answer With the Women Behind @OnThisDayShe
As I’ve mentioned before, lots of people doing interesting things related to women’s history hang out on Twitter. In the case of @OnThisDayShe, Twitter is literally where the discussion happens. The feed’s bio reads “Putting women back into history, one day at a time.” It is a daily delight.
I am pleased to introduce you to the women behind the Twitter handle:
Ailsa Holland is Manchester Cathedral Poet of the Year 2019. Her first pamphlet, Twenty-Four Miles Up, was published in 2017 with support from Arts Council England. Ailsa also likes to create word art and installations; she has collaborated with artists’ studio twentysevenb on several exhibitions including How Did It Get So Dark? (2018 & 2019). Ailsa is the Director of Moormaid Press (moormaidpress.co.uk) and co-creator of Twitter project @OnThisDayShe. In a former, pre-motherhood life she wrote about medieval women and did a PhD about British writers in 1930s Vienna.
Tania Hershman‘s poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, is joint winner of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and was published in Nov 2019. Her hybrid pamphlet is forthcoming from Guillemot Press in March 2020. Tania’s debut poetry collection, Terms & Conditions, is published by Nine Arches Press and her third short story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, is published by Unthank Books. Tania is also the co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of @OnThisDayShe, curator of short story hub ShortStops (www.shortstops.info) and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics.
Jo Bell is a former archaeologist who has worked on Byzantine sites in Cappadocia first surveyed by Gertrude Bell. She is now an award-winning poet—prizes include the Charles Causley Prize—and broadcaster. Her latest poetry collection Kith, and her ‘how to’ books 52: Write a Poem a Week and How To Be A Poet (with Jane Commane), are available from Nine Arches Press. She is co-creator of @OnThisDayShe.
Left to right: Tania Hershman, Ailsa Holland, Jo Bell
Take it away, ladies:
AILSA HOLLAND
What inspired you to start @OnThisDayShe?
The inspiration, if you can call it that, came from rage. Proof that Soraya Chemaly is right when she says that ‘there is creativity in anger’!
It started with a Christmas present in 2016: an ‘On This Day in History’ calendar, with a tear-off sheet for each day. I love tear-off calendars — we’ve had them before, with artworks from the Met, weird obsolete words, Snoopy cartoons. So I was looking forward to this one too. On 1 January 2017 I stood it on top of the microwave, ready to remind me what day it was (and therefore what I was doing, what the kids would be doing) and also give me a little nugget of knowledge. What’s not to like?
But as the weeks went on I realised that there was something not to like — namely that ALL the events mentioned only involved men. The first reference to a woman came at the end of February. I started to collect the days that mentioned women, as a little experiment. By the end of July I had 20. Out of 212. That’s less than 10%. At that point my rage reached the required intensity for me to give up on the experiment and throw the sheets away.
The calendar continued in the same vein, but it was too useful and I was too stingy to get rid of it entirely. In the autumn when I told Tania and Jo about it, they instantly shared my rage. We all wanted to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, preferably a counter-calendar, or even better a book, but of course we all have limited time and energy to devote to extra projects. In the end we decided to start a Twitter account — we were all on Twitter already — and call it @OnThisDayShe. And the rest, I suppose, is history.
Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.
One of my heroines is Sophie Scholl, the Munich student, who—with her brother Hans and friends including Christoph Probst—was part of the White Rose resistance group who printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in the 1940s. Sophie and some of the others were arrested, and executed on 22 February 1943 for their ‘crimes’. She inspired me to write a poem, trying to imagine the thoughts and the sensibility of a young woman who would come to such a brave decision. It’s in a poetry anthology about dissenters: https://beautifuldragons.net/dissent
More generally, the women I’ve learnt about through doing @OnThisDayShe have given me a new level of self-belief and a feeling of entitlement I didn’t have before. It seems that the saying ‘You have to see it to be it’ is really true. Seeing these women—the range of their activities and the sheer numbers of them—has really helped me to be more myself, to have confidence in myself as a writer. I spoke about this in more detail in my TEDx talk about @OnThisDayShe:
[Pamela here: If you are reading this in an email, you need to click through to your browser to see the video. (Just click the headline.) It is well worth it.]
Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why? How do you define women’s history?
I think of Women’s History Month like I think of food banks: it’s vitally important, but I fervently wish it wasn’t necessary. I think it’s great to have a time where people focus on women’s ‘forgotten’ stories or women’s perspectives, but of course there’s always the danger that this will be seen to be enough, that we can go back to ‘Default (Male) History’ for the rest of the year.
We try not to talk about @OnThisDayShe as ‘women’s history’, but rather as ‘putting women back into history’, a history that they are rightfully part of. Having said that, I’m becoming more and more aware, as I read about more women, how women have to some extent formed a parallel history because they been excluded from mainstream society and educational and professional networks: they’ve formed their own liberation movements; they’ve mentored and taught each other; they’ve supported and employed one another.
So I think we need to claim women’s place and importance in History while also acknowledging that, like any oppressed group, they’ve worked within society and outside it. In my TEDx talk I refer to women ‘who engaged with the world in such a way as to change it’; and whether that was by discovering a new element or inventing a life raft or by increasing women’s and others’ rights and opportunities, it’s important that we know about them, to make our knowledge of history more complete and to show our daughters that they shouldn’t limit their ambitions.
One thing ‘women’s history’ isn’t: it isn’t only for women to read and educate themselves about. If men want to have a more complete understanding of history and therefore of the world, they need to engage with these stories too.
TANIA HERSHMAN
Are there special challenges in writing history within the constraints of Twitter? (Of course there are. What I really want to know is: How do you manage to create such rich bites of history within the constraints of Twitter?)
Well, let’s first say that we’re pretty grateful that Twitter doubled its character limit a few years ago or it would be an even greater challenge! What we try and do – each of us in our own way, we do a week of tweets each – is tell a story within that tiny space, not trying to cover an entire life or delve deeply into some scientific breakthrough, say, artistic achievement or geopolitical event, but to spark the reader’s interest. It has been important to us from the very beginning that we use the #otd or #onthisday hashtag to highlight a day that was important to the woman herself, not the day she was born or died, but a day on which she did something. We try, too, to include some words in her own voice, if available, either in the tweet or in the accompanying image, a quote which gives us a flavour of her and makes her a real human being. And we always include a link in the tweet in the hopes that we’ve inspired people to want to know more. We often get questions about the daily tweet which seem to assume we are experts in this particular topic or time period and we politely respond (from our own accounts, not from OTDS, which we decided would only feature one tweet a day) that we don’t know everything, we do what research we are able in the time we have for this, a voluntary side-project in our busy lives, and suggest people follow the link we’ve provided to find out more. It’s wonderful when people chime in to tell us more about our women, we love that! And yes, occasionally we have made mistakes, and are happy to be corrected – sometimes we have repeated mistakes that are widespread on the Internet, which is a hazard of this kind of research. We once tweeted a photograph which had been widely touted as being of an inventor from the 1870s but, when it was pointed out to us, we realised that clearly it was from at least 40 years later, but this picture had illustrated articles about her on major websites. We do our best, and we appreciate constructive assistance – though we do also field snarky and sometimes abusive comments, but that’s life on social media, and fortunately it’s rare.
I hear rumors that a book based on the Twitter feed is in the works. When can we expect to see it?
We have had so many people suggesting that we publish a book, and that’s definitely on our radar, although no news at present. Watch this space!
Do you consider yourselves historians?
