![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fierce, smart, and sexy women in history
Oct. 5th, 2007 01:08 pmI'm having a good time poking through "Seductresses: Women who ravished the world and their lost art of love." I don't really buy into the thesis or tone of the writing - mostly I'm just in it for the mini-biographies of interesting sounding women. I liked "The Book of the Courtesans" and "Wild Women" for the same reason. Maybe someday I'll get around to reading the autobiography by the Victorian era Canadian politician who took off after the gold rush in her youth, ditching her husband 'cause he was not up to the trip. How she survived on squirrel, and hiked through the mountains in a corset, pregnant. Maybe I never will get around to reading it. But it's certainly very pleasant to know such a person existed.
After a while though, you do start to wonder: how does the thesis that earlier eras (say, pre-1920s, or pre-1890s, or pre-whenever) didn't have feminists, or didn't have women who were capable/educated/accomplished/sexual, or whatever - how does this thesis survive? I mean, how many exceptions can a rule possibly have and still remain a rule? Is it just that people are embarrassed to revise the thesis? Is it that the most likely revision (something along the lines of "before such and such date in this particular culture, men got away with actively suppressing, demonizing, and attacking any talented/sexual/threatening woman who showed up", perhaps?) might be too frightening? And why don't people look at things like the tidbit from that "The Great Mortality" book I read about how women's status improved temporarily (along with that of peasants in general) after the Great Death of the black plague, and then connect that to patterns of women's employment during wartime (and the backlash post-wars) in the United States and come out with some serious thesis that connects those two? Or have people done that connection in academia and my being non-women's studies girl makes me unaware of it? Is there totally a labor/feminism thesis about labor supplies and women's rights and birth control, drawing on relative employment and social status of women related to labor supply/population level over time and I missed it? 'Cause that would be a really awesome book that I would enjoy reading.
After a while though, you do start to wonder: how does the thesis that earlier eras (say, pre-1920s, or pre-1890s, or pre-whenever) didn't have feminists, or didn't have women who were capable/educated/accomplished/sexual, or whatever - how does this thesis survive? I mean, how many exceptions can a rule possibly have and still remain a rule? Is it just that people are embarrassed to revise the thesis? Is it that the most likely revision (something along the lines of "before such and such date in this particular culture, men got away with actively suppressing, demonizing, and attacking any talented/sexual/threatening woman who showed up", perhaps?) might be too frightening? And why don't people look at things like the tidbit from that "The Great Mortality" book I read about how women's status improved temporarily (along with that of peasants in general) after the Great Death of the black plague, and then connect that to patterns of women's employment during wartime (and the backlash post-wars) in the United States and come out with some serious thesis that connects those two? Or have people done that connection in academia and my being non-women's studies girl makes me unaware of it? Is there totally a labor/feminism thesis about labor supplies and women's rights and birth control, drawing on relative employment and social status of women related to labor supply/population level over time and I missed it? 'Cause that would be a really awesome book that I would enjoy reading.
