The Women's Suffrage movement in early twentieth-century England found an extremely useful ally in Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953), an astounding figure who is now comparatively little remembered.

Left immobilized by a childhood bout of Polio, Billinghurst relied on the wheelchair pictured above to get around. This didn't stop her from working furiously for the rights of women, children, and the poor, however -- in the years leading up to the 1910s, Billinghurst worked variously as a Sunday School teacher, a social worker, and a member of a team who took to the streets of London to rescue young women who might otherwise fall into the sex trade. She also found time to be an active campaigner for the Band of Hope, an organization dedicated to promoting temperance (that is, the abstention from and gradual suppression of alcohol).

The 1910s saw a tremendous upswing in suffragist activity, with groups like the Women's Social and Political Union--under the governance of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters--staging increasingly radical acts and demonstrations in their battle to secure votes for women. It should be remembered that the WSPU and organizations like it struck a decidedly and purposefully militant tone: the question of women's suffrage was not an abstract one to them, and was treated by many of those fighting for it as an outrage and an emergency calling for the direst possible action. Things akin to what we might now call terrorism were undertaken; the most militant suffragists waged a campaign of arson, vandalism, and the destruction of mail and public art and advertisements in an uncompromising battle to convince the general public of the seriousness of the matter. Emily Davison, perhaps most famously of all, died after running on to the track (viewer discretion advised) at the 1913 Epsom Derby to knock down King George V's horse. The horse fell, and so did she. The total, vengeful seriousness of a movement that many had previously dismissed as the whining of insufficiently busy housewives could no longer be ignored.

Both before and after this sensational event, however, England's suffragists had staged numerous protests and marches to draw attention to their cause. Rosa May Billinghurst had quickly discovered that her presence at such events was hugely beneficial, as there was scarcely a quicker way of winning over the passing crowd's sympathies than by subjecting them to the image of policemen brutalizing a woman in a wheelchair. And brutalize her they did, often with a certain satisfaction; having become popularly known as "The Cripple Suffragette," and it becoming more and more broadly understood that she would do anything necessary to provoke reaction, police and anti-suffrage agitators alike began to look for her on the lines whenever a protest or march took place.

The consequences of this were often dire. On various occasions, Billinghurst found herself forcibly tossed from her chair and left immobile on the pavement; at least once she was grabbed and driven down a nearby alley, only to have certain parts allowing her to roll removed. As awful as such treatment may sound, she relished the opportunity to fight the police and serve as a moral reproach to an entire nation. Nor did she do so peacefully: on several occasions she used her chair as a battering ram to break police lines, and also regularly concealed bricks and rocks in her seat that she could then use as missiles. She even chained herself and her chair to the gates of Buckingham Palace during a protest in 1913.

The punishments she faced as a result of her action were delivered without care for her disability, but often frustrated by it all the same. She was sentenced to prison on multiple occasions between the infamous Black Friday March of 1910 and the start of the First World War, and in several cases was given the additional punishment of hard labour -- which she was expected, amazingly, to carry out from her chair. Prison officials found this more or less impossible to enforce, however, and on several occasions she found her sentence suspended out of concern for her health or recognition of sheer futility.

A punishment she did not escape, however, was that of forced feeding. A popular suffragist tactic at the time was to stage hunger strikes in protest of having been imprisoned in the first place, in a bid to make the whole process as frustrating and embarrassing for the jailers as possible. The response to such strikes, in a bid to avoid further suffragist martyrdoms, was to forcibly feed them using the extremely limited technology available in the Edwardian era. Women were pinned to the ground or to chairs by orderlies as tubes were forced through their nostrils and liquefied food delivered to them by force, though not always with success; Sylvia Pankhurst's account of the experience is recorded here.

