Tag Archives: gender history

Celebrating Black History Month: Citizenship, Belonging and the Political Imagination of Women in Rhodesia, by Shepherd Mutswiri

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I was struck by the imposing Irish symbols and their historical meaning. The Irish Defence Forces marched on stage holding the Irish flag which had been chosen as the national flag during the Irish War of Independence in 1919.  As I sat there, I heard the national anthem and I looked up with a great sense of belonging and pride. Then we all stood up and pledged our fidelity to the Irish State. The Army Band under the command of Captain Carroll provided the music that day. The carefully choreographed ceremony was celebratory, and the mood was jovial, but it was the simple but poignant display of patriotism that was immensely moving. It left an indelible impression on me. Since then, my identity and belonging were intricately interwoven with the past and future of the Irish State, while being immensely proud to be Zimbabwean. When I look back at this internalization of symbols and images on the day of my Irish citizenship ceremony, I realise that identity is not static.

I had been a bit fraught wondering how long my application would take, but it turned out not to be an arduous wait. Alan Shatter, Minister for Justice (2011-2014) cleared a backlog of over 20,000 citizenship applications and in 2011 introduced the first-ever citizenship ceremonies in Ireland. Shatter was born to a Jewish family in Dublin. He remarked on the day of my citizenship ceremony how immigrants had contributed positively to Irish society.  Sadly, his reputation went up in flames in 2014 after a report by a barrister raised concerns about whether Minister Shatter had properly investigated complaints by a whistle-blower concerning Garda (national police force) misconduct. He would later write in his book that, ‘After my resignation from government all of the allegations that led to my political downfall would be discredited and established to be entirely untrue by two different independent statutory Judicial Commissions of Investigation’. He observed that ‘truth and justice matter but they do not inevitably win out’.[1]

Often tied to the idea of citizenship is the question: what underlies a sense of community and how is it constructed? Anderson (2006) suggested that communities are imagined through print culture.[2] Allman (2013) suggested that it is time to go beyond imagined communities that were formed through a shared print culture and explore how community was constructed through forms of culture such as song and dance to excavate claims of nationalism in performance.[3] This idea tests the limits of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities.

Belonging is an ongoing process that involves membership in, or exclusion from a community. In this regard, when people negotiate identities, it is done so with other people’s consent.  Newcomers to a community may not be imagined to be part of that community and shared identity might not necessarily be extended to them. Furthermore, others may choose not to seek belonging or reciprocal obligations that come with certain social identities. The concept of belonging is central to our understanding of how people ascribe meaning to their lives. The ascription of ethnic identities is a common subject in African studies. Ethnic naming and how people were categorised into distinct groups during the colonial period is also essential in researching belonging. Worby (1994) observed that the power to name others, and the authority to create maps and boundaries to categorise ethnic identities and culture formed an important part of colonisation.[4] These divisions had the potential to undermine or marginalise certain groups. A similar concern with the interaction between inventions and imaginings has been central in Terence Ranger’s writing on Zimbabwean history. His early work situated this dialectic in the form of contestation between collaboration and primary forms of resistance to modern political nationalism.[5] His complementary perspective on resistance and imaginings provided a more dynamic counterpoint in the face of any repression and oppression.

I would like to go back to the point Alan Shatter made about truth and justice. It resonates with what Cornel West, a scholar of African American studies perceives to be important in any discussion about gender, race, or equality. He states that ‘The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak’.[6] In analysing the transition from the imperial system to nation-states, some voices have been misrepresented or ignored. Oppressed peoples have often used religion and culture to express their freedom. In the 1940s and 1950s, Africans were driven off their land by the colonial state and put into Reserves which led to crippling overcrowding in Makoni, Manyikaland in Zimbabwe. In 1965, the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought to decolonize Southern Rhodesia and bring majority rule, but the Rhodesian Front (RF) led by Ian Smith’s minority government resisted the ‘winds of change’. To avoid majority rule, RF illegally declared independence from Britain. Although Britain was still legally responsible for Southern Rhodesia, it had great difficulty asserting power to end Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from 1965-1979. In the 1950s and 1960s, people in Makoni were desperate to align with anyone who would help them fight land alienation as a result of RF’s policies. Unfortunately, the revolutionary nationalists did not have it easy either. Nationalist parties were banned, and their revolutionary leaders were put into detention in 1964 and for 8 years there was no formal organisation of African opposition in Makoni. The banned political parties formed African National Council (ANC) and pinned their hopes on a Bishop of the American Methodist Church, Abel Muzorewa to lead the party in their absence.[7]

