Talking About Women’s History: A Bunch of Questions and an Answer with Dr. Emma Southon
Back in November at least half a dozen of my friends sent me the link to an essay by Emma Southon, titled “Why We Need a Women’s History of the Roman Empire.” I read it and was hooked by the voice and the ideas. I immediately ordered her delightfully titled book, A Rome of One’s Own and invited her to join us here for what turned out to be a whole bunch of questions and an answer.
Dr. Emma Southon holds a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham. The author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Marriage, Sex and Death: The Family and the Fall of the Roman West and Agrippina, she co-hosts a history podcast with writer Janina Matthewson called History Is Sexy and works as a bookseller at Waterstones Belfast.
Take it away, Emma.
What inspired you to write A Rome of One’s Own? How does looking at classical Rome through the lens of women’s lives change the story?
Mostly I wanted to add to the conversation about ancient women that had started to happen in fiction; after Madeleine Miller’s Circe, this wave of novels about Greek goddesses came out, retelling their stories to centre female narratives. I work in a bookstore and I saw them come in and the little contrary Romanist in me wanted to remind readers that Romans exist (and are, imo, cooler!) And even better, Roman women are real!
When I started compiling lists of women to include in the books and thinking about how to do it, I decided to tell the story of the rise and fall of the empire through women’s stories and lives and found that it mostly removes all the traditional narratives. There’s hardly any battles, no senatorial speeches. It think it makes the Roman empire more real and more clearly a thing that happened to people. The masculine narrative of war and expansion and more war always comes from the perspective of the Romans themselves and it feels so high minded. The female perspective means you have the space to include more stories of people experiencing the Roman empire changing their lives.
In A Rome of One’s Own, you look well beyond the stories of empresses and elite women to talk about slaves, business women, professional women, and women from distant parts of the empire. How difficult is to find sources for women whose lives are not well documented in traditional sources?
The real challenge is finding significant evidence for women beyond a couple of sentences! When I started making lists of potential women, they got overwhelmingly long because there are hundreds of stories that I could include. The problem was that so many of them are documented in just a line or an epitaph and nothing else is known about them. We know one thing about their life, such as that they were married to the commander of an auxiliary cohort that was stationed in Britain for a while in 100 CE, or that they owned a complex of buildings in Pompeii but nothing else. But that’s true for most men too. Most of the traditional literary sources are interested in a tiny minority of men at the tippiest top of the Roman tree and their experiences don’t really reflect the millions of other men who lived in the empire.
You look at a wide range of Roman women. How did you decide which women to include?
With great difficulty! I went through a lot of different lineups. It was dictated in the end by chronology. I knew I wanted women from every phase of Rome’s history until the abdication of Romulus Augustulus and I didn’t want there to be lots of chapters clustered around certain periods (*cough* the julio-claudians *cough*). So I lost a lot of great stories because they just happened to be too close in time to another woman that I included. I would have to make a decision between two or three women and I usually told the story that I thought had been told less, or was less Imperial. For example, Calvia Crispinilla was one that I had in until quite late because she just has a fun Roman story of excess. She’s an African woman who becomes prominent in Nero’s court, and he made her a “mistress of the wardrobe” to his enslaved “husband” Sporus. When Nero was overthrown, she cut off the food supply to Rome in order to try and force the Senate to choose her pick for emperor. Despite all this, she went on to marry a consul, run a wildly successful wine and olive oil business and live rich and happy. It’s a great story! But it’s too familiar, and overlapped with Boudicca and Cartimandua, which I decided were stories that were more surprising and gave a wider view of what living in or with the Roman empire was actually like.
Was there a woman you were sad to leave out?
I was devastated to cut out Babatha, a Jewish woman who lived in the Roman province of Arabia, on the modern border between Jordan and Israel. She died 132 CE because she fled the Bar Kokba rebellion in Judea and holed up in a cave near En-Gedi with various other friends and family to escape the fighting. Unfortunately, none of them ever left that cave but she obviously assumed she would because she took with her a bag full of documents detailing her marriages, her husbands’ other wives, her property disputes, her fights with the Roman governor about a pension for her son, the fist fights she had with the Roman woman who represented her in court, her fig trees. It’s such a glorious archive of a woman’s life! I chose Julia Balbilla instead because I love her but I do sometimes wish I had included Babatha.
You introduce readers to a lot of fascinating and unexpected women. Do you have a favorite, or two?
