The History of Women

The History of Women

The focus of this semester's videos is the history of women, both individually and collectively.   The first four videos comprise the complete BBC series, "The Ascent of Woman" presented by Dr. Amanda Foreman.

The other complete series featured this semester is "Suffragettes Forever," another BBC production. In fact, all of the videos are BBC productions.  Why such a U.K. focus?  One reason is simple availability on YouTube but a more important reason is that the programs are simply better than those I've seen that were produced in the United States.

The individual women whose lives are examined are: Joan of Arc in the 15th century, Mary Arden (a woman with a more famous son) in the 16th, Ada Lovelace (a woman with a more famous father) in the 19th and Marie Curie into the early 20th century.  The lives of ordinary and extraordinary women throughout recorded history are illuminated throughout "The Ascent of Woman" and "Suffragettes Forever."

The semester concludes with a lecture by noted historian of the Roman Empire, Mary Beard.  The title of that lecture sums up a common theme that appears in many of the episodes and throughout the history of woman's relationship with the opposite gender:  "Oh, Do Shut Up Dear."

There will be no class on March 18th, during spring break.

The Schedule:

Feb 5 The Ascent of Woman Episode 1

Dr. Amanda Foreman travels to a range of countries including Turkey, Siberia, and Greece, as she explores the history of women from the earliest urban settlements to the sprawling empires of the classical world. Tackling many of the subjects ignored by traditional history, Amanda investigates the origins of patriarchy, the silencing of women, the rise of the veil, the truth behind the Amazons, and the possibility of female agency in the ancient world. 

Civilisation has given us extraordinary advances: law and commerce – science and art. But what does it look like from the point of view of women?  In this episode, Amanda travels across the globe from the Fertile Crescent to the Eurasian Steppes, looking at the earliest civilisations in order to understand how and why the status of women declined as humanity became richer, more powerful, and more urbanized.  Along the way she asks some profound questions about the nature of power and the future of equality.

In Anatolia, Amanda visits Catalhöyük, one of the world’s earliest settlements, where archaeologists believe that men and women lived in relative equality.  Moving on to the so-called Cradle of Civilization (Mesopotamia), she explores the history of women’s relationship with the written word, as well as the effect of the world’s first legal codes on their freedom and status. Subjects include divorce, adultery, abortion, and the first veiling law in 1350 BC – two millennia before the advent of Islam.  Across Europe and the Near East, she highlights some of the extraordinary women who left their mark in history.  

These include Enheduanna, the world’s first recorded author; the nomadic priestess, the Ukok Ice Maiden, one of the great archaeological discoveries of the 20th century; and Hatshepsut, one of ancient Egypt’s most successful, but most maligned ruling Queens. Crucially, she also explores the darker legacy of gender inequality in ancient Greece, whose ideas on female inferiority have cast such a long and baleful shadow over women’s lives.  Amanda argues that it is time to eject the old idea of equating civilization with patriarchy; one doesn’t have to mean the other.

Highlights include Amanda holding the 3,000 year-old Assyrian law tablet that was responsible for introducing the long and problematic history of the veil.

Feb 12 The Ascent of Woman Episode 2

Dr. Foreman explores the rise of ‘separate spheres’ among early Confucian and Buddhist societies, as well the origins of the cosmic ordering of the female Yin and male Yang.  She interrogates the extent to which women accepted or resisted the inferior status allotted to them under Confucianism, using the example of the Trung Sisters’ rebellion in 1st century Vietnam;  Empress Wu Zetian’s palace coup in the 7th, making her China’s only female ruler; the impact of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the world’s first novelist, on Japanese culture; and the rise of foot-binding during the Song Dynasty.

Travelling to Vietnam, China and Japan, Amanda investigates whether the history of women in the East followed the same uneven trajectory as it did in the West. She looks at how the Confucian ideals defining feminine virtue, and the division of space between the private, female world of the domestic sphere – the Nei - and public male world of business and politics – the Wai -  contributed to the making of Han Chinese identity.  

Amanda also confronts the difficult issue of female complicity, asking whether the 2nd century treatise, ‘Nujie’  (Instructions for Women’) by Ban Zhao, the most influential Chinese female writer until the 20th century, reinforced the moral basis for foot-binding and other restrictive traditions.

