Tag Archives: women’s history

Medieval Monday – King Arthur and the Birth of the Romance Novel

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 1 Comment

Last week I talked about the tradition of storytelling that emerged in the Early Middle Ages and flowered into the High Middle Ages.  I talked a bit about the troubadours and their lyric poetry in the south of France and the adventure-romance stories that grew up in the north of France and England.  The merging of these two traditions was one of the great game-changers in the history of writing.

But let’s take a small step back.

Europe in the Early Middle Ages was a fiercely male-dominated society.  It was all about battle and conquest.  It wasn’t a good place to be a woman.  When they weren’t being thought of as objects of sexual gratification or baby-machines women were seen as weak and inferior, even sinful in the eyes of the Church.  But change was in the air.  A lot of this change came from the Muslim countries to the East, where women had a higher status in the community and were allowed a greater share in life.  Through trade, the Crusades, and Moorish Spain these influences slowly began to creep into Western European thought, and through that into literature.

What made the troubadours and their idea of courtly love so special was that it actually elevated the value and position of women.  The idea that a knight would fight not for the honor of his king or the Church, but for the love and favor of a lady was revolutionary.  The very fact that fashionable entertainment was made up of songs of love and stories of lovers, illicit and pure, was a drastic change from older barbarian ways.  Even in the adventure-romance tradition of the north heroes were starting to be effected by the influence of love.  “Feminine” virtues, such as compassion and sentimentality, were seen as belonging to the very masculine heroes.  And that was okay.  The heroes were still secure in their masculinity.

When these two traditions converged in the Arthurian Legend it really did awaken a whole new world of thought.  The Arthurian Legend, first recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, spread like wildfire through Europe.  It captured the imagination and was expanded on by the likes of Chretien de Troyes in France and Walther von der Vogelweide in Germany.  Subsidiary characters, such as Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival, were added and the quest for the Holy Grail was included.  More importantly, these stories contain some of the first really strong female characters in western literature, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, and the Lady of the Lake among them.  By the late part of the High Middle Ages it was the Lady of the Lake that bestowed Arthur with Excalibur.  That’s serious power for a woman!

I think Norman F. Cantor in his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages puts it best:

“The romantic literature also instructed the aristocracy that the sensibility that had hitherto been regarded as a mark of feminine inferiority was now made into a virtue practiced by heroes, such as Lancelot, Parsifal, and Tristan.  By making feminine qualities heroic, the romantic poets enhanced the dignity of woman and made her a being with distinctive and valuable qualities.  The teaching of the fourth-century church fathers on sex and marriage was the first and very modest stage in the emancipation of women in western civilization.  The romantic ethos of the twelfth century marked the second and more important stage.”

So suddenly here we have a world where the highest form of literature is the romance novel!  Well, sort of.  These stories, the Arthurian Legend and its offshoots, like the stories of Lancelot, Sir Gawain, and Tristan and Isolde, were more “romantic” in the sense that they centered around strong emotions and secular ideals of love rather than lofty Church moralizing.

The point is that with the Arthurian Legend and within a century or so Europe in the High Middle Ages had changed from a male and Church dominated society of subsistence to a more secular world in which women had greater importance.  It’s the difference between the values of Beowulf and the values of Arthur.  Both were great warriors, but Arthur endured love, loss, and emotional conflict whereas Beowulf just had to fight Grendel.  It’s a subtle difference, but the subtly is what defines the age.

Of course all of this focus on the sentimentality of female life backfired to a certain extent where women were concerned.  Out of the stories of Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot, of Tristan and Isolde and King Mark, and of the traditions of courtly love came the dreaded double-standard that would plague women well into the 20th century.  With all these stories of love triangles, love triangles where the women did NOT end up with her husband in the end, came a heightened awareness that a man had to watch out for the women in his life lest they were lured away by a more virile man.  Women may have been elevated to a pedestal, but it gets kind of lonely up there on that pedestal when your husband has the key.  And yet it was still fine and dandy for men to have affairs and produce as many bastard children as they wanted.

