Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Vanya Eftimova Bellinger
Vanya Eftimova Bellinger and I became acquainted three years ago after I heard her speak about her then new book, Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of ON WAR at the Pritzker Military Library. I was fascinated. Bellinger not only introduced me to an engaging historical figure about whom I knew absolutely nothing, but she also discussed important questions about the difficulties of writing about historical women. (Something that regular readers of History in the Margins know is a favorite topic of mine.) She did a Q & A for the blog then. I’m delighted to have her back.
Vanya currently teaches at Air University’s Graduate School of Professional Military Education and Air Command and Staff College and is working on her second book, a study of Carl von Clausewitz’s Last Campaign (1830-1831). Prior to that she worked as international correspondent for major European media. The views expressed are her own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. (A disclaimer that has never appeared on History in the Margins before.)
And now, here’s Vanya.
Who are some of your favorite authors working today?
I love Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls that came out last year. It is a brilliant retelling of The Iliad but from the point of view of Briseis, Achilles’s concubine. I wish I could have written something so beautiful but also powerful and devastating. Although a bit old, Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family remains one of my all time favorite books. It’s a prime example about how a work on women’s history can explicate the larger American history. Masha Gessen is not a historian but a journalist. I read everything she writes on Russia and Russian history.
Reading what other people read is, by the way, one of my favorite things in interviews. I am constantly on the lookout for new books. I am a bit of an insomniac and I literally need books to fall asleep and be able to function on daily basis. Also, when it comes to women’s history and women’s writing, we still suffer from disadvantages. We need to highlight these works and get them into the hands of more people.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Lack of sources remains the biggest challenge when writing about women. My first book, Marie von Clausewitz; The Woman Behind the Making of ON WAR is based on the newly discovered complete correspondence between Marie and Carl von Clausewitz. Yet this was a truly lucky break. In most cases, historians have to piece together the story from vague references in contemporary narratives, peel off layers of prejudice and fallacies, search for additional and indirect sources.
Despite working with a treasure trove that the Clausewitz’s correspondence is, I had to fill so many gaps in knowledge with interpretation, context, clues in other sources or texts written by other women facing similar challenges. The letters do not cover all periods in Marie’s life or always provide information about events and persons we find important. People write letters without thinking about the needs of poor future historians. They share what seems important for them, in that particular moment. Yet I find this detective work really exciting.
There is another issue I am very passionate about. I would like to see scholars relying on and granting more attention to female voices when writing history. I love reading and writing women’s history. But I would like, too, to encounter more women’s voices and women’s stories in the so-called traditional history. I will give you an example with my new book with the provisional title Carl von Clausewitz’s Last Campaign. It covers the European crisis of 1830-1832 and cholera’s arrival in Europe, and is going to be more of a traditional work of military history. I was shocked to discover how few women or texts written by women are featured in other works on the period. One of the books does not offer even a single quote from a woman. Furthermore on its three hundred pages, not even one woman is mentioned by name. Yet this was the time when fascinating personalities like Rahel Varnhagen, Bettina von Arnim, Dorothea von Lieven, Emilia Plater, among others, lived. They actively participated in the political, social and military events, and some of them left enormous correspondence or memoirs.
I don’t think the exclusion happened on purpose, rather a case of negligence. Still, the pattern is clear: women are quoted mainly in works on women’s history and female historians consulted only on topics concerning women’s history… The same unfortunate patter occurs with minorities. This is why I am so passionate about diversity in historical narratives. We have to break the pattern of negligence, do the extra mile and find other voices and viewpoints. Especially since these other voices offer so much more context and texture to our narratives.
[PT: brief pause here for cheering from the stands]
How does your experience as a journalist inform your work as a historian?
I think I am more disciplined when it comes to writing, researching and meeting deadlines than a traditional historian coming from academia. After twenty years in various newsrooms, I take deadlines very seriously. I actually feel happy and fulfilled when meeting a deadline. I should add, however, that compared to journalism where the main focus is on the creation of content, academics constantly divide their attention between teaching, grading, administrative duties, etc. Research and writing often come last, unfortunately.
I also welcome feedback and editorial changes eagerly. Again, in journalism, we are trained to rely on editors or producers whose role is to proofread our work and help us create the best possible pieces. I care a lot about my readers and devote considerable time and energy to good writing. Journalists are a vain bunch — we want to be widely read and we want to believe that our stories can change the world.
Now it’s time to turn the table: I would like to ask you too who are some of your favorite authors working today? Let’s compare notes.
Insomniac readers, unite!
Sticking roughly to the women’s history theme:
I’m currently loving Elizabeth Lett’s Finding Dorothy: a work of historical fiction by the author of The Perfect Horse about the making of the Wizard of Oz, seen through the eyes of Maud Baum. It is also about mothers, daughters, women’s suffrage, moving West, and creativity. Before I picked up Finding Dorothy, it never occurred to me to ask what it would be like to grow up as a prominent suffragist’s daughter. (The short answer: complicated.)
Sarah Gristwood’s Game of Queens and Blood Sisters:the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses transformed the way I think about women’s roles in medieval and early modern European power politics.
Finally, not women’s history at all, but a book I’m an evangelist for: Tanim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, which is hands down the best general Islamic history I have read. And I have read a lot of Islamic history.
Want to know more about Vanya Eftimova Bellinger and her work?
Follow her on Twitter at @VanyaEf
(Drop in tomorrow for the next Telling women’s History interview: I’ve got an entire month of some of my favorite history people talking about the work they do and how they do it. Next up: Theresa Kaminski, most recently the author of Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II.)
Telling Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Elizabeth DeWolfe
I interact with Elizabeth De Wolfe almost everyday. We are both part of a top-secret revolving Facebook writing challenge group, which provides friendship, support and an occasional kick in the butt as needed. Elizabeth regularly proves herself to be witty, wise, and passionate about the work.
