Abstract
Women have always practised various means of recording history, but these practices have rarely been recognised as history. This chapter will examine the work of women as historical writers from the Renaissance until the French Revolution. It will demonstrate that although lacking in civil rights, with poor educational opportunities and with little access to the materials necessary to write history, a small but significant number of women engaged in the production of history throughout this period. Subverting traditional genres like biography and family history, women inserted themselves into historical narratives and subtly manipulated the gendered expectations of historiography. During this period women historians did not necessarily write about women, nor were they overtly concerned with women’s rights, but many of them developed feminist consciousness through their study of history. Women’s historical endeavours created an intellectual environment that allowed the development of feminist ideas, and increasingly throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a sense of women’s oppression was acknowledged. If the study of history was seen as essential to develop ‘manliness’, it served equally to alert women to their unequal status and led to an assertion of history’s moral authority in order to achieve women’s rights.
History can only serve us for Amusement and as a Subject of Discourse …. Some good Examples indeed are to be found in History, tho generally the bad are ten for one … since the Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them,’tis with this wise Remark, That such Women acted above their Sex.
Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, 1705
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Notes
Margaret L. King, ‘Book-lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond Their Sex (New York: New York University Press, 1980), p. 75.
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Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), p. xxviii.
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As Susan Broomhall has pointed out, because we know so little about who read texts produced by women in the early modern period, the terms ‘public’ and ‘voice’ are somewhat problematic. Following Broomhall, I would suggest that the fact of women writing meant that women ‘perceived themselves to be making a public display of their opinions and were participating in political debate’. Susan Broomhall, ‘“In My Opinion”: Charlotte de Minut and Female Political Discussion in Print in Sixteenth Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31, 1 (2000): 26.
Cynthia Skenazi, ‘Marie Dentieere et la Predication des Femmes’, Renaissance and Reformation 21, 1 (1997): 5–18
and Irena Backus, ‘Marie Dentieere: Un cas de Feeminisme Theologique a l’Epoque de la Reforme?’, Bulletin de la Societe d’histoire du Protestantisme Francais 137, 2(1991): 177–95.
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See, for instance, the example of Samuel Pepys cited in Sara Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’ in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 184.
Faith Beasley, Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 47.
A number of memoirs exist of middle-class French women involved in the political and religious upheavals of the late seventeenth century. However, they do not really offer anything more than personal anecdotes. See Carolyn Lougee Chappell,’ “The Pains I Took to Save My/ His Family”: Escape Accounts by a Huguenot Mother and Daughter after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes’, French Historical Studies, 22, 1 (1999): 1–39.
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See also Mary Ann McGuire, ‘Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, On the Nature and Status of Women’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 1, 1 (1978): 193–206.
Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life in Elspeth Graham et al. (eds), Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth Century English Women (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 89.
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Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 25.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 206.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). ‘Above Their Sex’? Women’s History ‘before’ Feminism. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_4
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