Women’s agency has previously been marginalised in political discourse and they were often regarded as passive observers in nationalist discourse. However, in Makoni, Ranger argued that the ANC nationalist party acquired most of its energy from the political participation of Rukwadzano Rwe Wadzimai (RRW), a women’s self-help group within the American Methodist Church.[8] The RRW women played a huge role in nationalist activities by taking part in pro-Muzorewa political protests. This mobilisation added to the fight against the colonial state, engendered by an idea of citizenship and belonging. In 1979, for the first time in the country’s history, citizenship was expanded to incorporate black Africans after Ian Smith conceded to ‘one man one vote’ to Rhodesia’s 6.5 million blacks and 268,000 whites.

Frederick Cooper has challenged historians to investigate the dynamics of citizenship in colonial Africa. Citizenship was not just about rights, but about belonging to a political unit that could make demands on its citizenry.[9] Social movements could also operate within the imperial system and make demands on the colonial state. More importantly, the political imaginations of workers, peasants or women did not always fit neatly into the nationalist framework.[10] We must reflect on the ethical importance of respecting these deeply interwoven narratives. To accommodate various imaginativeness that existed in Rhodesia, we must recapture the political imagination of RRW women through the appropriation of Christian theology and culturally idiosyncratic agency. This will require going beyond Benedict Anderson’s print capitalism’s explanation of imagined communities to looking at how political imagination was performed and articulated.

Recently scholars have looked at music and dance as forms of culture that not only construct but reflect claims of nationalism in performance. The performative art of song and dance had meaning in the lives of RRW women. Perhaps now we can begin to ask questions about how a sense of community can be constructed through songs and dance. This will allow us to get a clearer picture of the important roles played by women in mobilising and performing nationalism.

Shepherd Mutswiri is a PhD Student of History, specialising in nationalism and religion in Zimbabwe between 1960 to 1980.

[1]Alan Shatter, Frenzy and Betrayal: The Anatomy of a Political Assassination, (Dublin, 2019), pp.7-9.

[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 2006), pp. 9-37.

[3] Jean Allman, ‘Between the Present and History: African Nationalism and Decolonization’ in: John Parker and Richard Reid (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford, 2013), 10-11.

[4] Eric Worby, ‘Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20, no. 3 (1994), pp. 371-92.

[5] Terence Ranger, ‘Connections between “Primary” Resistance Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa’, Journal of African History, 9, 3 and 4 (1968); ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

[6] Cornel West, There Is Joy in Struggle, Harvard Divinity School. (2019).

[7] Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago, 2015). p.214.

[8] Terence Ranger, Religion and Rural Protests: Makoni District, Zimbabwe, 1900 to 1980′, in J. Bak and G. Benecke (eds), Religion and Rural Revolt, papers presented to the Fourth Interdisciplinary Workshop on Peasant Studies, (British Columbia, 1982). p. 329.

[9] Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York, 1996). pp.266-268.

[10] Jean Allman, ‘Between the Present and History, p.10.