She is is Professor of History and co-founder of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine). She teaches courses in American women’s history, world history, and American culture. Elizabeth is the author of several books and articles, including the award-winning books Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867 (Palgrave Macmillan 2002) and The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories (Kent State 2007). She earned her Ph.D. in American and New England Studies at Boston University. De Wolfe makes her home in southern Maine with her husband, a rare books dealer, and Bella, a fat cat.She also plays in a ukulele band—a fact that warms my heart.
Obviously the perfect person to participate in Three Questions and an Answer. Take it away, Elizabeth!
Even well known women in the nineteenth century are often neglected by biographers and historians. What led you to write about “ordinary” nineteenth century women?
Boredom, assumptions, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The boredom comes from my 1970s high school history class—long lists of names and dates of great white men and the battles they fought, the treaties they signed, the elections they won, and the inventions they made. I wondered if people like me – female, not destined to be famous—ever “did” anything in history. History, as I understood it at that young age, was something famous people did. Years later, much to my surprise as my teenage self imagined a career as a scientist, I undertook my PhD in American and New England Studies. While hunting for a dissertation topic, my husband, a rare books dealer and expert in Shaker history, suggested I look at the anti-Shaker activist Mary Marshall Dyer. The conventional wisdom was that she was a hysterical woman, a one-time Shaker who had left the sect while her children and husband remained; that she was a bit unbalanced to keep up a 50-year campaign against such an ostensibly benign group in pursuit of the return of her children. But as I read her own works, I saw that that assumption – a view of Shaker history colored by nostalgia – was way off the mark. She wasn’t unstable; she was angry for the loss of her children, frustrated by her social and legal invisibility, and hamstrung trying to speak out for what she called “the just rights of women” in an era when speaking out was a sign of, well, instability. By putting aside assumptions and approaching her work with a blank slate, I saw her life in a new, revelatory light. And it was right around this time that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich received the Pulitzer Prize for A Midwife’s Tale. What captured my interest was her meticulous method of close reading, of tracing out relationships, of going back even further in time to understand her subject’s present. This research method showed me how I could troll the archives to uncover the stories of ordinary women who had been mischaracterized or simply overlooked–people like me.
You teach a variety of women’s history courses. What aspects of women’s history surprise your students most? What outrages them?
Students are surprised that there is a history. The first hurdle is to get them past the mindset that history is just the “important” things, and by important the default is largely “done by men.” The second hurdle is to get beyond the Queens and scatterlings of female authors or inventors who get a compensatory note in the historical record. Then we drill down to the everyday. Students are angry that they didn’t know there was a history and that women have largely been left out of what history there is. They are outraged that not all that much has changed globally and that we see similar themes and dynamics at work across cultures and time. This fury often spurs them to take action, which makes me both proud of them and hopeful for the future. What I want is for my students to come out of my classes asking questions: to use their voices, to ask what has been women’s role in a given place or time or situation. What was roles have women played then, what roles do women play now, and what dynamics make that so? As they move beyond college into their lives, if they raise their voices and ask questions, I am a happy teacher.
What have you read lately that you loved?
I loved Jill Lepore’s Book of Days, an exploration of the journal kept by Jane Franklin, sister of Benjamin. I found it so evocative that Franklin’s roughly made, private record not only survived but within its simple entries unleashes a window into her world. Lepore illustrated the richness of Jane Franklin’s own life for its own sake, well beyond being the sister to a founding father. Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder was mind-blowing. It’s hard to get the image of Melissa Gilbert’s TV character out of your head when thinking of the Wilders, but this work will do just that. In some ways she blows apart an American icon, but reveals a much richer story. Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey is the very opposite of the dusty, staid edition we suffered through in college. And I was captivated by Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
Question for Pamela: What is one thing in women’s history or women’s contemporary lives that you would like to see accomplished before your years are done?
There are so many ways to answer that question, but I’m going to go with the answer that first comes to mind, even though it has nothing to do with women’s history. I’d like us to reach the point where no woman is asked “Do you work or are you a stay-at-home mother?” It may seem small compared to equal wages or inclusion, but the assumption that being a mother is not work is the base for a wide range of beliefs about the value of women’s work.
Want to know more about Elizabeth De Wolfe and her work?
Check out her website: www.elizabethdewolfe.com and her Facebook page: Elizabeth De Wolfe, Author
Follower her on Twitter: @Prof_edewolfe
Come back tomorrow for another Telling Women’s History Interview. I’ve got an entire month of some of my favorite history people talking about the work they do and how they do it. Next up: Vanya Eftimova Bellinger, author of Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War
We Have Winners!
Depending on how you count, I began working on Women Warriors in November 2016 when I signed a contract with Beacon Press, sometime in 2014, when I began the proposal, or 1989, when I read Antonia Fraser’s Warrior Queens. It’s been exciting, frustrating, exciting, terrifying, exciting, humbling, and, oh yes, exciting. Along the way I’ve spent time looking at old friends like Joan of Arc and Molly Pitcher in new ways, and learning about women I never knew existed. I’ve spent a lot of time really really angry and I’ve been inspired by the courage of ordinary women in times of crisis.
It would have been a lot harder without having the Marginalia along on the journey.
And now it’s time to give away some books. Drumroll please. *brief pause while I stick my hand in the medium-sized mixing bowl and fluff up the names* And the winners are:
Cindy Hickling
Lynette Eklund
Please send me your mailing addresses at pdtoler@sbcglobal.net , and I’ll get your books in the mail.
Thanks for playing. Thanks for reading. And come back Monday for the next installment of Three Questions and an Answer.