On Shakespeare's Sister
Feb. 24th, 2012 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lliiraI 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.
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.
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.
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.
