Women's history 101

People often ask, why are there so few famous women writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals?

They seem to be forgetting that, in previous centuries, it was rare for women to be educated. Women also often died younger due to infections contracted in childbirth.

Women were not allowed to attend university until the 1870s, and even then they were not allowed to graduate.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was very difficult for women to obtain a university education. In 1870 Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon helped to set up Girton College, the first university college for women, but it was not recognised by the university authorities. In 1880 Newnham College was established at Cambridge University. By 1910 there were just over a thousand women students at Oxford and Cambridge. However, they had to obtain permission to attend lectures and were not allowed to take degrees. 

Without a university degree it was very difficult for women to enter the professions. After a long struggle the medical profession had allowed women to become doctors. Even so, by 1900 there were only 200 women doctors. It was not until 1910 that women were allowed to become accountants and bankers. However, there were still no women diplomats, barristers or judges. (John Simkin)

The first social groups to routinely educate their daughters were the Unitarians and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), starting in the 1840s.

When women did succeed in producing literature or scientific research, quite often someone else got the credit for it, or their contribution or achievement was minimised. Even now, there are people who dispute that Ada Lovelace wrote programs for Babbage's calculating engine, and want to impute authorship of the Brontë sisters novels' to their brother Branwell. The scientific achievements of Lise Meitner, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Hedy Lamarr, Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin, Katherine Jones, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Caroline Herschel, and many others, are forgotten or sidelined. I did not learn about any of these women at school - I found out about them by researching on the internet, and reading blogposts from the Finding Ada project.

Many nineteenth-century female scientists and mathematicians were told that their scientific and mathematical activities were bad for their womb. Many were prevented from attending university, or not allowed to graduate, or made to work in a separate laboratory from the men.

The work of female writers, poets, artists, composers, and playwrights suffered a similar fate. Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings were attributed to her father. The Nobel Prize for Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars went to her male PhD supervisor. The work of the women Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist artists is largely forgotten.

A similar fate happens to Black & minority ethnic (BME) and LGBT scientists, authors, and heroes. And if you are a woman and BME and LGBT, then you are doubly or triply doomed to be sidelined. Just look at the marginalisation of Mary Seacole, Edward Carpenter, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and many another BME and/or LGBT person.

Even today, women's novels are marketed as less serious than novels by men. They also receive less reviews in serious journals.  The novels of white male authors are taught on English literature courses; the novels of female authors are taught on courses of women's studies or women's literature. Maureen Johnson writes:

For much of history, women read the works of men. Every once in a while we see a woman cracking through, maybe changing her name, maybe hiding her work, or maybe breaking through the strength of her genius or good luck or both. Then we see a huge break in the early 20th century, a flux of brilliant women. Women start to climb into the bestseller charts, but not so much into the reading lists.

There is no doubt that women (despite massive disadvantages) have achieved great things in every field of artistic, literary, and scientific endeavour, but all too often, they are forgotten, sidelined, their achievements dismissed or diminished, their work not taught in schools or universities. The corpus of literature that is considered "the canon" is overwhelmingly by white men (usually dead white men, usually heterosexual). No-one is saying that these authors should no longer be taught; just that "the canon" should include women, BME people, and LGBT people.

Only women bleed

I see radical lesbian feminist philosopher/theologian Mary Daly has died. The blog-obits have varied between the naffly saccharine (from the Pagans, as per: 'May you rest in the sweet arms of the Goddess and have good joy of the Summerlands!' kind of thing) and the excoriating, taking Daly to task for her failings, perceived or actual. (There's a hilarious piece over at Melissa McEwan's on Daly, in which McEwan, having come to praise her, contorts herself into a flailing ecstasy of right-on self-abasement in the Comments once she's told that Daly was once nasty to transsexuals.)

It's rather difficult to write about Daly, as a man, without being accused of bigotry. A keynote of her playful style was the making of very extreme statements forte con brio which might or might not have been merely throwaway. In this she was like a kind of philosophical performance artist of woman-rage, but the line she trod between radical art-speech and radical hate-speech was, sadly, a narrow one. I'm not sure becoming a kind of mirror-image Tertullian really did her, feminism, or the world much good in the end, nor how deliberate a pose it was. But more on this anon.