Granted, life doesn’t shape itself in the image of the literature of the time in which it was written.  This new brand of romance story didn’t create the conditions that stifled women.  But literature is a reflection of the ideals of the time in which it was written.  The fusion of the courtly love of the troubadours and the adventure-romance tales of the north represents the explosion of the intellect that happened in the High Middle Ages.  It speaks to a movement that was already there: greater political stability and a growing economy that enabled people to focus on more than just subsistence.  It speaks to a society that had time for love and not just reproduction.  And we still love those stories almost a thousand years later.

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The Best Time To Be A Woman

Posted on March 27, 2012 | 9 Comments

In honor of International Women’s Day earlier this month I read a neat article from The Independent about the best and worst places to be a woman.  They broke it down throughout various disciplines, education, opportunity, health care, and the like.  It was no surprise to me that Scandinavian countries ranked so high in so many areas and that Iceland was named the best place to be a woman.  (I’m part Scandinavian, after all)  It was interesting to see other places throughout the world ranked high in other areas though.  Like Rwanda being the best place to be a female politician.

So it got me thinking….  When were the best and worst times to be a woman?

Now if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time then you know I’m something of a History Apologist.  I believe very strongly that the past was not such a bad place to live and that modern people have serious misconceptions about what conditions were like in bygone eras.  Your average modern person just assumes today is the best time has to offer.

Personally, I disagree.

Yes, there are some amazing advances that women have in the 21st century.  Healthcare, for one.  The rate of death in childbirth is lower than it has ever been.  Uniquely female chronic conditions are understood better now, without taboo, and they are able to be treated with modern techniques.  This goes for mental health issues as well as just physical ones.  Because remember, in the late 19th century hysterectomies were performed because a woman had become “hysterical” and needed to have her uterus removed to calm down.

So acute healthcare is light years better today.  But I am in the school of thought that says the day-to-day health of your average person, female or male, was actually much better at various points in history.  Prior to the 20th century people moved more, walked more, and “exercised” more as part of their daily routine.  In this regard I believe that the late 19th and early 20th centuries were healthier.  I’ve had doctors back me up on this one too, although since it was within private conversation I can’t cite it and show you an article.  But at the turn of the last century enough medical advances had been made to improve the lives of average people, food supplies were plentiful and there was variety, and general physical activity levels were higher.  Not too shabby.

Education is another important aspect adding to the quality of life of women.  Statistics show that, in America at least, 60% of students enrolled in higher education are women.  In the west women have access to education more than ever before.  Um, wait, EVER before?  Are you sure about that?

A Medieval woman teaching geometry. To men, I might add.

Actually, in the Middle Ages men and women pretty much had equal access to education.  Granted, by “equal” I mean that not a lot of people across the board had access.  The centers of education in the Medieval world, for the most part, were religious institutions.  Women were part of the religious life just as much as men.  Some of the greatest minds of the era were women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Héloïse d’Argenteuil, and Saint Catherine of Siena.  These women were writers and leaders within their religious orders.  Their opinions were sought by even the heads of state at the time.

Speaking of the Middle Ages, depending on the kingdom or country in which they lived, in the High Middle Ages women could actually own and inherit property, run a business, and be a member of the all-powerful guilds.  All that 20th century talk about the glass ceiling and the importance of women breaking through it?  They already broke through it a thousand years ago.

Alright, the modern person says, what about sexual equality?  Historically women have been confined to the home, the bearers of children, subject to the will of their husbands.  Wife-beating was legal in the past, wasn’t it?  Women had no legal recourse, right?

Well, not exactly.  I was just reading some fantastic stuff the other day in one of my favorite history books, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham.  In it the authors talk about one Medieval author, Daniel of Beccles, who stated that it was virtually impossible for women to resist their sexual appetites, especially when presented with a particularly well-endowed male.  He advised husbands to look the other way when it came to their wives’ inevitable affairs because the pleasure that the women would receive would make them happier people in the long run.

