On Shakespeare's Sister

[lliira]

I wrote this as a response to chocolatepot 's post here, then realized it's way too long for a comment on someone else's journal.

 

The thing with Virginia Woolf is -- she had no way of knowing about all the successful female writers and artists of Shakespeare's time. History had buried them. She didn't know, and it was impossible for her to know. She was not an historian who had been working with other like-minded historians for decades, and who were building on the work historians had been doing for at least a generation. She was highly educated, incredibly intelligent -- and she could not know the truths about women of the past that she so desperately craved.

She was also using the "Shakespeare's Sister" thing to talk about her own (Edwardian) time. Why were there fewer respected female than male novelists? Besides the fact that women were respected less than men? (Which Woolf did talk about.) She was saying, it's not because women are less talented than men. It's because women don't have the opportunities men have, and they don't even have the role models to look back on that men do. The histories that Woolf had access to that even bothered to mention women, and did not claim women were stupider than men, said that this was because women were heinously oppressed in the past. These historians were on the cutting-edge; they thought women were equal to men. They really believed that nearly all women had been beaten and traded like cattle, and they were themselves only building on what historians before them had done. For centuries, historians had decided, consciously and not, that women were simply not important, except for a favored very, very few. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Queen Elizabeth.

So I adore "Shakespeare's Sister". It demonstrates, more simply and directly than anything else I've ever seen, how important history is. How necessary it is to have many different types of people practicing history, so generations of people don't grow up without role models.

 

Imo, it's also important not to go too far the other way, which that excerpt seems to be doing. Shakespeare, as a man, was privileged over his "sisters" in nearly every conceivable way. Women were considered the property of their closest male relative, unless they were widows, until Woolf's time. There was terrible oppression, state-sanctioned, Church-sanctioned. Lords could rape peasant women -- really, nearly any women -- with absolutely zero repercussions. Rape of a woman was considered a crime against her male family, not against her. It was perfectly acceptable, by law and custom, for a man to beat his wife. Women were being killed as witches, by the thousands. (Fewer in England than on the continent, and England usually hanged "witches" rather than burning them, but the Pendle witch trials happened in England in 1612.) There was still debate over whether women had souls, even though the Bible very clearly said that they did.

While a glovemaker's son, like Shakespeare, had access to an excellent, state-run education, a glovemaker's daughter would depend entirely on her fathers and brothers to teach her what they knew, and allow her to read their books. Most women did not have access to the collegiality that men in education took for granted, the sharing of ideas and knowledge among equals. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu lamented this in the early 18th century, when women were more likely to be educated than the women of Shakespeare's time, and significantly less likely to be accused of witchcraft.

 

Claiming "there is almost no evidence of the oppression" strikes me as another kind of burying of history. Of course the women who succeeded weren't the ones who were horribly "thwarted and hindered." Of course they were the ones with supportive (and well-off) men in their lives. What of all the incredibly talented women who didn't have that, and could not fulfill their dreams? To think that they didn't exist is to erase them, to pretend western culture hasn't been largely built on the oppression of anyone who wasn't a rich white man. It buys into the myth that anyone can succeed, no matter what, and we should all stop whining about inequality. I don't think that was the goal -- but the fantasy of no oppression is at least as dangerous as the fantasy of complete and utter and 100% pervasive oppression.

Comments

[chocolatepot]

The thing with Virginia Woolf is -- she had no way of knowing about all the successful female writers and artists of Shakespeare's time.

Oh, definitely - I wasn't trying to say that she was twisting the facts. They do point out in the article that the female authors were forgotten after their own time, that without Woolf many of them would not be known today. The fact that these women were forgotten is itself a testament of historical sexism. But it's not because women's situations have become steadily better through the centuries, it's because women's situations have waxed and waned, and later generations with more repressive ideologies can alter history books, and I don't think it's helpful to cling to an idea of strict progression. It seems to imply that everything will work itself out in the end, so why bother working to change things? If the utter horror against women above the working class earning money in any way is mostly Victorian (in the *horror*, not so much the idea that it shouldn't happen but the total disgust that went along with it), it should not be harmful to point out that that aversion was less intense in earlier periods of history.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu lamented this in the early 18th century, when women were more likely to be educated than the women of Shakespeare's time

I don't know about that - I've read that noblewomen were often well-educated in the Elizabethan era and it went down from there for a while. MWM was quite awesome though, she's partially the basis for an article I'm writing that will hopefully be in the Material Culture Review.

Claiming "there is almost no evidence of the oppression" strikes me as another kind of burying of history.

I wouldn't call it burying. It's a broad statement, but given the context I'm pretty sure the author intended it as a shortened form of "there is almost no evidence of the oppression specifically described by Virginia Woolf about writing." It's definitely a place where absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but at the same time, when there are varied examples of women as published writers, it's reductive and dismissive to say they don't matter and just concentrate on potentially-apocryphal thwarted women who have apparently not even left diaries behind. And in the case of absence of evidence, the only thing one can do is phrase the conclusion in terms of "there is no evidence that ..."

Of course they were the ones with supportive (and well-off) men in their lives. What of all the incredibly talented women who didn't have that, and could not fulfill their dreams?

Again, I'm not sure. For example, the reviewer describes Lady Anne Clifford, a diarist and holder of titles in her own right who was brought up in, according to Wiki, "an almost entirely female household", and whose mother was a patron of a professional female poet (who herself was educated because of a noblewoman). There's also Mary Astell, who was the daughter of a coal merchant and was able to publish due to the efforts of Mary W-M and her intellectual circle of women. Bathsua Makin worked as a tutor under her own power, not because she had an indulgent man supporting her - in fact, looking at most of the women mentioned in the article, the lack of a living father or husband seems to have very often been the catalyst for a career. But the reviewer notes:

And while many of the figures are aristocrats who had the resources for education when it was a luxury, by 1670, we learn, beginning with Aphra Behn, middle-class women began writing plays to make money. Behn also wrote what may have been the first play set in the American Colonies, “The Widdow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia,” on display here (and she became the subject of a biography by Sackville-West, some 250 years later).

The women who made it sometimes had money, and men who didn't but wanted to make it as artists and writers certainly had an edge on comparable women, but the vast majority of people were thwarted by circumstance if they wanted to do more than pick from a narrow range of choices. Even if a woman was being supported by a man, I don't think that's

I would read the article, tbh, it contains a lot more specific information. I just quoted that bit because it's relevant to my feminist-historiography interests, which have been inflamed as I'm (finally) reading Laurel Ulrich Thatcher's A Midwife's Tale, where she noted in the intro that 1970s feminists dismissed Martha Ballard's diary because it was just a domestic account. I would love to go and see this exhibition for myself, but DC is quite a ways from where I live.

[chocolatepot]

Don't you love it when you start a sentence and then go work on a different one and forget that the first is unfinished? Me too.

Even if a woman was being supported by a man, I don't think that's a good reason to set her aside as not counting. It's sort of oppression olympicky - how far do you go? How many privileges are too many?

[lliira]

I wasn't trying to say those women didn't count, not at all. Of course they count. But what I am taking issue with is the idea that there wasn't a ton of oppression. There was, and some women, with a lot of help, grit, and luck, could overcome a lot of it. But the line about "no evidence of oppression" was a big wtf moment for me. I don't even understand how the person who wrote it could honestly come to that conclusion.

[chocolatepot]

Because they weren't at all saying that there's no evidence of women being oppressed. They were saying that there was no evidence that the situation Woolf described existed. Which is about the most sensitive way to express that - it's neutral, it's not saying it never happened. Context is important, and I cut out a lot by clipping what I found the most interesting.