 

The Criminalization of Homosexuality in Colonial History, by Dr Joseph O’Mahoney

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At first, we were surprised.  My co-author Enze Han and I had started looking into how many countries around the world it was illegal to be gay in.  We found that 72 states formally criminalized some homosexual conduct (today it is 67 UN member states).  Penalties ranged from fines, through prison terms of 10 years or life, up to the death penalty.  Our next question was why?  Why, given that some countries were moving to legalize same-sex marriage and protect other LGBT rights, were others so repressive?  Why was there this variation?

To begin with, we correlated these laws with other factors, like wealth, economic development, religion, etc.  But when we included a variable called ‘legal origin’, that’s when we were really surprised.  The effect size was so large that it explained almost all of the variation we see in the world today.  ‘Legal origin’ means where a state got its legal system from.  And from a lot of countries, this meant colonialism.  British colonies got a common law system, French colonies got a civil law system, and so on.  And it turns out that if you had to know one thing about a country to have a good chance of guessing whether it criminalizes homosexuality, that one thing is whether it used to be a British colony.

The relationship can be starkly illustrated with an example.

There are three Guianas.  British Guiana was a British colony, and is now called Guyana.  Dutch Guiana is now called Suriname.  French Guiana was a French colony and is now a French department (and part of the EU).  These three colonies were very similar in lots of ways, except for the big difference of which Europeans controlled them. And, also, the legal status of homosexuality.  French Guiana decriminalized in 1817, Suriname decriminalized in 1869, and Guyana… Actually, homosexual conduct (“buggery”) is still illegal in Guyana and has been since the colonial period.

Is this correlation between the three Guianas’s colonial heritage and sexuality laws a causal relationship?  And does this generalize to the rest of the world?  We next wanted to go beyond this high level quantitative analysis and look into the actual historical pathways whereby states acquired laws criminalizing homosexuality.

We looked at legal history and got hold of the texts of colonial penal codes and criminal codes to compare them.  There are some complexities and some false positives, which shows the value of detailed qualitative historical research. But the general pattern is borne out.  For many countries around the world that criminalize homosexual conduct, they do so because these laws were imposed on them during the colonial period by the British Empire.

If you want to read more detail about this, Enze and I published a book with Routledge about it.  In this blog post, though, I wanted to reflect briefly on part of my experience doing the research. I had to really engage with the complexity of historical reality.  Political science tends towards aggregated concepts and seeks causes that travel across many cases.  I think this is a worthwhile quest, but there is a danger that you can miss important specificities.  Historical work brings you face-to-face with the multifaceted nature of human social reality. This is perhaps especially the case when dealing with the British Empire, which not only covered a wide variety of local conditions around the world, but also seemed to delight in ad hocery and exceptions to the rule.  That is, if there even was a rule in the first place.

This complexity manifested in several ways.  One interesting way was that we commonly use the word ‘colonies’ to describe the UK’s relationship with polities and communities, but the politico-administrative arrangements were often very different in different places.  They also often changed over the decades.  For example, the current West African states of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria were previously made up of five colonies, four protectorates, and two League of Nations mandates and later trust territories.

In addition, there were several criminal codes circulating, with different implications for homosexual conduct.  Seemingly accidental judgments and choices by colonial administrators could have repercussions over a hundred years later.  For example, the colony of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, got a criminal code in 1892.  The colonial administrator modeled this on a code that differentiated between nonconsensual “unnatural carnal knowledge”, deemed a felony, and consensual acts, deemed a misdemeanor and ‘only’ punishable by 2 years imprisonment.  Other colonies’ codes had different model codes that did not make this distinction and had much longer sentences.  Today, in 2021, Ghana retains this distinction in its criminal code, and has a sentence of 3 years, compared with the 7, 10, 14 years or life imprisonment in other ex-British colonies in Africa.

For me, one of the takeaways from this research is that combining the empirical detail of historical research with the conceptual and causal abstractions of political science can lead to more accurate, richer, and more useful knowledge.

Dr Joseph O’Mahoney is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, specialising in how norms and rules about war affect state behaviour. Alongside co-author Enze Han, his research has explored the role of colonial heritage in the criminalisation of homosexuality. 

