00:07:26.560At the time I did the podcast, Agnes Sorrell was the focus of a particular meme that was0.97
00:07:31.140going around on the internet, which juxtaposed the oft-repeated and entirely false idea that
00:07:36.540women in the past were more modest, with the fact that Agnes Sorrell in the 15th century
00:07:42.260had a favorite boob and got her dressmakers to make dresses that left that boob uncovered.0.99
00:07:47.640An amusing meme, to be sure, and one that had the right idea, debunking that stupid0.99
00:07:52.080idea about the modesty of the past, but very poor execution. Because A, the idea that she had her0.61
00:07:58.700dresses tailored to expose her favorite breast is likely not accurate. At least I can't find any
00:08:04.120source for the claim. And B, the least interesting thing about Sorrel was her propensity for showing0.98
00:08:09.280off the goods. This was France, after all. That wasn't the cultural no-no we think it was at the
00:08:13.980time. Agnes was the 15th century mistress to King Charles VII of France. She posed for the painting
00:08:19.860the virgin child surrounded by angels by painter Jean Fouquet, which utilized the very popular
00:08:25.120nursing Madonna motif of the era. Hey, I'm not saying she didn't show off the goods, just that
00:08:30.300she didn't have her dresses tailored to do it. Also, the painting isn't sexual. Don't make it
00:08:34.860weird. She gave birth to four of King Charles's children and died at the age of 28. In 2005,
00:08:40.700research began to indicate that rather than dying of dysentery, as was the original belief,
00:08:45.100she was possibly murdered. A French forensic scientist suggested in 2005 that Agnes died
00:08:50.880of mercury poisoning. If she was murdered, why? Well, it might have something to do with the
00:08:55.480fact that her role in court had provoked some anger at the time. As a young woman with no
00:08:59.980political experience, she was advising and swaying the king on matters of state,
00:09:04.400which wouldn't have made his formal advisors, you know, men, very happy generally. Both Lady
00:09:10.300Godiva and Freyne of Athens have similar sources of fame to Agnes. Lady Godiva isn't famous for
00:09:15.900being a wealthy landowner in her own right and patron of religious houses like the Benedictine
00:09:20.420Abbey of St. Mary in Coventry. No, she's popularly remembered only in the context of her asshole1.00
00:09:26.360husband, Earl Leofric, and her nude ride through Coventry to get him to lower the burdensome taxes0.99
00:09:31.640he'd placed on the people. A story most likely first written down by a dude who lived nearly
00:09:36.840two centuries after the ride supposedly took place, by the way, which makes it very possible
00:09:42.020that the entire thing was the product of Roger of Wendover's overactive imagination and weird
00:09:47.220sexual fantasies. Freyne of Athens was an accomplished woman, a courtesan, which meant
00:09:51.920that in comparison to most women in Athens, she lived a life of freedom. She was educated. She
00:09:56.620could argue philosophy and art with men. She was incredibly wealthy. So wealthy, in fact, that
00:10:01.340legend says that she once offered to pay for the reconstruction of the walls of Thebes after they
00:10:05.740were destroyed by Alexander the Great. But what she's most remembered for in history isn't any of
00:10:10.820that. In fact, it's a likely apocryphal story, just like Godiva and Agnes, that she's remembered for.
