CLIO TALKS BACK: What’s the Matter with Reckoning Descent Through the Mothers?

The well-educated Englishman known as James de Laurence (whose real name was James Henry Lawrence, 1773-1841) had the bright idea in the early 1830s of proposing that descent and succession be credited to the mother’s side – what he called “umbilical descent”. Long an advocate of women’s rights, Laurence published a small pamphlet in Paris (1831) called Les enfants de Dieu, which he then published in English as The Children of God (1833).

The pamphlet opened with this drawing, entitled “Descente ombilicale des Enfans de Dieu,” or “Navel string Descent of the Children of God.”

Laurence explained the drawing in the following words:

“The umbilical Table shews what would have been the descent of mankind but for the indiscretion of Eve. Eve is painted above with her children united to her body by their navel strings: the sons upright, because they never lie in; the daughters reclining, to produce other children. 

In every son, the navel string ceases, and consequently there is no continuation of his body; but from the daughters descend other sons who die out, and daughters who produce other children in their time. 

Several females, however, are represented childless, and two are departing with their issue to people other parts of the globe. 

The navel string being cut, every individual is as it were an island; could the navel strings have remained uncut, the whole race would form a continent, and every indivieual have his place like a horse harnessed in a team, or a soldier in battle array. 

By the umbilical string, every individual might trace his descent through a line of mothers to mother Eve.” 

Calling this new understanding of descent “Tokology,” Laurence insisted that Genealogy understood as lineage through the fathers (as presented in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Chapter 3: “Genealogy of the Patriarchs”) and claimed to be the only possible understanding, was a mere “pretension.” Paternity was problematic, he asserted; only maternity could be documented. “A mother is the editor of the child – she alone can know who is the author. The navel string is the stalk that unites the fruit to the tree. How vain are the researches of the herald that are conducted by any other clue.” Clearly, Laurence was thinking against the grain by questioning customary “truth.”

With one dramatic claim, Lawrence challenged the preconceived, male-centered knowledge of his day by arguing for descent through the mothers. For most, this was a shockingly new way of thinking and it represented a big step forward in elevating the status of nineteenth-century European women.

Clio finds Laurence’s proposal most intriguing – “good to think with” – precisely because it puts women back into human history, at its very center. In fact, early feminists found his challenge to conventional wisdom very stimulating; they influenced the Saint-Simonian women of 1830s France among others throughout the following century.

 What do you think of Laurence’s Tokology? Why Not Umbilical Descent?

Source: James de Laurence, The Children of God, or the Religion of Jesus Reconciled with Philosophy, written originally in French (London, 1833).

CLIO TALKS BACK: May Wright Sewall organizes the International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace, 1915, in San Francisco, California

The International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace

A second women’s peace conference opened in San Francisco during the Pan-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. This exposition had been planned with the intention of announcing to the world San Francisco’s recovery from the devastating earthquake of 1906, and in May 1914 the President of the upcoming exposition, the Hon. Charles C. Moore, had personally recruited May Wright Sewall (1844-1920) to organize a conference of “women workers” (a term that included paid workers, educators, and other unpaid workers such as philanthropists and reformers).

May Wright Sewall, from Indiana, was internationally-known as a founder and past president of both the National Council of Women of the United States and of the International Council of Women (ICW, 1899-1904), and had long engaged in work for peace. For a decade she had chaired the Peace Section of the ICW. With the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, Sewall turned the focus of the conference toward consideration of peace. In the conclusion to her call to conference, Sewall wrote: “War is out of harmony with all the agencies of modern Civilization. War destroys Civilization – War denies the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, those two basic principles out of which all that we most value in modern life has been developed.”

CLIO TALKS BACK: The Women’s Peace Congress at The Hague

Women convene at the Hague in 1915

One hundred years ago this month (April 1915), in the midst of a major war on the European continent, a contingent of women associated with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) convened a congress in the Netherlands to discuss the prospects for peace. The previous fall, the IWSA had been forced to cancel its next congress, scheduled for Berlin, because of the outbreak of war. The initiative to meet in the spring came from women such as the pioneer Dutch physician Dr. Aletta Jacobs, who were concerned that the world’s women had no voice in matters of war – or peace.

The International Congress of Women, which met from the 28th of April through May 1st, 1915 in the The Hague, the capitol city of the Netherlands, made front-page news in the world’s newspapers. The American peace activist Jane Addams presided at the congress, which was attended by some 1500 women. Many others who had planned to come (especially from England) were blocked when the Allies “closed” the North Sea.

The organizing committee had decided, in the interests of fruitful discussion, to place “off limits” three burning issues concerning the war itself. These issues were (1) the causes of the war; (2) the manner in which it was being conducted; and (3) the responsibilities incumbent on the belligerent parties. It was clear enough that the German army had first invaded Belgium, a neutral country, and then France, and had occupied considerable territories in both; its soldiers had destroyed buildings and cultural property (including the famous library in Louvain), they had raped, pillaged, and plundered wherever they went – such misbehavior fostered immense public outrage once it was known (although the German women claimed to know nothing of this, probably due to heavy censorship of war news in Germany). So questions about the causes and consequences of the war were very controversial and evoked extremely emotional responses.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Maria Vérone on the “Modernization” of Islam

Maria Vérone

Several days ago, Clio came across an intriguing text about the “modernization” of Islam, written by a French woman lawyer and published by the International Council of Women. The author, Maria Vérone, a dedicated feminist, was one of the first French women to be admitted to the French bar; she had worked as a teacher and a dancer before studying law.  She presided over the Ligue Française pour le Droit des Femmes [French League for Women’s Rights] for many years. By the early 1930s she had been tapped to head the pathbreaking Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality, appointed by the League of Nations, and she continued to be active in international legal circles, engaged with studying, comparing – and attempting to advance – the status of women in the law both in France and worldwide.

Here is what she wrote about the status of women in Islam.

“After long centuries of lethargy, Islam is awakening from its slumber. By a sort of return to primitive religion, Musulmen, as pious as they are broadminded, may now be found who declare, text in hand, that the Prophet never intended to place women in a state of servitude. The Veil, they say, is not obligatory; instruction should be given to girls as well as to boys; polygamy is permitted but not enforced; on the contrary, men are forbidden to abuse their rights. The Egyptian (Islamic) Civil Code has been framed in this spirit, recognising that woman, married or single, has full civil capacity; in this spirit, too, Musulman Tribunals have recently given certain judgments, suing a man for damages towards his ex-wife, whom he repudiated soon after the marriage, she having been compelled to leave the occupation which she followed as a single woman.

“In Iran, in Syria, in Irak, in Palestine, all the Musulmen inhabiting these parts of Asia have seen the rise of Feminist Associations; Congresses have been held in the more important cities, where the Delegates appeared unveiled before high authorities, where programmes of new demands have been drawn up, and certain reforms are already on the way to accomplishment. In Europe, the young King of Albania, believing that the emancipation of women is not a sign of revolution or of irreligion, has begun by forbidding the use of the Veil, as a start, greater changes may follow. In Northern Africa, pecuniary difficulties, stronger than the most ancient custom, are doing away with polygamy. Men, if not because of sentiment, at least in their own interest, marry only one woman, and this completely changes the moral position of the family; should an era of prosperity follow, it may be that a generation brought up in utterly different surroundings than those of its ancestors, may not desire to return to ancient customs.  So, by good will or perforce, the world is changing."

