Maggie Andrews - A History of Women in 100 Objects

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Maggie Andrews & Janis Lomas, 2018

The right of Maggie Andrews & Janis Lomas to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8719 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Turkey

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Womens history is multifarious, womens experiences infinitely varied, too wide-ranging to be summarised by 100 objects in 100,000 words. The objects we have included provide a starting point for exploring and discussing womens past. They provide a sense of the rich heritage of women, stories of how women were encouraged to conform to ideas of femininity and how feminist forebears challenged any such pressures; the objects are indications of womens oppression, womens heroism, womens ingenuity, and their skill and expertise.

The journey to select the 100 objects for this volume is littered with objects that were going to be included and were then sidelined in favour of others. The choices we have made will not, and should not, be those that others would have made. Historians are not neutral or impartial; they start from where they are at, their own experiences and knowledge, values and interests, their concerns and politics. This is a history written by and with the priorities of social and cultural historians of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but we have attempted to look beyond this to explore some of the communalities in womens experience across time and space. Written for publication in the year that Britain celebrates the centenary of suffrage being granted to some women, maybe suffrage and the steps along the way from womens domestic focus to their increasing engagement in the public sphere loom larger than they otherwise might. This book is however a history of women not the history of women; our choices are intended to provide a starting point for discussions, debate and some discord about womens history, about what, how and why womens lives have been changed, shaped and redefined.

Womens history has perhaps inevitably charted many of the constraints, controls and restrictions placed on women in the past and the present. But women are not passive nor merely victims; they have agency, they find ways of taking control even if the conditions of their lives are far from ideal. In 1852 Marx argued that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. His analysis could perhaps very usefully have discussed women, who also make their own history, and as rulers, scientists and creative talents they have also made everyones history although this has all too frequently been forgotten. The objects in this volume celebrate womens skills and resourcefulness, their tenacity and creativity, their sense of fun and freedom in the face of constraints and criticism.

The significance of individual objects discussed sprawls across borders and boundaries although we have arranged them thematically, in sections, to make it easier for readers to navigate their way around the topics. Some of the objects could have been placed in a different sections; the electric refrigerator, which was invented by New Jersey housewife Florence Parpart in 1914, could have come under Wives and Homemakers, but is included in the section on Science, Technology and Medicine, because it serves as a reminder that domestic technology is not something that is invented for women but something that women have taken a role in inventing themselves.

This is not a book we have written on our own: so many people have been involved in discussion about it and made suggestions for inclusions. We have had the benefit of a considerable number of professionals with relevant expertise. Our special thanks therefore go to Paula Bartley, Dickie James, Sallie McNamara, Lesley Spiers and Gill Thorn. Research and specific chapters have been written by past and present postgraduate and undergraduate history students at the University of Worcester: thanks are due to Hayley Carter, Nicola Connelly, Amy Dale, Lisa Davies, Richard Dhillon, Scott Eeles, Jade Gilks, Elspeth King, Rose Miller, Anna Muggeridge, Linda Pike, Charlotte Sendall and Leah Susans, who have all contributed to making this a more richer and more varied text. The research in this book relies upon the explosion of womens history that has occurred in the last fifty years; it draws upon the academic research of countless historians, who are too numerous to mention or reference. It is not a book intended to sit on the shelves of university libraries but rather to enter the homes of those who had not realised how fascinating womens history can be. We hope you will get excited by womens history and explore it further in the hundreds of books, films, blogs, events and websites dedicated to womens history, perhaps beginning with the Womens History Network, which since its formation in 1991 has been promoting and encouraging womens history in Britain. This book is therefore dedicated to historians of women, past, present and future, with grateful thanks.

For some it is the body that defines what it is to be a woman the experience of menstruation, pregnancy and giving birth but although these may seem to be unifying biological experiences, they are given many varied meanings in different cultures at different historical moments. There have been, for example, shifting attitudes to the pain women experience in childbirth; thankfully the idea that it was something that women needed to experience in order to love their babies has now been abandoned, thanks to objects such as the Lucy Baldwin apparatus for obstetric analgesia.

Recent debates about gender have shifted away from the idea of a binary opposition between men and women, emphasising the fluidity between the genders, and the degree to which people exert agency in shaping their own gender identity. Objects such as baby feeders have separated the degree to which biology predetermines womens experience.

Nevertheless, many religions have placed taboos on the natural functions of womens bodies, forbidding women to undertake various tasks or enter holy places during menstruation and insisting on the ritual purification of women after giving birth. Similarly, the pleasure that women can enjoy from their own bodies and masturbation remains a topic that may elicit social disapproval. While medieval historians have debunked the myth of metal chastity belts as humorous fantasy objects, there are a range of social and physical ways in which power has been exerted over womens sexuality. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is still practised and is the subject of contemporary feminist campaigns across the world.