by Mary Beard
But what does a feminised history mean anyway? Is it history for women, by women, about women?
Predictably enough, the papers have collected outraged responses from women who have written about women: Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Lisa Hilton, author of Athenais, The Real Queen of France, and many others. These are excellent historians in their way, I’m sure. But the point of ‘feminising’ history isn’t just to pretend that women were as powerful or as influential as men, and then to write about them in the same old fashion.
The Sunday Times, enjoying a dig at Starkey, cited some of the famous women who had been powerful in the history of the Roman world, and who shouldn’t get left out of the story: Messalina (the adulterous wife of the emperor Claudius) and Agrippina (her successor and the mother of Nero); Cleopatra and the emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena.
But hang on, I thought, isn’t it a bit more complicated? Surely we have hardly any clue at all about whether Messalina or Agrippina really were powerful; what we know is that they were useful symbols on to which Roman writers themselves projected all the ills of their political system. I’m not saying that they were demure, shrinking violets. But they were certainly convenient targets for ridicule and abuse, useful figures to blame for a whole range of disasters that afflicted the Roman imperial house. Someone’s just died … must have been poisoned by Agrippina! A history book based around Agrippina makes even less sense (and must be even more speculative) than one based around the emperor Nero.
I thought feminising history was about doing history differently, and having different assumptions about what power was. The sort of history, for example, that doesn’t always start from the antics of ye olde royal family, and Tudors in tights, perhaps?
Comments
Wow. What exactly is the problem? And how exactly does history become ′feminised′? By finally paying attention to women in history, perhaps? I for one am just becoming aware of the vast corpus of convent chronicles from the late medieval period and early Renaissance, and it′s quite clear that, once a large number of them are finally translated, they will be seen as an actual genre in the hulking shadow of humanist literature. By women, about women and for women. Bring it on, I say!
JOHN T
Isn′t most of the written evidence about Agrippina (both of them), Messalina and Cleopatra the work of elite males with the benefit of ′hindsight′? And almost entirely hostile. If you look at the contemporary evidence, coins, statues etc., the picture is completely different. Agrippina, for example, is seen as a conduit, linking the past with the future, a sister, wife and mother of emperors. Power may have been a step too far for most, but women have always had influence. It′s about time male historians recognised the fact.
JACKIE
Norman Mailer once said of feminism in academia: Down with bulls–t, up with cows–t! And it can be, too.
MARION DIAMOND
Pirates? Try the Pompey-the-Great solution?
13 April 2009
Piracy, it seems, has always been with us, and still is. Or, at least, as we’ve seen this last week with the piracy off the Somali coast, there are still people we don’t like doing nasty things on the high seas with tragic consequences.
Exactly who is to count as a ‘pirate’ as such will always remain a matter of opinion and dispute. For ‘pirates’ are no more objectively defined than ‘terrorists’. To most of the world, after all, Sir Francis Drake was a dreadful pirate; to the British he still somehow manages to qualify as an ‘explorer’.
But however you define them, the Romans had plenty of trouble with criminals sailing around the Mediterranean. It must sometimes have seemed hard to decide which was the greater danger of a sea voyage in antiquity: shipwreck or kidnapping by one of the many gangs of thugs looking to make quick money by getting ransoms for the wealthy individuals they captured (or alternatively by selling them into slavery).
The most famous victim of this was the young Julius Caesar, who fell into pirate hands in the 70s BC. The story of this crime was almost certainly later embellished to make it a nice prequel of Caesar’s later character and career. It is said that when the pirates told him that they were going to demand 20 talents ransom money (a hefty sum), Caesar replied that he was worth much more than that – and insisted that they double it.
Some of his party went off to get the cash, leaving Caesar to live for a month or so with his captors. He is supposed to have treated them as servants, telling them not to make too much noise when he wanted to rest, making them listen to him practising his oratory and threatening that when he was released he would have them crucified. When the ransom arrived, he was set free – and indeed, in due course, he did crucify the lot of them.
But it was Caesar’s great rival Pompey the Great (pictured above) who had greatest success against the pirates, with a rather more liberal approach.
By the early 60s BC, pirates had become such a menace to Mediterranean shipping that in 67 Rome gave Pompey a ‘special command’ and vast resources to try to get rid of them. It was a great opportunity for this general ‘on the make’ to demonstrate his military genius. So he divided the sea into separate operational regions and, using loyal subordinate officers, he swept the pirates off the waters in just a few months.
But Pompey was smart enough to realise that, unless they were given some other form of livelihood, they would soon be back. (This is basically the Afghanistan problem: if they don’t make their money out of the poppy crop, how are they going to survive.) So in a wonderful, early ‘resettlement of offenders’ initiative he offered the pirates smallholdings near the coast, where they could make an honest living for themselves.
In fact, Servius, the late Roman commentator on the works of Virgil, was convinced that his poet had given one of these reformed characters a walk-on part in the Georgics (4, 125ff.): an old man, living near Tarentum in south Italy, peacefully keeping bees, his days of piracy long behind him.
Might this not be a better solution than a shoot-out for the Somali pirates?