Do you know, Clio asks, when these words were written and published?  Can anybody guess?

Would any of you imagine that it dates from 1937 – well over 75 years ago?

Source: Maria Verone, “The Evolution of the Family throughout the World,” International Council of Women: Bulletin, 16:3 (November 1937),18-19.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Fatima Mernissi on the Future of the Arab World

Fatema Mernissi

Fatema (Fatima) Mernissi (b. 1940 in Fez, Morocco) is a persistent longtime advocate of women’s empowerment in the Arab world. A university-trained political scientist, a social investigator, and multi-disciplinary humanist and writer of considerable note, Mernissi has carefully studied the situation of women in Islam (historically and in the present), conducted interviews with Moroccan women on the street and in the marketplace, and has kept the world abreast of women’s issues – and advances – in the Maghrib. She is a fervent proponent of literacy and education at all levels, especially for women. Mernissi lectures at Mohammed V University in Rabat, and is also affiliated with the University Institute for Scientific Research. Her current projects concern the development of technological literacy for both women and men.

 This eloquent excerpt from her writings, published in English in 1996, contains the seeds of the projects she continues to pursue today:

 “The only Arab world worthy of being fought for and worth clashing over . . . is one in which the Arab brain can extend its capacities the way a free bird extends its wings to reach the heights. And that Arab world can only exist if – and on condition that – the chief educator of the brain also shares in this modern technological knowledge. And that chief educator is, I tell you, neither the army of educational experts (schoolteachers and university professors), nor the civil servants in the ministries of education and national culture. The chief educator is woman, who, as mother, nourishes the child, in the fateful first five years, with the knowledge she possesses. 

“The lesson of the Gulf War, a lesson you, the leaders of the Arab countries, will read in no Western document, is that the mother of all battles (umm al-maa’rik) is not the one you fight against the Americans, but the one you fight against illiteracy – the illiteracy of men and women. But, up to now, the impression has been that the budgets of the national education ministries are only for men. Thirty years after independence, 90% of Moroccan women in rural areas are illiterate and 100% of them politically marginalized. You will never be powerful, Mr. Arab leader, in a modern world where democratized and democratizing knowledge is both arm and ammunition. You will never be anything but backward outsiders in the world of satellite-borne information, whilst your mothers, sisters, wives and, most importantly, your secretaries, maids and women workers are illiterate. I omitted your daughters from the list because we all know an Arab man is hugely committed to the education of his daughter. She is the only woman with whom he identifies and whose future causes him concern. But we shall all, men and women, leave behind the mutilating law of the tribe-family and take our first steps in the space and planetary age the moment we realize that our destiny is linked to the most deprived, the most excluded of all: the poor woman, ground down in field and factory, on whom any arbitrary power whatever may be visited. The subjugated, scorned and humiliated Arab will be transformed into an autonomous, self-governing person the day he is suckled by an autonomous mother. And the path to the autonomy of the individual is through access to worthwhile knowledge. The day the political leader understands that the most faithful mirror to his strength is the reflection which comes back to him from the female citizens living in the remotest villages, the planetary Arab will be born.  

“An Arab at ease in the galaxies, interested in their movements and attuned to their secrets, can only be born of a woman who weaves her ideas around the satellite networks with the ease with which her ancestors wove a thousand geometrical flowers into their carpets.” 

Source: “Rebuild Baghdad? But in What Galaxy?” from Fatima Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion & Islamic Memory (1996), pp. 9-10. Translated from the French.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Making History: Haifaa Al Mansour’s feature length film "Wadjda"

CLIO can’t say enough good things about the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, which she saw last week. This is the story of a spunky girl on the threshhold of adolescence, who wears tennis shoes, and whose dream is to obtain a bicycle and race her young friend who happens to be a boy. In pursuing her dream, Wadjda confronts all the “religious and social strictures of a kingdom literally shrounded in sexual anxiety, misogyny and severe repression,” to quote Ann Hornaday’s review in the Washington Post. This film is “making” women’s history.

What is eerie about this film is that the ten-year-old Wadjda and her family live a lot like we do in the West – the interior of her home looks much like a middle-class Western home, the activities that take place within it seem quite recognizable. And yet – there is purdah. Wadjda’s mother tells her that she is now old enough to cover herself when she goes out: the black abeyah comes out of the closet. The beautiful mother, a working woman, is very concerned about the avoiding glances of men, even as she contemplates dressing sexier to regain the attention of her husband, who is on the verge of taking a second wife. Wadjda places her name on the family tree, only to discover that someone has removed it; she learns that females don’t count on the Saudi family tree. And so it goes…Wadjda plots and schemes to win a Koran recitation contest so that she can buy that bike--and you will have to see the film yourself to find out how it ends. It is brilliantly conceived and executed.

 In an interview for National Public Radio (with Rachel Martin), the director Haifaa Al Mansour – who had to direct from a closed van – said:

“I couldn't make a film where women are all innocent and they're all striving to be free and all that; it's not real. I think a lot of women are the gatekeepers, a lot of women reinforce the values ... For me, it was not making women all the victims, and men are the oppressors. 

I wanted also to make a film that is happy. A lot of people who make films from the Middle East, [they are] almost like a horror movie when you go. And it makes me very uncomfortable watching a film like that, and I feel helpless. I feel like a victim.  

I wanted to make a film that when I see it, I feel powerful. And I think it’s time now in the Middle East to bring films of that type. It is a hard, tough time now in the Middle East, and it is up to people to change things — if they really change at heart. Not only by changing regimes and political stuff, but also by believing in women. By believing in others and becoming more tolerant, more respectful for other cultures. ... It is time to open up the culture."

If Clio’s readers want to get insight into contemporary Muslim family culture in Saudi Arabia, this is the film for you! You can view the trailer for the film here, and the director’s NPR interview here. If and when you have seen the film, let Clio know what you think by commenting below.

CLIO TALKS BACK: The Heart Divided: Writing the Human Drama of Partition in India/Pakistan

Today’s blog is a guest blog, written by Clio’s colleague, Pippa Virdee, a specialist in South Asian history and the history of women, who teaches in the United Kingdom. Clio met her at the recent interim congress of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History, held in Sheffield, in England.

Pippa Virdee is passionate about her subject. She is particularly drawn to non-‘official’ sources. “As a historian,” she writes, “I find fiction, memoirs and autobiographical writing have greatly enhanced our understanding, often filling in the gaps left by ‘official’ history. For me, the personal narratives and the human stories provide an alternative lens through which we can understand the socio-economic changes taking place during this tumultuous time of the partition of India. I am particularly interested in Muslim women and how they responded to the call for Pakistan’s independence - a call that eventually resulted in partition and the creation of Pakistan.” It was through her that Clio learned about Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s important, though all but forgotten novel, The Heart Divided (1948), which was finally republished in 2004 in India.

The blog text that follows is by Pippa Virdee:

The Partition of India in August 1947 was a pivotal time in the formation of India and Pakistan. In the newly-divided province of Punjab it was responsible for one of the most violent upheavals the twentieth century has ever experienced. Even as independence celebrations were taking place, Punjab (and also Bengal) witnessed scenes of mass genocidal violence, rape and abduction of women and the dislocation of millions, in one of the biggest migrations of the twentieth century. An estimated 15 million people crossed the borders between India and Pakistan. Ordinary people, forced to abandon their ancestral homelands, suffered the most. The death toll associated with the partition violence remains disputed; the figures vary from 200,000 to 2 million.