Verdant Coloured Glasses: Rural Studies through a Gendered Lens, by Tamisan Latherow

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Gender history permeates every field of study where women are concerned and since women account for 49.5 per cent of the global population (some 3.908 billion persons)[1], that’s a lot of fields. I’m researching the Homefront during the Second World War and the women left behind to keep the home fires burning and the war machines running by focusing on the women who toiled in the fields to grow and process the food needed to keep Britain alive and fighting, or what I’m calling rural studies through a gendered lens. It’s ended up being much more than I anticipated.

From 1920 until 1960, agriculture in England and Wales changed drastically and nowhere was the arrival of ‘modern’ machinery more pronounced than on the farms and in the factories. While the Industrial Revolution saw the first use of mechanized equipment, the 1920s-60s saw a conglomeration of technology and swift improvements in chemical and biological understanding. It was not unusual to see women reapers with sickles working alongside coal powered threshing machines in one field while internal combustion engine driven Fordson tractors ploughed up the neighbouring field, all while under the constant threat of bombardment. Yet for the mostly young, urban women who took up the mantle of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) and became the Land Girls or the Timber Corp’s Lumber Jills, their new set of skills often came with a steep learning curve.

Most of these women received very little training. Some were lucky and went to a WLA hostel and training center before being sent on to farms, while others were called up and dropped off in the same breath, and for a seventeen-year-old hairdresser from London or thirty-year-old secretary from Manchester, suddenly being left on the roadside and trekking across a field only to find a small cottage with no running water, electricity or indoor plumbing must have been daunting. Thank goodness for the Women’s Institutes and the County Advisory Staffs!

Begun in 1915, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) were formed to address the concerns and issues of the everyday woman and by 1925 had established firm ties with both the Boards of Agriculture and Education and held as one of it’s primary tenets the goal of filling the gap of countrywomen’s education through short courses, lectures and demonstrations in what came to be known as courses in Rural Domestic Economy (RDE). Meeting minutes from the WI and county sub-committees on Agriculture and Agricultural Instruction show thousands of participants from the first RDE course in Berkshire in 1932 until the end of the research period in 1960. In 1943 alone 2,259 individuals participated in RDE courses which covered everything from war-time cookery to domestic poultry keeping. For comparison, the total WLA numbers for that same year in Berkshire was less than 1,400, showing that most of the participants were normal countrywomen.[2]

Additionally, cooperative cheese schools and fruit and vegetable preservation centres dotted the countryside under the watchful eyes of Instructresses like Miss Matthews, the Dairy Instructress for Berkshire County. The minutes show a steady increase in both her salary as a full-time county advisor and her participation as a member of the county sub-committee on Rural Domestic Economy under the auspices of the WI. She travelled throughout the county and even abroad on behalf of both, learning new techniques to bring home and show her fellow countrywomen in town halls and the WI’s travelling lecture van.

For rural women, as well as the Land Girls, these instructresses became a key factor in learning their new roles milking cattle, culling chickens and harvesting eggs, fruits and vegetables for the greengrocer and butcher. A civilian organization, the training certifications the Land Girls undertook, often given by these instructresses, became key selling points when they applied for positions at farms. The instructresses also worked closely with local schools, young farmer’s clubs and farm institutes, and pushed for government and county grants to promote the education of women and girls in the new university degree programs and trainings at RDE centres.

The blueprints found in the Berkshire Records Office shows a building featuring large handicrafts and lecture rooms and three kitchens for preservation, demonstration and preparation, as well as various storerooms, including a bacon curing and storage room to go along with the courses offered showing the newest technologies in food preservation. The Marcham Society’s Denman College collection gives us a unique look inside the demonstration kitchen in a series of photographs. Here one can see an electric chest freezer and range along one wall while the traditional paraffin range sits on the back wall; a combination of old and new technology common during the 1940s and 1950s as the electrification of villages increased.

