An interesting segment on medieval Muslim women from the Memoirs of Usamah Ibn Munqidh in ‘The Crusades: A Reader’, edited by S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt
“Duke Amalo sent his wife to another estate to attend to his interests, and fell in love with a certain free-born girl. And hen it was night and Amalo was drunk with wine he sent his men to seize the girl and bring her to his bed. She resisted and they brought her by force to his house, slapping her, and she was stained by a torrent of blood that ran from her nose. And even the bed of the duke mentioned above was made bloody by the stream. And he beat her, too, striking with his fists and cuffing her and beating her otherwise, and took her in his arms, but he was immediately overwhelmed with drowsiness and went to sleep. And she reached her hand over the man’s head and found his sword and drew it, and like Judith Holofernes struck the duke’s head a powerful blow. He cried out and his slaves came quickly. But when they wished to kill her he called out saying: “I beg you do not do it for it was I who did wrong in attempting to violate her chastity. Let her not perish for striving to keep her honor.” Saying this he died. And while the household was assembled weeping over him the the girl escaped from the house by God’s help and went in the night to the city of Chalon about thirtyfive miles away; and there she entered the church of Saint Marcellus and threw herself at the king’s feet and told all she had endured. Then the king was merciful and not only gave her her life but commanded that an order be given that she should be placed under his protection and should not suffer harm from any kinsman of the dead man. Moreover we know that by God’s help the girl’s chastity was not in any way violated by her savage ravisher.”
Queen consort of England and Countess of Angoulême
Born c. 1186/c. 1188 - died 1246
Claim to fame: a feisty young queen who defied the English monarchy and rebelled against the French.
At the age of 12 or 14, Isabella became the second wife of 34 year old King John of England in 1200. Though young, she was already a renowned beauty with blonde hair and blue eyes. It was reported by his critics that John was so infatuated with her that he neglected his duties as king to stay in bed with her. She became the Countess of Angoulême in her own right in 1202. She had five children with John, including his heir Henry III. She oversaw the coronation of Henry after John’s death in 1216 but left her son and returned to France a year later although he was just nine years old.
In 1220 Isabella married Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of La Marche. Interestingly, she had been betrothed to his father prior to her marriage to John and Hugh X was engaged to her daughter, Joan, but decided he preferred Isabella who was still still a beautiful woman of around 30 years old. She married without the consent of Henry III’s council which lead to a stoush whereby her dower lands were confiscated and she threatened to prevent the marriage of her daughter to the King of Scots. Her son tried to have her excommunicated but eventually came to terms. She had a further nine children with Hugh.
Apparently disgruntled with her lower status as countess, she took great offence to being publicly snubbed by the French Queen Dowager, Blanche of Castile, whom she already hated due to her support of the French invasion of England in 1216. In retaliation, Isabella reportedly conspired with other disgruntled nobles to form an English-backed confederacy against the French King Louis IX. By 1244 the confederacy had failed but Isabella was implicated in an attempt to poison Louis. To avoid arrest she fled to Fontevraud Abbey where she died two years later.
The first image is of her effigy at Fontevraud Abbey. The second is her seal, presumably designed before she had fourteen children…
“When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours; and although we may be delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are also strong; and others, coarse and harsh, are cowards. Women have not yet realized this, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow.”
#NowReading Constellations by @sineadgleeson and it’s everything I expected it to be. I’m still near the beginning but I can tell I’m in for a journey. The chapter on hair brought up so many emotions within me, I had to let myself cry when I came to the end of it. Looking forward to savouring the rest of the book over the next few days. • #herstory #nonfiction #memoir #womenwriters #irishwriters #constellations #newbook #ourshelvesareourselves #bookstagram #books #bookstagrammer #bookcommunity #bookish #bestoftheday #saturday #weekend #igreads #reading #white #home #interiors (at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxnwEbwA8TB/?igshid=cwsc6j6l23y
alright. we’re going to talk about typhoid mary. one last time, i promise.
it was not mary’s fault that her body was hospitable. it was not mary’s fault that there was no cure.
she wasn’t discovered as a fluke. an epidemic fighter by the name of george a. soper, who was investigating the outbreak at oyster bay, tracked her down. her work as a cook wasn’t directly her downfall either, for almost everything she handled would be exposed to high temperatures thus killing the bacteria. instead it was a frozen dessert “which Mary prepared and of which everybody present was extremely fond. This was ice-cream with fresh peaches cut up and frozen in it.” in the beginning there is always a woman and a piece of fruit. whether an apple, a pomegranate, or a peach. an ovarian symmetry persists in propagation.
