Redrawing the Lines of Power--Women's Family Trees

 Redrawing the Lines of Power--Women's Family Trees

I have just finished hanging a framed poster that was a recent gift from my son: "Matrilineal Dynasties of Europe." It was a perfect present. As it is described at the UseFul Charts website, "This unique chart views European history in a totally new way by focusing on the female-only lines within royal genealogy. Over 100 queens and empresses shown!"

My really crappy photo of
Useful Charts's beautiful
"Matrilineal Dynasties of Europe"
(published with permission)

It was exactly the kind of family tree I wish I'd had many years ago, when I was researching and writing a book that would eventually be published as The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (2002). 

In the introduction, titled "Redrawing the Lines of Power," I wrote about my frustration with finding so few women on royal family trees. As I now look happily on the new poster hanging on my wall, I thought I might post an early version of my introduction--it was necessarily edited for the book, but I can print here what I originally wrote years ago . . .* 

And so, an earlier version of "Redrawing the Lines of Power," written in 1998, is published for the first time:

Let us now sing the praises of famous men, the heroes of our nation's history, through whom the Lord established his renown, and revealed his majesty in each succeeding age. Some held sway over kingdoms and made themselves a name by their exploits. . . . Some led the people by their counsels and by their knowledge of the nation's laws. . . . Some there are who have left a name behind them to be commemorated in story. There are others who are unremembered; they are dead, and it is as though they had never existed, as though they had never been born or left children to succeed them.

                                                            --Ecclesiasticus 44:1-3, 4, 8-9

Abraham, the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob. Moses and his brother Aaron. David, the father of Solomon, and Solomon of Rehoboam. Like the "praises" of these "famous men" sung by the author of Ecclesiasticus, the historical narrative of western Europe has focused on generations of men. Political histories, biographies, and genealogies trace lines of power from fathers to sons and grandsons, brothers and nephews. 

During the period of English history with which I am most familiar, for example, Edward III is followed on the throne by his grandson Richard II; Henry IV is followed by his son Henry V, who is followed, in turn, by his son Henry VI; Edward IV was to have been followed by his son, who would have been the fifth English Edward, but instead is succeeded by his brother, Richard III; Henry VII is followed by his son Henry VIII, who is followed by his son Edward VI. Then something strange disrupts this narrative. At his death in 1553, Edward VI is succeeded by his sister, Mary I.

The succession of a woman to the throne of England horrified many, including the Protestant reformer John Knox, who concluded that any woman who presumed to "sit in the seat of God, that is, to teach, to judge, or to reign above a man" was "a monster in nature." Women were incapable of effective rule, for "nature . . . doth paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment."

Knox published this blistering assessment of female rule, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in 1558; his bitter indictment of "gynecocracy" was quickly followed in print by a series of pamphlets that echoed and expanded his argument that female rule was unnatural, unlawful, and contrary to scripture. From Knox's point of view, the political situation could hardly seem worse. Not only had Mary Tudor succeeded to the throne of England, but Mary Stuart, wife of the dauphin of France, had become queen of Scotland, while her mother, Mary of Guise, was acting as regent in Scotland on Mary's behalf.

Unfortunately for Knox, though, the political situation could get worse, and did, almost immediately. When Mary Tudor died only a few months after the Blast appeared, her half-sister Elizabeth succeeded her as queen of England. In France, following the death of her husband Henry II, Catherine de' Medici attempted to become regent of France for her son, Francis II. Outmaneuvered in 1559, she succeeded a year later when Francis died and the dowager queen assumed the regency for her second son, Charles IX. Thus, by 1560, England, Scotland, and France were under the direct "regiment" of women.

I began thinking about this exceptional historical moment after I had the experience of reading, one after another, the arguments against female rule penned by Knox, Anthony Gilby, Christopher Goodman, Jean Bodin, Robert Filmer, and Bishop Jacques Bossuet, among many others, and then, in turn, the defenses of female rule published to counter their extreme, sometimes violent, positions. Much has been written about the political, religious, and cultural factors that shaped this debate, but I was interested in analyzing these texts in a different context. In order to relate theory and practice, I planned to write a series of biographical portraits of the remarkable women whose "regiment" had inspired the debate, exploring the way each of these women achieved, maintained, and manipulated her position even as her right and her ability to do so were contested.

As I considered my project, I was at first uncertain about how to proceed. Aside from Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart and her mother, and Catherine de' Medici, I knew of only two other women to include in my project: Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and Jeanne d'Albret, the Protestant queen of Navarre, whose son had become Henry IV, hing of France. Would it be possible, I wondered, to find enough female rulers to make a "series" of such profiles possible?

But the more I thought about my project, the more I came to see what had been there all along. These women weren't the first powerful women in early modern Europe. Any analysis of female rulers in the early modern period should really begin by focusing on the lives of four formidable women who died early in the sixteenth century: Isabella of Spain (d. 1504), who inherited the throne of Castile; Lady Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509), who chose not to press her own claims to the English throne in order to promote the cause of her son, Henry Tudor; Caterina Sforza (d. 1509), who seized power in Imola and Forlì to preserve it for her son, Ottaviano; and Anne of France (d. 1522), who acted as a shrewd and politically adept regent for her brother, Charles VIII. The careers of these powerful and successful women seemed to me to provide models for the women who were to follow in the next generation. 

Still, as notable as they were, these weren't the only women to whom Mary Tudor or Catherine de' Medici could look for example. As I searched the indexes of political histories and biographies, I began to find the names of female rulers about whom I knew little or nothing. Despite arguments like Knox's against female rule, and despite the ordinary descent of political power from one man to another, it became clear to me that a whole range of "dynastic accidents" in early modern Europe had resulted in a surprising number of women ruling as queens or functioning as regents. It became equally clear that the lives and political careers of these sixteenth-century queens were hardly without precedent. 