I’m a big fan of Julia Balbilla! Which is why she won over Babatha. I love her combination of boastfulness and desperation to be remembered; of being hugely educated and smart and rich and royal and also deeply mediocre at poetry! I also love that she has this triple identity as Greek and Roman and Seleucid; royal and not-royal at the same time and that she makes such a big deal about how SHE is descended from gods too, just like Hadrian! I find her so fascinating.
The other is Julia Felix, who we know about only from the fact that she just happened to be renting out her entertainment complex at the exact time that Vesuvius erupted. She’s running this great business, she’s persuading the authorities to move a road for her, she’s showing her customers themselves as epic artwork and giving them a taste of luxury. She’s great.
What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved? (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format? )
I recently loved Jane Draycott’s book about Cleopatra Selena Cleopatra’s Daughter. Her reconstruction of her life and reign after the death of her parents is entertaining and brilliant. The one I recommend to everyone is The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, which blew my mind. I had no idea so much information about Jack the Ripper’s victims existed and it made me totally reevaluate that whole story. One that I love and plunder regularly is Emily Hemelrijk’s Women and society in the Roman world: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West. A collection of women’s lives in epigraphy and graffiti, it contains so many tiny stories.
[Note from Pamela: Look for three questions and an answer with Jane Draycott later this month.]
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Challenging is the lack of their actual words. When you get to read the letters of Pliny the Younger or Cicero or Fronto, you get such a thrilling insight into their minds and personalities that we never have for women and it’s infuriating to know they all wrote letters and they were all lost. On the other hand, the lack of big texts means that there are hundreds of fragmentary female stories to be discovered and it is thrilling every time you find a new one. The first time I read Claudia Severa’s letter from Vindolanda it was AMAZING. And when I first read the female-authored sapphic graffiti in Pompeii, I wanted to tell everyone I knew about it. You don’t often get that excitement with a Cicero letter!
You also co-host a history podcast, History is Sexy, which Radio Times describes as “amiably daft.” How would you describe the purpose of the podcast? What types of stories do you discuss?
History is Sexy aims to answer questions that listeners have that they don’t have time to research themselves, in a kind of friendly chatty way. So we are guided by our listeners! Sometimes we do big topics like the history of red heads, or or how men’s clothing got boring or whether matriarchal societies were real (and what a matriarchal society even is). We just did a big two-parter running through the whole Ptolemaic dynasty and then did one on debutante ball culture in the UK and US. It’s always different and usually fun!
You’ve successfully made the jump that many academics dream of, from writing purely academic work to writing books of rock-solid scholarship with a popular audience in mind. Do you have any advice for readers who dream of doing the same?
The main advice I give academics who want to write for non-academic audiences is to stop being defensive in your writing. When you are writing for academics, you know that the first three readers are going to read it looking for holes and everyone else is going to try and mine it for their work/disagree with it. So you become defensive and try to cover every angle. When you’re writing for non-academics, you get to assume that the person reading it already wants to agree with you and learn from you, and they want to be entertained or moved or made to go wow or to learn something cool they can tell their friends. I was lucky that I taught academic writing and writing across the genres for a few years which taught me to break down writing for different audiences but it is hard work to shift from everything you know about writing your subject. Assume you are writing for a friend rather than an enemy!
A question from Emma: Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?
The answer I come back to every year is that I think it’s important, I love celebrating it, and I wish we didn’t need it.
If you look back at Lori Davis’s mini-interview yesterday, you’ll read a story about a professor who squeezed in an obligatory, uninspired, and unsatisfactory moment of women’s history at the end of each unit in a History of Civilization course. Until we reach the point that women are included in history classes, historical museum exhibits, and living history programs as a matter of course we need Women’s History Month.
In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the annual carnival feeling of celebrating historical women, well-known and otherwise, with my people across the Internet and in real life
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Want to know more about Emma Southon and her work?
Visit her website: https://www.emmasouthon.com/
Listen to her podcast: https://historyissexy.com/
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with novelist Kip Wilson.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Lori Davis
Lori Davis is the writer and producer of the podcast and blog Her Half of History. The show explores what it was like to be a woman in the past, from queens to slaves to everything in between, with episodes on women who successfully seized control of an empire, the nitty gritty of how to do laundry without electricity or plumbing, when women finally could get credit cards and more. In short, lots of fascinating stuff that doesn’t show up in mainstream history classes.
Her Half of History is a member of both Evergreen Podcasts and the Into History podcast network.
