Jess Wells

Two books on women's lives in the distant past reveal fascinating differences and similarities to our own time. Here are highlights from She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia and Women at the Dawn of History.

• The first woman in history known by name was KA-GIR-gal. They discovered her name on a land sale peg, which would have been inserted into the wall of a building to denote ownership, ca 3000-2750 BCE.[i]

• Prosperous and autonomous: "During the old Babylonian period there existed a class of so-called cloistered women (Naditus/Naditum)  Read More 

In one of those "blow your mind" discoveries of unsung women in history comes the story of the daughters of Genghis Khan. I've never heard that he had daughters, let alone daughters who "ruled the largest empire the world has ever known."

Jack Weatherford, the former DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota, is best known for his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. After its publication, he researched and wrote The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire.

He says "Genghis Khan sired four self-indulgent sons who proved good at drinking, mediocre at fighting, and poor at everything else; yet their names live on despite the damage they did to their father's empire. Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had…[but] without Genghis Khan's daughters, there would have been no Mongol empire."

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To understand the achievements of this pioneer, it's necessary to go back and describe the world as it was, and it was pretty surprising.

As late as the early 1960s, it was believed that the ocean floor was a flat, unchanging surface, as smooth as a sandy beach; that the edge of the continent sloped down to an abyssal plane, until the sea floor gradually sloped up at another continent. Scientists called the sea floor a "place of perfect repose." Belief in continental drift would cast you as a nut-job, though it had been suggested in 1922. There was very little understanding of earthquakes, no discovery of the Ring of Fire; no respect given to ideas of tectonic plates. The idea of a supercontinent of Pangaea (and the others that proceeded it) was scientific heresy. "There was still no definitive theory that explained how the earth's crust formed. Mountains, oceans, continents, islands, valleys -- even the earth's simplest features were still a source of contention."[i] Read More 

There are a few things more core to the American way of life than the safety net instituted by The New Deal, and it turns out that a woman who is hardly known today was "the moving force" behind it all.

In a lively, engaging, and detailed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kirstin Downey, it was Frances Perkins who laid out the reforms that President Roosevelt would have to back before she would accept the post as America's first female Secretary of Labor.

"She ticked off the items: a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance.... The scope of her list was breathtaking. She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American Society, with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws."

Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, says that "Francis Perkins was the moving force behind much of [The New Deal]. Her legacy included … initiatives that have improved the lives of generations of Americans."

And her daughter nagged her into championing the WPA's inclusion of artists, which is responsible for some of the excellent murals in public buildings by Diego Rivera and others.

According to influential authors studying the period, "Francis Perkins (was) a fierce advocate who put people first, a public servant who was actually worthy of the name, and a bracing reminder of what inspired government can do."

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On International Women's Day, we're honoring our pioneers to whom we owe a great debt, and Christine de Pizan is one of our earliest and most eloquent pioneers.

She defended the moral character of women during the viciously sexist Romance of the Rose debates. She penned more than 20 volumes of work at a time when no lay woman wrote at all. She wrote the only poem championing Joan of Arc during her lifetime. Her writing is still taught in universities as one of the great voices of the Middle Ages.

Ambition as a Drug

Genuine people, however, are multi-dimensional and the faceted sides of the human psyche give us an opportunity to examine the truth behind each side of the story of Christine de Pizan, in this case the addictive and conflicted nature of ambition.

For example, all pioneers waffle between the inculcated lessons of the status quo (giving rise to self-loathing) and their determined, brilliant will to move forward. Pioneers know their position as an out-cast, as Christine does when she acknowledges that she is a raptor (ferocious and potentially deadly) amid a court of decorative and powerless blue-bird women. She sometimes feels reptilian in her alienation.
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Latest sighting of women in the past: spirts honored in early Europe were willies -- girls and young women who died without giving birth and therefore donated their fertility to the good of the agrarian community. These willies spent "their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests" the way living girls did. Also honored was the Cosmic Bride.

Here are some great visual images and tidbits from The Dancing Goddesses by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

"There existed a very special group: young women born into the clan who have died before having any children – hence not ancestors of the living but still belonging to the community. Most important, they have not used their natural store of fertility. So, people reasoned, if we're especially nice to them, they might bestow their unused fertility on us. Because unmarried girls in the living community spent much of their time singing and dancing together,  Read More 

Always on the lookout for under-represented women, I have found Katharine Tynan in "The Irish Identity: Independence, History, and Literature" taught by Dr. Marc C. Conner, Washington and Lee University, The Great Courses Plus.

A prodigious writer, Tynan (23 January 1859 – 2 April 1931) penned more than 100 novels, five autobiographical volumes and several volumes of poetry, but is most frequently mentioned because of her substantial influence on William Butler Yeats.