Yet I could find little more than the names of these women at first. How many Blancas of Navarre were there? How many Isabellas of Aragon? Of Castile? Of Portugal? Were Charlotte of Savoy and Bona of Savoy related? If so, how? How did Louise of Savoy fit in? Were Anne of France and Anne of Beaujeu the same woman? What about Mary of Guise and Mary of Lorraine? And why was all this so difficult for me to sort out? I knew that the relationships and connections linking these women couldn't be more complicated than those of the eight Henrys, six Edwards and three Richards I knew so well; the English line of succession from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries has always been easier for me to recite than the names and dates of American presidents. 

But it was hard to find out much about these Isabellas, Annes, and Marys in traditional political history. Like the "unremembered" others in Ecclesiasticus, it was almost as if they "had never existed, as though they had never been born or left children to succeed them." But clearly they had been born, and equally clearly they had left children to succeed them. And despite the familiar narrative of conventional history, they had also had some degree of real "sway" over various kingdoms and principalities. And so, trying to figure out who these women were and whether and how they were related, I began to focus on the family trees in the books I had in front of me. And that's when I began to notice what (or who) was missing.

Like the generations of "famous men" in Ecclesiasticus-- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David, Solomon, Rehoboam--one Henry or Charles followed another in succession, father and son, springing forth as if by spontaneous generation. I searched, sometimes in vain, for women; wives and mothers were simply absent from many of the genealogies appended to the histories and biographies I was reading. I think my favorite is a Valois "family tree" that charts four branches of the family over the course of nearly four hundred years. It looks as if the line of Valois kings (from 1328 through 1547, anyway)--Philip VI, John II, Charles V, Charles VI, Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I--managed to do without any wives or mothers at all. Then again, maybe I like best the Habsburg genealogy that begins in the tenth century and continues through the seventeenth century. There are a few wives among nine generations of Habsburg descendants, but, at least according to this family tree, there were no Habsburg daughters born between 950 and the mid-sixteenth century, when Eleanor and Mary show up on one branch.

Meanwhile, in England, the five daughters of Edward III (r. 1327-77) are all too often lumped together at the end of the genealogical line as "daughters," but that at least is an improvement over the tables that chart the descendants of his sons without noting that he had any "daughters" at all. I imagine that "issue," as it often appears on such family trees, could include insignificant males as well as females, but I am suspicious that "other issue" refers exclusively to daughters. I am almost afraid to think of what the disclaimer on one "short genealogical tree" might mean: "The irrelevant branches have been pruned."

Of course not all the family trees I looked at omitted women. The "Kings and Queens of England" poster that is hanging right next to me as I type indicates the wives of Edwards I through III, Henry IV and V, Henry VII and Henry VIII (all six). But why isn't the wife of Henry VI included, especially since she was the strong and powerful Margaret of Anjou (Shakespeare's "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide")? Edward IV and Richard III are also missing their wives, as are James V of Scotland and his grandson James VI, who becomes James I of England. Then again, to be absolutely fair, while Mary Tudor's husband (Philip II of Spain) is listed, Mary Stuart's husbands, all three of them (Francis, Darnley, Bothwell), are eliminated. Still, this version of the poster is a marked improvement over the previous edition, which left out the wives of Edwards I through III, Henry IV and V as well as Henry VI, and limited Henry VIII to only three of his six wives. If there are rules to determine when women are included and when they are omitted in such genealogies, I haven't been able to figure out what they are.

I must admit I took unexpected pleasure in some of the inconsistencies I found. The Oxford History of England's volume of The Earlier Tudors eliminates all of six of Henry VIII's wives, and while I am, in general, frustrated that so many women have disappeared from royal family trees, I was delighted to see that Henry's entire matrimonial career had been wiped out. Interestingly, his elder brother, Arthur, wasn't given his wife (Catherine of Aragon) either, but his sisters Margaret and Mary are accompanied by their husbands, or at least some of them, at any rate; Margaret has her first two, James IV of Scotland and Archibald, earl of Angus, while Mary has only her second, Charles, duke of Brandon--I don't know why she didn't get to keep her king, Louis XII of France. Henry, for whatever reason, hasn't been allowed to keep a single wife. He looks almost lonely.

Even the most complete family trees, one tracing the Medici family from Giovanni "di Bicci" (1360-1428) and his wife Piccarda Bueri through Giovanni Gastone (1671-1737) and his wife Anne of Saxe-Lauenburg, for example, work patrilineally, tracing descent through the male line. In so many family trees, men's names are set in capital letters or boldfaced or highlighted, their wives' names, when included, are smaller, underneath the names, dates, and titles of the men to whom they are connected, or off to the side, after "m" or "=" to indicate their status as wives. When women marry into a family, their names suddenly appear--but where did they come from? Who were their grandmothers, their mothers, their sisters? And when women marry out of the family, where do they go? Their names are left dangling on the trees of their families, dead ends on the lines of descent. Are they and their descendants the "irrelevant branches" that have to be pruned?

And so, out of frustration, trying to identify the "unremembered" others whose names I had stumbled across, and trying to sort out the connections between them, I set out to draw my own family trees, linking women, generations of mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces. I searched--not always successfully--for the dates of their birth, the dates of their death, the children who succeeded them. As I drew and then redrew my new genealogical tables, I came to see not a series of individual, isolated women who came from nowhere to be swallowed up in the Tudor, Valois, Habsburg, or Medici families, but networks of related women and patterns of connections between them.

Once I had started to redraw the lines, I began to see something else of significance. Mary Tudor can no longer be portrayed as a "monster in nature" who suddenly, and without precedent, dared to assume political power. Mary Tudor's mother, Catherine of Aragon, was not only Henry VIII's first wife, but a queen who had served as regent of England; Catherine, in her turn, was the daughter of Isabella, queen regnant of Castile, who herself was the niece of Maria of Castile, governor of Aragon, and granddaughter of Catherine of Lancaster, regent of Castile. Isabella's elder daughter, Juana (Catherine of Aragon's sister), inherited the crowns of both Castile and Aragon; Isabella's granddaughters included Isabel of Portugal, regent of Spain; Mary of Austria, regent of the Netherlands; and Catherine, regent of Portugal. Among Isabella's great-granddaughters were Margaret of Parma, regent of the Netherlands, and Joanna of Spain, regent of Spain.