Credit where credit is due: Daly wrote some wonderful, profound, clever things that totally put the bomb under the 'kyriarchy' (great word, all credit to her). Beginning with work on the great Jesuit intellectual Jacques Maritain, she moved into skeweringly accurate analyses of patriarchal religious structures, especially in her early works like The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father. These did much to enable women and men alike to see the hierarchies of institutional Christianity as contingent and Kafkaesque, and in them she laid bare---with lacerating, scornful wit---how deeply that religion's pompous absurdities of practice are in fact rooted in the murky bowels of its theology. (A metaphor Daly would have liked, that.) I find this a tenable if intellectually-unsubtle view, but then Daly was never really interested in nuance: her favourite word was 'BIG!'. I respect Daly a great deal for her refusal to bill herself as any kind of dutiful patriarchal daughter, utterly rejecting any concession, and, sometimes, using language with a kind of bubbling, fierce humour. And may her name be forever blessed for the wonderful coinage academentia: don't we all just know what she meant.

Unfortunately, she then began a period which lasted until her death in which she gradually lost touch with the world around her whilst claiming to see it ever more clearly. As Lord Shaftesbury remarked, '[T]he most ingenious way to become foolish' is 'by a system.' For a deeply learned woman, Daly's scholarship became erratic: she clung, for example, to the notorious 'nine million women' figure for the number of deaths in the early modern Witchcraze, and completely ignored the emergent and specifically radical feminist scholarship of the 1980s which demonstrated that her view of the witch trials was simply mistaken---a note of intellectual high-handedness with other women scholars which sadly came to blight her work. She was not in any way a competent historian (except perhaps, once, of the Church) but ultimately a kind of philosophical propagandist; when history becomes martyrology and persuasion is replaced by propaganda---in however prankish a spirit and in however good a cause---then the scholar ensures the eventual academic evanescence of their own work, because it will have to be redone properly.

This propaganda settled into the form of a radical feminist Manichaeism, in which the world is divided down the middle into men (bad, intrinsically disordered, violent, oppressive and 'necrophile') and women (good, intriniscally oriented correctly towards life and each other, peaceful, oppressed and 'biophile'.) One of the saddest things to watch, as one reads Daly's later works, is the way that the first category grew ever more capacious and the second shrunk ever further as the ideological strictures tightened. By the late 90s, 'women' had come to mean radical feminist lesbians, or, as Daly might have put it, only Positively Revolting Hags who had Crone-ologically seen through the patriarchal pompenile parades, rejected intercourse in favour of Outercourse, and had joyously up-risen into Quintessential Be-ing. As her remaking of the dictionary, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, makes plain, Daly was, alas, no Joyce when it came to wordplay. The experience of being trapped in the book's thuddingly-repetitive, elephantine punning makes me feel like Victoria Wood's wonderful character Kitty, a formidable Manchester matron of decided views, who tells us:

--She said, 'Kitty, do you like fun?' I said, 'No, I don't!--I had enough of that in 1958 when I was stuck in a lift with a hula-hoop salesman.'

(As Daly might have said, 'We may be overthrowing the patriarchy, but I want it to be fun fun fun.') As her throught developed, she appointed herself the arbiter of who of who was not 'a real woman' according to her own exalted criteria, eventually defining which women were and were not worthy of a feminist revolution. Sex-workers, transgendered women, Christians, straight women who enjoy straight sex, mothers of boys, women who love their male relatives, women who have undergone male-derived kinds of psychotherapy---all were eventually excluded in Pure Lust as 'imitation males.' Men, of course, had to go too, via a shady and unspecified process of 'decontamination'. I find it astounding that a woman of Daly's obvious intelligence felt able to use that term in a post-Holocaust world, in which it is a clear and sinister synonym for 'extermination.' As she said:

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Change 'males' to 'Jews', 'blacks', or 'gays' and see how it reads. Whether or not she meant this statement seriously, and whether or not anything can be said on the grounds that it's merely playful, philosophical free-association, Daly struck here a genuine note of wistful Stalinism once too often for my liking.