Take it away, Lori!
How do you choose the topics for your episodes?
My listeners choose! At least, they choose the theme for each overall series.
My setup is different than most history podcasters because I’m not trying to cover a chronological period, and I’m also not picking topics at random. Instead, I let listeners vote on a series theme. Past themes have included women who seized power, women as great painters, and women who escaped slavery. I’ve also done some social history themes: the history of housework, the history of girlhood, the history of getting married, etc.
Once the polls are closed and the theme is chosen, I dive into research mode. I choose the topics for each individual episode based on what I find. For example, I am currently working on Series 12: The Last Queen. I’ll have episodes on Boudica, Cleopatra, Liliʻuokalani, and Marie Antoinette for sure. There are also a whole host of less famous women that will also get an episode.
I always try to include a variety of locations and historical eras because one of my favorite things about history is the cross-cultural comparison. I love looking at how people faced very similar situations and sometimes came up with radically different solutions. Or sometimes they came up with the same innovative solution as another group with whom they had absolutely no contact. Unfortunately, I find that the sources available to me often skew heavily in favor of Western Europe and North America, but I do try hard to make sure that my podcast does include women from other places.
When did you first become interested in women’s history? What sparked that interest?
I’ve always loved history in general, but I used to despise women’s history! When I was in college, I took a History of Civilization course. The professor had clearly been informed that women exist because at the end of each unit, he’d say, “What was the position of women in this civilization?” The answer was always “Bad.” We’d list all the rights women didn’t have (it was always the same list as for the previous civilization), and then we’d move on to the next unit. I thought women’s history was the most boring thing ever. I mean why even ask the question if that’s all there is to say? I thought we should have just stuck with the interesting stuff, which was what the men were doing.
I’d also heard a lot of women rant about how much discrimination women faced in the past (and the present). That wasn’t exactly boring, but it was depressing. A lot of what they said was true, but it didn’t make me want to hear more.
Women’s history sort of snuck up on me. When choosing a research topic for my capstone thesis, I wanted to do something with literacy in territorial New Mexico. That was too big for the time available, so cutting it down to women’s literacy seemed like a way to make it manageable. Many years later when I wanted to make a history podcast, I was casting around for what my distinguishing niche would be, and it occurred to me that most of the history podcasts I had binged and loved didn’t include a lot of women. It seemed like a place where I could add to the conversation. One thing really just led to another, and I just published my 117th episode. I really love women’s history now!
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
Just how much there is on women! Earlier I had the vague impression that traditional history didn’t include many women because women weren’t allowed to do anything. That meant women’s history had to be short, vague, boring, depressing, or all of the above. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
It is true that men have dominated the historical record, but when you take the trouble to look, you find women everywhere. Given the reality of discrimination against women, it is incredible just how much they did manage to accomplish, in pretty much every field of human endeavor. There is absolutely no shortage of things to say about women, their lives, and their achievements.
A question from Lori: Who are your favorite women in history that you think should be better known than they are?
At least for today, I would say Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), senator from Maine. She is certainly not forgotten, but is not as well known as she should be, and is one of my personal heroes.
Tomorrow I might have a different answer. So many amazing women. So hard to chose.
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Want to know more about Lori Davis and her work?
Visit her website: https://herhalfofhistory.com/
Follow her on the social media platform previously know as Twitter: : https://twitter.com/her_half
Visit her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/herhalfofhistory
Check out her Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/herhalfofhistory/
Come back tomorrow for a whole bunch of questions and an answer about women in ancient Rome with historian Emma Southon,
Talking About Women’s History. A Bunch of Questions and an Answer with Brooke Kroeger
I am pleased to open this year’s Women’s History Month series with what turned out to be more- than-three questions and an answer with journalist and author Brooke Kroeger, whose most recent book, Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (2003) explores how women have fared in American journalism’s most competitive and highly valued bastions, the ones men have dominated in the 180 years since mass media began. A topic that I have some interest in.
Brooke is also the author of Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994); Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (1998); Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (2003); Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012), and The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (2018).
Early in her career, she was UN Correspondent for Newsday and deputy metropolitan editor for New York Newsday. Over eleven years with United Press International in its Scripps Howard days, she reported from Chicago, Brussels, London and Tel Aviv, where she was bureau chief (1980-83) before returning to London to become the agency’s division editor for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (1983-84). At NYU, she served on the journalism faculty from 1998 to 2021 and from 2005 to 2011 was department chair and founding director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She created the MA unit Global and Joint Program Studies and directed this joint program field of study from 2007 to 2020.