Comments
One of the most riveting lectures I ever heard was a description by J. N. L. Myres (former Bodley′s Librarian and Anglo-Saxonist) of how his father, J. L. Myres, (Who were the Greeks?) spent a large part of the Great War cattle-rustling on the western littoral of Asia Minor, thereby tying down large numbers of Turkish forces who might otherwise have been employed at Gallipoli or Kut or against Allenby. I seem to recall that his privateering activities came to an end when he rustled some cattle belonging to the family of the Greek wife of W. R. Paton (Loeb Greek Anthology). I suspect that the pamphlet which resulted from the lecture, ′The Blackbeard of the Aegean: Commander J. L. Myres R.N.V.R.′, is now something of a rare bibliographical item.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
Literary ladies at Cambridge – and who’s minding the baby?
27 April 2009
There are many nice things about being a fellow of Newnham College. I could go on at great length about the virtues even (or especially) in 2009 of having a college for women only. But I will spare you, till later. This weekend I’ve been thinking instead about Newnham’s literary inheritance. Among our alums (as I have now almost got used to calling them) is a range of the best, and best-known, writers of the twentieth century: A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Claire Tomalin, Sylvia Plath, Joan Bakewell, Germaine Greer, Katharine Whitehorn, Sarah Dunant – and many more.
So it was partly in celebration of this that the Cambridge Wordfest (the local literary festival) held some appropriate events in Newnham this year, and the college hosted a dinner for the speakers and assorted others, me included. Almost all of us had some connection with Newnham; most had been students or on the staff at one time or another.
There were fourteen of us ‘girls’, and those at my end of the table included Frances Spalding and Isabelle Grey (who was in my year in Newnham when I was an undergraduate), plus Jean Wilson. And after dinner I quaffed – I confess – a lot more
claret with Isabelle and Rebecca Abrams, and the college Vice-Principal, Catherine Seville.
So how was the conversation?
Well, over dinner I talked to Frances about work. She was about to do a Wordfest session with Susan Sellers on Virginia Woolf (featuring the very table around which Woolf famously dined at King’s – as she explains in Room of One’s Own – an iconic piece of feminist furniture recently loaned to Newnham), and she has a book on John and Myfanwy Piper coming out.
But after dinner we fell increasingly to talk, as women do, about a woman’s lot. Why is it, when everything should be swimming for women, that there is still such a gap between men’s and women’s lives and careers?
A lot of that, we agreed, is about the ‘conceptual economy’ of domestic responsibility. I sit down at lunch with the mothers who work at Newnham and know that, whatever else they have been doing (from splitting atoms to lecturing on the Anglo-Saxons), they have never left their home life entirely behind. Their heads still must have space for the lost ballet shoes, the nursery Christmas party and the up-coming vaccinations.
Most men, I am convinced, however much they share the domestic chores when they are at home, leave them all behind as soon as they shut the front door. I watch Cambridge academics at seminars in the early evening. Suppose the discussion is going really well. You see them calculating if they can stay later than they should – and quite how apologetic they are going to have to be when they roll up home an hour late. Will flowers be enough to compensate? Or a bottle of wine, or a dinner out? The women don’t have a choice; they just leave.
We finished the evening with a tragic reductio ad absurdum of just that point. Isabelle remembered the story of a guy in America who went to work and simply forgot that he had the baby in the back of the car, to drop off at daycare. At the end of the day the baby was found dead, locked in a very hot car in the parking lot.
An urban myth? No, it really happened. And it gives new depths to the old joke: ‘Oh my God, I left the baby on the bus.’
Comments
An average of 38 babies died every year between 1998 and 2008 in the US caused by hyperthermia in cars. It seems related to mandatory airbags – this made it illegal to put a small child in the front seat. Babies were put in the back of the car. Out of sight, out of mind.
TONY FRANCIS
Re: ′Most men, I am convinced, however much they share the domestic chores when they are at home, leave them all behind as soon as they shut the front door′.
The ′most′ in that sentence might save you here, Mary, since I couldn′t produce statistics either. But I′m afraid I don′t share your impression. In fact, I′d much prefer that there wasn′t this assumption that this is fine/usual/just how men are; it makes it rather difficult for those of us who, however much we like a good academic discussion, also would rather like to spend some time at home with the family in the evening.
JIW
Provocative stuff Mary! Our learned friend JIW has beaten me to the punch, but I share his sentiment entirely … Perhaps the ladies at Newnham might like to invite the likes of James and me to such a discussion. I fancy our rapid exits from meetings/seminars and the like to do the Brownie & Cub run (it′s Monday, so that′s my task for this evening … Beavers tomorrow, dancing on Wednesday and preparation of ′family meal′ on Thursday) are far from unusual in 30-something fathers today.
CHRIS
Even though women consistently get better academic results than the embollocked, the expectations on them are still belittling and destructive. Men are considered attractive on the basis of status, wealth and the possession of corresponding material goods – houses, cars, trophy women/mistresses etc. Women on the basis of their allure re such men. Poor bitches. So go Boudica and slaughter the myriads of jumped-up male parasites and swollen boils currently infesting the skin of our body politic.