Is it just me or does that sound like a complete gender reverse of the prevailing attitude of the 19th and 20th centuries?  Furthermore, Danziger and Gillingham also point out from several Medieval sources that the undisputed scientific opinion of the time was that a woman could only conceive if she experienced pleasure in the sexual act.  Definitely not Victorian!  And finally county court records of the time show time and time again in the Middle Ages that women frequently sued men for canoodling with them then refusing to marry them.  The courts ruled in favor of the women and forced the man to marry them.  This would have had significant socio-economic implications, by the way.  And frankly, I don’t think that the modern world provides women with as much protection from being taken for a ride by a man.  Just sayin’.

I could go on and on with examples from history about how life wasn’t really all that bad for women at various other times.  It all boils down to who you were, where exactly you lived, and what you considered to be most important.  If you wanted to work and excel in your profession, then the High Middle Ages was a good place for you.  If you didn’t want to work and wanted to live a more leisurely life, being born into money in the 19th century might have been more your thing.  I personally would have avoided the entire 14th century, and if I had to be lower class I wouldn’t have wanted to live during the early Industrial Revolution.  Although if I had to live in the 17th or 18th century I think it might have been interesting and still reasonably viable as a woman to live in Colonial America.  My point is that there are so many options throughout history for a woman to live a safe, satisfying, and comfortable life.

Is this what we wanted to become?

But if you take away anything from this blog post, let it be this!  Remember, women have had extensive rights and powers at various points in history.  In the High Middle Ages they could own property, participate in business, and become highly educated just like any man could.  Fast-forward 500 or so years and suddenly women were little more than the property of their husbands or fathers, unable to inherit or vote, called whores if they exhibited any sexual appetite, with little recourse under the law if they were threatened.  Women lost what they once had!  Think about it.  Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again?  Life might be pretty good for women now, but what will our lives and rights look like in another 500 years?  In another 50 years?  Never take any right for granted.

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Medieval Monday – Cities, Crafts, and Guilds

Posted on March 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

I tend to focus a lot on rural life on a manor in my Medieval Monday posts.  That’s because for the vast majority of people life was rural and agricultural.  And because I like peasants.  But there was another type of Medieval life that shouldn’t go without mention.  I talked briefly about it last week in my discussion of how the textile industry revolutionized life during the Middle Ages.  This was, of course, life in the city.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I really, really like the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Dutch painter from the early-mid 1500s.

Medieval cities were few and far between.  They were also centers of politics and commerce.  Sure, the great and mighty lived there, but just as on a manor, the majority of folks living in a Medieval city were not lords or bishops, they were common people doing common jobs.  In other words, they were craftspeople.  And the lives of craftspeople revolved around something that is both familiar and totally foreign to modern people: guilds.

I think modern people tend to forget the huge variety of crafts and craftspeople that existed in the Middle Ages because these days everything is done by a machine in a fraction of the time.  But in those days long before mechanization, everything was done by hand.  Every piece of cloth was spun, woven, dyed, cut, sewn, and decorated by hand.  Every goblet was forged, hammered, and finished by hand.  Every piece of furniture, every stone carving, glass window, and book was made by hand.  None of it was a quick process.

Tools were also made by hand, often by the people who would go on to use them.  Since crafts were a family affair, tools and equipment would be handed down through generations.  True, you may not have had much choice about what you were going to do with your life.  If you were the son of a carpenter chances are you would be a carpenter.  If your mother was a brewer, you’d probably be a brewer too.  The advantage was that families worked together, families involved in the same or complimentary trades worked together as well, and over time that developed into the guild system.

The earliest guilds were merchant guilds.  The first guilds appeared in Italy in the tenth century.  Merchant guilds were responsible for commerce.  They would import goods from the countryside or from faraway lands, organize them, and see that they were sold in the great Medieval marketplaces.  These guilds would set prices and regulate trade.  Merchant guilds became incredibly powerful in the budding Medieval political world.  Their influence stretched beyond the goods they sold to include the care and administration of the people who worked under or around them.  This is why in a lot of areas the central location of political and judicial influence was the guildhall.