During the 1940s in British India elite Muslim women had been making genuine progress. At the forefront of this movement were elite women such as Fatima Jinnah (the sister of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League); Begum Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan (the wife of Pakistan's first prime minister); Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz ; Shaista Ikramullah (who struggled for the opportunity to get an education and went on to do a PhD at the University of London); and Abida Sultan, a member of Bhopal's royal family who ardently supported the Muslim League. These figures served as early role models for other women to "come out" of purdah, as the system of veiling and seclusion was called, and to participate in the political process. For example, in 1942, Lady Maratab Ali said wrote:

The days have gone when Punjab’s Muslim women were considered fit only for cooking food and minding children. It is now essential for them to take an equal share of responsibility with their menfolk in the field of politics. 

Writers of fiction were the first to capture the human drama of partition. Writers such as Intizar Husain, Bhisham Sahni, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Amrita Pritam wrote from their own experiences of being dislocated during partition. They were able to capture the nuances and the sensitive subject matter under the guise of fiction.

The Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz (the daughter of Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz , mentioned above) offers a moving fictionalized account that documents the plight of Muslim women before and during the partition. Written in English and set in Lahore in the late 1930s, this writer tells the story of two sisters, Zohra and Sughra, and their family and friendships. It poignantly documents the challenges of modernity and the impact this has on the Muslim community and on politics. The story narrates the division of India and Pakistan, which the author believes had already begun in the 1930s in people’s hearts. It is based on Nawaz’s own life.

In later years Zohra often wondered when the change in her life began. The change that had led her, a young Muslim girl, born and bred behind the purdah, to a life of independence and adventure. It was not easy to define when it began, for the lives of all the girls of her generation had changed so much and they were woven together in such a manner, like many-coloured threads of an intricate pattern, that it is difficult to decide when the change in her particular life began. 

Mumtaz Shah Nawaz became a socialist, a poet, and a women’s advocate and, until the 1940s when she began to question her allegiance, an idealistic Congress supporter.

The novel charts the story of Zohra and how her split between the Congress and the Muslim League was mirrored in the wider society and in personal life. After the Congress started its ’quit India movement’, Nawaz broke completely with the Congress. She decided that her future lay in organising Muslim women to demand their rights as women and as Muslims. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who led the Muslim League, encouraged her to organise Muslim women in Delhi, where she was then based. From 1942 until the end of World War Two, she became a prominent member of the separatist movement. She then shifted her attention to Lahore where she helped set up the Women’s Branch of the Muslim League in the Punjab. She also assisted in organising relief work for victims of communal riots after partition and worked to rehabilitate the Muslim refugees coming in from India.

The Heart Divided is ground-breaking in the way that it represents Muslim women. Nawaz weaves together four separate stories connected to Zohra, Each strand represents the dreams and aspirations of a young girls growing up in Lahore. Zohra’s brother, a Muslim, falls in love with her Hindu friend; Zohra’s sister is agonizingly unhappy in her arranged marriage; Zohra’s friend is forcibly married off to a widower, and then Zohra herself falls in love with a man from a lower social strata then her own. Each story narrates the predicament of young Muslim girls with aspirations and minds of their own, who are restricted within the confines of family tradition, with its responsibilities and pressures to conform. Some of the characters manage to change the rules but others succumb to the pressures.

Tragically, the author of The Heart Divided, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, died in an air crash in 1948 at the age of 35. She was on her way to the US to represent Pakistan at a session of the United Nations concerning Kashmir. Her novel was published posthumously.

Had Nawaz survived to see how Pakistan developed, she would undoubtedly have been disappointed with the lack of progress for women’s rights. During her lifetime, the movement for women to come out of purdah paralleled the Muslim separatist movement. Emancipating women seemed necessary to progressive Muslims, to demonstrate modernity and responsibility and to show that self-rule could be granted.

Yet, after partition this campaign fell by the wayside. In the second half of the twentieth century there was a gradual, almost reactionary shift toward the re-introduction of ‘modest’ dress, to symbolically demonstrate the shift from colonial to self-rule by developing a national Islamic identity. The Heart Divided evokes the split between the various futures envisaged by the character Zohra. This theme resonates in today’s Pakistan just as much as it did when the novel was originally published in 1948.

 Sources: Shah Nawaz Khan, The Heart Divided (India: Penguin, reprinted 2004); Khawar Muntaz and Farida Shaheed (eds.), Women of Pakistan (London: Zed Books, 1987); Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, India (Oxford University Press, 2006).

CLIO TALKS BACK: Thinking About Women's Life Story-Telling in Iran

Writing in the Journal of Women’s History, Professor Farzaneh Milani observes that autobiographical writing is a very new phenomenon in the very old land of Iran. Only since the mid-twentieth century have Iranian Muslim women begun to publish their personal stories in any form.

Early in her pursuit of Iranian women’s life stories, Milani speculated that “a barrier as forbidding as a veil covers private selves and inhibits self-revelation. The cultural context . . . values and strongly institutionalizes a sharp separation between the inner and the outer, the private and the public. The culture of Hijab . . . is not conducive to the development of personal narratives and their generic public uncovering and display of the self. I surmised that in a veiled society, women are not the only ones veiled. The concrete, the specific, and the personal are also veiled. Communication is veiled. Words are veiled. Public expressions of intimate relationships are veiled. In such a society, walls abound, dissimulation conceals individualistic tendencies; houses become compartmentalized into inner and outer areas; abstractions supplant concreteness; elusiveness substitutes precision; art becomes impersonal. There is no tradition of confession, either in its Catholic sense or in that practice’s secular modern version, psychotherapy. A culture that idealizes women’s public anonymity, I concluded, considers life narratives as exhibitionism, as an act of immodest self-referentiality, as self-absorption and an ultimate act of unveiling.”

But then, living in the United States, she discovered that “invisible fences” also existed in America; these were less physical than cultural. The process of self-revelation only goes so far; zones of privacy and secrecy remain, but the boundaries keep shifting. Have these femces since fallen by the wayside in the Age of Facebook’s potentially extravagant culture of self-disclosure? Or are there still shifting boundaries? What causes a cultural shift that allows any individual to tell her story?

Even as American women, from movie stars to ordinary women, indulge in a “tell-all” or at least “tell-almost-all” culture, and sign up for courses in life-writing, women writers in Iran took to embedding their autobiographical work in poetry, in novels, and then insisting that these works were “not really” about themselves. In the late twentieth century, some began to publish more documented “hostage narratives” and “prison narratives.”

Where does one draw the line between fiction and “truth”? And why does it matter?

Clio, the Muse of History who talks back, thinks that the “facts” of personal stories do matter, but that they require considerable space to “get right.” They can’t be presented adequately in the space of the “soundbite,” the “tweet,” or the Facebook profile, or even in an on-line museum exhibit. This is why autobiographical memoirs and books still count.

What do Clio’s readers think?