In any event, the beginning of the First World War dramatically reshaped the relationship between many militant suffrage groups and the government even though the desired result of votes for women had not yet been achieved. In an agreement notable (I feel, at least) for its reasonableness on all sides, Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU agreed to cease their disruptions of public order in exchange for the release of all suffragist prisoners. This having been achieved, the WSPU -- Billinghurst among them -- turned instead to supporting the war effort while arguing for the necessity of women's involvement in it. It was intolerable to them that women should be kept in the sidelines as their country fought for its life and for the liberation of other peoples; they demanded instead that women be allowed to serve in whatever military capacities could be achieved, and that traditionally male-dominated industries should be opened to women as well. "We Demand the Right to Serve!" was one popular slogan; "Let None Be Kaiser's Cat-Paws" was another. Not all suffragists agreed to curtail their activities in this way during the war, but this was still more or less the mainstream response.

With the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, and the consequent opening of the vote to (some) women, Rosa May Billinghurst retired from her life of militancy to convalesce. She would die in 1953, willing her body to science in a bid to help find treatments for other women who had endured conditions like hers. She has remained an extremely important figure in the history of the suffrage movement, and serves as a powerful example of the ways in which persons with disabilities have continued to fight for social reform even while enduring obstacles their colleagues never had to face.

For this section of women's history, I'm sharing the story of Joan Robinson (1903 to 1983), the first great female economist, and who should've been the first women to win a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. She certainly deserved one. 

This was a time in economic theory when the leading economists such as Keynes, Coase and Hayek typically would make wide-ranging contributions across multiple areas, and Joan Robinson was no exception.  Her first major work was in 1933, the Economics of Imperfect Competition, where she invented the word "monopsony". This work shows up even in Econ 101 texts, see for example Mankiw's Principles of Economics. 

Robinson also found time to critique John Maynard Keynes' early drafts of "The General Theory" in the 1930s, and was one of three people thanked by Keynes himself in his preface. And in 1937, she wrote on international trade theory, spreading the idea of "Beggar thy neighbour policies" amongst the economics profession. What a decade!

In 1941, she published Essay on Marxian Economics, in which she outraged many leftists by blithely rejecting the Marxist labour theory of value, but she also found much of value in Marx's work. 

If you thought Robinson's 1930s was impressive, in the 1950s she kicked off the Cambridge capital theory debates (between Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, Boston) with her 1954 paper in the Review of Economic Studies, "The production function and the theory of capital". This argued that there was no such thing as aggregate capital: a view which is now generally accepted (though people keep adding up capital anyway, as one of my professors said, you can't defeat a bad model unless you can replace it with a better model). Though only after a long and lively debate with the Americans, which ran through into the 1960s and widened to the entire neoclassical theory of production and distribution. She also worked with Nicholas Kaldor to develop "Cambridge growth theory" during this period. 

Alongside these major theoretical contributions, she also found time to work on economic committees for the Labour Party and the British government, and be involved in problems in underdeveloped and developing countries, and write a number of more popular works. And if that wasn't enough, she was a mother, with two daughters. 

Despite all this, she was only appointed a full professor at Cambridge in 1965 (coincidentally the year her husband E. A. G. Robinson retired). And as I started off with, she never won a Nobel Prize, possibly due not merely to her gender but also to her political beliefs including lauding Mao Zedong and the Chinese cultural revolution (neither should have made a difference to the prize committee).  

Robinson claimed to be non-mathematical, famously she declined an invitation to become vice-president of the Econometric Society in 1958, saying she didn't want to be part of something that produced works that she did not read. But I think she must have been very good at thinking conceptually along similar lines to a mathematician, more so than Keynes was, her major work naturally flows into more formal models.   Finally, let's end with some quotes from this acerbic genius:

"I never learned math, so I had to think." 

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

"Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker."

And, perhaps most relevant to r/askhistorians:

"There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks."

Sources

NY Times article on Joan Robinson from 1976 (written when it was anticipated she'd win the next Nobel Prize)  https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/23/archives/economist-joan-robinson-72-is-full-of-fight-economist-joan-robinson.html

Joan Robinson, The History of Economic Thought: https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/robinson.htm

Joan Robinson, EconLib Encyclopedia: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Robinson.html

I'm getting over probable coronavirus at the moment so this isn't going to be my best work, but I figured I wanted to write a bit about Regina Jonas. After this, I have a couple of answers about Jewish women that I have lined up, and hopefully I'll be in the headspace to get those done as well before the month is up!