XJY
Does College need a new grace?
12 May 2009
Here is another everyday story of academic folk.
Our students at Newnham (or some of them, at least) are worried that the grace we use before dinner in Formal Hall is too Christian. Here we are, a college proud not to have a chapel (the only mainstream undergraduate college in Cambridge of which that is true) – and yet before formal dinners we are always thanking ‘Jesum Christum dominum nostrum’ (not to mention ‘deum omnipotentem’), ‘pro largitate tua …’ etc. etc. A fair point, in a way.
So they brought to last week’s college meeting an alternative grace for our consideration: ‘Pro cibo inter esurientes, pro comitate inter desolatos, pro pace inter bellantes, gratias agimus’ (‘For food in a hungry world, for companionship in a world of loneliness, for peace in an age of violence, we give thanks’).
Now a lot of work had gone into this, and there were no obvious grammatical howlers in the Latin. But, irreligious as I am, I just couldn’t stomach it.
For a start, it was all terribly non-Classical, indeed medieval in tone. (True, agreed the Bursar – but then the Classical Romans didn’t actually have grace, did they? And what we say already, would be more at home in a fifteenth-century cathedral than at Cicero’s dinner table.) But worse, the undergraduates’ rewrite was a classic case of disguising a load of well-meaning platitudes in some posh dead language, which was actually an insult to that dead language. The Beard line was simple. Could we imagine getting up and saying this in English? No. Well, don’t say it in Latin then. (At this point someone asked if one could say the existing grace in English with a straight face. Maybe not, I thought – but at least it has the virtue of hoary tradition.)
The debate got more complicated than this. Did the undergraduates want a secular grace or a multi-faith grace? If secular, then whom were they thanking in the new version? If it was simply a multi-faith version, then couldn’t we just remove the ‘Jesum Christum’ bit. (Presumably Jews and Muslims and almost every faith could tolerate a ‘deum omnipotentem’.)
After the meeting, we wondered if we shouldn’t actually be thanking the cooks (or, to put it more crudely, those arguably exploited by us to bring us our nice food). But how would that go into Latin? ‘Servi oppressi’, suggested the Keeper of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam (roughly translated as ‘oppressed slaves’). Hardly a tactful way of thanking the staff, piped up the Bursar.
We then began to wonder if we needed formally to approve any form of grace at all. Maybe anyone who said grace should be able to say whatever form of grace they wanted. A carte blanche there, I thought, and suddenly warmed to a task I had previously shunned. And then there was the issue of the history of the existing grace. How long had it been said, and who had devised it? No one knew. (Some later research revealed that it had actually been framed by Jocelyn Toynbee, one of Newnham’s most illustrious fellows ever – and a Catholic.)
Anyway, after this meeting, we went as usual to dinner. What grace would the Principal say?
She cleverly avoided the issue. ‘Please be seated’, she invited us.
Comments
′No one knew. Do you mean to tell me that Newnham dons don′t all keep a well-thumbed copy of The College Graces of Oxford and Cambridge, by Reginald Adams, by their bedsides? Shocking.
BEN WHITWORTH
′Everyday story of academic folk′: no. ′Everyday story about Cambridge′: perhaps …
RICHARD
Your students understood the grace?! Are you sure they′re not winding you up? All credit to your teaching, I′m sure, but at my college it was a point of pride for the academic in question to reel it off as quickly and pompously as possible. We are very fond of the college ducks whom we enticed off Emmanuel, and as our grace starts ′quidquid nobis appositum est′, it′s called the ′quack quack grace′.
LUCY
It would make more sense to turn ′gratias agimus′ into a conditional: ′we would be grateful for food …′ This would then involve entering into a new discourse with the Supreme Being.
ANTHONY ALCOCK
&nbs
p; The Newnham ′Pro cibo′ proposal strikes me as close in general
sentiment to the Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,/ And some wad eat that want
it;/ But we hae meat, and we can eat,/ Sae let the Lord be
thankit.
RICHARD BARON
How about: ′To what we are about to consume we are perfectly entitled′? An honest-to-goodness, graceless grace, that avoids all the inter-faith bother. Would it add any relish to members′ eating, though?
NEIL JONES
Christianity banned
15 May 2009
It was perhaps (as has been pointed out to me) a little beyond propriety to blog about Newnham’s internal discussions on its college grace. But I just couldn’t resist. (‘It is easier for a wise man to stifle a flame within his burning mouth than to keep bona dicta to himself’, as the Roman poet Ennius said.) Besides, I thought college came rather well out of it, over all – students taking multiculturalism, multi-faith and the traditions of their institutions seriously, dons taking students’ comments and suggestions seriously, the discussion going at the problem from every angle. Amusing from the outside it might have been, but it was feisty stuff – showcasing argumentative young women at a flourishing single-sex institution, not a load of Laura Ashley-clad wimps.
I feared the worst when the Cambridge Evening News rang up to get some more information, but was assured (!) that the story would be carefully and accurately handled, when it appeared in the Thursday edition. Well, the story itself was. But the headline (on the front page) ran ‘GRACE BANNED’ (which it certainly hadn’t been).