Begin the Béguinage

In the late middle ages (and please note that I am by no means suggesting the late middle ages were a good time to be in, I’m just covering some things that would become unavailable in later centuries) there were several avenues by which a woman might live independently. Béguinages offered something akin to the male guild systems, a community by which women might live collectively and pursue a trade, functioning much like convents but without the whole “retiring from the world to pursue a life of spirituality” element.

Many small industries were dominated by female crafters at the time, particularly the production of votive candles, and the brewing of beer (which, prior to increases in production scales in the 1500s was mostly a home industry).

Lastly, at the opposite end of the scale to the beguinages, there was the sex industry. (This is not to suggest that independent woman meant prostitute in the late middle ages, as some people often imply. See above for counter-examples.) Disclaimers aside, municipally sanctioned prostitution was both common and acceptable in the latter part of the 15th century, and provided one route to an independent life.

…the courtesan was not a phenomenon on the margin of society, but one of its essential components… and constituted an important stage in the diversification of social roles and of labour.

-Achillo Olivieri, Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice

By the mid-16th century, much of this had changed. Economic conditions had all but eradicated the béguinage; the production of goods had switched to a male-dominated large scale industry; the rise of Protestantism had seen the closure of many convents; and socially acceptable sex-work was done away with by changing religious mores and the increasing prevalence of syphilis (the “French evil”) and other STDs as public health threats from 1493 onwards. The Renaissance may have improved overall quality of life, but in many ways it proved a step backwards for the opportunities of Western European women.

Meanwhile, in the world of fiction…

So, that’s how society changed; what do we see happening in fiction over the same time period? In pre-16th century work we find heroines taking on roles the Grimms would later depict as “bad for a girl but bold for a boy”. We see, in an early Catalan variant of The Waters of Life, an adventurous princess succeeding where here brothers have failed, winning out through bravery and compassion to restore her home. In the fabliaux of France and Italy we see female characters taking the lead in stories that range from the bawdy to the obscene, which reflect the assumption that of course women will sometimes take the initiative.
Even moving away from the fantastic and magical tales we find similar characterisations in more serious works such as that of Madonna Lisetta in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

By the mid-16th century the characters were beginning to take the forms that would be most recognisable to most modern readers. Here we see the shift from the active, protagonistic female character to the passive, receptive object to whom fairy tales happen.

Straparola’s magic tales, dating to 1553, deliver a mixed message on sex and gender. The older tales in the collection stay fairly true to their roots, but the newer ones show female characters who must fear men, who must fear the consequences of associating with them. No longer do they take the lead, instead they are there to be won, as with the story of three brothers who rescue a princess and fall to arguing over who should wed her. She doesn’t get a say in the matter.

If Straparola’s collection shows the transition, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) gives us the conclusion. By this point all the stories reflect the new order of things. Female characters are there now almost entirely to receive the actions of the male leads, without much choice in things themselves. A large portion of Basile’s tales revolve around unwanted and involuntary pregnancies. This tone continues all the way through to at least the early 19th century, and provides the link to the next point of this post.

And now, speculation!

Right, this next bit is somewhat more speculative: There is some research suggesting that up until around the start of the 16th century women had a good deal of control over their fertility (check the further reading section at the end here for more details). Between 1500 and 1700 this ability substantially declined, leaving women far more susceptible to the consequences of sex. We can suggest a few reasons for this decline: Firstly, there was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, which branded midwifes who provided abortifacients as witches, and lead to witch-hunt panics through Western Europe. At the same time there was the rising tension caused by the Protestant Reformation, which saw increased conflict between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, and lead to both the Protestant and Catholic churches being increasingly zealous in order to demonstrate their own faithfulness.

There are arguments (see particularly Ruth Bottigheimer’s essay Fertility Control and the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine available in this anthology) that the change in the role of the fictional woman and the change in real life control over fertility are utterly bound together. The real dangers of sex became the over-arching dangers of the fairy-tale plot, the imprisonment in towers, the kidnappings, captivity, and general disempowerment. Thus the tales of the Grimms, in which “men act, women are acted upon.”

…old concepts took on a new force and came to dominate… Women in tale collections no longer survived by their wits… Instead, their bodies became vehicles of “honour” and “dishonour”.
– Ruth Bottigheimer

So yes, the overall point here is that considering the representations of gender in fairy tales is not quite so simple as just going “Cor, Disney/Grimm/Perrault were a bit crap at gender, eh?” There are myriad other factors that go into the formation of a story, as hopefully this (incredibly brief) overview of some has demonstrated.

Other stuff on vaguely related notes that’s worth reading:

• John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
• Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
• Patricia Hannon’s Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairytales in Seventeenth Century France

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus

M

MARRIAGE

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2.24

So begins marriage. In this day and age, most people think of such ‘cleaving’ as kinda cute, an emotional commitment “’til death do us part”; and indeed the union matrimony represents (‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) begins with the word’s Latin ancestor, the double-gendered maritus / marita (= ‘husband / wife’). Ever-efficient, the Romans join husband and wife in one word, giving us, in miniature, marriage’s first definition: ‘the relation between married persons; wedlock’.

