| 11-12 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Bodil Begtrup on the Status of Women
The "Feminizing Process" in Renaissance Studies
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTE by
Golda Meir.
Bodil Begtrup, U.N. Delegate
"It
is all well for us to talk about raising the status of women; but so many
of them live in homes so ill-equipped, kitchens so meagerly planned and
furnished, that it is practically impossible for them to find time or energy
to take any sort of part in public or community life.... if we want the
women of the world to take an active part in the affairs of the world and
of their communities, we must do more than give them equal status with
men and urge them on to active public life - we must make it possible for
them to accept their responsibilities as citizens, to freely, and without
anxiety or strain, take their place with men in order to accomplish, jointly,
with the men of the world, those great tasks that must be fulfilled if
thinking and living on this earth are to transcend to any degree at all
the thinking and living it has known so far!"
These words were spoken
in 1946 by Bodil Begtrup (born Nov. 12, 1903), Danish delegate to United
Nations and chair of the U.N. Status of Women subcommission (1946). Under
her direction the first international statement for the Human Rights of
Women was adopted in 1946.
Instead of merely writing the usual report in vague
terms, the subcommission prepared a 2,000 word, detailed statement regarding
the rights of women world-wide. The original report was revised to a few
summarizing paragraphs because male delegates on the Human Rights Commission
(nine men and Eleanor Roosevelt) thought rights for women infringed on
the sovereign rights of individual countries. Through the efforts of ER
and Begtrup, the complete report was published.
"It is no longer a question of whether women shall participate in
the affairs of the world. It is rather a question today of how to get their
full cooperation in every nation."
Among the rights the report demanded for "women
as human beings" was an office on women's
affairs and an international women's conference. They sought equal rights
with men in all nations and in all fields including civil, education, economics,
political and social. It was so far ranging and modern that it demanded
a compulsory free and a full education: the abolition of prostitution and
the right to divorce.
"As the field of
discrimination is so vast our report has to be comprehensive; it's not
comprehensive enough." Begtrup said of
the progress expected on the report, "It
will move slowly. See me in a thousand years."
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Lorna Hudson, editor. Feminism & Renaissance Studies.
Oxford Readings in Feminism Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999. ix + 467 pp. Bibliography and index. $19.95 (paper), ISBN
0-19-878243-8.
Reviewed by Carole Collier Frick, Department of Historical
Studies, Southern Illinois University. Published by H-Women (June, 2000)
The "Feminizing Process"
in Renaissance Studies
What a good idea! Even a casual perusal of the
names of the seventeen feminist scholars included in this impressive collection
will be enough to make those in the field take notice. Lucidly introduced
by author Lorna Hudson, this volume collects together gemstones of some
of the most influential (and often photocopied!) pieces of previously-published
contemporary scholarship on the Renaissance, and will be a wonderfully
useful resource for those who teach in the field.
The anthology widely casts its nets, and fittingly
begins with Joan Kelly's germinal "Did Women Have a Renaissance?"
(1977), and also includes such classics as Natalie Zemon Davis' early exploration
of "unruly" women in "Women on Top" from her Society
and Culture in Early Modern France (1965), Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's
"The 'Cruel Mother'," from Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance
Italy (1985), and a portion of Ian Maclean's foundational The Renaissance
Notion of Woman (1980), entitled "The Notion of Woman in Medicine,
Anatomy, and Physiology."
Editor Hudson has usefully divided the book into
four sections, each of which tackles a particularly thorny issue for Renaissance
feminist scholars. "Part I. Humanism after Feminism," besides
Kelly's offering, includes an early piece on the education of female humanists
by Lisa Jardine, "Women Humanists: Education for What?" from
her From Humanism to the Humanists (1986) with Anthony Grafton,
which here focuses on Isotta Nogarola, the female intellectual prodigy
who languished behind private walls.
Next, editor Lorna Hutson takes up an investigation
of the classic texts which influenced Renaissance thinking on the "economics"
of households, originally part of her 1994 The Usurer's Daughter.
Completing this section is Stephanie Jed's 1994 "The Tenth Muse: Gender,
Rationality, and the Marketing of Knowledge," which frames the reception
of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's poetry in London as a "New World"
phenomenon. (They even have women poets there!)
Each of these pieces, which range from late fourteenth-century
Italy through seventeenth-century England, represents a feminist voice
confronting and challenging preconceptions about Renaissance Humanism as
old as Jacob Burckhardt himself. An instructor would be able to use this
text in an upper-level undergraduate class to great effect to offset traditional
Humanist readings - Pico della Mirandola, for one, immediately springs
to mind.
In "Part II. Historicizing Femininity,"
all four selections in some way engage the very definition of femininity
in its various manifestations over time.
Maclean's piece explores the basic theory of sexual
difference adhered to in Renaissance medicine, while Davis takes on the
transformational possibilities open to "Women on Top" for social
change.
Moving to cultural conceptions of the feminine married
state, Klapisch's investigation of the double-bind in which married Florentine
widows found themselves (to stay widowed and retain their children, or
to re-marry and leave their children behind with their deceased husband's
kin), concludes the impossibility of a widow being a "good mother."
Lyndal Roper's "Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early
Modern Germany," from her 1994 Oedipus and the Devil, uses psychoanalytic
categories to explore the commonalties between the mentalite of seventeenth-century
Augsburg and our own, in judging women accused of evil-doing in and around
marriage.