Figure 1: Inside the Rural Domestic Economy Centre, Marcham, 1950s.

Female farmers were also not unheard of for the period. The popular bi-weekly newspaper Farmer and Stockbreeder promoted Successful Women Farmers throughout the country in 1935. One such was Mrs. Taylor of Oare Farm in Hermitage, Berkshire. The article concludes by stating:

“Mrs. Taylor manages this big farm entirely by herself, she has no bailiff or foreman, and superintends all the work. It is difficult to see how she can find time for outside work, but last year she was chairman of Newbury F. U. [(Farmer’s Union)] (the first woman to be elected to such an office), and is now a member of the Berkshire County Milk Committee and of other agricultural bodies[1].”

Such multi-tasking was common for women, many of the members of the Berkshire WI appeared in various sub-committees and ran events, attended trainings and managed their own families and businesses.

Figure 2: Successful Women Farmers, Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1935 (MERL)

These types of archival items combined with diaries, meeting minutes and census reports, paint a picture of a tireless group of women striving to make the most out of what they had available to them while breaking barriers in both gender and ethnicity, such as the first black Land Girl, Amelia King. And as government policies changed and women were allowed to attend universities and sit for examinations, more female scientists such as Dr. Elfreida Mattick broke historic barriers to participation. Dr. Mattick researched calcium chloride’s use to alleviate the symptoms of milk fever and was also the first woman to receive a Board of Education Agricultural Scholarship from the Ministry of Agriculture and received her PhD from the University of Bristol in 1923.[1]

By reviewing the archival records found in museums and historical societies, doing ethnographic interviews and biographical information on scientists, nutritionists and farmers, we find the women behind the curtain. The forgotten and often overlooked voices from the past that have made a future where we have female scientists making lab-grown food, female MPs and a female president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU)[2]. Gender history isn’t just about the politics, it’s about the people-both male and female-that tells a story from multiple angles and through multiple lenses. As one of my interviews said, “without those girls, we all would have starved. They won the war and it’s a damn shame they haven’t been given the respect they deserve.”[3] While I’d like to think we’ve come a long way since 1945, we still have farther to go, and yet, every voice raised is one step closer to when Gender History will just be called History.

Tamisan Latherow is a second year PhD Candidate in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading researching women’s participation in English agriculture (1920-1960) in conjunction with The Museum of English Rural Life and agroecological farming systems for Martian food production with the School of Biological Sciences. To read more about Amelia King, go to the Museum of English Rural Life’s blog. https://merl.reading.ac.uk/news-and-views/2020/08/breaking-the-colour-bar/

@SeshatofMars

[1] Sussman, M. Society for Applied Microbiology: a short history. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2006.

[2] The largest farmer’s union in the UK at over 55,000 members.

[3] Interview with farmer, Roy Barwick (2020).

[1] Farmer and Stockbreeder, April 1, 1935, pg. 753.

[1] https://countrymeters.info/en/World as of 24 May 2021.

[2] WLA participant numbers taken from the monthly WLA’s The Land Girl newsletter and RDE numbers from the various meeting minute notes.

An Interdisciplinary Approach: Gender and Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales c. 400-1200 CE, by Arica Roberts

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There are a total of 565 monuments for Wales c. 400-1150 CE. which cover three geographical regions: the South-East Wales and the English Border (Redknap and Lewis, 2007), South-West Wales (Edwards, 2009) and North Wales (Edwards, 2013). The three regions have 191, 216, and 158 number of monuments respectively. My questions about how gender was constructed and manipulated by high-status men in Wales through the surviving evidence of stone monuments relies on an interdisciplinary study that includes their archaeological, historical, and art-historical context.