As the Middle Ages progressed, craft guilds became as important as merchant guilds.  Craft guilds were centralized organizations regulating and overseeing any given craft.  The weavers had their guild, the goldsmiths had theirs, armorers, brewers, carpenters … they all had a guild.  And like the merchant guilds, craft guilds did much more in the lives of their members than regulate quality and set prices.  They took care of their members.  In a lot of cases they would see to funeral and burial costs for their members.  They would provide basic social services, like medical care, food and clothing assistance, and care for elderly members.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it.  It was the Medieval equivalent of unions and a welfare system.  Instead of being the responsibility of a central government, which was often ineffective or in flux in the best of times or mercenary in the worse, those who shared a craft would also share the responsibility of the collective lives of their members.

 

Why yes, that IS a woman making armor with a man

In the early days guilds were easy to join.  If you were a craftsman in any given profession you would just join.  Within the guild there were masters, journeymen, and apprentices.  Crafts were well-ordered this way.  It wasn’t just men either.  Entire families were part of a given craft and therefore part of the guild.  Oftentimes when a man died his widow would assume responsibility for the business and take his place in the guild.  And guess what?  Single women could join guilds in areas where women practiced a craft, and they were considered equal to men.  Because as I’ve said before, the concept of women being inferior to men and having a place barefoot and pregnant in a man’s home is actually a much later concept and not Medieval at all.

So there we are in our cities.  We’ve got guilds organizing people from all professions.  We’ve got a lot of people working and making stuff that would be used in the cities or imported back out into the countryside.  We’ve got smiths hammering on things, weavers clacking away at their looms, fullers and dyers with great big smelly vats of caustic substances treating cloth.  We’ve got brewers with boiling cauldrons.  We’ve got glassblowers with their furnaces.

Yep, cities were loud, smelly, hot, and crowded.  But not because people were ignorant and nasty and enjoyed being dirty and smelly.  Cities were so unpleasant because they were hives of activity.  They were the places that stuff was made and where things got done.  So I think we can forgive a little muck.  That was the muck of craftsmanship!

Although it’s no surprise that when things like the Black Death swept through Europe cities were hit hardest.  It also doesn’t take much of a leap of logic to see how the overall quality of life took a few giant steps backwards when these centers of industry took a hit.

I still think I would have preferred to live as a peasant on a farm than a craftsman in the heart of a city.  I don’t think I would have liked all that noise.

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Medieval Tuesday – The World is Spinning

Posted on March 6, 2012 | 1 Comment

Fashion is big business.  So much of our modern lives and identities revolve around what we wear and where we bought it.  We have a huge amount of variety in the things we put on our bodies these days.  Most of it comes from far away countries and I’m not sure I want to know too much about the conditions it was all made in.

But I bet you didn’t know that the rise of the textile industry is actually a Medieval invention.  Clothes weren’t a super huge big deal back in the Ancient world.  That didn’t change much in the very early Middle Ages.  The clothing of the first part of the Middle Ages was a combination of Roman tunics with Barbarian cloaks and leggings.  Styles remained more or less the same for hundreds of years.  People wore simple designs made out of fabrics that were available to them locally.  Only the exceptionally wealthy and powerful could afford to import fabrics from the east.

All that changed in the middle part of the Middle Ages.  First, as we discussed last week, because agricultural technology advanced, greater stretches of land were able to be cleared and farmed.  Not only did this lead to an increase in food staples, it meant that there was more grazing land.  More grazing meant more livestock, and that included sheep.

Merchants buying wool from English shepherds

England was the Medieval sheep capitol of the world.  (Insert sheep joke here.)  The land was suitable for grazing and the value of wool as a tradable commodity encouraged landowners to raise sheep wherever possible.  But raw wool was just that, raw.  It needed to be processed, taken to market, transformed into cloth, and sold once again to make clothing.  This whole process formed the first and arguably most important industrial system in the western world.

But let’s take a step back.

In those early Medieval days of decentralization the production of cloth for clothing was a task that every household and every member of the household was involved in.  Women were primarily responsible for spinning raw wool or flax or even cotton where it was available into thread.  And a spinster’s work was never done.

Apparently a distaff could also be used as a weapon!

