A History of Women in 100 Objects

Maggie Andrews, Janis Lomas, Professor Maggie Andrews, Dr Janis Lomas

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750967143
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750987196
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

The history of the world has been told in objects. But what about the objects that tell the history of women? What are the items that symbolise the journey of women from second-class citizens with no legal rights, no vote and no official status to the powerful people they are today? And what are the objects that still oppress women, even now? From the corset to the contraceptive pill, the bones of the first woman to Rosa Parks's mugshot and the iconic Mary Quant cape, A History of Women in 100 Objects documents the developing role of women in society through the lens of the inanimate objects that touched women's lives, were created by women or that at some time – perhaps even still – oppressed them. Woven by two leading historians, this complex, fascinating and vital tale of women and womanhood is told with a lightness of touch and depth of experience that will appeal to all those interested in women's history.

Part I

The Body, Motherhood and Sexuality

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 women’s experience.

Nevertheless, many religions have placed taboos on the natural functions of women’s 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 women’s sexuality. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is still practised and is the subject of contemporary feminist campaigns across the world.

For some women who transgress social expectations in relation to sexuality, there has often been a heavy price to pay: they may be considered mad or bad. The tokens left by mothers who had to part with their illegitimate children at the London Foundling Hospital provide an insight into the ways in which women have suffered because they are, so to speak, ‘left holding the baby’.

The objects explored in this section also have some upbeat stories to tell: the fun to be had from the introduction of the dual-action vibrator, the Rabbit, in 1984; the freedom women obtained when the Maclaren baby buggy was introduced in the 1960s; and the role grandmothers take in passing on women’s history to the next generation.

1 | The Bones of Lucy

The Grandmother of Humanity

MAGGIE ANDREWS

In July 2015, President Obama visited the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa to see several hundred pieces of bone fossils representing 40 per cent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species from some 3.2 million years ago, known as Lucy.

She was discovered by a team of palaeontologists, led by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, digging in the Afar region of Ethiopia in November 1974; as the team celebrated their discovery over supper, the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band played on the stereo. Someone hearing the song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ suggested calling this collection of bones, which had most of its skull missing but contained portions of the jaw, vertebral column, pelvis and limbs, Lucy. President Obama referred to his visit to the museum at a state dinner with the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, saying:

We honour Ethiopia as the birthplace of humankind. In fact, I just met Lucy, our oldest ancestor. As your great poet laureate wrote: ‘Here is the land where the first harmony in the rainbow was born … Here is the root of the Genesis of Life; the human family was first planted here’.

He pointed out that Lucy is ‘a reminder that the world’s people are part of the same human family’ and referred to Lucy as the ‘grandmother of humanity’.

Scientific evidence suggests that the physical traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors slowly evolving over 6 million years. A range of archaeological finds provides indications of significant steps along this evolutionary path. Lucy has attributes of both man and ape; in a sense she is a halfway house between the two species. Most importantly, scientists studying the structure of Lucy’s knee and spine curvature have ascertained that she spent most of her time walking on two legs – a distinctly human trait. Furthermore, evidence of tool making has been identified in the East Turkana district of Kenya, believed to be from over 2.5 million years ago. Evidence of this has also been located in East Africa and estimated to date from 2 million years ago. All the fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago have been found in Africa. The first migration from Africa into Asia is considered to have occurred between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago, and migration to Europe between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.

The history of women in the millions of years since Lucy lived rests upon snippets of the past, incomplete traces and fragments of women’s lives that historians struggle to understand and interpret. As the 1970s feminist Sheila Rowbotham astutely pointed out, women have been ‘hidden from history’. Their history is often about the private and domestic spheres, intimate relationships, heroic struggles to survive; women’s stories are rarely considered important enough to be written down and recorded. Instead women’s history is often passed down by stories told by mothers to daughters, and perhaps even more importantly, told and retold by grandmothers. As Angela Cavender Wilson explained in the American Indian Quarterly in 1996:

In 2012, women comprised 64.2 percent of grandparents who lived with their grandchildren in the USA.

As I listened to my grandmother telling the last words spoken by her great-great-grandmother, and my grandmother’s interpretation, I understood that our most important role as women is making sure our young ones are taken care of so that our future as Dakota people is assured … It also was clear, through this story and others, that although these were and continue to be hard memories to deal with, always there is pride and dignity in the actions of our women.

Histories and traditions are often handed down in the many hours grandmothers spend caring for their grandchildren. In Britain, women working in the Lancashire factories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often relied on grandmothers for childcare, as did women who worked in the Portsmouth dockyards in the Second World War. In many contemporary societies marital breakdown and the need to combine paid work and motherhood ensures grandmothers continue to play a role in providing physical, practical and emotional support to their daughters and daughters-in-law. Furthermore, the Helping Hands study of 3,000 over-55s carried out in Britain in 2010 discovered that 65 per cent of what is now being referred to as the ‘sandwich generation’ in Britain struggle to care for both the elderly parents and grandchildren of their family. One in four working families depends on grandparents for childcare in the UK; in Holland the figure is nearer to one in two. In many African communities grandmothers are caring for children orphaned by AIDS. In 2006 the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign was launched in Toronto to ‘raise awareness, build solidarity and mobilize funds for community-based organisations that support African grandmothers and the children in their care’.