I also began to see significant connections and relationships I couldn't always indicate on my redrawn family trees: there were "genealogical" links that went beyond blood ties. Margaret of Austria, who functioned as regent of the Netherlands from 1519 until her death in 1530, had been betrothed at age three to Charles, the dauphin of France; in 1483 she had been sent to the French court where, for ten years, her care and education were directed by the extraordinary Anne, who acted as regent of France for her brother. The betrothal didn't result in marriage; instead, in 1497, Margaret was sent to the court of Queen Isabella of Castile, marrying John, heir to his mother's Castile and his father Ferdinand's Aragon. What was the influence of two such politically adept women on Margaret, who would function so successfully as regent for so many years?

If all this seems confusing, you can see why I needed to redraw family trees. Instead of genealogies that focused on kings and their sons, making clear their relationships and connections, I wanted to draw links that moved backward and forward, tracing queens and their grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, nieces, granddaughters, and grandnieces. I have to admit that I enjoyed the process of constructing these new family trees. I made the names of the four women I identified as models big--really big, with bold boxes around them. Isabella of Castile overpowers her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. She also overshadows him--wherever I could, I put my women on top. I also eliminated every son I could, including Henry VIII's long-desired Edward, as "issue" with which I was not concerned, an "irrelevant branch" I could prune. I kept only those men through whom lines of power descended to a woman. The names of the men who remain on my redrawn genealogies are so tiny I can hardly read them without my glasses. It's somehow very satisfying to see Henry VIII looking so small. Instead of Francis I and Charles V looming so large on the scene, I could see women--generations and generations of women of power.

One of the family trees I drew for The Monstrous Regiment of Women

I could also see the shifting political alliances of early modern Europe from a very different (and revealing) perspective. As I drew my new family trees, I realized that the narrative of early modern European political history looked very different if I focused women instead of men. Men like John Knox might argue against women's right and fitness to rule, but women had and could and did rule--and rule well--even as they were were being told they could not and should not.

I began my research, as I said, afraid that I might not find enough female rulers to make the project worthwhile. Instead, as I worked, I found more and more women whose stories should be included in my project, too many women, in fact, to make the project, as originally conceived, practicable. But my redrawn family trees had also suggested a way of redefining the "biographical" essays I had originally planned. Instead of perpetuating the tendency to identify a single, extraordinary woman and to focus on her individual life and "unique" accomplishments, I decided to explore the relationships among women whose lives occupy a place in and perpetuate a continuing, though largely unrecognized, tradition of political rule. Their careers, like their lives, are intertwined.

The women who assumed political power in succeeding generations in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and city-states of Italy were far more numerous--and more successful--than I had imagined, but even more surprising than their numbers and their successes is how completely their names and stories have disappeared from the history of early modern Europe. Aside from Queen Isabella, who funded the voyage of Columbus, "Bloody Mary" and good Queen Bess in England, and the romantic Mary, Queen of Scots, I had learned almost nothing about any of these "monstrous" women in a classroom, through a textbook, or from the pages of the histories and biographies I had read on my own throughout the years.

The "story" of early modern European political history has been defined by the lists of "famous men" we have constructed, lists that have "revealed . . . majesty in each succeeding age," lists that have told us who "held sway over kingdoms." There are, indeed, some "who have left a name behind them to be commemorated in story," just as there are "others"--primarily women--who have been forgotten. As far as "history" has been concerned, they are dead--it is "as though they had never existed, . . . never been born, or left children to succeed them."

I have tried here to read the past in a different way and to narrate the story from an alternative perspective. I hope, in fact, to have presented a counter-narrative here--by focusing on the lives and relationships of women, those "others" who did exist, those others who--like theirs fathers, husbands, and sons--did "hold sway" over kingdoms and make themselves names "by their exploits," who did leave children to succeed them, and who, though dead, should not be "unremembered."

My efforts here are not intended to be, and could never be claimed to be, definitive and comprehensive. I have crossed too many chronological, geographical, institutional, and theoretical boundaries to speak authoritatively. Instead, I hope they will be regarded as exploratory and suggestive-- summarizing, contextualizing, and drawing together what is known about female rule and rulers in early modern Europe, perhaps best read as an outline for or a rought draft of a counter-narrative that remains to be written.

By the way, after thinking about it for some time, I decided as I redrew my family trees to let Henry VIII keep two of his six wives--Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, strong and determined mothers whose daughters became queens.

. . . 

If you've read this far, I hope you can see that I've continued the work I began more than twenty-five years ago. In 1998, I wrote, ". . . as I worked, I found more and more women whose stories should be included in my project, too many women, in fact, to make the project, as originally conceived, practicable."

Now, at this site, also named The Monstrous Regiment of Women, I've been able to write about many of the women whose stories I couldn't tell then.

*For the sake of readability, I haven't linked all the names here to corresponding essays on this site--if you use the search function, you will be able to find posts for all of the women named here.

Update, 19 April 2026: It’s now hard to fine this chart at the website, and I am not sure whether it can still be purchased. (To find it, you have to use the search bar, but if you click “buy,” you get a “not found” message. It seems as though you can still download it, and the accompanying “video explanation” is still on YouTube. Why can’t we have nice things?

The Midnight Ride of Sybil Ludington, American Revolutionary

Sybil Ludington and her "Midnight Ride" (26 April 1777)

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

 Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, 

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: 

Hardly a man is now alive 

 Who remembers that famous day and year.

Well, I don't know who Longfellow was thinking about here--everybody hears about Paul Revere and his damn midnight ride. 

Anna Hyatt Huntington's sculpture of
Sybil Ludington, on her midnight ride,
Carmel, New York
(photo by Anthony22)

But not too many people hear about the ride of Sybil Ludington--at the age of sixteen, she undertook a dangerous ride to alert her father’s militia forces of the approach of the British.