Further reading: Farzaneh Milani, Women’s Autobiogtaphies in Contemporary Iran (1990); Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (1992); and Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (2011). This blog is based on Farzaneh Milani’s article, “Iranian Women’s Life Narratives,” Journal of Women’s History , 25:2 (Summer 2013), 130-152.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Fadela Amara Speaks Out and Organizes Against Violence in French Housing Projects

Fadela Amara

The French human rights activist Fadela Amara (b. 1963) is best known as the founder of Ni Putes Ni Soumises [Neither Whore Nor Submissive], a French organization of progressive young Muslim women and men and their supporters. Born and raised in Clermont-Ferrand to Berber parents who had immigrated from Kabylia, in Algeria, Amara found herself a “native” citizen in France, a country in which religion and ethnicity are not supposed to matter, but in practice matter very much. As a young woman, she became deeply concerned about the development in her nearly all-Arab Muslim neighborhood of a culture of male violence against girls who wanted to dress like other French girls and to go out unchaperoned. The causes of the violence were closely linked to rising unemployment and deteriorating conditions in the community infrastructure, which fed and fueled the concern of young males for the chastity of “their” women even as the young women wanted to pursue a freer lifestyle than some in their community were willing to sanction.

Fadela Amara believes strongly in the secular, individualist values of republican France, which did not seem to apply to young women who shared her background. So she decided to do something about it. This led her to a lifetime of activism, in the Beur march, in SOS Racisme, to the founding of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, and to upholding the ban on headscarves in French schools. She has since held a junior cabinet position in the French government, and in early 2011 she was named Inspector General for Social Affairs.

What follows is an excerpt from the Prologue to Fadela Amara’s memoir, Breaking the Silence, in which she reminisces about the beginnings of her activism:

I would never have imagined we could do it. To bring together on 8 March 2003 more than thirty thousand people in the streets of Paris, most of them from the suburbs, behind our slogan Ni Putes Ni Soumises – I would never even have dared to dream of such success.
For many years feminist associations had struggled to mobilize around their own traditional themes. And there we were, a handful of young women from the housing projects, with little political experience, who had managed to assemble some of the most diverse organizations in French society, political parties, unions, associations for women’s rights, and various other groups! Public opinion suddenly discovered these women from the projects who were demonstrating to protest the daily violence they endured; everyone could glimpse the proud faces of women who were determined to break the taboos of a new form of sexism. 

We were only eight marchers at the start, six young women and two young men, who set out – in a climate of indifference and distrust – on a five-week march to denounce gang rape and male violence. Our path through France included twenty-three stopovers, multiple press conferences, meetings with elected officials, and debates with people in the housing projects, all aiming to raise the awareness of this evil that was destroying our suburbs. 

Two major events several months earlier had incited us to organize this march. One was the horrible crime that took place on 4 October 2002: the murder of Sohane, a young woman of eighteen, burned alive in the cellar of a housing project in Vitry-sur-Seine. Beautiful and rebellious, Sohane paid with her life for her refusal to conform to the gender norms of the suburbs, to the law of brute force. Her older sister Kahina, despite her grief, her suffering, and outside pressure, refused to remain silent. With courage and determination (like another Kahina, famous in the history of the Berber people), she spoke out against the atrocity that had destroyed her family and vowed to make public the fate of young women in the projects. 

Several months before that Samira Bellil had published Dans l’enfer des tournantes, a personal account of gang rapes, now a topic of public attention. We had often heard stories in our association meetings, stories of gang rape perpetrated by groups of young men against women who had refused to hide their femininity. But the pressure in the projects was so strong that the victims refused to speak out, and the neighborhood maintained its taboos. In revealing the facts, Samira’s testimony – raw, direct and painful – acted like a bomb. She faced her struggle alone and told the whole story. I have great admiration for her and for her great humanity! During meetings at each stopover of our march, she explained again and again that she could never pardon those who raped her, but she could understand how they came to act in this way, and the long, slow process of destruction that consumed these young men. By refusing to live with hatred, she taught us an extraordinary lesson. I am proud that she has become the symbolic center of our movement. Her book also helped open the eyes of women suffering the same horrors, giving them the strength to say ‘Enough!’ The support and the direct experience of Kahina and Samira have strengthened our resolve to put an end to violence against women.

Source: Fadela Amara, with Sylvia Zappi, Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto, translated with an introduction by Helen Harden Chenut (University of California Press, 2006); originally published in France as Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Éditions la Découverte, 2004), pp. 35-37.

Clio Talks Back: Finding Fran

Once upon a time (in the 1950s) there were two friends in Los Angeles, California, named Lois and Fran. Both super-achievers, they were inseparable in high school, but once graduated, they attended different universities (both in California), and eventually lost touch with one another. Lois discovered feminism and became a pioneer in the new field of women’s history. She is now a history professor at the University of Southern California.

The artistic and intense Fran took a more spiritual route. With her first husband, Hans, she ultimately sought refuge in a commune called Lama in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. Seeking spiritual peace, she left her husband, and built a new union with the founder of the Lama community (Stephen, later Nuridin). Ultimately she converted to Islam, took the name Noura, embracing a new life as a Muslim woman, wife, and mother. Fran covered herself and embarked on an adventurous but simpler lifestyle, living (after New Mexico) in Chamonix, then Mecca, and ultimately settling in Alexandria, Egypt.

How could these two young women have followed such different paths. This was the question that led Lois to decide to find Fran (Noura), and, ultimately, to write a book about their converging - and diverging - lives and ideas about religion and life. Lois’s book, Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women, appeared in 1999.

In later life Lois had located Fran. The two met several times, in New Mexico and again in Egypt. Fran explained to Lois that her mother had conditioned her for domesticity, but she discovered that she needed to live her own life, to make her own choices – to escape that overpowering, albeit benevolent maternal presence. “I lived my mother’s life until I was thirty; then I wanted to live my own life,” she explained (p. 95).

Noura’s quest was fundamentally spiritual, a search for “inner freedom,” for what Lois termed “liberation thorugh surrender.” She quotes Noura as saying: “What may appear from outside Islam as a set of strictures, even a trap, a series of limitations, appears from inside to be an infinite expanding geometry, a crystalline structure of great beauty which not only insures safety and orders chaos, but allows the soul freedom to soar” (p. 193).

Noura learned to chant “La illaha illa Llah” (There is no God but God), which, in her words, “is the basis of Islam”. . . “You must acknowledge this and say, I surrender. That is what separates a Muslim from a non-Muslim, because Islam means surrender” (p. 197) She converted to Islam in 1975 in Jerusalem, the city in which the three great world - Judalism, Christianity, and Islam - converge. She was deeply moved by the traditional culture of the Muslim Palestinians, among whom she lived. And she embraced the Sufi approach to Islam.

Living in Makkah (Mecca) in Saudi Arabia for several years in the late 1970s, Noura was similarly impressed with the community of women, who came from all over the world on the ritual pilgrimage. She and her now-husband decided to establish an Islamic study center in New Mexico. This initiative never developed in the manner they had hoped. Settling in Alexandria, Egypt, where Sufism was more accepted than in Saudi Arabia, Noura and her family at last ceased their journeys.

Noura (Fran) and Lois held long conversations during their meetings in the 1990s. They debated and disagreed about women’s (and men’s) covering themselves completely, as a means of de-emphasizing sexuality. But they found common ground when evaluating the scope of women’s liberty in a society based on strict sexual segregation and parallel spheres. For example, in Islamic societies, married women could own property and establish businesses, a privilege for which wives in Western societies long campaigned before achieving it. Both Noura and Lois agreed on “equal education for women, equal access to the professions, and equal pay for equal work” (p. 213).