Ooh little darlin’…

I do... Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Image from http://www.halloweenweb.co.uk/

But before all our newfangled post-Romantic notions of individualism, marriage was much less dewy-eyed. It required nothing more than parental consent, and its functions were social, religious and legal. Firstly, it acknowledged a sexual relationship and those children born within it, thus easing the financial burden of bastard upkeep on society and oiling the cogs of inheritance. Secondly, it was a Holy Sacrament, an institution to prevent sin, though it did not sanction guilt-free sex – too much fun with your wife, and it became adultery (= ‘pollution of the marriage bed’).

Finally – then as now – marriage linked families, dynasties, and countries together ‘in-law’, in a way that could be personal, symbolic, or world-changing: new money meeting impoverished aristocracy; the Venetian Doge annually ‘marrying’ the sea; Catherine of Braganza bringing England £300,000, Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. In extension, it helped negotiate the legal exchange of worldly goods, including a dower for the bride should she survive her groom, inheritance for the children, and the resolution of all money matters under the auspices of the pater familias. So it was impossible for a wife to run up debt, to own property, or, in any sense, to exist independently of her husband. In consequence, marriage became the Holy Grail for 99.9% of young women, who dreaded remaining financially dependent on rich relations or married sisters should the marriage-market reject them (as it did, if you were the wrong side of one in three aristocratic women).

…if U ain’t busy for the next 7 years…

Phew. In its second definition marriage takes up the legal challenge, becoming ‘the action, or act, of marrying; the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’.

Dearly Beloved... Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.

The non-specifics here are no accident: to the irritation of the early modern church, ‘contract marriages’ and Dodgy Marriage more generally (Scotch Marriages or Fleet Marriages) endured for centuries before the Marriage Act of 1753 put paid to such shenanigans and demanded a public service or none at all. Previously, ‘the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’ could be an exchange of bent or halved coins, the presentation of a ring, or a declaration (‘I make you my wife’). There were certain caveats to this last, of course – you had to use the present tense (no conditionals), unless you used the future and then tumbled into bed: present consummation is present consent.

All very neat, in theory, although such marriages generally took place on the hoof between impetuous couples and only became of real significance once the bride fell pregnant or one or both of the parties got into difficulties. Then you get into semantics: what does ‘will’ mean, exactly? It’s an uncooperative word, conflating what you ‘want’ and what you ‘will do’. Church courts agreed, and many of those marriages that were challenged were dissolved, with an inevitably skewed impact on the would-be wife.

So marriage is as much about speech and silence as ‘cleaving’: moreover, much of its value depends on the weight society gives how you live (today, you can lose your state benefits if you ‘live with another person as if you are married‘). It also creates interesting problems if you are physically silenced before you can assert your consent (as happens in Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed), or if your marriage is explosively interrupted, as in Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun. Conversely, Renaissance actors wondered what God thought about marriages carried out on stage as part of a performance: valid or not? Why not? This whole idea is, in essence, the premise of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2004), where nobody questions the legality of Victor’s (clearly accidental) declaration to the bride of the title, despite trying every other conceivable method to get him out of it.

…Let’s pretend we’re married and go all night.

The word marriage reflects this in a now-obsolete sense, as ‘intimate union’, antonymic to virginity. And here I nearly tripped up on another little tradition: breach of promise, a common law tort allowing a partner to sue their long-fled lover for damages based on the impact of such ‘intimate union’ but also on the value of language – ‘Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die? Well you’re still alive…’

This tort was overwhelmingly used by women, although originally payable to the father of a seduced girl, who had lost ‘services’ (make me a cuppa, love) because of her pregnancy. Later on, it became a means of quantifying waste of time, reputation and trousseau-money in a marriage market competitive enough that such things mattered. Although the tort was abolished in the UK in 1970, a version is still in use elsewhere: a jilted woman in Chicago is currently suing her fiance for the costs of her cancelled wedding, and ’emotional distress’. Whether or not she will succeed is unclear, but her early-modern precursors inevitably triumphed:

See my interesting client
Victim of a heartless wile!
See the traitor all defiant ,
Wears a supercilious smile!
Sweetly smiled my client on him
Coyly wooed and gently won him….

W.S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (1875)

Trial By Jury explains why the tort was so useful to jilted women, but also why it declined: by 1875 female financial options were expanding enough to change the public perception of such cases from ‘poor innocent maid vs. base seducer’ to ‘I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…’ So what began as a way to compensate gender inequality itself ended as a vehicle for misogyny, with stories of pretty girls luring men in and then threatening to do the legal equivalent of ‘thcreaming and thcreaming until i’m thick‘. What God has joined, let no man put asunder.

Further Reading:

• Check out Lawrence Stone’s The Road To Divorce: England 1530-1987, which tells you everything you need to know about everything.