On the night of 26 April 1777, during a terrible rainstorm, she road forty miles, from Putnam County, New York, to Danbury, Connecticut. (Revere, by the way, was forty years old and didn't complete his ride--he was captured by the British.)

Born on 5 April 1761, Sybil Ludington was the daughter of Abigail Knowles and Henry Ludington, the eldest of their twelve children.

Henry Ludington was both a farmer and the owner of a grist mill. Ludington began his military service in 1755, at the age of sixteen, when he enlisted in the Second Connecticut Regiment. He fought for the British against the French in the so-called French and Indian War, part of the larger European conflict known as the Seven Years' War. Ludington served from 1755 until 1760. In recognition of his distinguished service, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the British Colonial Army. Ludington resigned in protest after the Stamp Act (1765), but rejoined in 1773 when he was commissioned as a captain.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, rather than continue as a British officer, Ludington joined the Continental Army and took command of a volunteer infantry regiment. On 26 April 1777, Ludington learned of Governor William Tryon's planned attack on Danbury, Connecticut--this was where supplies and munitions for the Patriot army were being stored. 

And now attention turns to Sybil Ludington. Accounts differ about why she made the ride--according to family legend, she volunteered to make the trip, though it may be that she rode at her father's direction. 

In any case, Sybil made the journey, setting off after nine p.m. and riding through the night. Despite the dangers, she carried her father's order for muster, spreading the word to the militiamen to rally at her father's farm. By daybreak, most of the men had gathered. 

The British nevertheless managed to burn Danbury and destroy the Continental Army's supplies. Ludington's men were late for the series of skirmishes that became known as the battle of Ridgefield, arriving "short of ammunition" and "outnumbered by the British three to one," but they nevertheless were able to "harass the British" with their "scattering sharpshooter fire from behind trees and fences and stone walls," and the British retreated to their ships." 

Whether her father's troops won the battle or not, Sybil Ludington's ride achieved its purpose. In a history written by a member of Henry Ludington's family, Sybil and her sister Rebecca are also credited with having aided her father in his espionage work, established under the direction of General George Washington, whom Henry Ludington came to serve as an aide-de-camp. The two girls were "privy" to the "doings" of one of their father's spies; they "had a code of signals, by means of which they frequently admitted him in secrecy and safety to the house, where he was fed and lodged."

And when their father's activities raised hostilities in their neighbors, the two girls also took action:

These children would sit for hours, armed with heavy muskets, at the upper windows, behind casks on the piazza, or in a neighboring cornfield, watching for the approach of suspicious or openly hostile characters and ready to give their father warning.

While her actions in defending her father's spies and her father himself may be part of a family historian's fanciful collection of stories, and while some details of Sybil's ride may have been fancifully embroidered in later retellings (I've left out the fluff here), the fact of her ride is not in doubt.

After the war, Sybil Ludington married Edward Ogden, variously described as a lawyer (Encyclopedia Britannica!!!), a farmer, or an innkeeper. (Then again, sometimes he's named as "Edmund" Ogden--for what it's worth, the family historian identifies Ogden as a lawyer, but says he's named Henry!)

Sybil Ludington Ogden's headstone,
Maple Ave. Cemetery,
Patterson, New York
(note the spelling of her name,
"Sibbell" and "Edmond"
as her husband's name)

Now Sybil Ogden, she moved to Catskill, where she had one son, named Henry (the family historian may be confusing Sybil's husband's name with her son's). She died on 26 February 1839, aged seventy-seven. 

There are no known references to Sybil Ludington Ogden's ride before 1880, when Martha Lamb, a New York historian, included it in her History of the City of New York. 

I know I'm always bitching about the Encyclopedia Britannica's refusal to include women, but as noted above, there is an entry for Sybil Ludington. 

A profile of Sybil Ludington Ogden is also provided by the town of Patterson, New York, as part of ts "Historic Patterson" website.

Although Sybil Ludington Ogden's application for a Revolutionary War pension was denied--the reason given was that there was insufficient proof of her marriage to Edward Ogden, who had served in the Continental Army--she was honored by a U.S. postage stamp in 1975. 

Back to the Future, Part 14: More Good News for Women--We're Still Missing!!

Back to the Future, Part 14: Women and Wikipedia

I rarely refer to Wikipedia in my posts. It's not that I'm a research snob (well, okay, I'm a research snob), it's just that I hope to include information in these entries on women that wouldn't necessarily appear at the top of the page after a quick Google search. 

Logo of WikiProject Women in Red

But here's the thing, which should surprise no one: women are vastly under-represented in Wikipedia. Despite many efforts to redress the balance, the "pages" of Wikipedia are heavily skewed toward men--male historical figures, artists, writers, musicians, politicians, athletes, even goddamn video game characters. Etc., etc. Ad nauseam. 

And now a bit of happy news about just how bad it is. 

According to an April 2019 report released by Wikimedia, of the 1,618,509 biographies in the English Wikipedia, only 287,852 of them are biographies of women!!! Just 17.79%!! (This is reported by WikiProject Women in Red.)*

This number--17.9%--is up from 15%, reported in 2014. Yay????

A similar number is reported by Le project les sans pagEs: "en octobre 2018, Wikipédia en français compte 547 599 biographies d'hommes, contre 94 021 de femmes, soit seulement 17,3%" (in October, French Wikipedia includes 547,599 biographies of men, compared to 94,021 of women, only 17.3 percent).

Logo of Le project les sans pagEs

Why the disparity? A recent story in the New York Times suggests that it's not because women don't care. Rather there are continued barriers to women writers and editors--Wikipedia is a place of "relentless harassment" for women. According to a report by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Foundation itself is "seriously concerned about the idea that cisgender women and transgender editors could be repelled from Wikipedia by online abuse."

It's not only the online abuse: there is a "systemic bias in policies," "implicit bias within the [Wikipedia] community," and "poor community health"--which includes, in addition to harassment, a lack of support for "gender equity work" and a "lack of diversity in leadership."