"In sowing the seeds of the renaissance of Irish culture, Hyde, Russell, and Yeats were joined by another figure, the poet and novelist Katharine Tynan, a good friend of Yeats and a prolific author whose career spanned many decades. She was an important poet even before Yeats, having published two volumes of poems in the 1880s and more than a dozen books in the 1890s," Conner says.

Her poem 'Any Woman', expressed the centrality of the woman figure in Irish mythology."

"Tynan and Yeats met in 1885 and already she had formed a weekly evening gathering over literary conversational ideas, a sort of small literary salon of Dublin writers. She and Yeats soon became confidants and exchanged many letters over the years. As Yates emerged as a young poet, and then became a major poet...he would try his ideas out on Tynan, gauge her responses, and he formed many of his aesthetics of poetry through his correspondence with her," according to Conner. Wikipedia suggests that Yeats "may have proposed marriage and been rejected, around 1885."

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Recently occurred to me that...

A few great things about having nuns as characters in historical fiction is that:

• It can be assumed that they are better educated than their neighbors and so capable of more. They could be one of the few in the story who could read a manuscript or a secret ledger. They can read edicts for the village, putting them in a position of power, and letters for the individual so they are privy to information that others won't possess.
• They have been brought up to be leaders. They organize things and investigate/snoop/assist so there's an excuse for them being the center of attention, or one of the key powers in the story.
• Nuns have more of their own agency and freedom to move about the village and surrounding area which makes it easier for her to move through the story, unencumbered.  They visit the sick and isolated, and so can be a conduit for information or communication from afar.
• They are also protected by a level of sanctity that can lessen the chance of assault, because no one wants to write about that.
• Nuns are excused from the typical social or sexual obligations women face with men and so can co-exist with men in a story without coupling up.
• It is reasonable for a nun to be an orphan or a cast-off from her family, or at the very least 'stationed' away from her family, so you can get away with a truncated backstory. They have fewer resources to call upon (no father/brother/sister to come to the rescue) which can increase tension in the story and keep this character focused on/dependent upon the protagonist.
• Her room and lodging can also be extremely sparse so there doesn't have to be a lot of description of decoration and dressing.

So, I think nuns are very handy.  However, the downside is that  Read More 

In "Unsung Heroes of World War II" (The Great Courses Plus), Lynne Olson introduces us to three women who played pivotal roles in the resistance to the Nazis in World War II. Olson, a bestselling author of eight books, is the historian whom former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called "our era's foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy."

Here are three women who made Professor Olson's list:

Andree de Jongh

Known as Dedee, Andree de Jongh founded the Comet Line, the largest and most important escape line smuggling airman from behind enemy lines.

Dedee "worked as a nurse for British troops wounded in the fighting. Along with a group of friends and acquaintances, she began to smuggle injured British soldiers out of German-controlled hospitals and take them to nearby safe houses that she had set up. Not long afterward, she traveled secretly to Spain, which, during World War II, was a neutral country" and struck a deal to smuggle fighters through Spain to the coast where they would be flown back to England.

"The majority of Comet Line workers were women," Olson says. "Being part of an escape network was probably the most dangerous form of resistance work in Europe. German officials were keenly aware of the value of these airmen to the Allied bombing effort. If escaped line members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, and/or execution. It was particularly dangerous for the couriers—most of them young women, many of them still in their teens—who escorted the servicemen hundreds of miles across enemy territory.

"The Comet Line would be the largest and most important escape line in occupied Europe. It would be credited with rescuing more than 800 British and American servicemen, getting them out of enemy territory and back to freedom.

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I swear sometimes I can read a 400-page book and discover only one visual or a single trivial oddity that captures my imagination and makes its way into a new novel. I won't tell you which of these fascinating facts is the one but here's what I gleaned from The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, by Robert Fossier, (Princeton University Press, 2010)

Best facts first:

• The fire or hearth went from outside the house to inside sometime between 900-1100 AD.
• Last rites could be given by laypeople, even criminals, during the Black Death and early Middle Ages.
• Children who died without baptism or were stillborn were buried under the threshold of the home to prevent demons from seizing it and turning it into a changeling.
• Women worked salt marshes and salt pans in fishing villages, hard physical work to produce the salt required to preserve food.
• Churchman San Bernardino of Sienna maintained that a fetus less than 40 days old could be aborted for reasons of health or poverty. Herbal abortion recipes were well known.
• Wine was not kept from one season to the next. It was either consumed or destroyed.
• Houses of prostitution were kept by the Church, noted here and detailed in my first book, A Herstory of Prostitution in Western Europe.  

Here are other gems:

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