First Session: Penelope's Loom
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God's cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
The Odyssey, Book One, 1-11,
Emily Wilson translator.
Women And History
Why begin with a pottery shard depicting Penelope at her loom followed by the opening lines of the Odyssey?
Penelope's story is an apt paradigm for the place of women in traditional history, her weaving an apt metaphor for the contribution of women to the story of civilization. Homer begins by telling us that this is a story about a "complicated man". In the Western cannon, most of our historical and literary narratives celebrate the exploits of famous men, most especially when they are involved in military or political conflict. Women appear as marginalized adjuncts to the activities of men rather than standing alone. As Margaret Crocco, chairperson at Michigan State University’s Department of Teacher Education, put it:
If women have had half the world’s experience, there’s a truth value associated with [teaching and writing] history in a way that reflects those experiences, even acknowledging the fact that [putting together a historical narrative] is a selective process. If you aren’t telling the broader story about all human beings, then what you are representing is partial and flawed.
The implications of Crocco's observation are profound, not only in terms of equity for women and other disenfranchised groups in the historical narrative, but in the distortion of reality she references. Rather than documenting the all encompassing "dailyness" of human experience in all its diversity, traditional history presents a virtual reality dominated by white males engaged in an exciting historical panorama. Thumb through the table of contents of any high school U.S. History textbook and you will find chapter titles such as "Chapter 6: Conflict on the Edge of the Empire, 1713–1774, Chapter 7: Creating a New Nation, 1775–1788, Chapter 8: Contested Republic, 1789–1800." [Of The People, Oxford University Press] A hundred years of American history dominated by males engaged in conflict and revolution and little else. The most you can expect to find is perhaps a brief reference to John Adam’s letters to Abigail or Betsy Ross’s sewing skills. But what of the rich tapestry of life during this period? These political events were embedded in a much broader historical context that shaped their development and evolution.
So too for Penelope in the background of the Odyssey. She patiently awaits the return of Odysseus whose exploits and travails dominate the tale. She is not even certain he has survived, yet she holds his domaine together, raising her son Telemachus, and fending off the advances of 108 insistent suitors. Her world is one in which gender roles are well defined and although at times overlapping are largely separate. Elite men are in the foreground, they take part in councils, fight wars, trade, travel, slay opponents, seduce and are seduced. Women are in the background creating and sustaining a household involving all the usual domestic tasks.
Our first subject in this course is taken from Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, a portrait of Martha Ballard's life at the end of the eighteenth century in Hallowell Maine, I was struck When I first read A Midwife's Tale by how little had changed over three millennium. Like Penelope, Martha lived in a separate sphere from that of her husband Ephraim. While she maintained their household, raised their children, tended her garden and practiced midwifery, it was Ephraim and the other men of Augusta who attended town meetings, mustered and drilled, practiced professions and traveled far, and received acknowledgement in the various town chronicles and histories. Where their lives intersected they complimented one another. It was Ephraim who planted the flax that Martha and her daughters would transform into linen. But when Ephraim would be off for weeks or months surveying the back country, or yet again confined to jail for debt, it was Martha who, like Penelope soldiered on alone shouldering her husbands tasks in addition to her own. If it were not for the survival of her diary Martha and her considerable contributions to the web of community life in Hallowell would be unknown to history. Laurel Ulrich becomes her Muse. Ulrich's exegesis of the diary her Odyssey. "Tell me about a compassionate women..."
Weaving As Metaphor
For three years, while the suitors feasted and caroused, Penelope retreated to her private quarters where she wove a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. It was a ruse employed to fend off the suitors. She can't possibly consider marriage until it is done. Of course, in the evening while they sleep, she unravels the threads she has so painstakingly woven together. There is a very close relationship between the crafts of weaving and story telling. In attic Greek, hyphainein is to weave, and hyphos is the web of threads created. Ancient Greek poets are described as "weaving" their words together. Both literally and metaphorically Penelope has woven a tapestry, a narrative to protect her home and Telemachus's patrimony. But in a larger sense the loom and its textiles are an apt metaphor for the contributions of women to the fabric of civilization. The underlying threads that create a social web and sustain a community are largely the product of women's lives and interactions. As with Penelope in Ithaca if one entered the Ballard homestead in Hallowell the first floor living space was dominated by the implements of weaving: loom, spinning wheels, reeds, shuttles, large iron kettles for boiling. This was a community activity. Daughters were borrowed as well as reeds and shuttles. There was a constant coming and going among this community of women. The weaving of textiles not only produced cloth, but it sustained a social web that knit the community of Hallowell together.
History From The Bottom Up
I began my graduate studies in American History in the nineteen-sixties during a period when teaching history "from the bottom up" was beginning to inform the curricula of universities as well as secondary schools' history departments. The "new social history" endeavored to enlarge the scope of traditional political, economic, military and "great man" history by incorporating the lives of ordinary people, including their ethnicity, race, gender, labor, values, lifestyles. Much of this was driven by a new interest in statistics, data, demographics and quantification. Statistical analysis became a new requirement in many history departments. While this was all well and good, it often resulted in a stilted, dry, unsatisfying picture. Memoirs, diaries, letters and other first hand accounts restore the missing narrative which gives life and depth to analysis. A skillful historian brings together the narratives of particular persons and integrates them into the overall context of time and place, each one informing the other. One could redress the gender inequity inherent in history by highlighting the lives of famous women, but this perpetuates the same distortions as the "great man" narratives. This is not to say that John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells are not important and did not make contributions, they were, and they did. But to focus on them exclusively is to miss the larger context, the texture, the warp and weft, of the communities they were part of.
Over the course of the next several weeks we will explore the lives of six women whose lives spanned the late 18th century through the 19th, from Martha Ballard, born in Oxford Massachusetts in 1735, to Rachel Colof, a Russian Jewish immigrant who homesteaded in North Dakota in 1894. They represent diverse social and ethnic backgrounds and their lives span American History from the Revolution through the Gilded Age. Unique and different, each life holds up a mirror informing us about the times they lived in, and the contributions of women to the communities in which they lived. We may well find echos of their lives in our own.