Banner posted by Wotancito,
Spanish "Women Love Wiki" project
("making women invisible in history is also violence")

I've filled this blog with complaints about women written out of history, women written out of the literature, women written out of art, the lack of public monuments for women's achievements, and, especially, the terrible treatment of women by "reliable" sources like the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. I'm always bitching about something, I guess . . .

Update, 16 April 2019, afternoon: And, then, there's this--

The man charged with throwing a 5-year-old boy off a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America told police he was angry at being rejected by women at the Minnesota mall and was "looking for someone to kill" when he went there last week, according to a criminal complaint Monday.

But, hey, he wasn't murdering his wife, his girlfriend, or his own child . . .

Update, 19 July 2019: For Jessica Wade's efforts to write women into Wikipedia, see Maya Salam's New York Times column, "Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That" (click here).

Update, 11 April 2020: For a profile of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, the co-founder of Women in Red, see Rachael Allen's "Wikipedia Is a World Built by and for Men--Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight Is Changing That," published as part of The Lily in The Washington Post (click here).

*Update, 13 February 2024: The figures quoted on the Women in Red Project have recently been updated—as of 5 February 2024, a whole 19.74% of Wikipedia’s biography’s are about women. Woohoo!

Nicholaa de la Haye, Defender of Lincoln Castle

Nicholaa de la Haye, castellan of Lincoln (second battle of Lincoln, 20 May 1217)

Nicholaa de la Haye (c. 1150-1230) was the eldest daughter of Richard de la Haye, a Lincolnshire lord, and Matilda de Vernon, the daughter of William de Vernon. Unusual for thirteenth-century women, she played a notable role during the tumultuous reign of the English king John. 

Tomb effigy identified as Nicholaa de la Haye
 St. Michael Church, Swagon,
Lincolnshire

The year of her birth is not at all clear, but is generally estimated to have been between 1150 and 1156.

At the time of her father's death in 1169, she is one of his three co-heirs; her two younger sisters inherit her father's Norman holdings, Nicholaa her father's English estates, including those in Lincolnshire.

She also inherited a claim to the title of castellan of Lincoln Castle, a position previously held by her father and grandfather, received by royal grants

Nicholaa de la Haye is known to have been married, first, to William fitz Erneis, who died by 1178, and with whom she seems to have had one child, a daughter. She later married Gerard de Camville, probably before 1185, giving birth to two sons and a daughter or maybe two daughters--there is some uncertainty here. (Gerard's father, Richard de Cambille, was the admiral for Richard I's fleet of ships during the Third Crusade.)

By right of marriage to Nicholaa, both her first and second husbands controlled Lincoln Castle and the claim to the wardship of Lincoln Castle--in 1189, Gerard's claim on the title was affirmed by a charter granted by Richard I. (Nicholaa de la Haye may also have had a claim to the title of sheriff of Lincoln--it's a title her husband claimed in her right, but it was not mentioned in the royal charter.) But Nicholaa does not seem to have ceded all interest and control in this role.

In 1191, during Richard's absence from England during the Third Crusade, his brother John rebelled, and Gerard joined his forces at Nottingham Castle. During his absence, he left Nicholaa at Lincoln, her role to defend the castle, which she did, holding out for forty days against the siege undertaken by William Longchamp, Richard's lord chancellor.

As reported by the chronicler Richard of Devizes, "Nicholaa, not thinking about anything womanly, defended … [Lincoln] castle manfully." She did not yield her castle--the siege was broken when John's castles at Nottingham and Tickham fell. Hmmmm--it would seem that her castle was not quite  defended manfully . . . The men surrendered!

After the rebellion, Gerard was excommunicated, and in 1194, when Richard finally returned to England, Nicholaa's estates were forfeit, as was the claim to wardship of the castle. The two had to buy back their holdings with the payment of a considerable fine

When John came to the throne in 1199, after Richard's death, the position of castellan was returned to Gerard, in his wife's right. But after her husband's death in 1215, Nicholaa de la Haye assumes a more prominent role in politics. 

In the summer of 1216, during yet another period of tumult, this time barons rebelling against John, England was invaded by the French, under the command of Louis of France, "the Lion" (later Louis VIII), who was claiming title to the English throne. Nicholaa de la Haye secured the safety of Lincoln by purchasing a truce from the invaders.

A thirteenth-century manuscript illustration
of the battle of Lincoln;
from Matthew Paris's history, Chronica majora

The embattled king made a visit to Lincoln in September 1216. His meeting with Nicholaa, then a woman of about fifty or sixty, is described in a chronicle later preserving the testimony of witnesses:

And once it happened that after the war King John came to Lincoln and the said Lady Nicholaa went out of the eastern gate of the castle carrying the keys of the castle in her hand and met the king and offered the keys to him as her lord and said she was a woman of great age and was unable to bear such fatigue any longer and he besought her saying, "My beloved Nicholaa, I will that you keep the castle as hitherto until I shall order otherwise."

On 18 October of that year, just hours before his death, King John appointed Nicholaa de la Haye to the position of sheriff of Lincoln, About this unusual appointment, Louise Wilkinson notes, "The appointment of a woman as a sheriff was highly unusual in an age when women, as members of ‘the weaker sex,’ were usually barred from public life. Lady Nicholaa’s appointment as sheriff in Lincolnshire in 1216 owed a great deal both to her inherited lands and connections, and to her strong track record of loyal service to King John."

John's trust in Nicholaa's strength, courage, and loyalty proved to be well-placed. When John died on the night of 18/19 October, his nine-year-old son became king, but the country was still engulfed in rebellion. 

Once again, Nicholaa de la Haye defended Lincoln Castle for the king--this time, she held the castle for the new English king, Henry III, for several months against the besieging forces of the rebellious English barons and the French prince. 