00:10:17.160The story goes that she was the model for a statue of Aphrodite sculpted by Praxitelles,
00:10:22.140which is likely how she ended up in court with a charge of impiety for daring to be the model
00:10:26.940for a statue of a goddess. I feel like Praxitelles is more at fault here, but he's a man. They weren't
00:10:32.440going to punish him. At court, her lawyer decided to save her life by tearing her dress off in front0.93
00:10:37.660of the jury. Some versions have her disrobing herself, which I guess is better, because he
00:10:42.540believed that once they saw her beauty, they would understand why she'd been the model and would be
00:10:46.960so impressed that they would decide they couldn't kill someone so beautiful. I chose those three
00:10:52.060stories for that particular episode for one specific reason. Each of these women were, by all
00:10:57.140surviving accounts, women with many good qualities. They had intelligence, wit, political savvy,1.00
00:11:02.900strength, money. They found a way to take leadership in a world where the political
00:11:07.000and social structure was set against them. And what do we remember them for? Having really great
00:11:13.120tits. And that's about as damning a commentary as you can get on the history of women as it's1.00
00:11:18.280existed throughout modernity. Another take on this same issue is the popular history of Anne0.93
00:11:23.460Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. Many of the classic views of Anne have painted her as a
00:11:28.260seductress, a power-hungry, gold-digging homewrecker. However, historians like Haley
00:11:33.060Nolan in her book Anne Boleyn, 500 Years of Lies, question that narrative. I won't go into that book
00:11:38.920in detail, but I'll provide a link to it in the recommended reading in this episode's substack
00:11:43.200post. So that gives you an overview of the major ideas of why we study women's history. Now let's
00:11:49.100talk about how the field of women's history came to exist. There's a French term, which I absolutely
00:11:54.280won't try to pronounce because it would embarrass all of us, which translates as history seen from
00:11:59.740below and not from above, and that's really where the concept of telling the history of the people
00:12:04.520rather than the great men of history begins. The term first began to be used in the 1930s as
00:12:10.380historians began to tell the history of the masses and not of the starlets. E.P. Thompson, an English
00:12:15.880historian popularized the term among historians in his 1966 essay, History from Below. During the
00:12:22.2801960s and 1970s, many subsets of historians began to break away from the great man theory of history
00:12:28.480and began to explore the history of the masses, especially in Britain where the history workshop
00:12:33.120movement of Raphael Samuel, who worked to democratize history, began. While this movement
00:12:38.740at first focused on the history of working class people, it would eventually become the ground from
00:12:42.900which women's history would spring. British feminism and historical inquiry became intrinsically
00:12:47.880linked because of the history workshop movement, with many of the overlapping members working to
00:12:52.640uncover the quote-unquote hidden histories of women's lives. The history workshop movement
00:12:58.520would spread from Britain to many other countries, including America. During the 1960s, the second
00:13:03.900wave of the feminist movement was just beginning to really gain steam here in the United States.
00:13:08.840Betty Frieden's Feminine Mystique is published in 1963, a direct response to a book I've mentioned before on the show, Modern Woman, The Lost Sex,
00:13:16.900and Gloria Steinem founds the Women's Action Alliance in 1971.
00:13:21.820Feminism is growing as a movement, and historians who are researching women's history are beginning to outline a project to restore women to the history of the world.
00:13:30.320This initially starts out with historians combating the great man theory of history
00:13:34.560with the obvious corollary, the great woman theory of history.
00:13:39.000Historians begin to work on writing the history of the major female actors
00:15:17.620Narratives like how the birth control pill impacted the lives of women in countries that
00:15:21.960were at the heart of the proxy wars between the USSR and the United States.
00:15:25.800The Cold War era influx of Western aid for family planning programs in these countries was driven in part by a fear that if these countries saw too much population growth, it would cause a destabilization of their economies, which might lead them to turn to communism.0.77
00:15:39.760In America, the birth control pill also drastically changed women's lives.
00:15:43.860It decreased family size, increased participation of women in the workforce, and gave us an altered view of sex, which had major consequences for the shaping of American society in future decades.
00:15:54.220Women's use or non-use of birth control took on many social and political implications.
00:15:59.620While these processes aren't as easy to document as the chronology of the Cold War confrontations,
00:16:04.700for many, they impact daily life as much, if not more, than the grandstanding of political leaders.
00:16:11.080And now I'd like to take some time to discuss one of the founders of the women's history movement here in the United States,
00:16:17.580In 1963, while she was still studying at the New School for Social Research,
00:16:21.580she taught great women in American history, which is considered to be the first regular college
00:16:26.860course on women's history offered anywhere in America. Born in 1920 in Vienna, you can guess
00:16:32.800at some of the experiences she would have had as a young Jewish woman who did not move to the United
00:16:37.300States until 1939. But you don't have to imagine, you can read her autobiography, Fireweed, which
00:16:42.800she published in 2002. She didn't start her academic career until she was 38, and she earned
00:16:48.300both a BA and a PhD in only six years, an absolutely absurd timeline as anyone in academia
00:16:54.400can tell you. Gerda wrote her PhD dissertation about the white abolitionist Grimke sisters,
00:17:00.520children of South Carolina slaveholders who were stars of anti-slavery activism of their era,
00:17:06.200as well as early women's rights advocates. She would go on to play a key role in the development
00:17:11.320of women's history programs and curriculum at a number of universities, including Sarah Lawrence
00:17:16.280and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which had the first Ph.D. program in women's history.
00:17:21.860She was also co-founder of the Seminar on Women at Duke University and Columbia University.
00:17:27.220And here's a couple of my favorite clips from interviews with her.
00:17:30.820And for women, looking back to the past has usually been painful
00:17:39.280because what we would learn would be an absence.
00:17:44.680We would learn that women had not done this, and they had not done that, and that essentially, according to the traditional view, women had contributed very little to the making of human society, and even less to the making of the intellectual product of Western civilization.