In short, Brooke is a woman who knows a lot about women in journalism.
Take it away, Brooke!
Photo by Jenn Heffner @East27Creative
How did your own long career as a journalist shape the writing of Undaunted?
My background was essential to the work. It influenced the anecdotes I chose, the details I emphasized, the reflections those examples elicited, the questions I asked of the living and of the historical record, and the responses all of these elements evoked, ones that grew out of my own long experience and relationships over more than 50 years with other women journalists—both established and emerging—feelings, really, that remain common to us all.
You share the stories of a large number of women in Undaunted. How did you choose which women to include?
This was such a painful process and I know from a few comments in public forums that it is hard for some readers to accept who got left out in the winnowing. We wanted the text to be under 400 pages. Hence, the 120 pages of endnotes as I couldn’t entirely let go. And yet, it’s meant to be representative history—emphasis on representative.
I focused on women with outsized careers for their time in major mainstream publications and broadcast outlets or those who attracted major mainstream notice, not later in excavation, but in real time. I looked only for women doing what we might call men’s work, women who had jobs or held positions that men in the field would envy. Women who competed directly with men. This mattered especially in the years when this was far less common than it is today. That meant no women’s magazine denizens (e.g. Gloria Steinem only as a freelancer before Ms.), no activists, no writers who wrote or broadcast primarily in languages other than English.
In the introduction, I explain my method. For consistency, I used dozens of proprietary databases from 1840 to the present and applied the same two search terms to every decade: “women” “journalism.” This gave me “a good sense of the conditions that governed the presence and place of women as journalists, the ideas about them that prevailed in each period, and how those ideas changed, or did not change over time. It became possible to identify the individuals whose achievements received the most attention. I considered how and why some women attracted publicity and if and how their stories fit into the wider context of women’s advancement.” I told the story in strict chronology, decade by decade. The dominant theme of progress-setback-progress-setback guides the telling. On top of all that, I gave precedence to the episodes that dealt with or dovetailed with the most significant news events and trends of each period.
I used 12 questions as guides: Which stories best illustrated what women were up against in their professional lives? How or why did the most successful women first get in the door? Who were the true trailblazers and pioneers? (Sidenote from Brooke: those words erroneously get thrown around far too often.) Assuming talent and hard work, how much did background, privilege, strategy, charisma, style, looks, advocacy, connections, or luck figure in their ascent? How well did women manage their successes and failures, their celebrity and censure? Were they “womanly” or “manly” in their reporting and writing or in their editorial vision? What impact did they have on the nation’s news diet and on the profession? Whom among women has the wider journalism community chosen to honor? Which qualities and characteristics fairly or unfairly attributed to women brought condemnation? Which brought respect? How did newsroom politics figure? Have women made a difference? I liked the opportunity to highlight great friendships and I gave due respect to the men who gave deserving women opportunity when so many others would not.
Was there a woman you were sad to leave out?
So, so many. In many cases this was because the most compelling contours of those personal stories were too similar to those of predecessors from earlier decades whom I had already detailed. See above.
You introduce readers to a lot of fascinating women in Undaunted. Do you have a favorite, or two?
Again, so many. This would include all the well-remembered you would suspect with a special place for Charlayne Hunter-Gault. And from the entirely forgotten, don’t miss Edith Evans Asbury, who defied all odds to become a brilliant New York Times metro reporter (but not until her 40s!), serving from 1952-1981, and Ann Stringer, the United Press World War II correspondent, who, like a few others, defied no-women-allowed regulations to report up the Rhine, but then also scooped every other reporter on the Russian-US linkup at Torgau, and produced scoop after scoop from Nuremberg working under Walter Cronkite, then also with UP.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
In a field that puts a high premium on youth, how many enormously successful early 20th century women journalists hit stride in middle-aged, e.g. Pauline Frederick, Marvel Cooke, Ethel Payne, Edith Evans Asbury.
A question from Brooke: If you’ve read the book, what was your most significant take-away?
The clear sense that more women worked as serious reporters than the shorthand version of the story tells us, something I’m finding to be true in more and more historical contexts.
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Want to know more about Brooke Kroeger and her work?
Check out her website: https://brookekroeger.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @brookekroeger
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer from Lori Davis, writer and producer of the Her Half of History podcast.