Most of the stones with inscriptions include a name in the nominative or genitive case, which implies that the stone is the ‘monument of X’ and includes the filiation, frequently using filius or fili, followed by the name of the father in the genitive ‘X son of Y’. The stones also contain the formulaic Latin ‘hic iacit’ ‘here lies’and ‘pro anima’ ‘for the soul[s] of’, commemorating the dead and their souls in Christian fashion. The imagery on the stone monuments includes human figures, most of which are arguably Christian and depict familiar Biblical scenes or ecclesiastical figures. There are also identifiable secular masculine warrior figures.

The Pillar of Eliseg is one such exceptional stone monument in Wales that I employ interdisciplinary methods. This stone was erected by Concenn ruler of Powys (c. 854 CE), to honor his great-grandfather Eliseg, who had expelled the Anglo-Saxons from that part of Powys. The pillar is a round-shafted cross that stands on a barrow near the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis. The lengthy inscription carved into the monument is now illegible, but two copies of the transcription in 1696 by Edward Lhuyd have survived, enabling a study of the inscription and its significance. The archaeological context of this pillar has recently been reconsidered, illuminating how its form and function emphasized the link of the rulers of Powys with the Roman usurper Magnus Maximus and the sub-Roman ruler Guarthigirn. The inscription was intended to be read out loud and that the monument was as an important piece of public propaganda erected at a time when the kingdom of Powys was severely under threat (Edwards, 2009).

Figure 1. Eliseg’s Pillar near Llangollen, Denbighshire, Wales. Photograph © 2006 by Jeffrey L. Thomas(http://www.castlewales.com/eliseg.html)

The separate elements of the inscription as well as its landscape context and function can be pulled together to present a clearer picture of elite masculine constructions of identity. What does the evidence reveal? Firstly, that the Pillar of Eliseg had commemorative functions, both political and religious.

The masculine names and filiation demonstrate patrilineal kinship and seek to commemorate Eliseg, the great-grandfather of the 9th century ruler, Concenn. It praises Eliseg for defending Powys from the Anglo-Saxons, using the words in gladio suo parta in igne “with his sword and with fire” demonstrating the importance of a forceful warrior masculinity amongst Welsh rulers. The inscription asks that those who read the stone give a blessing to the soul of Eliseg, “det benedictionem supe/[r animam] Eliseg,” an example of the “pro anima” commemorative Christian formulae. The inscription ends by Conocenn legitimizing his rule by explaining his Roman lingeage through “Maximus the king, who killed the king of the Romans” and asks for a blessing of the Lord upon Conocenn, his household, and the entire kingdom of Powys. The entirety of the inscription and its phrasing demonstrates a masculine construction of power and legitimacy through secular patrilineal kinship, links to the distant past via Roman rule, as well as Christianity.

The Pillar of Eliseg is only one example, but it clearly shows how men constructed their own intersecting identities of gender, status, religion, and ethnicity using an earlier Roman and pre-Christian past to assert the legitimacy and power of warrior-kings. It also reveals how high-status men also constructed their identities via patrilineal kinship, ethnic names, and patriarchal Christianity. These men engaged with gendered symbols of power and legitimacy across a variety of different cultures and the acceptance of a plurality of models of masculinity served political ends in helping to promote order and coherence for hegemonic masculinity in early medieval Wales.

Arica Roberts is an international student from the United States and a PhD Candidate in Archaeology  specializing in gender of early medieval Wales.

References:

Edwards, Nancy. A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales Volume II: South-West Wales, University of Wales Press, 2009.

 

——— A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales Volume III: North Wales, University of Wales Press, 2013.

 

——— ‘Rethinking the Pillar of Eliseg’, The Antiquaries Journal, Vol. 89, September 2009, pp. 143-177.

 

Redknap, Mark and John M. Lewis. A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales Volume 1 Southeast Wales and the English Border. University of   Wales Press, 2007.