A common Medieval joke was that a woman was never without her spindle and distaff.  All day long, even as she went about other chores, a woman would have her fork-like distaff holding raw wool and the spindle that she was spinning the thread onto with her.  Apparently there’s even a Medieval illustration out there of a woman spinning while otherwise engaged in bed.  Spinning with a drop-spindle is a slow process too.  I have a modern friend who does it and she says it can take her months to spin enough thread to create one single piece of cloth big enough to make clothes out of.

The weaving, in these early days, was done mostly by the men.  At first, as in Ancient times, cloth was woven on a vertical loom.  This was a very basic contraption with weighted warp threads that was woven from top to bottom.  The process was revolutionized with the introduction of the horizontal loom around the 10th and 11th centuries.  These new looms allowed the man to sit while weaving.  They also allowed for longer and wider bolts of cloth to be produced.

As cities grew, the production of cloth gradually shifted from being a rural activity within each household to being an urban industry.  And remember, this craft was employing people in cities with the aim of high volume of production in an era long, long before the Industrial Revolution.  The great cloth-making outfits of the Middle Ages were organized and run by guilds.  There were guilds for every step of the process too, from fulling to dying to weaving.

I could go on for ages about Medieval guilds and their importance to the development of trade and commerce and the Medieval economy.  In fact, I think I will next week.

But back to the cloth itself.

Two developments in the later Middle Ages laid the groundwork for one of the most pivotal technological moments in the history of the world.  The first was the invention of the spinning wheel.

It is thought that the spinning wheel came to Europe from China or India in the 13th century.  What made this simple device so revolutionary was the fact that it sped up the process of making yarn and thread exponentially.  Rather than relying on gravity to create tension as a woman turned the spindle, the spinning wheel made it possible to turn one or even several spindles much faster.  This meant that the amount of thread being produced went up and therefore the total output of cloth grew by leaps and bounds.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages the “putting-out” system increased production to an even greater degree.  In the putting-out system a central merchant located in a city would purchase the raw materials to make cloth and distribute them to workers, usually women, who would work at home and then bring the finished product back to the merchant.  He would pay them a wage and be spared the cost of housing workers in the city.

In a nutshell, thanks to the technical and organizational developments in the cloth industry in the Middle Ages the sheer volume of fabric being produced meant that clothing was less expensive.  It meant that multiple pieces could be owned by more than just the upper classes.  And when clothing leans in the direction of a luxury instead of a necessity it means that greater risks can be taken with style and clothing can become a means of individual expression.

So really, the Middle Ages invented fashion.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But let’s take the progression a little further than the Middle Ages.

Because of the Medieval inventions that made the production of cloth faster and more efficient, the demand for cloth rose (and several fortunes were made).  Because clothing became so popular the demand for new technology skyrocketed.  Working off of inventions like the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom, intrepid entrepreneurs in the 17th and 18th centuries looked for even more methods to speed up the process.  This all came to a head, of course, when the textile industry combined with experiments in steam power.  It all came together and the Industrial Revolution was born.

But never forget that the Industrial Revolution was a direct result of innovations of the Middle Ages.

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Women and World War One

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 8 Comments

World War I changed everything, plain and simple.  But in so many ways the biggest changes it brought about involved not the scores of men who fought and died in the trenches, but the women who held the fort down at home.

It’s important to remember that the world before the war saw women as primarily mothers, wives, and daughters.  They were the keepers of the graces, gentle creatures whose sphere was in the home and whose thoughts were best expressed through the men in their lives.  Sure, this meant that women were put up on a pedestal to a certain point, especially in the upper classes.  To use Downton Abbey as an example, the Crawley sisters were expected to do no more than look fashionable and snag the right husband.  No thought was given to what they would be when they grew up.  And you can see through the characters of the Crawley sisters that this life and these expectations were profoundly difficult for a lot of women to bear.  Women knew that they were perfectly capable of taking charge.  It wasn’t until war swept through the world that they were truly given a chance to show that.