There are a variety of questions that can be raised about Daly's career, beyond the infamous banning of male students from her advanced classes; on the latter, I can see her point, but on the other hand it's little better in my opinion than the ghastly Islington registrar Lilian Ladele refusing to perform Civil Partnerships: in other words, whatever wacko views you feel it incumbent upon you to hold, you have to perform the job you were employed to do fairly. I find it striking that Daly told women to leave the Church en masse, but continued to work for a Jesuit university for over three decades. Intellectually, the main problem is her apparent inability to conceive that there might be other axes of oppression beyond men vs women, and that perhaps class, education, race, and economic status might just possibly complicate such a simplistic binary. It mystifies me that such a sophisticated thinker could be so tin-eared at times. Hers was ultimately not a flexible mind; her intellectual style closely resembles that of that Eagleton-coined atheist pushmi-pullyu, 'Ditchkins', i.e. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchkins. Whereas Ditchkins sees religion itself as an irredeemably corrupting influence on the human mind and writes from a position of withering intellectual certainty, Daly saw the kyriarchical forms of religion as the monstrous leviathan to be slain by herself as a labrys-wielding female Marduk. Both often hit the target and hit it hard; both are often guilty an obtuse lack of imaginative sympathy and intellectual manoeuvrability.

There were other problems: the issues about Daly's unedifying fear and loathing of transsexual women (to whom she implied actual violence should be done) have been well picked over on the blogosphere, as has womanist poet Audre Lorde's famous open letter accusing Daly (in polite terms) of a privilged, colonialist and unconsciously racist mindset and methodology---to which Daly apparently never publicly responded. I'll let you hunt those out for yourselves should you wish to do so.

All in all, I'm glad feminism has moved beyond Beyond God the Father, as it were, jettisoning Daly's utopian flights of fantasy and lurid lesbian neo-hierarchies, despite her importance. Daly once wrote: 'I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism – or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism – which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!' I find in this---Maoism and Marxism aside---a recipe for the reductive suicide of human culture, and an extraordinary sense of intellectual contempt deriving from unconscious feeling of vulnerability to pollution. (She could have done with thinking about Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger a bit harder.) For Daly, there is no point even thinking about, say, the three-thousand year old legacy of Hindu culture, spirituality, literature, art, ritual, architecture, medicine, or philosophy: it is merely an instantiation of the patriarchy. (Someone had better pop Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty a note through.) I find myself questioning whether Daly was really learned enough in, for example, Buddhism or Jungian thought to pronounce them valueless and 'itty-bitty' in this way. Judging by her basic lack of attention to them and the historical errors of her scholarship, I rather doubt it. As she gradually lost interest in any account of literature, psychology, biology, history, or religion which conflicted with her stark worldview, she became increasingly ideologically self-marooned; a great loss to the world, as she had an exceptional mind.

There's one term in particular that I do wish that she had picked up from Jung: enantiodromia, that is, 'the tendency of polarised extremes to come to resemble one another via a process of compulsive unconscious compensation.' Ultimately, Daly was an extraordinarily powerful and yet limited thinker, who took the tools used to construct patriarchal religion and analysed them in great and mordant detail. Alas that she went on to use those tools to erect a house of mirrors, which came strangely to reproduce the original patriarchal edifice. By being hierarchically exclusivist, by claiming privileged access to truth, by erecting purity laws about sex and by anathematizing dissent, Daly created a house in which every surface reflected only her own face. In the end, perhaps the best---and the worst---that I can say about Mary Daly is that after a lifetime's striving in the service of feminist thought and nine or so books, historically she won't even be as important as Camille Paglia, another lesbian feminist and her thorough-going ideological opposite.


Anyway, despite my misgivings above, rest in peace, Mary.