In addition to exploring the philosophical underpinnings of Yin and Yang, Amanda looks at some of the challenges to Confucianism from rival faiths such as Buddhism and Shintoism, as well as from rebellious women who refused to be defined by the limits placed on their sex. Featuring prominently in this episode are Vietnam’s Trung Sisters, whose armed rebellion against China highlights the crippling effect of Confucianism on the gender relations in neighbouring countries. Amanda also lays out the case in defence of Empress Wu Zetian, the creator of the first meritocratic government, whose reputation has suffered 1500 years of calumny.

Moving on to Japan, Amanda reveals the woman behind the world’s first novel,  Lady Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji(The Shining Prince), a tale of love, longing and betrayal.

Highlights of the episode include Amanda being shown for the first time on television the 1000 year-old ink well that Lady Murasaki Shikibu used to transform the literary landscape forever.

Feb 19 The Ascent of Woman Episode 3

Dr. Foreman travels to Istanbul, Germany, London, Paris and Delhi to explore the ways in which women created their own routes to power, often subverting to their advantage the very restrictions placed on them. Episode 3 showcases the achievements of six extraordinary women, from Empress Theodore of Byzantium to Nur Jahan of Mughal India, to argue that it’s time for history to embrace the fact that if women are excluded from the narrative, then not only are the wrong questions are being answered but an untruth is being told.  

In this episode, Amanda offers up the example of exceptional women who defied the entrenched male intellectual movements and religions of their eras, by creating their own worlds from which a female perspective could thrive.

Women who operated from within the patriarchal systems of religion, law, marriage and education to create their own routes to power:  from Empress Theodora who transformed herself from street performer and prostitute to Empress and co-ruler of the Eastern Orthodox Church, to the 12th century German nun, writer, preacher and visionary Hildegard of Bingen.

From Christine de Pizan, the first woman to write in defense of women’s rights to Roxelana, the Ukrainian concubine who achieved the complete restructuring of dynastic politics in the Ottoman Court, and the Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, who pioneered the visual aesthetic of India we know today.

These women resisted and rebelled from within the confines of the home, the palace, the convent, and the harem. They demanded to be heard, fought to have respect, and insisted on having their own authority. And in doing so, they helped to shape our world.

Highlights of the episode include a master class in Shakespearean language with actress Fiona Shaw as she deconstructs Elizabeth I’s famous Tilbury Speech: “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too!”

Feb 26 The Ascent of Woman Episode 4

Dr. Foreman travels from east to west, including Russia, Britain, France and the United States, as she asks whether any of the modern revolutions actually delivered on their promises to women. From the French Revolution of the 18th Century to the Arab Spring in the 21st, Amanda argues that women have played an indispensible role, only to have their hopes betrayed as one patriarchal hierarchy is replaced by another. The remedy, she claims, is to create a different kind of revolution that isn’t about winners and losers but equal participants.

In this final episode, Amanda looks at the role of women in the revolutions that remade the modern world. She believes that the great alliance between men and women to achieve social change has been fraught with betrayal.  From the political uprisings of the 18th century, to the ongoing battle for reproductive rights, women campaigners have had to fight for their own interests.  Literary revolutionary Olympe De Gouges discovered during the French Revolution that her compatriots’ promise of equality, liberty and brotherhood was in fact limited to male citizens only.  Likewise, the Bolshevik radical, Alexandra Kollontai, realised that although her fellow Revolutionaries claimed to put women’s rights at the forefront of ideological change, in reality Soviet Russia was no more interested in gender equality than its predecessor.

In the end, claims Amanda, revolutionary change for women only happens when they lead the struggle themselves – as Millicent Fawcett argued during the fifty-year suffrage movement, and Margaret Sanger did in America as she fought to get safe and effective birth control in the hands of women. The crushing disappointment for women of the Arab Spring, and the slow rate of change in Africa highlight the enormous challenge facing the developing world. Lindiwe Mazibuko, the former Leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance party, and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Undersecretary General and Executive Director of UN Women both argue in the strongest terms possible that the future of Africa lies with its women.