Noura pointed out to Lois that under Islam, “married women have the right to their own income; they can start a business with it; they can put it into the bank or buy jewelry with it; they can do anything they want with it. Women are guaranteed the right to inherit under Qur’anic law, and if the portion decreed for sons is larger than that for daughters, it’s because sons are required to care for the unmarried women of their families, and daughters aren’t required to support themselves. Under Islam, married women keep their maiden names; children alone take fathers’ names” (p. 214).

Women under Islam enjoy great authority, Noura asserted. “The power of the ‘mother’ dominates the home. Muslim children are taught to honor their mother first of all. Muslims will give their paychecks to their parents and forego marriage in order to support them; they will do anything for their mothers. When you marry, you serve your mother-in-law; as you age and your children grow up and marry, you are the one who is served. Even urban professional women regard their famiies as the center of their lives. They live with husbands or families; single men and women living alone are considered anomalous, even dangerous” (p. 214). Noura’s observations on the power of mothers are especially poignant, coming from a woman who sought to escape the powerful influence of her own mother.

As the conversations of Noura and Lois continued, they discussed many more aspects of Islam and the differences between Western cultures and Muslim cultures. “By Qur’anic prescription,” Noura pointed out, women and men are equal before Allah; no mythology exists about Eve bringing evil into the world. In contrast to Christian dogma, sexual pleasure is considered integral to marriage. In Arabic the word Allah has neither a masculine nor a feminine connotation” (p. 214).

Clio invites you to read Finding Fran. The parallel yet dissimilar lives of Lois and Fran, and their evaluations are relevant today for understanding the commonalities – and differences – of great religious traditions, and how these can inform ways of living and individual spiritual journeys.

Source: Lois W. Banner, Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). All quotations from the hardcover edition. A paperback edition and Kindle edition are available through Amazon books.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Meet ‘A’isha Taymur, a great Muslim poet in nineteenth-century Cairo

A'isha Taymur

To honor the launch of Muslima: Muslim Women's Art & Voices and Women’s History Month, Clio proposes the story of a young Turkish/Egyptian girl, the eldest of three daughters, who became a famous poet. A’isha Taymur (1840-1902) here talks about her early educational experiences and about her understanding father’s role in helping her transcend stereotypical female constraint.

When my mind was ready to develop . . . , my mother, the goddess of compassion and virtue and the treasure of knowledge and experience, brought the tools of weaving and embroidery and exerted herself in teaching me. She explained things clearly and cleverly, but I was not receptive. I was not willing to improve in the feminine occupations. I used to flee from her like a prey seeking to escape the net.

[At the same time], I used to look forward to attending the gatherings of prominent writers without any awkwardness. I found the sound of the pen on paper to be the most beautiful, and I became convinced that membership in that profession was the most abundant blessing. To satisfy my longing, I would collect any sheets of paper and small pens. Then, I would go someplace away from all and imitate the writers as they scribbled. Hearing that sound was very enjoyable. When my mother would find me out, she would scold me and threaten me. This only increased my rejection of embroidery and did not improve my skills.

Even though I was genuinely inclined to [literate]learning, I also tried to get my mother’s approval. But I continued to dislike the feminine occupations. I used to go out to the reception hall (slamlik), past the writers who were there to listen to their melodious verse. My mother – may God rest her in the heavenly gardens – was hurt by my actions. She would reprimand, threaten, warn, and promise to punish. She also appealed to me with friendly promises of jewelry and pretty costumes.

[Finally], my father reasoned with her, quoting the Turkish poet who said: “The heart is not led, through force, to the desired path. So do not torment another soul if you can spare it!” He also cautioned: “Beware of breaking the heart of this young girl and tainting her purity with violence. If our daughter is inclined to the pen and paper, do not obstruct her desire.”

“Let us share our daughters: You take ‘Afat and give me ‘Asmat [another of ‘A’isha’s names]. If I make a writer out of ‘Asmat, then this will bring me mercy after my death.” My father then said: “Come with me ‘Asmat. Starting tomorrow I will bring you two instructors who will teach you Turkish, Persian, fiqh (jurisprudence), and Arabic grammar. Do well in your studies and follow what I instruct you to do, and beeware of making me ashamed before your mother.”

Source: As translated from A’isha Taymur, Nata’ij al’ahwal fi al’aqwal wa al’af’ al [The Results of Circumstances in Statements and Deeds] (Cairo, 1887). Published in Mervat Hatem’s article, ‘A’isha Taymur’s Tears and the Critique of the Modernist and the Feminist Discourses on Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, 1998), pp. 76-77.

CLIO TALKS BACK: What Kind of Mother . . . ?

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) was one of America’s most beloved writers. She did not write novels, she wrote humorous and irreverent observations about the serious things in life.

In tribute to the perils and joys of motherhood everywhere, Clio is sharing this excerpt from Erma Bombeck’s observations on motherhood:

"‘What kind of a mother would . . .’ It was a familiar phrase. Ten years and three children earlier, I had used it myself with just the right blend of shock and disapproval. . . .
“ ‘Mother’ has always been a generic term synonymous with love, devotion, and sacrifice. There’s always been something mystical and reverent about them. They’re . . . infallible, virtuous, without flaws and conceived without original sin, with no room for ambivalence.
“Immediately following birth, every new mother drags from her bed and awkwardly pulls herself up on the pedestal provided for her.
“Some adjust easily to the saintly image. They come to love the adulation and bask in the flocks that come to pay homage at their feet on Mother’s Day.
“Some can’t stand the heights and jump off, never to be seen again.
“But most mothers just try to figure out what they’re supposed to do—and how they can do it in public.
“Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.
“It’s the biggest on-the-job training program in existence today.
“Motherhood is not a one-size-fits all, a mold that is all-encompassing and means the same thing to all people.
“Some mothers give standing ovations to bowel movements. Other mothers reserve their excitement for an affair.
“Some mothers have so much guilt, they cannot eat a breath mint without sharing it. Other mothers feel nothing when they tell a kid his entire pillowcase of Halloween candy got ants in it . . . and eats it herself. . . .
“I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the articles that eulogized me as a nurse, chauffeur, cook, housekeeper, financier, counselor, philsopher, mistress, teacher, and hostess. It seemed that I always read an article like this on the day when my kid was in a school play and I ironed only the leg of the trouser that faced the audience, knitted all morning, napped all afternoon, bought a pizza for dinner, and had a headache by 10:30.
“For a long time, I was afraid to laugh at the contrast for fear no one else would. . . .
“What is certain is that there is probably not one of you who has not at some time of your life demanded an answer to the question “What kind of a mother would . . .’ It’s an old phrase, conceived in innocence, carried with pomposity, and born of condemnation. It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
“Let none of you who read about . . . mothers judge them until you have walked in their shoes of clay.”

Source: Erma Bombeck: “Introduction” to Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (McGraw-Hill, 1983), excerpts pp. 1-4.