mary didn’t believe that which she could not see. in her defence, what would you do if a man showed up at your door demanding samples of piss and shit and blood, insistent that you were an accomplice to a crime, unwitting or not.
soper kept tracking mary down. she was increasingly bullish and refused to acknowledge any part in the infection. soper called mary a proved menace to the community. mary retorted that there had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. there was typhoid fever everywhere. the department of health and the police hunted her down. after administering the tests and fully confirming her role as a carrier, she persisted in her denial while they forced her confinement.
when soper discovered her once more she was again sent to north brother island. this time there was less of a struggle.
she never fully admitted that she agreed with the diagnosis but the fact that enough around her accepted it meant that perhaps she could no longer go about her life in the usual fashion.
no one came to her aid while she was sick and no one came to claim the small sum she left behind. for all intensive care purposes she was alone.
it’s funny that we don’t have other accounts of asymptomatic carriers of the like. then again, how can we expect others to self-report an unrecognizable lack.
consider war as a disease. it spreads from one to another while borders are shut hoping to keep out the infection hoping to contain peace. those considered to be instigators are shut up and isolated.
consider that war is self-induced. a mass hysteria of its own. an auto-immune condition that erupts from within.
“war is a disease, a disease not of individuals, but of countries.” this metaphor is neither new nor controversial. but often it is treated as an inevitably malady, something to be contained and limited but unavoidable. laying skeletons and genes bare to decode a resistance to nature while unable to ascribe a resistance to ourselves.
almost everyone is a warmary. asymptomatic carriers who go about their daily business because their own personal lives aren’t interrupted by the sickness. never mind the fact that it is often those daily habits that contribute to the suffering of others, whether witnessed or not.
what would it mean to stop that spread of transmission? how can a sickness that ripples through us all be contained? such questions reveal the limits of the metaphor as well as of our own coping mechanisms.
carrying it within ourselves the potential to spread to aggravate is great. typhoid mary persisted with her habits because it was all she knew. other options were more difficult. they always are.
we have to question the systems that keep us entrenched in asymptomatic warfare.
•
metaphors can easily be stretched thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. metaphors can spread like an infection, drawing dangerously false equivalences like the recent economist article that i will not dignify with a link. or become kindling to inflame without elaboration for the sake of a buzzing headline.
war on a virus is proclaimed, willfully oblivious to the fact that a virus cannot sign a peace treaty. aiming for an annihilation of the abstract regardless of the bodies that lie in the wake. bodies are just carriers, patients made culpable by their visibility.
so of what use is this warmary analogy when nothing is quite like another and straws grasped at are hollow nonetheless. perhaps the appeal lies in its ability to reveal complicity without malice. a banality of evil that is at once benign and malignant like a cancer cell who claims it’s just trying to survive like all the rest. but what’s to be gained from acting like there’s opposing sides when there’s only one body.
marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.
This badass here was the coolest woman of the Middle Ages. She was the daughter of William X, duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers. When she was fifteen, her daddy died and she inherited his lands. She married Louis VII and became queen of France. She accompanied her husband to the Holy Land on a crusade, where she is rumored to have cheated on him (possibly with her uncle Raymond of Poitiers). Her and her ladies dressed as Amazons and were badasses, but the Second Crusade was a disaster. Louis was not only a boring lover, he was also at the time an ineffectual military leader. Under the pretext of consanguinity (they were third cousins) and the wife’s supposed inability to bear sons (they had two daughters together), Eleanor was repudiated. She said kthanxbye and bounced with her lands. Some dude tried to kidnap her and force her to marry him but she was like HELL NO. She married Henry, Duke of Normandy, who was eleven years younger than her (what a cougar! and she might have had an affair with his father prior to their wedding). Two years later, Henry became king of England. Throughout their marriage, she gave him five sons and three daughters (in your face, Louis!). She supported her sons in their rebellion against their father, so Henry imprisoned her for sixteen years. When Henry died, Eleanor’s favorite son, Richard the Lionheart, became king and released his mommy at once. Aged approximatively 67 at the time of her liberation, she became queen dowager. She died at 82 years old! She is, to my knowledge, the only woman to have ever been queen of France and of England. Three of her sons ruled over England (Henry, Richard and John), and two of her daughters were also queens (Eleanor and Joan). Throughout history, people have accused her of every vice (notably to have poisoned Henry’s mistress, the Fair Rosamund) but such allegations are false and were only invented in attempt to discredit a queen who, in a time where so little opportunities were given to women, displayed great fierceness and power.
