Let's talk about the fact that mainstream history
has a tendency to treat women's contributions in one of two ways.
Generally speaking, it's either minimised, or mythologised.
Boudica led a revolt of several native tribes
against the Romans in Britain. It was a big thing in its day, and
Camulodunum (among others) certainly noticed, but in the grand scheme
of things it was another provincial rebellion that was put down by
the Roman Empire. The long-term strategy against such events was
romanisation, which continued and succeeded across southern
Britannia, and to variable extents as you went north.
Rosalind Franklin barely escaped her contribution
being ignored, partly by virtue of living recently enough. Lise
Meitner did critical work leading to nuclear fission, but it was her
collaborator Otto Hahn who got most of the credit – and the Nobel
prize. Ada Lovelace, on the other hand, certainly did groundbreaking
work on computing, before there were any physical devices to which
the work could be applied, but modern appreciation of this work often
leads those who do not understand it to dramatically overstate its
importance and impact.
Florence Nightingale is the mother of modern
nursing, and her work was certainly groundbreaking. It did not,
however, exist in a vacuum, and it depended on other women. She was a
leader, an outrider, but she became a figurehead around which
mythology could develop, even while she was alive.
Wu Zetian is held up as an exceptional figure of
female rulership in China, being empress consort, dowager empress,
and empress regnant (in that order), with a range of stories told –
scandalous and triumphal – to make her more exceptional. It seems
hardly necessary to mythologise the first clearly successful queen
regnant of England, Elizabeth I, but that did not stop people from
doing so while she was ruling –
and more so, if less simperingly, after her death. In both polities,
and many – likely all – others, there have been politically
important women who are either completely forgotten, or their impact
minimised until one comes to study them particularly. Eleanor of
Aquitaine is celebrated, with minimal mythologisation, by those who
have chosen to learn about her and her impact, but for most even in
Britain she is a name that people recognise but struggle to provide
any information about. Women have been the power behind the throne,
they have been key diplomats, they have been administrators, they
have even been (usually unofficial) key military advisors.
I shan't even get
started on Joan of Arc, or this post would end up far, far too long.
By emphasising
and mythologising the impact of a select few women, largely those
whose impact was too significant to be ignored, we create the
impression that the only women who had influence and impact were
women of such exceptional quality that their sex could be forgotten.
Attributing supernatural or superhuman occurrences to them makes them
seem more exceptional than they were, and thus normalises the
exclusion of other women from history.
If we are to
truly celebrate, not to mention understand the impact of women, both
in history and today, we must do our best to see the truth, however
dimly, and celebrate women without making impossible idols of them.
We must do what we can to elevate the forgotten women of history, to
understand the lives of ordinary women, and to accept and mourn the
fact that much of what women contributed is lost forever, unless we
should develop the ability to view the past through some sort of
miraculous technology.
For Quakers, we
should not fail to do this with our own history. We can be so
self-congratulatory about our inclusion of women as ministers from
our earliest days, we forget that women were excluded from many
business meetings for quite some time. We forget that even the
estimable Fox had women set up special meetings for doing work that
was seen as appropriate for women, while men got on with the other
business. We celebrate Margaret Fell and Mary Fisher, and forget a
nameless multitude of early travelling ministers who were never
counted among the valiant sixty – many of them women. Indeed, even
if we consider the valiant sixty, the names most remembered tend to
be the men. For all our progressiveness, even at the time, we were
not angels. We should not be satisfied that we did better than most
communities at the time, in recognising and remembering women; we
should do what we can to remedy the situation before time and
distance makes it impossible.
So, for
International Women's Day, let us celebrate women in our lives, in
the world, and in history, but let us also commit to working to do so
in a way that does not fall prey to exceptionalism. Let us not only
celebrate the women who did so much or did the spectacular, but
remember that women have been part of society, influencing and
driving forward even when patriarchal norms forced them to do so in
ways that were unseen and unacknowledged.
And let that
hidden history remind us that we still have far to go, and that the
same is true today. It might be less so, as it cannot be denied that
the 20th
century saw progress in the matter of equality between the genders.
But let us not mistake progress for success.
