Investigations of a Dog

There’s a meme going round which involves picking a theme tune for your blog. I decided to do it because I’ve got so much other writing to finish before I can do a proper post with words in it. So I choose “Our Daughters Will Never Be Free” by The Indelicates. It’s the second song in the video below (starts about 3:50). Being a live version the words aren’t always easy to make out, but take it from me, this is a scathing attack on postfeminist complacency.

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that.

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

This is a selection of First World War photos from my collection, mostly bought from ebay. I’ve posted some horse photos over at The horse in history and culture. The ones here have more of a gender theme. Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions.

Four male prisoners of war, two in drag. This was taken in the theatre at Cottbus PoW camp, where my great-grandad was held from 1917 to 1918. He performed in the theatre but there’s no evidence that he dressed as a woman. One of the paradoxes of the hyper-masculine environment of the 20th century British Army was that it often forced men into stereotypically feminine roles in order to stand in for the women who were excluded.

Royal Army Medical Corps group, taken in France, 1919. It clearly shows how uniforms reinforced gender roles. The men are wearing army service dress, just like combat soldiers, although their role is to provide medical care. The women are wearing long skirts and big head-dresses. Also notice that some of the men are very short. The man on the left of the middle row, standing between the corporal and the nurse with a dog at their feet, looks shorter than some of the women. If you look very closely you can see that some of the group are holding puppies.

A man and woman called Fred and Kitty, but I don’t know their surnames. Fred is a sergeant in the Army Service Corps, and Kitty is in civilian clothes. The poses reinforce the differences in dress, suggesting male dominance and female submission.

Territorial Royal Field Artillery corporal with a small boy. Probably taken in Cardiff or Pontypridd. Like the Sergeant in the previous photo, the corporal is wearing spurs. These were standard equipment for troops classed as mounted, which included field artillery and service corps because they relied on horses for transport. I love the little boy’s pose. Although man and boy are both male, they illustrate the hierarchy of masculinity: the corporal is more of a man because of his age, independence and military service.

A group of female munitions workers. The unprecedented expansion of both the British Army and the arms industry in the First World War, along with the assumption that women couldn’t or shouldn’t fight, led to more women working in munitions factories. This temporarily gave some women increased pay and freedom, but 90 years on women as a group still earn less than men as a group. Although the uniforms make some concessions to the practicalities of working in a factory, they also signify femininity.

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it. (more…)

Last week I watched The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. There’s not much I can say about it as a historical drama as I’m not familiar with the true story that it’s supposed to be based on. In general terms there are some things which I thought it got right and which you don’t necessarily see so much in more traditional costume dramas. Oppression and inequality were shown working as a system which dominated everyone rather than being the fault of individuals. There were no pantomime villains. The governor, lieutenant and marines had varying degrees of power and privilege, but they weren’t really free and clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Women were shown making patriarchal bargains to survive in difficult circumstances. Everyone from the governor to Mary made perfectly rational decisions to do really horrible things. As Marx said, we don’t choose the circumstances in which we have to make our choices.

But what really struck me was how similar it was to 70s science fiction series Blakes 7 (like Dexys Midnight Runners it shouldn’t have an apostrophe – Wikipedia is wrong!). A disparate group of convicts is transported to a penal colony and escapes in a boat/spaceship. None of them is unambiguously good or bad. They don’t like or trust each other but necessity forces them to work together. The only thing they have in common is a need to be free from an oppressive empire. You probably get that in lots of stories, but there were some more specific things. The scene on the beach where Will gets shot was very, very similar to the final scene of Blakes 7. Cox says almost the same things that Vila says about being forced to join the convicts. Will even has Avon’s smile! And Mary deciding to leave Sam is not too different from Avon deciding to kill Dr Plaxton by turning the engine on before she can get clear – in both cases their ruthlessness saves everyone else and proves them to be capable leaders but not nice people. So I wonder if the makers of the Mary Bryant series were consciously or unconsciously influenced by Blakes 7. Obviously it can’t all be a Blakes 7 rip-off because it’s also based on history. Which leads me to wonder whether Terry Nation knew about and was influenced by the story of the real Mary Bryant when he came up with Blakes 7. That would be an interesting case of intertextual relationships: a science fiction series influenced by historical events which goes on to influence a historical drama based on the same history. Intertextuality can be complicated like that.

Following on from my last post about ideology, I want to introduce a new concept which I’ll probably be mentioning a lot in the future: the FedEx Arrow. I got this from yukie1013 via Debi Linton. The basic idea is that the FedEx logo has an arrow in it. Some people notice it and some people don’t, but once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. This is analogous to ideological assumptions in texts (and for the historian this applies whether those texts are fiction, primary sources, or secondary works; it also applies to films, comics, art and any other cultural artefact you can think of). Some people notice ideology in a text, and some people don’t. Once you’ve noticed it you can’t make it go away, and that changes the meaning for you.

Probably my first major experience of this effect was the film The Spitfire Grill. Maybe it was never a great film but I used to really like it. It was kind of like Twin Peaks re-imagined as a chick flick, which somehow appealed to me. But then I read somewhere on the internet that it was anti-abortion propaganda funded by the Catholic Church. That wasn’t particularly obvious from the film itself. Although it was obviously very sentimental and manipulative, Percy’s situation was so far removed from reality that I didn’t connect it with real women having real abortions. It doesn’t really matter whether the rumour is true or not, because once the possibility was there in my head it wouldn’t go away and I started to notice things in the film which were definitely there but which I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly it became unwatchable because it seemed so misogynistic. The message I get from it now is not only that if you have an abortion you’re a murderer who deserves to die, but that if someone rapes you and gets you pregnant, and you decide that you definitely won’t have an abortion, but the rapist beats you up until you have a miscarriage, that you’re still a murderer and deserve to die. Now it doesn’t quite say that explicitly. Percy doesn’t actually get tried and executed for the death of her unborn baby. But it’s strongly implied that she has an unbearable burden of guilt that won’t ever go away until she dies. No-one ever tells her it’s not her fault. Yes, I’ve spoilt it now, but spoilers or not, just don’t watch it. I’m never going to watch it again.

But as Debi says, seeing the arrow doesn’t have to ruin something completely. It’s still possible to enjoy something while seeing the arrows in it. I really like old TV action series like The Sweeney and The Professionals even though they’re full of casual racism, misogyny and homophobia. Actually, having watched every single episode of both of them earlier this year (there’s a limited range of things you can do when you’re recovering from RSI) I think they’re not quite as bad as they’re often assumed to be, but there are still lots of problems with them. I can still be influenced by Nietzsche even though I can see that he had some very dodgy ideas about race and inadvertently encouraged the Nazis. The Smiths will probably always be my favourite band despite Morrissey’s blatantly horrible misogyny in songs like “Pretty Girls Make Graves” (and the fact that it’s such a great song probably just makes it all the more dangerous).

So that’s the FedEx arrow. Try and spot some. They’re everywhere even if you don’t realise it.

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like. (more…)

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from. (more…)