• Sadly finished now, but keep an eye out for Amanda Vickery’s At Home With The Georgians, should it ever return to TV.

NEXT WEEK: N is for Nanny

G

GIRL

And alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
– Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

‘Twas brillig

Picture the linguistic landscape of the thirteenth century. Full of bastard Latin, Anglo-Norman, smatterings of Anglo-Saxon crudities, and a few words whose origins nobody knows. Sometime around 1290, the word girl appeared, used to signify ‘a child or young person of either sex’, alongside clarifying compounds knave girl and gay girl (‘boy’ and, er, ‘girl’ respectively). Like some tantalisingly similar words – lad, lass, boy – its provenance is unclear, although some cunning linguists would have it derive ultimately (via some torturous and dark history) from the Greek ‘parthenos’ (=’virgin’). But yes, uh huh, you read right: in its earliest incarnation, girl was ungendered. In fact, it was not until the 1530s that its more specific application to XX chromosomes surfaced, with girl meaning ‘a female child’ – and even then, it still had its enduring reference to ‘a roebuck in its second year’, with roebuck being, naturally, the male equivalent of roe (a deer, a female deer).

Dear, dear

John Ruskin aged three and a half, by James Northcote (1882), National Portrait Gallery, London (In storage: clamour for its return!)

So the Sylvanian Deer Family would be made up of a roebuck, a roedeer, and, perhaps a (male) girl. Not actually that uncommon: after all, we classify animals via male, female and child (calf, cow, bull; pup, bitch, dog) with a third, genderless young’un alongside their sexually mature parents all the time.

Here comes an art history aside to girl’s ambiguous beginnings: glancing, for example at Queen Victoria with her family, a  young prince of Spain, or even an English merchant family of the 1740s, the gender identities of the under-6s seem, well, fluid at best. I should add that, in the case of the Spanish Royal Family, the eldest prince (Baltasar Carlos) leaps straight from painterly petticoats to politically potent riding gear and full armour with apparently no mid-point whatsoever. Another prince, the young Charles II, appears in full armour aged twelve, although in his case there were excellent practical reasons for the switchover (lol revolution). There is also James Northcote’s portrait (right) of John Ruskin, art historian, antiquarian, arguable founder of the National Trust, patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and sometime author – aged three and a half. Manly indeed.

This could speak of a reluctance to bother gendering the child until that gender could be of socio-political relevance (something infant mortality could only have encouraged), but that is not to say it went un-bemoaned by the children themselves. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke complained bitterly of his mother’s reign of sartorial terror: ‘I had to wear beautiful long dresses, and until I started school I went about like a little girl. I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll.’ I am also reminded of the story that hit headlines in Sweden about a couple who refused to gender their two-year-old at all, for fear of falling into gender’s traps.

Not yet a woman

Beggar children are in. Alice Liddell, photographed by Lewis Carroll.

But, as we may ask of this Swedish child, what happens to girl once its gender has been set? Well, one of its first gender-specific definitions is, as of 1668, ‘a maid of all work’; sweetheart or mistress makes its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century (as in the popular song ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’); and it appears in compound reference to prostitution – a kind girl, girl about town. These are all potentially belittling terms for female-orientated stations in life, which can nonetheless retain a flattering appeal ­– think Patsy Stone and her insistence on being referred to as ‘mademoiselle’; or, more psychotically, think Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

So, actually, as girl grows up, it sexes up: indeed, once gendered firmly female, its sexual identity becomes more complicated, and this is something that seems to go alongside a developing idea of what early youth actually is. It is only really with the Victorians that the ‘cult of childhood’ really came into being, upheld by luminaries such as J. M. Barrie, Ruskin himself, Charles Dickens and, of course, Lewis Carroll.

This is where whispers start snaking around history, and it feels fitting that the term paedophilia erotica did not come into diagnostic existence until 1886, for this was arguably the first time childhood was regarded with fetishism (as later underlines the actions of ‘poet and pervert’ Humbert Humbert, in Nabokov’s now-notorious Lolita). Girls suddenly become not simply small genderless adults, but (feminine) symbols of what adulthood is seen to lack: innocence, purity and beauty, as in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, whose Little Nell loves to say her prayers. Dickens’ adult females fare little better, of course, and the Victorian infantalisation of women proves girl in grown-up action, and a topic for another day.

This, then, is the context for Carroll’s photography, but it is important to note that, whatever their evidence for something darker, their subject matter was by no means original: Carroll’s contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, produced many similar images (worksafety check: mild nudity) that played on girlish simplicity for typically Victorian effect.

[She was] the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed.

He wondered if she was a real live person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops.

– Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1862-3)

A strange journey, then: a word that commences genderless and ends sexualised and technically belittling (‘the checkout girl’), but without much perceptible backlash from the female population. Are we not all Patsy Stones?

NEXT WEEK: H is for Hysteria