The great English knight, the seventy-year-old William Marshall, arrived to relieve the castle--the second battle of Lincoln, fought on 20 May 1217, defeated the opposition forces. Nicholaa's defense of the castle and her aid to the royalist army were crucial in William Marshall's victory.

Of course, Nicholaa de la Haye's reward for her courage and fidelity was great. NAAAAH!!! Who are we kidding here???? Four days after the battle, she was removed as sheriff of Lincoln, the position given to the king's uncle, the earl of Salisbury, who not only took control of the city and of the castle, but attempted to control Nicholaa herself--he promptly married off Nicholaa's granddaughter and heiress, Idonea, to his son.

Even then, Nicholaa de la Haye did not surrender. In Wilkinsons' words, "Time and time again, Nicholaa was called upon to defend her home as the earl tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to wrest control of Lincoln castle from Nicholaa, first by force and later by offering hostages. Nicholaa relinquished control of Lincoln castle for the last time in June 1226 and died peacefully at her Lincolnshire manor of Swaton in 1230."  

It may not count for much, but, in the end, she survived Salisbury by four years. 

She is buried there in St. Michael's Church. 

There is no biography of Nicholaa de la Haye, but you can access Wilkinson's excellent essay, from "Women of Magna Carta," by clicking here. 

A more extended account of Nicholaa de la Haye is in Wilkinson's Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincoln.

If you are interested, the In Our Time podcast commemorating the Battle of Lincoln includes an account of Nichcolaa de la Haye's role; to listen, click here.

A plaque commemorating Nicholaa de la Haye,
Linoln Castle

The French Historian Louise-Félicité Guynement de Kéralio

Louise-Félicité Guynement de Kéralio (19 January 1757-31 December 1821)

I've been reading Carolyn Harris's recent book on Henrietta Maria, queen of England, and Marie Antoinette, queen of France. In her discussion of Marie Antoinette's woefully poor education, Harris notes that, nevertheless, she acquired many books for her personal library. 

In addition to popular novels and dramatic works, Marie Antoinette also subscribed to Louise de Kéralio's five-volume Histoire d'Élisabeth, reine d’Angleterre, published between 1786 and 1788. 

As Harris observes, "Karalio was one of the first recognized French female historians, and Marie Antoinette's purchase of the book suggests that she was interested in promoting female writers, just as her patronage of Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun encouraged the acceptance of women artists."

But, while Marie Antoinette may have subscribed to Kéralio's publication of her history of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in order to support a woman writer, Kéralio was not a supporter of the French queen. Rather, she wrote and published a scathing denunciation of  Marie Antoinette.

Louise de Kéralio was the daughter of the Breton nobleman Louis-Félix Guynement de Kéralio, a soldier, writer, and translator; her mother, Françoise Abeille, the daughter of the engineer and architect Joseph Abeille, was also a writer and translator. 

Kéralio began her literary career early; her first translation, Les nouveaux extraits des mémoires de l’Académie de Siennes, was completed when she was sixteen, her first novel, Adelaide, by the time she was seventeen. Kéralio was also a resident of the court at Versailles between October 1777 and April 1782.

A 1777 visit to Paris by the noted English historian Catharine Macaulay may have inspired the young Louise Kéralio to turn her attention to the writing of history--when publication of her history of Elizabeth Tudor began, she noted that the project was the result of ten years' of work. 

Between 1786 and 1789, Kéralio published fourteen volumes* (of a projected forty) of edited works by French women writers, Collection des meilleurs ouvrages françois, composés par des femmes, dédiée aux femmes françoises--including a sizable number of extracts from the work of Christine de Pizan, who is one of the founding mothers of this blog. And today is also Christine's birthday: she was born on 11 September in 1364. (Kéralio thought that Pizan, "as superior as she may have been to women in her century," was nevertheless "very inferior to Heloise.") 

In August 1789 she founded the Journal d’État et du Citoyen, becoming the first French woman to edit a political journal. The following year she married the political revolutionary Pierre-François-Joseph Robert.

In 1791, Kéralio published a scathing five-hundred-page attack on French queens, in particular Marie Antoinette: Les crimes des reines de France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'à Marie-Antoinette (Crimes of the Queens of France, from the Beginning of the Monarchy to Marie-Antoinette). Kéralio depicted Marie Antoinette as a monster. She calls her a "political tarantula" that weaves a web to catch her prey and a tiger that, having tasted blood, can never be satisfied.

Frontispiece to The Crimes of the
Queens of France

A frontispiece to the volume is notable: at the center of the scene is a monstrous, fish-tailed woman wearing only a crown. With her left hand, she stabs a male ruler, lifeless on the throne; with her right, she offers a cup of hemlock to three wise men. A leering satyr hovers over the scene. 

Underneath the image, the frontispiece caption reads: "A people is without honor and merits its chains when it lowers itself beneath the scepter of queens."

Well, there you have another view of the "monstrous regiment of women"!

You can view the entire 1791 Crimes of the Queens of France online, via the Bibliothèque nationale de France, by clicking here. (There you can see a much clearer, full-size  image of the frontispiece.)

An excellent analysis of Kéralio's life and work during the French Revolution, by Annie Geffroy, "Louise de Keralio-Robert, pionnière du républicanisme sexiste," is available here. 

*Numerous sources give the number of volumes as twelve rather than fourteen, but the entry for Kéralio at the Bibliothèque nationale de France indicates that fourteen volumes were published.

Many thanks to the commenter, below, with clarification about the number of volumes and with information about the disputed authorship of the Crimes of the Queens of France. After a bit of research, I am adding a link to this essay, by Éliane Viennot, on the question of attribution. This is an accessible .pdf published online--the piece is a chapter from Femmes des Lumières, recherches en arborescences, ed. Huguette Krief, Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, Michèle Crogiez Labarthe, and Edith Flamarion.

I'm With Her . . .

Hillary Clinton, Candidate for President of the United States of America (28 July 2016)

On Thursday, 28 July 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton made history--the first woman nominated by a major political party for the office of president of the United States of America. 