I am the only one of the three of us who has no background in history at all – my first degree was maths and physics, so I am the On This Day She science nerd! Before we started this project, I wasn’t a great fan of reading about “history”, it hadn’t been a favourite subject at school, and I would never have sought out history books as light reading. But our project has had a transformative effect on me because it’s about women – women we never learned about in school, women overcoming obstacles, doing things I had no idea they did (not always positive, of course, that’s part of our remit too, putting all women back into history), and suddenly I am utterly compelled and want to find out more, about all of them. I’m not a historian, that is an entirely different occupation. As an ex-science-journalist, I feel more like a reporter and a factual story-teller, doing research and distilling it into 280 characters. I can only hope that anyone like me – female or male – who feels or felt turned off by history at school, perhaps because it seemed like Men Doing Things, might stumble upon our Twitter account and be inspired to take another look.
JO BELL
All three of you are poets. How does that inform your work as historians?
I’m not sure it informs our work as historians exactly, but it informs our output. We have to fit a lot in to a single tweet each day: the discipline of poetry helps us to fit large ideas into a small space.
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
We’d all give different answers and each of us would answer differently tomorrow. Today and most days, I’d say Grazide Lizier. She was a peasant in a southern French village, who answered the questions of the Inquisition at a heresy trial in 1321. In medieval history, we seldom read the actual words of anyone outside the educated classes; to hear a peasant woman speaking in her own words about village life, her sex life and what she had for dinner is amazing. Grazide stands for all the unheard voices we can’t recover.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
The big challenge is to find them. The second is to disentangle them from the propaganda, both negative and positive, that makes it harder to see what they really did. Women who deserve to be honoured are often left out of the record altogether, whilst women who deserve to be excoriated were apparently everywhere. If you believe the Roman historians, almost every important woman in the polity was promiscuous or a poisoner.
There are dangers in assuming that women simply weren’t there in the professions, the sciences, the arts. There were always women in these fields, no matter how hard it was for them to access opportunity. They are systematically undervalued or overlooked. Time and again, a woman’s work – her paintings, her scientific papers, her art or inventions or literary output – is attributed to a man, because the men writing history didn’t believe a woman could do it.
More than that, the very categories and descriptions we use for valued work are unsuited to women. Women have had to operate at the edges of institutions. When a woman is described as a king’s mistress, sometimes she is simply that: but often she’s a gatekeeper, a lobbyist, a politician pursuing a particular agenda just like any other courtier, and with better access. When a painter is described as her father’s helper, she’s often his apprentice. When a woman is described as a pilgrim or missionary she’s often an explorer, visiting remote cultures in a way that is acceptable to her own. Or we remember women for what we want them to be, not what they were. Florence Nightingale was a nurse for two years. She was a social campaigner and statistician for forty.
On the flip side, some women have been disproportionately revered because we are so hungry for examples. We have sometimes had to put aside a treasured role model because we can’t find good enough evidence to justify her place alongside the ground-breakers. Another challenge is the expectation that women in history must be uplifting, inspiring, exemplary. We don’t subscribe to that. Women rulers have committed atrocities; women have been bigots, murderers or simply complex people who weren’t all good. We aren’t writing hagiographies or uplifting tales for young ladies; in a small and cumulative way, we’re writing history.
And a question for Pamela!
We enjoy planning fantasy dinner parties with women from history and what they would say to each other. Which women from the past would you invite to dinner? How do you think it would go?
I love throwing dinner parties! And my favorite dinner parties are the ones where My Own True Love and I host four other people who didn’t already know each other and then let the conversation fly. (I must admit: I plan and cook the meals. My Own True Love carries the conversational burden. So he absolutely has to be included in the party.) So let’s go with four women who I think might have something to say to each other: Florence Nightingale, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands, and Marie von Clausewitz.
The next question: what would I serve? Hmmmm.
Want to more about @OnThisDayShe and the women who run it?
Follow the Twitter feed: @OnThisDayShe *duh*
Check out their websites and follow them on Twitter:
Ailsa
@Ailsaholland
https://ailsaholland.wordpress.com
Tania
@Taniahershman
http://www.taniahershman.com/wp/
Jo
@Jo_Bell
https://belljarblog.wordpress.com/about/
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Paige Bowers, who has a new biography of a woman we need to know more about coming out in January.