Amanda ends with the bold statement: “I think radical change is happening to women right now. It is by no means universal and in some parts of the globe it’s not even going in the same direction. Nevertheless, it’s a wholly new kind of revolution: it’s an uprising without bloodshed, in which women are challenging the status quo, through awareness, through dialogue and through education.”

Highlights of the episode include an interview with Pussy Riot on whether Russia under Putin can ever learn from its mistakes.

March 4 Joan of Arc

Writer and historian Dr Helen Castor explores the life - and death - of Joan of Arc. Joan was an extraordinary figure - a female warrior in an age that believed women couldn't fight, let alone lead an army. But Joan was driven by faith, and today more than ever we are acutely aware of the power of faith to drive actions for good or ill.

Since her death, Joan has become an icon for almost everyone - the left and the right, Catholics and Protestants, traditionalists and feminists. But where in all of this is the real Joan - the experiences of a teenage peasant girl who achieved the seemingly impossible? Through an astonishing manuscript, we can hear Joan's own words at her trial, and as Helen unpicks Joan's story and places her back in the world that she inhabited, the real human Joan emerges.

March 11 Shakespeare's Mother

Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary woman in a time of revolution. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, Mary Arden is the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer, but she marries into a new life in the rising Tudor middle class in Stratford-upon-Avon. There she has eight children, three of whom die young. Her husband becomes mayor, but is bankrupted by his shady business dealings. Faced with financial ruin, religious persecution and power politics, the family is the glue that keeps them together until they are rescued by Mary's successful eldest son - William Shakespeare!

March 25 Harlots, Heroines and Housewives Episode 2

Lucy Worsley explores the ordinary as well as the extraordinary lives of women in the home. This was an age when respectable women were defined by their marital status as maids, wives or widows. If they fell outside these categories they were in danger of being labelled whores or, at worst, witches.

While history has left many women voiceless over the centuries, Lucy discovers that in the Restoration a surprising number of women were beginning to question their roles in relationship to their husbands, their position in the home, their attitudes to sex and, most importantly, the expectation to produce children.

April 1 Calculating Ada

Ada Lovelace was a most unlikely computer pioneer. In this film, Dr Hannah Fry tells the story of Ada's remarkable life. Born in the early 19th century Ada was a countess of the realm, a scandalous socialite and an 'enchantress of numbers'. The film is an enthralling tale of how a life infused with brilliance, but blighted by illness and gambling addiction, helped give rise to the modern era of computing.

Hannah traces Ada's unlikely union with the father of computers, Charles Babbage. Babbage designed the world's first steam-powered computers - most famously the analytical engine - but it was Ada who realised the full potential of these new machines. During her own lifetime Ada was most famous for being the daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron ('mad, bad and dangerous to know'). It was only with the advent of modern computing that Ada's understanding of their flexibility and power (that they could be far more than mere number crunchers) was recognised as truly visionary. Hannah explores how Ada's unique inheritance - poetic imagination and rational logic - made her the ideal prophet of the digital age.

This moving, intelligent and beautiful film makes you realise we nearly had a Victorian computer revolution.

April 8 Suffragettes Forever Episode 1

In this series, historian Amanda Vickery explores why, in the early 20th century, thousands of British women joined a violent militant organisation. In the struggle for women's political rights in Britain, the most iconic are the suffragettes - but for Vickery the story begins long before these Edwardian activists.

The suffragette campaign was the inevitable conclusion of a fight that women, rich and poor, had been pursuing for hundreds of years against a system that gave men complete legal, political and physical control over the other half of the population. In this first programme Vickery describes how a wife was the property of her husband - who could if he chose, beat, rape or even sell her to another man. But the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century opened a crack in the door.

From a wife sale at Hailsham cattle market, to the bloodstained streets of Paris on the trail of the grandmother of British feminism, to the heroic Manchester women attacked at Peterloo, to the great opportunity of the Great Reform Act, Vickery describes how at every step men furiously resisted giving women an inch.

 April 15 Suffragettes Forever Episode 2

In this second programme Amanda Vickery describes the paradox for British women of a female queen who thought women's rights campaigners deserved a good whipping. But during Victoria's reign extraordinary women gradually changed the lives and opportunities of their sex, despite successive governments furiously resisting giving women the vote.