War fashion took a decidely slimmer turn

It wasn’t obvious at first.  In the early days of the war, as far as women were concerned, or rather as far as the media assumed women would be concerned, it was the loss of life’s luxuries that would affect them most profoundly.  Women’s fashion changed quickly to incorporate simpler lines and less material.  The blooming, voluminous dresses of the Victorian era, dresses that took more than one person to climb into, were replaced by straight lines and modest colors.  And in the early days “sacrifices” like this, the fact that women of all classes were encouraged to donate their money to the war effort instead of buying new clothes, were seen as the worst women would or could endure.  It also brought about a huge crisis in the garment industry, which is a whole other story.

The thing is, women who were in the know, the ones who had been fighting for equal rights for decades, knew that to simplify the contribution by women to the war effort as giving up finery was an insult.  The fact of the matter was that while men were in power, fighting in the front lines and making the military and political decisions that had gotten everyone into the mess in the first place, it was the women back home, wherever home was, that suffered the most.

In her book A Woman and the War, the Countess of Warwick goes to great lengths to point out that the suffering of a mother losing her son in battle is a far graver tragedy to be endured than any man could handle:

“She has lost much that was dearest to her, much that life is powerless to replace.  All the springs of her being have nourished the love that she has given to her dear ones, to the man who was her choice, to the son who fed upon her life.  In many cases she has loved almost entirely in her children, for the ties that bind her to the active pleasures of life grow weak in conflict with the powers of maternity.  She has forgotten the brief years in which she lived for herself and savoured all the sweets of existence, she has lived in her children, happy chiefly in their happiness, ambitious only for their future and concerned with the struggle for the freedom of her sex less on account of her own generation than on account of that which is to follow.”

I wanted to quote this paragraph because I don’t think that we women of the early 21st century can really appreciate what it was like to live a life where we were not truly individuals in and of ourselves, but rather a root or an extension of someone else.  Prior to the war so many women out there didn’t work, couldn’t vote, and, as this paragraph implies, devoted their whole lives to their husbands and most especially their children.

And suddenly that was gone, torn away by a war that many women opposed.  It was a war built on policies that women were powerless to vote for or against.  Many women, especially the suffragettes violently opposed the war.  And yet they could do nothing about it.  Because during this time women couldn’t vote.

Think about this for a second.  As pretty as the world before WWI was, the women who inhabited it were largely powerless.  Then suddenly this war comes along, this war that they didn’t want, that ripped their lives away from them in so many ways that went far beyond fashion.  And in the midst of the unspeakable sorrow of losing the men that these women not only loved but who were their conduit to be heard … life got better.

Downton Abbey does a pretty decent job of showing these changes in the lives of women through the characters of Sybil, who drops everything about her posh lifestyle to become a nurse, and Isobel, who was already a nurse but steps up and takes charge not only within the context of the hospital in town, but later by going to France to help the Red Cross.  Even Edith steps up to help on a farm and Cora by helping to run the convalescent part of Downton Abbey.  These are all real examples of massive changes that rearranged the social and sexual landscape forever.

Women stepped into all sorts of jobs that the men had left behind.  It wasn’t quite the era of Rosie the Riveter yet, but Rosie was on the way.  And once that cat was out of the bag, no pun intended, it was difficult to put it back.

WWI Factory workers - photo courtesy of http://rememberingscotlandatwar.ning.com/

When the war was over some things reverted back to the way they had been.  Jobs were given back to men and women were shuffled back into the home.  But wheels had been put in motion that couldn’t be stopped.  In 1918, as the war ended, women were finally given the vote after as much as a century of struggle.  Well, in the UK and Germany at least.  Women didn’t get the vote in the US until 1920.  And guess what?  Women in France didn’t get the vote until 1944 and 1946 for Italy.  Even in Russia women were granted the vote in 1917, but there were a few other revolutionary factors at play there.

The point is that the war marked a distinct turning point in the lives of women.  No more could they be said to be fragile creatures that were incapable of serious work or serious thought.  While they had to endure sadness and loss on a level that men couldn’t comprehend, they gained the ability to organize their lives around more than just men.  It might sound like a small thing as I write it here, but you can’t put too fine a point on it.  As horrible as the war was, it opened so many doors for women.

Which is why I’m dying to see how Downton Abbey season three handles this transition.  But I’ll have to wait a super long time now to see that.

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