Again, these range in time and place from fourteenth
and fifteenth-century Italy, to early modern France and Germany. Collected
together here, they are eloquent evidence of the sophisticated feminist
scholarship which has been generated on topics central to the Renaissance
period in the last thirty-five years.
"Part III. Gender and Genre," moves
from the feminine in historical documents to the feminine in literature,
with two pieces on female literary creations, and two on women writers
themselves.
Beginning with Nancy J. Vickers' early influential
piece on Petrarch's Laura, entitled "Diana Described: Scattered
Woman and Scattered Rhyme" (1981), the disconcertingly fragmented
manner in which Laura appears within Petrarch's poetry is explored. Following
is Patricia Parker's "Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the
Text," from her 1987 Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property,
which confronts the link between textuality and female bodies in general,
engaging texts from the Bible to James Joyce.
One of the newer offerings included here is Victoria
Kahn's 1997 "Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract,"
which examines the relationship between romance and the contract in seventeenth-century
English literature in the work of female author Cavendish.
Rounding out these texts is Ann Rosalind Jones'
"Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric"
(1986), where she highlights three female poets, two from France and one
from Italy, to examine the often hostile milieu in which women writers
had to work, after being thrust into the gender-specific masculine sphere
of fame and eloquence.
Finally, "Part IV. Women's Agency,"
provides a fitting finale of five articles. The very title of Sharon Achinstein's
opening piece from 1994, "Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature
of the English Revolution," nods its respects to Natalie Zemon Davis,
even while it energetically broadens her initial inquiry of female agency
to seventeenth-century English popular literature. Fredrika Jacobs' "La
Donnesca Mano," from her recent Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa:
Women Artists and the Language of Art History(1997), gives us our first
and only visual images (13) contained within this book, as she carefully
explores the meaning of the feminine in art by examining female artists
working in Renaissance Italy in the male discourse of gender which surrounded
their work.
Here too is the fruit of a new generation of feminist
art historians enabled by earlier work such as Broude and Garrard's ground-breaking
Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany from 1982.
Also in this section is Merry Wiesner's important
"Guild, Male Bonding and Women's Work in Early Modern Germany"
(1989), in which this author examines the creation of "the old boys'
club" mentality in medieval urban craft guilds in fifteenth through
eighteenth-century Germany, and its subsequent effect on urban women, especially
the widows of guildsmen. (In my opinion, this one offering would justify
buying this volume, as it has been so crucial to our understanding of women
in the world of work).
Rounding out this final Part IV is Laura Gowing's
"Language, Power, and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early
Modern London" (1994), where she patiently untangles the knots of
the language of litigation as extracted from early seventeenth-century
court records, to discover the processes by which women were able to stake
claims to authority within English society. And finally, the last essay
in this collection, and the only one which has NOT been previously published
elsewhere, is Tim Carter's "Finding a Voice: Vittoria Archilei and
the Florentine 'New Music'" (1999).
Here, the new school of song and solo singing in late-sixteenth-century
Florence, forms the setting for an investigation of the role of virtuoso
soprano Vittoria Archilei at the Medici Court. Using personal correspondence
and poetry which described her performances, Carter attempts to again give
female voice to this most ephemeral of historical art forms. Carter's piece
provides a fitting end to Part IV, which ranges from agency in popular
literature, court records, and the world of work, to the rarefied realm
of the arts.
My final answer: This fine new addition to the
feminizing process in Renaissance Studies should be on every academic's
office bookshelf, and in the classroom as well. Non-specialists in the
field will also find it extremely accessible and engaging in its wide-ranging,
energetic approach.
Citation: Carole Collier Frick.
"Review of Lorna Hudson, editor, Feminism & Renaissance Studies,"
H-Women, H-Net Reviews, June, 2000. http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=408196203
0440.
Copyright 2000, H-Net, all rights
reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper
credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission questions,
please contact hbooks@h-net.msu.edu.
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11-12 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 11-12-1651, Juane Ines de La Cruz, Mexican
poet-nun-intellectual whom the Roman Catholic church made sell her
4,000 volumn library and renounce any desire for broad knowledge. She was
all but hidden away from public knowledge until recently. Commemorated
as the first feminist of Spanish America, this amazing intellect had to
become a nun to survive in a civilization that forced women into marriage.
B. 11-12-1751, Margaret Molly Corbin, revolutionary
war shero who was near her husband at a battle when he was killed (women
were on the battlefields of the war both as participants and as water,
food, and munitions suppliers) and she immediately took over the gun until
she was wounded by enemy fire. Disabled she was granted a soldier's half-
pay as a pension, was considered a full member of the military until mustered
out in 1783. Margaret Corbin was listed on military rolls until April 1783.
B. 11-12-1815, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for
54 years the women's rights movement's principal leader, organizer, theorist,
and writer. Preserved the early women's movement herstory in the first
three volumes of the monumental History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1922)
written along with Susan B. Anthony and Joseyln Gage. You can read some
of Stanton's works in the WiiN Library.
B. 11-12-1898, Flora Belle Ludington, innovative
librarian of Mount Holyoke College who advanced the cooperative Inter-library
system that allows students and researchers use of the entire library system
of the United States (without which this WOA would not be possible!)
Event 11-12-1912, Ruth Law earned her pilots
license, She specialized in death-defying stunts at night that earned
her as much as $9,000 a week. She was, of course, rejected as an army pilot
in World War I but was requested by the Army to wear a NONCOMMISSIONED
officer's uniform while recruiting for the Army.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
MEIR, GOLDA:
"Whether women are better than men, I cannot say - but I can say they
are certainly no worse."
-- Golda Meir
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