Has the important role played by grandmothers in conveying women’s history to their grandchildren been overlooked?

Many women it seems are now continuing Lucy’s role as grandmothers of humanity, and indeed proponents of the Grandmother Theory suggest humans’ longevity evolved because grandmothers played a crucial role in taking care of children: ‘Grandmothers’, according to Kristen Hawkes in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2015, ‘are what make us human’.

2 | Venus of Willendorf

Women and Fertility

MAGGIE ANDREWS

The ‘Venus of Willendorf’ is a small female figurine thought to date from the old Stone Age, between 28,000 and 22,000 BCE. Johann Veran found the figurine during excavations led by the archaeologist Joseph Szombathy, near the town of Willendorf in Austria in 1908. It is made from oolitic limestone, measures 110mm in height and is tinted with red ochre; it is now kept in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.

This is perhaps the most well known of several hundred stone figurines of somewhat curvaceous women found in the area between the Russian Steppes and the Pyrenees, which are collectively known as Venus figurines. This name, which links the figurines to Venus, is perhaps a little confusing as they pre-date by millennia the Roman period, to which the mythical figure of Venus belongs. Venus was the goddess of love, beauty and fertility; and such a name has led to an assumption that these earlier figurines were also fertility goddesses, which were perhaps appealed to by women in order to bring about conception. Certainly the statue is female, and the parts of body associated with childbearing are emphasised: the enlarged stomach, breasts and pubic area, and absence of facial features seem to define this woman by her role in procreation. Furthermore it has been suggested that the red ochre pigment symbolises menstrual blood.

Certainly time and effort were invested in constructing these figurines, but by whom, or how they were used, is hard to gauge. The figures themselves and their feet were particularly small; they seem constructed to be carried or placed on display lying down. They may have been good luck charms, which accompanied nomadic tribes in their search for food – such ample, even obese, proportions are sometimes venerated by groups facing food shortages. While some have suggested they could be cave porn with exaggerated features to appeal to men, others see them as fertility charms given by women to other women as examples of the great fecund mother goddess, perhaps even indicating a matriarchal culture. Emblems of fertility, goddesses, fruits and even animals that appear to reproduce prolifically have a place in many cultures; for example, mistletoe, hazelnuts, pomegranates, and lotus flowers. Indeed in Hindu culture the lotus flower is perceived to grow untouched by the impurity of the muddy waters in which it grows, whereas the abundant reproduction of frogs and rabbits have carried sexual symbolism, and the Easter bunny is an emblem of both rebirth and fertility. Nature and particularly women’s ability to reproduce is a potent and powerful symbol, something to be both revered and feared. When the magazine Vanity Fair displayed in 1991 the heavily pregnant actress Demi Moore on its cover a media controversy ensued. Some news-stands refused to sell the magazine; others enfolded it in brown paper, suggesting such an image was pornographic.

The Venus of Willendorf may be a fertility charm or a great fecund mother goddess.

Arguably for women the ‘sacred call of motherhood’ can be a double-edged sword. Women who do not, or cannot, bear children, historically, have been more likely to be abandoned or divorced – whether infertility was their ‘fault’ or not. In contemporary society, women unable to conceive naturally continue to feel inadequate, isolated by the numerous images of ‘perfect motherhood’ that circulate on various media platforms. In wealthier Western countries, a range of treatments for infertility has become more readily available. In 1978 the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was considered a landmark. In vitro fertilisation (IVF) gave hope to many women struggling to conceive, and is now used alongside surrogate motherhood, ova donation and adoption to enable women to become mothers. But in developing countries such as sub-Saharan Africa infertility is also common but medical assistance is hard to obtain, as health programmes are geared towards controlling the population and containing high fertility.

Are women, even in the twenty-first century, defined by their fertility?

Women encounter social and health challenges when going through IVF treatment which involves being injected with powerful drugs that can lead to excruciating headaches, mood swings and spots in front of the eyes. But perhaps it is the emotional rollercoaster of IVF that is most challenging. One woman recalled her experience:

Those years of trying for a baby were hands-down the most difficult in my life. They really changed me. Gradually I became someone I didn’t recognize or even like any more: a baby-obsessed, crazy, tearful nightmare. Never mind crying over newborn photos on Facebook, I once lost it while watching Shrek when it turned out Fiona was pregnant!

Medical and social interventions to enable women to become mothers are not problem free, or value free. Controversy now rages over the practice of women from wealthy Western countries adopting children from Africa or using surrogate mothers in India. As Carole Joffe has pointed out, ‘Adoption, by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Body, Motherhood and Sexuality
• Part II: Wives and Homemakers
• Part III: Science, Technology and Medicine
• Part IV: Fashions and Costumes
• Part V: Communication, Transportation and Travel
• Part VI: Women’s Work and Employment
• Part VII: Creativity and Culture
• Part VIII: Women’s Place in the Public World
• Select Bibliography
• Image Credits