Women's History

Why do we only know half of the world's past?

Victoria C. Woodhull

Born in Ohio, in 1838, one of ten children, Victoria C. Woodhull was neglected and uneducated. She married at fifteen but continued to travel, earning her living as a clairvoyant and healer for a decade.

Beautiful, intelligent, and enterprising, she divorced, remarried, then met Cornelius Vanderbilt. She persuaded him to back a New York brokerage company that she founded with her sister called Woodhull, Claflin & Co. The "Lady Brokers of Wall Street", made a fortune and in 1870 started publishing a weekly paper that advocated women's rights and even free love.

Woodhull became famous (or infamous); the popular press called her "Mrs. Satan" and "Queen of Prostitutes." Yet, she managed to appear in Congress speaking in favor of woman suffrage.

This extraordinary woman argued that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted citizenship and voting rights to everyone born or naturalized in the United States; women were citizens, and voting was a right that a mere Congressional act could endorse. Her 1871 speech won the support of other suffragists and women's associations.

As the first woman to run for president of the United States, she achieved another milestone in 1872. Her inability to vote for herself was due to history and fate: Women had not yet won the right to vote, and she had been jailed on the day before the election on obscenity charges.

Hundreds of women turned up to the polls in 1871 and 72 expecting to be turned away. Susan B. Anthony, another suffragist, sought to vote and was allowed to do so. Only to have, a few weeks later, federal marshals banging on her door to arrest her for illegally voting. She was arrested and lost her case but used it to publicize women's suffrage.

It took decades, but women eventually won the right to vote.

And they won with only themselves - without weapons, political rights, or much wealth, they had only their minds, bodies, spirits, voices, influence, charm, rage, tenderness, and strenght to turn the world around. - Marilyn French.

Have you heard of Woodhull and Anthony before?

I haven't. Maybe I'm biased because I'm not from the US, or maybe we don't hear much about the role women played throughout history. Think of a historical figure. I'm pretty sure you'll think of a man.

Having read more, I am becoming more convinced that women were at the center of many movements, particularly those battling for a better life for all. The rights we now take for granted were gained through the efforts of thousands of women.

It is especially true for the 19th and 20th centuries. Women started working, but there was a lot of fightback. Men didn't want women in their workplace because they didn't want the competition. Industry owners hired them anyway because women, together with children made for the cheapest labor force.

In 1875, women were hired for the first time in white-collar positions in governmental offices in the UK. Men working there protested that employing women was causing "grievous dangers, moral and official." Beyond that, they said, women would not be strong enough to write cross-entry acknowledgments, which required "heavy pressure by means of very hard pens and carbonic paper.” [!]

This backlash was everywhere. Men claimed women could not physically do work because it involved too much standing and lifting heavy weights. They simply ignored women's positions in mines, laundries, and other physically demanding and menial jobs during the same period. Women could only get the lowest-level and lowest-paying jobs. Most worked 14 to 16 hours a day in the clothing industry, sometimes sleeping in the factories.

But women fought back, they unionized, and they did strikes. They were beaten, arrested, and many lost their jobs, but their continuous fights, in the end, made child labor a thing of the past (at least in rich countries) and the 40-hour week a possibility.

They also had to fight hard for voting. It took over 70 years of fighting for women to get suffrage in the US and the UK.

Unsurprisingly, black women fared the worst, with the poorest and least-paid jobs. As they were often employed for domestic work, they had difficulty organizing because they worked alone at someone's house. Most importantly, they weren't broadly accepted or heard in both white women's unions and black men's unions. They had to organize their own unions and associations to fight back for their rights. They did win a few fights but still to this day earn far less than everyone else.

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World

Those are just some of the topics covered in the book From Eve to Dawn: Women's History of the World. For fifteen years Marilyn French studied the history of women, collaborating with a team of researchers and prominent historians. It culminated in a four-book series published in the 1970s exploring human history but focusing on prominent female figures and how women lived in each era.

Although I have only read book 3 - which focuses on centuries 18, 19, and the beginning of century 20 - it was quite interesting to learn how much we ignore this part of history and how courageous those women really were during these challenging and testing times, the industrial revolution.

The early industrial age was turbulent because industry revolutionized both the nature of work and relations between the elite and the workers; and it changed relations between women and men, women and work, and women and the family. Both capitalism and industrialism are patriarchal, but they are also…dynamic and offer the means for destabilizing patriarchy. They made collective action possible. - Marilyn French

Despite loving history, I have always felt that the history I learned in school was far from comprehensive. Although growing up in a country that was formed by immigrants from all over the globe, enslaved Africans, and hundreds of native tribes, I was only ever taught European history. In addition, only half of European history was covered, since it mainly focused on males.

If you are like me and interested in the other half, I recommend reading Marilyn French.

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From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Vol. 3 (Marilyn French)

Writing about what she calls the “most cheering period in female history,” international best-selling author Marilyn French recounts how nineteenth-century women living under imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism organized for their own education, a more equitable wage, and the vote.

Suffragette (2015). In 1912 London, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) a young 24-year-old laundry worker mother is galvanized into political activism supporting the right for women to vote. The film also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, and Meryl Streep.

Self Made: Madam CJ Walker

Inspired by the story of Black hair care pioneer Madam CJ Walker, this show details how the businesswoman (played by Octavia Spencer) became America’s first Black self-made female millionaire.