Ain’t I a Woman? “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do wid Him.” Sojourner Truth, ex-escrava, líder abolicionista novaiorquina e ativista dos direitos das mulheres
Na Hyeseok was a Korean feminist, poet, writer, painter, educator, and journalist. Her pen name was Jeongwol. She was the first female professional painter and the first known feminist writer in Korea.
As a young woman, Na was known for her high spirits and outspokenness, making it clear she wanted to be a painter and an intellectual, rejecting the traditional “good wife, good mother” archetype.
Her major written work, Kyonghui (경희), published in 1918, concerns a woman’s self-discovery and her subsequent search for meaning in life as a “new woman;” it is the first feminist short story in Korean literature.
In 1919, she participated in the March 1st Movement against Japanese rule. She was jailed for this, and the lawyer hired by her family to represent her soon became her husband.
She challenged the patriarchal social system and male-oriented mentality of Korean society at the time. In “A Divorce Confession”, Na criticized the repression of female sexuality; stated that her ex-husband had been unable to satisfy her sexually and refused to discuss the issue; and finally she advocated “test marriages” where a couple would live together before getting married to avoid a repeat of her unhappy marriage. It was “A Divorce Confession” that ruined Na’s career as her views were regarded as scandalous and shocking as in traditional Korean Confucian culture premarital sex was regarded as taboo and women were not to speak frankly of their sexuality.
Unable to sell her paintings, essays or stories, Na was reduced to destitution and spent her last years living on the charity of Buddhist monasteries.
Her fate was often used to scold young Korean woman who had literary or artistic ambitions; “Do you want to become another Na Hye-sok?” was a frequent reprimand to daughters and younger sisters. However, she has recently been acknowledged in Korea for her artistic and literary accomplishments.
Kanno Sugako (1881–1911), was a Japanese radical anarcho-feminist.
She was the first woman to be executed in modern Japan for political reasons, at the age of 29, for having led a plot to overthrow the government - which was building a new economy on the backs of girls sold in slavery to textile factories during the Meiji period.
Later, when the judge asked Kanno if she wished to make a final statement, she stated her only regret was that the plot failed.
I learned about her from a book called “Flowers in Salt” by Sharon Sievers about the modern beginnings of feminism in Japan.
It’s a heartbreaking book.
Japan wanted to modernize after seeing the threat of US technology in the late 1800s. The government was able to create a trade economy due to the literal enslavement of women and girls in textile factories.
Companies visited rural towns promising a better life for young women. Farming parents believed their daughters would have more opportunities if they could support themselves, and the government created propaganda to this aim.
Girls as young as 6 walked through the mountains to the factories with no shoes, so it was eventually called a trail of blood.
Later, towns caught on, and when a company came to collect girls, they protested, and were met with violence.
(Resistance to company collection of girls actually sparked one of the first modern labor protests in Japan.)
Female workers were locked in, and the dorms were a prison. The invention of lamps meant that working hours extended to as much as 36 hours at a time. Their handwoven textiles were exported for company profit, and male overseers raped them.
There are anecdotes of men finding women’s bodies near the factories, where they had escaped just long enough to kill themselves.
Kanno lived at a time when this was happening, and had been raped herself when she was fifteen. She wanted to stop the government expansion which was coming at the expense of human rights.
The modern economy of Japan was created through enslaving and selling women and girls.
And as radical feminists know, that hasn’t ended. All economies are built on women’s slavery in one way or another.
Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992. After medical school and a brief general practice, Jemison served in the Peace Corps from 1985 until 1987, when she was selected by NASA to join the astronaut corps. She is a dancer and holds nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, letters, and the humanities.
Lucy Parsons (1853 – 1942) was an American labor organizer, radical socialist and anarcho-communist. She is remembered as a powerful orator.
Parsons entered the radical movement following her marriage to newspaper editor Albert Parsons and moved with him from Texas to Chicago, where they co-wrote an anarchist newspaper called “The Alarm”.
Following her husband’s execution in 1887, Lucy Parsons remained a leading American radical activist, as a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.
It is speculated that Parsons may have been born a slave, to parents of Native American, African American and Mexican ancestry. Lucy Parsons’ origins are not documented, and she told different stories about her background so it is difficult to sort fact from myth.
Described by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” in the 1920s, Parsons had become highly effective as an anarchist organizer primarily involved in the labor movement in the late 19th century, but also participating in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women.
“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