‘Useful’ Old Women: ageing women in the dual role of patient and caregiver in early modern England, by Amie Bolissian

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How did the older gentlewomen healers and caregivers of early modern England feel about providing hands on care when suffering illness and infirmity themselves? Amie Bolissian provides a historical perspective on being an ageing and infirm carer. [Content Warning: injury detail]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Despite being disparaged as ‘quacksalvers’, or marginalised, witch-like ‘crones’ by qualified doctors, ‘old women’ played a crucial role in the care of patients at every level in Tudor and Stuart cities, towns, and villages. Most of these women were also usually suffering from some sort of illness or infirmity themselves. Why did these ailing women continue to care for the sick into their old age? Some, of course, may have needed the income for everyday subsistence. Parish records have shown that poor women with ‘nursekeeping’ experience might be pressured into caring for patients by the authorities, on pain of losing their own poor relief of money and food.[1] But what of wealthier older women, who cared for patients in their families and communities while also suffering from disease or disability? These women were entirely capable of paying for others to provide care, but they chose to persist, working on through feelings of fear, ‘grief’, pain, and discomfort. Why might this have been? Affection for an ailing relative may have played a part, and a feeling of duty towards kin and friends, but my research into diaries and letters has also revealed the particular importance of feeling ‘useful’.

An example of this can be found in the extensive writings of English gentlewoman Lady Anne Halkett (1623-1699), who suffered from extremely painful kidney stones, a chronic cough, and breathing problems but continued to care for the sick up until months before her death aged seventy-six. Former courtier and staunch royalist, Halkett was schooled in medicine and surgery by her mother – Jane Drummond Murray, previous governess to King Charles I’s children – and treated patients for most of her life. This included stints during the civil war, and within her community in Fife, Scotland, where she lived with her husband until he died at age sixty, then as a widow for a further 29 years.

 

Wax figure of Lady Anne Halkett at her desk in Abbots House, Dunfermline, Wikimedia Commons

Halkett made and distributed remedies, but her ‘meditations’ reveal that she also provided in-person care, day and night. Descriptions of her attending patients, including her own son, as she entered her seventies, show the toll that could take on her health – causing neck pain, cramps and worse. In 1696, at the age of seventy-three, she described a charitable care visit one evening but explained that, while she had little ‘paine or sickness’ at the time, after supper her painful ‘fitt of the stone… grew so much worse as I could get noe rest’. She eventually passed the stone, described as ‘a Pea & sharpe att one end’, and felt much better, but she directly linked her relapse with her caring labours.[2]

Directly after her ‘fit of the stone’, she wrote that she had declined to take in a sickly child for care because, as she put it, ‘I absolutely refused […] in the reason of my old Age & unfittnese to undertake new trouble of others when I had so mych of my owne’, referring also to her substantial debts. But then she had a change of heart. The pious Protestant wrote that she began to interpret the petition to help the child as a sign from God. ‘Perhaps’, she wrote, ‘the Lord in his Providence had sent this occation to lett mee see hee would have mee still continue to bee usefull to others.’ The word useful appears twice in this passage, and she also refers to her practice as doing God’s work.[3]

An old woman wearing a black veil; head and shoulders. Etching by or after Rembrandt van Rijn, 1631. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

While the term ‘useful’ does not (curiously) appear in the King James Bible, the notion of being of use and in service to God was commonly expressed. ‘Useful’ as applied to a person appeared with greater and greater frequency in Protestant religious commentary over the seventeenth century. The theologian Richard Steele’s 1688 Discourse on Old Age suggested that before decrepitude set in, old age might even be considered the ‘best parcel of our Life’, because ‘our impetuous Passions being already spent, we are furnished by great experience to be very useful’.[4] Halkett may have felt that, as long as she maintained her ‘usefulness’ in her medical care-work, she might avoid entering the culturally dreaded decrepitude of extreme old age – what a contemporary diarist of hers, Lady Sarah Cowper, called the bitter ‘dreggs’ of life and what is now often referred to as ‘the fourth age’.[5]

Early English Books Online, Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary

Yet there were other routes to feeling useful for ageing women in early modern devout Protestant culture. Printed religious discourse, following the teachings of Cicero, assured the aged that, despite being infirm and unable to work as they formerly had, they could turn to studious, religious contemplation, edifying reading and writing, and a pious preparation for death – thereby avoiding ‘idleness’ which was considered a gateway shrug to sin. When describing the ideal old man, Steele recommended that ‘Aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound in Faith, in Charity, in Patience’, but added, ‘The aged Women likewise, &c.’[6] As customarily found in published works, ‘old women’ were an addendum, an afterthought, a postscript, inhabiting the &c. This also occurred in texts on women’s health, where postmenopausal women past childbearing were found relegated to parentheses and consigned to caveats. On the rare occasions that old women were addressed in spiritual literature, they were urged to be exemplars for younger women. The cleric and author Thomas Becon, used the image of a mirror, claiming the ‘dutie of olde women’ was to ‘shew themselves … naturall myrrours of all godlines and honestie’.[7] To be useful, they could erase their own decrepit, post-menopausal, post-protagonist body by becoming a reflective surface representing a purely spiritual ideal for the reproductive-age women who mattered.

Page from Lady Anne Halkett’s ‘Meditations’, Image: Public Domain, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/autobiography-of-lady-anne-halkett

As a devout, literate woman with visibility, and some means (despite her debts) Anne Halkett had access to these forms of cultural identity and validation in old age. Nonetheless, despite her prodigious efforts in spiritual writing and religious practices, something about her medical ministry still called to Halkett, and made her feel that she was truly the ‘worke’ of God’s ‘owne hands’.[8] It appears her characterisation of ‘usefulness’ was far more active and embodied than that recommended by religious doctrine.

My research has shown me that there is no doubt ageing women like Halkett, and others, believed their medical care-work was hazardous to their health and emotions, but the desire to be ‘useful’ to God, those they loved, and the wider community seems to have compelled them to continue. In a cultural context which largely ignored, vilified, or ridiculed older women, unless you were the actual Queen of England (and even then… ), they may well have gained a valued identity and sense of continuing relevance from their medical roles.

Amie Bolissian is a Wellcome-funded PhD Candidate researching ageing patients in early modern England, examining medical understandings of old age and the experiences of sick older people from c.1570-1730.

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  1. See: Harkness, Deborah E., ‘A View from the Streets : Women and Medical Work in Elizabethan London: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe’, Bulletin of the history of medicine, 82/1 (2008), 52-85, 66; Munkhoff, Richelle, ‘Poor women and parish public health in sixteenth-century London’, Renaissance studies, 28/4 (2014), 579-96, 587; Wear, Andrew, ‘Caring for the sick poor in St Bartholomew’s Exchange, 1580-1679’, Medical History; Supplement, 11 (1991), 41-60, 46. Also: Pelling, Margaret (ed.), The Common Lot : Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), Ch.8: 179-202.
  2. National Library of Scotland, Halkett, Lady Anne, ‘Meditations’ NLS MSS.6489-6502 (Mid seventeenth century), MS 6501, fol.246.
  3. Halkett, Lady Anne, ‘Meditations’, MS 6501, fol.249.
  4. Steele, Richard, A discourse concerning old-age tending to the instruction…of aged persons (London, 1688), 11.
  5. Kugler, Anne, The Diary of Sarah, Lady Cowper, eds Lynn Botelho and Susannah R. Ottaway, 8 vols. (The History of Old Age in England, 1600-1800, 7; London, 2009), 87; Gilleard, Chris and Higgs, P., ‘Aging without agency: Theorizing the fourth age’, Aging & Mental Health, 14/2 (2010/03/01 2010), 121-28..
  6. Steele, Richard, A discourse, title page.
  7. Becon, Thomas, The sycke mans salve, (London: 1561), unpaginated.
  8. Halkett, Lady Anne, ‘Meditations’, MS 6501, fol.246.