Clio Talks Back: Happy Mothers, Grieving Mothers

by Mary Cassatt

Among women artists who have depicted scenes about motherhood, two particularly stand out in Clio’s mind: Mary Cassatt (1844-1926 ), an American from Philadelphia who resided for much of her life in Paris where she painted with the Impressionists, and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who was born in Königsberg (then in East Prussia, now part of Russia) but lived primarily in Berlin where she was identified with the Naturalist school. Both are ranked among the greatest artists of their time.

By Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt, a woman of means, never married nor had children of her own (because she thought marriage and children would interfere with her career as a painter). Yet she seems to have thought a lot about motherhood; some of her finest paintings are tender, benign private scenes of well-dressed mothers, seemingly unmarked by unhappiness or political turmoil, gazing at, touching, and tending to their well-fed, healthy-looking, almost sensuously delicious babies. Her paintings are colorful and, at first glance, sweet. Yet, Cassatt’s early biographer Achille Ségard, insists that she was a “painter of children and of mothers,” rather than of the romanticized joys of motherhood.

Käthe Kollwitz, on the other hand, did marry. She bore two sons while continuing to pursue her artistic career. She worked in various media, including etchings and bronze statuary. Her works of art are somber, full of shadows and blackness.

by Käthe Kollwitz

Kollwitz’s depictions of motherhood are poignant; they bear the mark of an intense social consciousness of poverty, deprivation, and death. The loss of one son who was serving in the German army in World War I undoubtedly exacerbated this tendency. Her concern for the fate of the poor and unfortunate, particularly mothers attempting to protect children or mourning dead children, was magnified by the political, social, and economic turmoil that ensued in the wake of the lost war, compounded by the ominous, overhanging threat of yet another war. In 1922 she wrote: “There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!” . . . and she quoted from Germany’s great poet Goethe, “Seed for the planting must not be ground.”

by Käthe Kollwitz

Kollwitz’s impressive bronze, Tower of Mothers, a work completed in 1938 – just as the shadow of war once again hovered over Europe – has inspired a contemporary poet named Gail Peck to publish the following meditation:

Today their hearts are stone,
these mothers who’ve created
a fortress with their bodies,
their children peecking from the folds
of skirts. One mother has her bare feet planted,
another has her fist in the air.
No, they shout at marching boots,
planes overhead. Nothing can get
to the children now – what kind
of game is this they ask?
It has no name. 

Clio’s question: Throughout history, mothers have repeatedly nurtured and tried to protect their children, to keep them safe from the ravages of poverty and war. Why has it been so difficult for mothers and others to triumph over those dark forces of destruction? Why can’t all children have a beautiful future, like the children of the mothers in the works of Mary Cassatt? Why do some nations continue, even today, to “grind” their seed for planting rather than planting it?


Further reading: 

Griselda Pollock, “Mary Cassatt: The Touch and the Gaze, or Impressionism for Thinking People,” in Women Impressionists (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2008).

Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz, Woman and Artist (Feminist Press, 1976).

Elizabeth Prelinger, et al., Käthe Kollwitz (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Yale University Press, 1992).

Gail Peck, “Tower of Mothers,” Wild Goose Poetry Review, posted Nov. 10, 2011.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Thoughts About the Empress Maria Theresa As Mother

Clio recently revisited Vienna, where she was reminded of the remarkable career of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780).  She was the sole female Habsburg ruler, thanks to the Pragmatic Sanction negotiated by her father Charles VI to guarantee her succession.  In her early twenties, she took power following his death in 1740.

It is hard to grasp just how much of Europe Maria Theresa and the Habsburg dynasty once ruled.  These crownlands encompassed what is now Belgium in the west to Transylvania in the east, not to mention Austria proper, the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, Croatia, Serbia, and much of the Dalmatian coast plus major parts of northern Italy.  Taking an active role in directing affairs of state, this empress fought several wars against Frederick the Great of Prussia to maintain her right to rule Silesia as well as to keep the Turks at bay.  She engineered an alliance with the French, hoping to contain the expansionist aims of Prussia.

During her reign (following her marriage to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who was subsequently appointed Holy Roman Emperor and duke of Tuscany), Maria Theresa made her mark as a prolific mother – producing sixteen children, of whom eleven lived to adulthood. Such numbers, she believed, would assure the dynastic future of the Habsburgs. 

Maria Theresa took great interest in her children, their upbringing and their futures.  She produced three daughters before the birth of her first son and heir, Joseph.  Then two more daughters, and another son (short-lived).  Then six more daughters and two more sons.  It’s a wonder she could even keep track!  One would need a secretary just for birthdays!  But then, in a court where four languages were regularly used (German, Italian, French, and Latin), perhaps keeping track of birthdays was just one complication among others.  Even so, the children’s education was less thorough than it might have been.

Work-life conflicts can be less of a problem for royal mothers, or for families of the super-rich.  They have no shortage of household help, and they don’t have to purchase the groceries, wash the dishes, join the parent-teachers’ association, or drive carpools to school or after-school activities, tasks which consume many mothers in the western world today.  They can call on wetnurses, maids, cooks, coachmen, and nannies.  Relieved of these mundane duties, Maria Theresa found time to build a summer palace at Schoenbrunn, which rivaled the Versailles of Louis XIV of France – a fine playground for lively, growing children, when the Hofburg in central Vienna was not enough.

Maria Theresa was one of the three major enlightened despots of eighteenth century Europe, along with Catherine of Russia and Frederic the Great of Prussia.  A celebrated female historian of international affairs (Ragnhild Hatton) once commented, “I never really understood enlightened despotism until I became a mother.”  Indeed, enlightened despotism is an excellent metaphor for the act of mothering, especially when children are small.  But when they grow up, more liberty is called for.  However, Maria Theresa never withdrew from her children’s lives or offered them much liberty.  Motherly advice  – and directives – were never in short supply.  They were above all Habsburgs.

Maria Theresa kept up a voluminous correspondence with her adult children, who had married – or been systematically married off – to consolidate or  reinforce political alliances for the House of Habsburg.  One of her most notable – and intrusive – correspondences (later published) was with her youngest daughter, Marie Antonia, who became Marie Antoinette – the queen of France who would be guillotined during the Revolution. 

Further Reading:  Karl A. Roider, Jr.  Maria Theresa (1973); Robert Pick, Empress Maria Theresa: The Earlier Years, 1717-1757  (1966); Regina Schulte, “’Madame, Ma Chere Fille’ – ‘Dearest Child’ : Letters from Imperial Mothers to Royal Daughters,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World 1500-2000 (2006).

CLIO TALKS BACK: Remembering Fanny Blankers-Koen: Mom and her four gold medals

Fanny Blanker-Koen running

As the 2012 Olympic Games in London come to a close, a historic heroine has re-emerged – one unfamiliar to most of us today. Fanny Blankers-Koen (1918-2004), the extraordinary Dutch track-and-field athlete known affectionately as “the flying housewife,” has returned to public notice. Why?

Fanny Blankers-Koen is, in fact, the most decorated female Olympian of the twentieth century. She won four gold medals at the 1948 London Olympics – in the 100 meter, the 200 meter, the 80 meter hurdles, and as anchor in the 4 x 100 relay. This, out of nine Olympic events in women’s track and field. Not many athletes, female or male, are as versatile or as successful, then or since.