She's not the first American woman to have sought the office--I've posted before about the women who preceded her in seeking the office, including Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Bennet Lockwood, Margaret Chase Smith, Charlene Mitchell, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm, Patsy Mink, and Linda Jenness. If you don't know these names, time to get to work on Google! 

But, for all the women who tried before, HRC is the first to succeed in achieving the nomination. And she won't be the last . . . 

Men Write History--Of Men

Men, Women, and “History”

A few days ago, I ran across Andrew Kahn and Rebecca Onion’s essay in Slate—“Is History Written about Men, by Men?”

Of course, without reading the any further, I was pretty sure I could answer that question correctly: yes.

Even so, the findings of their study, inspired by VIDA’s annual “Count,”* are depressing:

We examined a set of 614 works of popular history from 80 houses, which either published books we defined as trade history or landed books we defined as trade history on the New York Times Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction best-seller list in 2015. . . . We found that 75.8 percent of the total titles had male authors. Interestingly, the effect was slightly less pronounced among titles that made the New York Times best-seller list—but only slightly (70.4 percent of those authors were male). University press and trade imprints had roughly the same proportion of male to female authors. The persistence of this imbalance, even among authors writing for presses that publish more academics, seems to reflect a continuing gender disparity among academic historians.

Kahn and Onion further note that 71.7 percent of all the biographies published in 2015 were about men—mostly Founding Fathers, presidents, war heroes, athletes, and male writers—and they were written by men (mostly—87%). Of the relatively few biographies about women published in 2015, most were written by women (only 6% of the biographies about women were written by men).

Rachel Hope Cleves's

history, published by Oxford,

mentioned in the Slate article

Just a few days later, last Monday, Alison Flood reported on Slate’s piece in her “Popular History Writing Remains a Male Preserve, Publishing Study Finds,” published in The Guardian. 

But Flood did more than summarize the Slate essay—she went on to report on figures in the UK, concluding that “the skew is just as dramatic.” 

Only 4 of the top-selling 50 histories published in the UK in 2015 were written by women, with 2 more co-authored by women. When The Bookseller, a trade magazine, previewed the top 57 history and politics titles of 2015, only 13 were written by women, with one additional co-authored by a woman (that’s roughly 22.5%).

In response, Imogen Robertson, chair of the UK Historical Writers’ Association, noted, “For me, the gender bias is horribly clear when you look at what women are supposed to write about: men write the grand expansive histories, the thesis-driven revisionist world views, and they mostly have the second world war to themselves. Women are allowed to write about, well, women.” 

Even though I'm now retired, I still spend my time reading and writing about women’s history. In fact, as my dear friend and colleague Tom can attest, about the time I had my fiftieth birthday, I had a bit of a flip-out, declaring that in whatever reading years remained to me, I was no longer going to read books by or about straight white men. He just laughed—saying I was not the first woman-of-a-certain-age he’d heard say that.

While I continued to teach medieval and early-modern literature until I retired in 2014—Beowulf and Chaucer and the Gawain-poet and Thomas Malory and Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser and . . . well, you get the picture, and it’s all literature I love—I have spent the better part of my career writing about women’s history and literature. (To be absolutely honest, though, I admit that I am thrilled I don't have to read Astrophil and Stella or teach even the first canto of The Faerie Queen ever again.)

Historian Mary Beard's new book is
one of the few "grand expansive"
and best-selling histories
written by women in 2015

So I find this latest analysis a bit depressing, if not the least bit surprising. Last year, as I wrote and posted an essay-a-day about women’s history, I linked to books about the day’s topic, whenever I could. Most of them were written by women. 

And it's not just who is writing and what gets written, it's about who is reading—and what readers are willing to read. 

Over the course of the thirty-five years that I taught at the university from which I retired, the student population shifted—today about 62% of the students are female. Even so, when I taught a medieval survey course or a Shakespeare course, the classroom was a mix of men and women, When I taught a semester-long course on Beowulf in the spring of 2011, a course I'd daydreamed about teaching for most of my career, 10 of the 14 students who enrolled were men.

But when I taught a course with the word “women” or, even worse, “feminist” in the title, I rarely saw a male student in the classroom. Oh, sure, sometimes there might be one or two men who enrolled in these courses—wonderful, dedicated, interested and interesting, fearless men—but so few that most of those courses were entirely filled with women. 

An excellent new history
of the women's suffrage
movement, recommended to me
by Nate Levin, a reader of this blog

More often, if there was a male student in the classroom on the first day of “Five Feminist Classics,” for example, or “Barbie, Bratz, and Bella: The Construction of American Girlhood in the Twenty-First Century” (a first-year writing seminar), he was there by accident rather than by design—he needed a literature class or a writing class and just picked one that fit his schedule without noticing the course title, reading the course description I'd written, or bought the textbooks. Sometimes he stayed—I'd like to think that the course material looked so interesting he just had to stay.

But I can’t tell you how many men didn’t even make it through the first class session—it was pretty clear what was going to happen when we hit break time, and I watched as the one or two men hurriedly packed up all their books and laptops and left the room.

“Oh, no, I’ll be back,” I remember one guy assuring me when I asked if he was going to stay in class (there were a handful of wait-listed students sitting in that day, hoping for a spot). But he never returned from that first ten-minute break.

(By way of contrast, when my friend and colleague Tom taught a first-year seminar under the title of "Fathers and Sons," he always had a plenty of women enrolled in the course, eager for what the semester would bring.)

As I think about these topics—what is history, who writes history, what history is published, who reads history, and what history is being read—I am taken back to my own moment of enlightenment, reading Gerda Lerner’s The Majority Finds Its Past:

Flipping through the pages of The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979), a book I just casually pulled off the library shelf one day, probably in 1981 or 1982, I found myself stunned at this observation: "women are and always have been at least half of humankind, and most of the time have been the majority." And then shocked by this one: "The overriding fact is that women's history is the history of the majority of humankind" (from the essay "Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges").