Vickery introduces us to the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation - child custody rights for mothers. Plus a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes, a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could even be better at maths than boys and undermined the centuries old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only, and a certain Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after so many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.

April 22 Suffragettes Episode 3
In the final episode of her story of British women's fight for power, the historian Amanda Vickery explores how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorist organisation. She asks what they achieved with their violent campaign and argues they are best understood as part of a war still going on today.

Vickery brings to life the enemies of female suffrage too, from the golfing prime minister Herbert Asquith, who had nightmares of being stripped naked by angry suffragettes, to the furious anti-suffrage societies and their mass meetings in the Royal Albert Hall. She describes the political skulduggery to stop women getting the vote and the increasing extremism of the suffragettes in response.

So what did the suffragettes achieve? Vickery describes the political backroom deal that finally allowed some women the vote, the abusive treatment of the first female MP Lady Astor and the misogynistic backlash of the 1920s, revealed through attitudes to a great women's football team.

The series concludes by looking ahead, 50 years after women won the vote, to Margaret Thatcher. Was her election a sign that the suffragette dream had been fulfilled, or is this a fight that is still going on today?

April 29 The Genius of Marie Curie

Over 80 years after her death, Marie Curie remains by far the best known female scientist. In her lifetime, she became that rare thing: a celebrity scientist, attracting the attention of the news cameras and tabloid gossip. They were fascinated because she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and is still the only person to have won two Nobels in two different sciences. But while the bare bones of her scientific life, the obstacles she had to overcome, the years of painstaking research, and the penalty she ultimately paid for her discovery of radium have become one of the iconic stories of scientific heroism, there is another side to Marie Curie: her human story.

This multi-layered film reveals the real Marie Curie, an extraordinary woman who fell in love three times, had to survive the pain of loss, and the public humiliation of a doomed love affair. It is a riveting portrait of a tenacious mother and scientist, who opened the door on a whole new realm of physics, which she discovered and named: radioactivity.

May 6, Hitler, the Tiger and Me

Look up "spry" in the dictionary and you might see a picture of children's author Judith Kerr, who turned 90 this June, but still bounded up the stairs to the her attic study, leaving Imagine host Alan Yentob panting behind her. She also walks around Barnes, in south-west London, for an hour every evening, takes a sip of martini every day at lunch and dismisses the Janet and John learn-to-read series as "boring". My kind of woman.

What a pleasure it was to look at the world through Kerr's eyes for a little while in Imagine – Hitler, the Tiger and Me on BBC1. She hasn't ceased her eager observation for 80-odd years and in that time has produced beautiful sketches, paintings, textiles and illustrations, all almost as lively as the artist herself. It's this creative curiosity, inherited from her father, that has been her lifelong solace. "He was looking at things all the time and if you do that, you don't despair. He would say, 'Yes, this is bad, but it's interesting.'"

Alfred Kerr was a leading Jewish intellectual in pre-war Berlin, but escaped with his family in the nick of time. The Nazis came to power the day after they left for England. On a trip back to her childhood home, Judith told the little girl now living there about her wartime experience, "It wasn't so sad, it was very interesting." In fact, as she later acknowledged, the trauma of these years cast a long shadow over her family, especially her mother, who bore the greatest amount of stress and attempted suicide several times. Kerr drew on this these years in her semi-autobiographical books for older children, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and The Other Way Round.

This Imagine was an example of the increased cultural significance children's books are now accorded and it's good to see. Making children laugh is a noble pursuit.

As Michael Rosen, another great in the genre, usefully pointed out, there are darker shades in Kerr's work too. In a literary form where most characters drift on forever in a kind of permanent stasis, it was radical to kill off beloved cat Mog, but like all the best authors of books for children, Kerr has no time for sentiment

May 13 Oh, Do Shut Up Dear
From torn-out tongues to internet trolls, Mary Beard explores how women's voices have been silenced in the public sphere throughout the history of Western culture. Using examples that range from Homer's Odyssey to contemporary politics and from the writings of Henry James to threatening posts on Twitter, Beard argues that public speaking has all too often been regarded as 'men's business' and that commonly held attitudes to the voice of authority need to be readdressed and reappraised. Part of the London Review of Books Winter lecture series recorded at the British Museum.