What is worthy of note is that in 1948 this remarkable athlete (who had already competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and had married her coach in 1940) was thirty years old, already the mother of two and expecting a third when she won her four Olympic gold medals. Despite the hardships brought on by the Second World War, she had persevered to become an established European champion in various events and a member of the Dutch Olympic team.

In 1999 the International Association of Athletic Federations honored Fanny Blankers-Koen as the outstanding female athlete of the entire twentieth century (Carl Lewis, the American runner, who also won Olympic gold four times, was honored as the outstanding male athlete).

Fanny’s Dutch biographer, Kees Kooman, published her biography in 2003 with the title Een koningen met mannenbenen [A Queen with Men’s Legs], which has been reissued in 2012 as Fanny Blankers-Koen: De huisvrow die kon vliegen [Fanny Blankers-Koen: The Flying Housewife]. To Clio’s knowledge, this biography has not appeared in translation.

Clio honors Fanny Blankers-Koen for her pioneering athleticism and also for breaking the taboos on what women could accomplish, notwithstanding marriage and motherhood. Clio also honors her husband-coach for encouraging her to continue training and competing in a time when such activity was upsetting to some neo-traditionalists who thought mothers should abandon their ambitions to stay at home with their young children.

Sources: Considerable information on Fanny Blankers-Koen can be found on the Internet, including many photos. Clio first learned of her existence from an online blogpost by Gilbert King, “Past Imperfect,” on the Smithsonian Magazine website. See http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2012/07/four-gold-medals....

CLIO TALKS BACK: Can mothers be artistic geniuses?

While reading Paula Birnbaum’s fascinating new book on Women Artists in Interwar France, Clio came across a debate that took place in the mid-1930s between those who claimed that motherhood might be incompatible with artistic genius and women artists who defended women as artists and proclaimed that motherhood in no way inhibited their genius. Denial of women’s genius, artistic, literary, or scientific, was an old antifeminist trope in European circles, but even this more nuanced expression of such views by a well-meaning man, in an era in which well-known women artists abounded, triggered a sharp response.

In early 1934, a government official from Geneva named John Albaret opened an exhibit of Swiss women artists by asserting that to date there had been no great women artists. He indicated that wifehood and motherhood was women’s most important role – and that, given the obligations of these roles, wives and mothers could never become “artists of genius.” Albaret did acknowledge, however, that as more and more women did not marry, some were indeed showing promise in the arts. He hoped that some would soon display their creative genius. Implied in his introduction, was that no women had done so to date.

 Some women artists were highly offended by Albaret’s analysis. Marie-Anne Camax-Zoegger (1887-1952), the Parisian artist and founder of Femmes Artistes Modernes (a collective of women artists) and the mother of five, replied to the Swiss official as follows:

Maternity and art are two different things that in no way detract from one another. There are very great women artists who are not married, and there are others who are married and who have been admirable mothers. I believe that the more cultured a woman is, the more worthy she of raising her children. Maternity does not diminish her art, and Art does not erode her capacity to mother. 

To illustrate her point, Marie-Anne Camax-Zoegger invoked the examples of Mme Vigée Lebrun, the celebrated French court painter of the late 18th century, who “exalted maternal tenderness,” of Berthe Morisot, who had several children and painted with the Impressionists, and of Camax-Zoegger’s near-contemporary Suzanne Valadon, whose son Maurice Utrillo had also become a great French artist.

 “I know from experience,” Camax-Zoegger wrote, “that children do not detract from one’s art; they renew its vigor. For a woman they are the immortal fountain from which she is able to draw tenderness and life.”

What do Clio’s 21st century readers have to say about this debate? From the perspective of your own culture, what response would you make to the question of whether or not mothers can be artistic geniuses?


Source: “Attendons avec patience les artistes de génie, que les femmes nous donneront avec le temps,” Comoedia, 8 Nov. 1934; “Deux femmes artistes répondent au Conseiller de Genève qui plaça l’art féminin au-dessous de l’art masculin,” Comoedia, 24 Nov. 1934. See Paula J. Birnbaum, in Women Artists in Interwar France (Ashgate, 2011), p. 36. Translations from Camax-Zoegger lightly amended by Clio.

Clio Talks Back: A Tribute to Adrienne Rich and Of Woman Born

Adrienne Rich

 Clio has learned of the death of Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), one of America’s greatest poets and author Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). In this book she brought her poetic skills to bear on enhancing our understanding of motherhood. Mother of three sons, she subsequently divorced their father and lived the rest of her life among women.

As Rich points out, “All human life on the planet is born of woman. . . [and yet] we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”

She insists on the difference between the experiences of sons born of woman and of daughters, and of the way in which, “because women have not been makers and sayers of patriarchal culture,” women have been categorized as either mothers or as “barren” or “childless.” And the powerful physical and emotional experience women enjoy as mothers has been institutionalized in such a way that “that potential – and all women – shall remain under male control” in such a way that it has “ghettoized and degraded female potentialities.”

“The ancient, continuing envy, awe, and dread of the male for the female capacity to create life has repeatedly taken the form of hatred for every other female aspect of creativity.” Perhaps the word “hatred” is too strong, but Clio knows that women’s history offers centuries of examples of antifeminist men disparaging and belittling women’s “genius” or even talent – in art, music, literature, and every other field of endeavor in which they might potentially compete with men.

“Motherhood,” writes Adrienne Rich, “ – unmentioned in the histories of conquest and serfdom, wars and treaties, exploration and imperialism – has a history, it has an ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism.” Clio would add that since 1976 the findings of women’s historians have underscored the significance of Rich’s observations over and over.

Adrienne Rich admits that “I did not understand this when I started to write the book. I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself: a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.”

Clio salutes the life and works of Adrienne Rich and urges all of you to read this precious, insightful book – a timeless classic and still so “right on” even today.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Remembering a Dutch Woman Physician Who Pioneered Birth Control Methods

Dr. Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) became the first woman physician in the Netherlands. In the course of her practice in Amsterdam, she became sensitized to the plight of poor women who came to the hospital to deliver their babies. Out of sympathy and necessity, she became a pioneer in offering birth control advice and devices to needy women – much like Margaret Sanger in the United States. In this excerpt from her Memories, Aletta Jacobs tells us how this came to be:

“When I was a student, and particularly when I worked at Amsterdam Hospital, I was haunted by the suffering caused by frequent pregnancies, which, for various reasons, can have a disastrous effect on a woman’s life...In my long conversations with a variety of women in the delivery room, they explained to me that they found it impossible to prevent pregnancy when sexual abstinence was the only method available. Women who produced sickly babies or stillbirths, for whom birth meant yet another brush with death, kept on returning to the delivery room. Families that were already large enough, considering the mother’s physical condition and the parents’ circumstances, simply continued to expand. I spent hours wrestling with this problem without any solution in sight. Sometimes I discussed the issue with my fellow students. ‘Yes,’ they would cooly reply, ‘that’s what’s called a woman’s destiny’ or ‘Thank God, there’s no way of preventing pregnancy. If there were, then the whole world would soon collapse through underpopulation’.”

During a visit to England, Dr. Jacobs learned about the possibilities of contraception from a group of neo-Malthusian advocates. She then visited with a German doctor named Mensinga who had invented a pessary for use by women. She began to prescribe it for a select group of patients from her free clinics for poor and destitute women. And, in consequence, she “incurred the wrath of the entire medical establishment.”