It's hard now to convey my surprise at Lerner's simple statements of fact—"women are and always have been half of all humankind," their history is "the history of the majority of humankind." What seems so obvious now was not at all obvious to me then--I had a B.A., an M.A., and by the time I found my way to Lerner's book, a Ph.D. I had just started my first teaching job at a private liberal-arts college.  I had spent my life studying literature and history, preparing for my career as an academic, and yet it had never occurred to me that I didn't know about any women writers before Jane Austen or about any women in history beyond Cleopatra, Elizabeth Tudor, and Susan B. Anthony.

We have come a long way since 1979—but when it comes to "placing women in history" as writers, as subjects, as readers, we still have a long way to go.

(And, by the way, if you look around for who buys and reads more books in the US, it's women. Here are recent statistics from the Pew Research Center.)

*This link will take you to a link on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—as of 1 January 2025, I can no longer access VIDA: Women in Literary Arts… Heck, it’s not just that my previous link is dead, it’s that I can’t fine the organization itself. 

Anna Comnena, Byzantine Princess and Historian

Anna Comnena (born 1 December 1083)

"Born and bred in the Purple"--porphyrogenita--is the way the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena describes herself in the preface of her fifteen-book history, The Alexiad.

Anna Comnena

The eldest child of Alexius I Comnenos, emperor of Byzantium, and the empress Irene Doukaina, Anna would also write not only that her birth had been greeted with "acclamations . . . gifts and honours" by the "leaders of the Senate and the army" but that her "parents honoured [her] too with a crown and imperial diadem." 

Although the imperial couple's third child, a son, would succeed his father as emperor, Anna did not relinquish her imperial ambitions without a fight--a long and hard fight.

She was extraordinarily well educated--or, as she puts it, she is "not without some acquaintance with literature." She "devoted the most earnest study" to Greek and to the study of rhetoric. She "read thoroughly the treatises of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato" and "fortified [her] mind with the Quadrivium of sciences" (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music).

She was also capable and ambitious. But instead of succeeding her father as the basilissa, as she seems to have expected, when she was nine she witnessed her younger brother proclaimed as basileus. And then, when she was fourteen, she was married to Nicephorus Bryennius, a soldier and statesman.

But, with her mother's support, she persisted in her efforts to have her father recognize her as his successor. Their pressures were not successful, and when the emperor died in 1118, Anna's brother, John, was proclaimed emperor.

Anna Comnena was widely believed to be a part of a plot to murder John at Alexius's funeral, and she seems to have conspired, with her mother, in her brother's overthrow. Her husband, however, refused to support his wife's claims against the new emperor.

Contemporary chroniclers and more recent historians cast a great deal of shade on Anna--but it's hard, now, to sort out her exact role, if any, or to decide whether much of the vituperation is because of her sex. How dare she.

After her unsuccessful attempts to remove her brother from the throne, Anna Comnena forfeited her property and was removed from court. After her husband's death in 1137, she either retired, or was forced to retire, to the convent of Kecharitomene.

There, at the age of fifty-five, she began writing The Alexiad, an account of her father's reign, certainly, but also a vivid portrait of the history of the period, including an account of the First Crusade, not from the perspective of the self-glorifying Christian warriors from the west, but from the point of view of the Christians in the east.

A twelfth-century manuscript copy of 
The Alexiad
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

Anna Comnena died about the year 1153--thankfully, she did not live to see the sack of Constantinople by those western Crusaders in 1204.

The Alexiad is available online at the Internet History Sourcebook--you can access it by clicking here. There is also a very affordable Penguin edition.

Update, December 2016: An excellent biography of Anna Comnena was published late in 2016, Leonora Neville's Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. Here Neville addresses both Anna Comnena's efforts at self-representation as well as later historians' versions of her: 

[Neville] begins by asking why women did not write history in Anna's society, what cultural rules Anna broke by doing so, and how Anna tried to respond to those challenges in her writing. Many of the idiosyncrasies and surprises of Anna's Alexiad are driven by her efforts to be perceived as both a good historian and a good woman. These new interpretations of Anna's authorial persona then spark a thorough re-thinking of the standard story which defines Anna's life by the failure of her supposed political ambitions.

For an insightful review, you will want to read Barbara Newman's "Byzantine Laments" from the London Review of Books: click here.

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes: Victims of Violence

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (murdered 30 September 1888)

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered in Whitechapel, London, on 30 September 1888. 

Elizabeth Stride,
photo from 1872

Elizabeth Gustafsdotter was born in 1843 in Torslanda, Sweden, the daughter of Gustaf Ericsson and Beata Carlsdotter. She arrived in London in 1865 and married John Stride in 1869. He died of tuberculosis in 1884. 

Catherine Eddowes was born in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton in 1842, the daughter of George Eddowes and Catherine Evans Eddowes. She arrived in London with Thomas Conway, and after separating from him in 1880, she began living with a new partner, John Kelly.

Stride's body was found at 1:00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, 30 September 1888, Eddowes's less than an hour later, at 1:45 a.m.

Many of the women I've written about this year have been assaulted, tortured, and killed--but they were regarded as having suffered "for their faith," and they are now known as saints.

Catherine Eddowes,
photo from 1883

Far more women--nameless, numberless--have been victimized and forgotten. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes would probably be included among those countless nameless, faceless, and unremembered murdered women, except for the fact that they are the third and fourth victims of "Jack the Ripper."

Update, 31 May 2020: The pandemic lockdown has given me lots of time to read--and so I've finally picked up Hallie Rubenhold's terrific new book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. 

Update, 4 October 2021: Hallie Rubenhold has just begun posting episodes for a new podcast series, Bad Women: Ripper Retold, which I cannot recommend enough! In the first episode, "The Ripper Myth," she reveals the outrage of the "ripperologists" and their community over her book, The Five, and the abuse and scorn heaped upon her for daring to focus her narrative on, gasp, the lives of the victims!!!!! It's an excellent series, narrated by an engaging and knowledgeable historian. (I am listening via Overcast, but it seems to be available on all podcasting services.)