“As the only woman doctor in Holland, I often found it difficult and painful to row against the tide of lies and slander spread by my male counterparts. However, the absolute conviction that I was doing the right thing, and the awareness that this whole situation concerned not only individual suffering but also the interests of society at large, gave me the strength to stand by my point of view. I kept thinking that the longing to have a child is so strong in most normal women that only for the most serious reasons would they choose to avoid motherhood. Of course, I thought, contraception would certainly lower the number of unwanted pregnancies and hence should be welcomed for many social, sociological, and individual reasons. If there were fewer unwanted babies, the race would advance, which in turn would lead to greater social well-being and human happiness. Studying this subject in great depth finally convinced me that I had taken the right course of action.”

Well before the invention of the contraceptive pill (which only made its debut in the early 1960s in western countries), Dr. Jacobs persisted in providing assistance with family planning to her clients. In the early 1920s she could write that “after all these years there is still no better form of contraception than the Mensinga pessary I always prescribed.”



Further reading:
Aletta Jacobs, Herinneringen (Amsterdam, 1924); edited by Harriet Feinberg as Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), pp. 46-49. Translation by Annie Wright. See also www.alettajacobs.info (in Dutch).

CLIO TALKS BACK: What Do We Really Know About the History of Maternity and Motherhood in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Clio just read a recent, important article by a French colleague, Anne Hugon, who addresses the history of maternity in sub-Saharan Africa. As she remarks, everyone who knows about African societies agrees that maternity is an obligatory passage for black African women, and that the status of women is determined by their fertility – the more children they have, the higher their status. Sterility is grounds for suspicion and marginalization.

And yet, few scholars have actually studied maternity in southern African societies as a historical issue, one that concerns the changes over time in the experiences of women in pregnancy, birth, the post-partum experience of nursing and childrearing and that engages the experiences of both women and men. Until recently, this was a history that still cried out to be written, to be recovered from the shadows of “nature” and restored to “culture” and to history.

Anthropologists, according to Hugon, had looked mainly at kinship systems and rituals, but did not deal either with maternity per se, or with change over time. Historians have found means of studying maternity in several contexts, but primarily in the colonial periods where christianization of the populace entailed “educating” future wives and mothers for european-style domesticity. Another striking feature of the historicizing of maternity is the irony of preparing stay-at-home mothers in an economy where men did not support their families and the possibility of earning money was extremely low. A third important feature is the medicalization of pregnancy and birth, in the interests of maternal and infant survival but also in the interests of the colonial state. Hugon singles out for commendation a study by Lynn Thomas on the “politics of the uterus” in Kenya during the period between the world wars, where control of women’s sexuality and fertility became a central issue.

What seems to be missing in all this research, which is admittedly in its early stages, are the voices of the mothers and their own accounts of their coming to motherhood. Can these voices be recuperated? How did these mothers in the various cultures that constitute sub-Saharan Africa understand their own motherhood experiences? How do these mothers understand their motherhood experiences today?



Further reading:
Hugon, Anne. “L’historiographie de la maternité en Afrique subsaharienne,” Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, no. 21 (2005), 212-229. This review article features over four pages of invaluable references to pertinent scholarship in French and English. Online at http://clio.revues.org

Thomas, Lynn. Politics of the Womb : Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya. Berkeley & Los Angeles : University of California Press, 2003.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Debating the Role and Responsibilities of Mothers in Early 20th Century America

Anna Howard Shaw

Concern about falling birthrates in the 1890s provoked a number of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to speak out against women’s higher education and women’s participation in the industrial labor force, as well as women’s ostensible self-indulgence. Married women, especially mothers, they said, should be at home, not in the workforce or out running about, organizing mothers’ clubs and “interfering” in public affairs.

In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) addressed the issue as a featured speaker for the National Congress of Mothers, held in Washington, D. C., in March 1905. He asserted that women were not doing their duty to the nation. “The primary duty of the woman,” he insisted, “was to be the helpmeet, the housewife, and mother” – not a breadwinner; that was the husband’s role. Objecting to the notion that families should limit themselves to two children, he proclaimed that the result would be “race suicide.”

Women’s rights advocates quickly countered Roosevelt’s remarks. Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), a trained physician and a licensed minister, presided over the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1904 to 1915. In June 1905, at the NAWSA annual convention, she directly answered the president. Here is an excerpt from her speech:

When the cry of race suicide is heard, and men arraign women for race decadence, it would be well for them to examine conditions and causes, and base their attacks upon firmer foundations of fact. Instead of attacking women for their interest in public affairs and relegating them to their children, their kitchen, and their church, they will learn that the kitchen is in politics; that the children’s physical, intellectual, and moral well-being is controlled and regulated by law; that the real cause of race decadence is not the fact that fewer children are born, but to the more fearful fact that, of those born, so few live, not primarily because of the neglect of the mother, but because men themselves neglect their duty as citizens and public officials. If men honestly desire to prevent the causes of race decadence, let them examine the accounts of food adulteration, and learn that from the effect of impure milk alone, in one city 5,600 babies died in a single year. Let them examine the water supply, so impregnated with disease that in some cities there is continual epidemic of typhoid fever. Let them gaze upon the filthy streets, from which perpetually arises contagion of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Let them examine the plots of our great cities, and find city after city with no play places for children, except the streets, alleys, and lanes. Let them examine the school buildings, many of them badly lighted, unsanitary, and without yards. Let them turn to the same cities, and learn that from five to a score or thousand children secure only half-day tuition because there are not adequate schoolhouse facilities. Let them watch these half-day children playing in the streets and alleys and viler places, until they have learned the lessons which take them to evergrowing numbers of reformatories, whose inmates are increasing four times as rapidly as the population. Let them follow the children who survive all these ills of early childhood,until they enter the sweat-shops and factories, and behold there the maimed, dwarfed, and blighted little ones, 500,000 of whom under 14 years of age are employed in these pestilential places. Let them behold the legalized saloons and the dens of iniquity where so many of the voting population spend the money that should be used in feeding, housing, and caring for their children. Then, if these mentors of women’s clubs and mothers’ meetings do not find sufficient cause for race degeneracy where they have power to control conditions, let them turn to lecturing women. It is infinitely more important that a child shall be well born and well-reared than that more children shall be born. It is better that one well-born child shall live than that two shall be born and one die in infancy. That which is desirable is not that the greatest possible number of children should be born into the world; the need is for more intelligent motherhood and fatherhood, and for better-born and better educated children.

Teddy Roosevelt with babies

Spoken over a century ago, Shaw’s remarks remain all too pertinent to conditions that still exist in many areas of the world in the twenty-first century. Clio notes that it was primarily through the efforts of organized motherhood that the conditions Shaw describes above were finally addressed. Standards for pure water, food, public sanitation, playgrounds, school safety, etc., all resulted from the public efforts of empowered American women (some of whom could already vote in their states but not in national elections) who were concerned for the future of their own families and those of their neighbors. We can all appreciate the lesson provided by this historical example: mothers taking action can (eventually) get results!








Sources: The longer texts by President Roosevelt and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw can be consulted in “Nationalism and ‘Race Suicide’ in the United States,” in Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 2: 1880-1950, ed. Susan Groag Bell & Karen M. Offen (Stanford University Press), pp. 136-143. The original source references are provided there.