Anyway, Regina Jonas was the first ordained female rabbi. Other women before her had embraced rabbinic roles, such as Asenath Barzani, who was the head of a yeshiva in Iraq and whose marriage contract with her husband stipulated that she not be made to do housework so as not to distract her from her studies, or such as Chana Rochel Werbermacher, known as the Maiden of Ludmir, a chassidic spiritual leader. However, none of them pursued rabbinic ordination in a formal setting.

Jonas was born in Berlin to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was educated at the Jewish girls' school connected to the somewhat progressive Orthodox synagogue her family attended; her classmates noted that even at that point, she expressed a desire to become a rabbi. When the time came for her to begin that training, while she would have preferred to attend an Orthodox institution, none would accept women and so, after receiving a teacher's degree, she attended the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, an institution for higher Jewish education with a more liberal bent. She faced a good deal of opposition at the Hochschule, with some students and faculty members antagonistic to the idea of a woman as a rabbi; while Rabbi Eduard Baneth, the ordaining rabbi at the Hochschule, encouraged her in her journey, upon his sudden death in 1930, shortly before Jonas finished her training, Baneth died and his successor, Rabbi Hanoch Albeck, refused to ordain a woman. Throughout her journey, she believed that there was no reason for any opposition to ordination for women from the perspective of Jewish law, not just among the more liberal rabbis with whom she studied but also on the part of the more traditionalist Orthodox community from which she came; in her thesis at the Hochschule, she wrote that "aside from prejudice and unfamiliarity, there is almost nothing halachically [from the point of view of Jewish law] opposed to the woman taking on the rabbinical role.”

Despite her efforts and her convictions, it took her another five years until she could find a rabbi to ordain her, and in the end she was ordained in 1935, by Rabbi Max Dienemann. At that point, her services as a rabbi were greatly needed. With the Nazi regime, the Jewish community in Germany was in incredible distress, and pastoral services were in high demand. While initially communities would not hire her to work in synagogues, she worked instead at old age homes and as a teacher, providing support to vulnerable people both young and old, and became a chaplain in a women's prison. Once more and more rabbis began to escape or be sent to concentration camps, Jonas was hired by an organization which sent traveling rabbis to communities without Jewish leadership. Throughout extraordinarily difficult times, she provided whatever services were needed; and especially emphasized the need for sermons and inspiration.

This talent for sermons, lectures, and inspiring those who needed it became most important when she was deported in 1942 to Theresienstadt (Terezin), a concentration camp/ghetto where the elderly, young, and prominent were often brought, and which was used as a show camp to demonstrate the good living conditions which Jews had in Nazi camps; while, in fact, things were often better for Jews there than elsewhere, conditions were still dismal and dangerous. However, Jewish leaders, such as the leading liberal rabbinical figure Rabbi Leo Baeck, were able to take advantage of the opportunity to offer support and services to the Jews who found themselves in Theresienstadt, and Jonas became a key player in these efforts, greeting Jews as they disembarked at the camp and offering them words of encouragement as well as participating in a lecture circuit, where her lectures were advertised as being by "the only female rabbi." We only have scraps of her words, such as this:

"Our work in Theresienstadt, serious and full of trials as it is, also serves this end: to be God’s servants and as such to move from earthly spheres to eternal ones. May all our work be a blessing for Israel’s future (and the future of humanity)…. Upright ‘Jewish men’ and ‘brave, noble women’ were always the sustainers of our people. May we be found worthy by God to be numbered in the circle of these women and men… The reward of a mitzvah is the recognition of the great deed by God. Rabbi Regina Jonas, formerly of Berlin.”

Unfortunately, in 1944, Jonas was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in the gas chambers.

Shockingly, Jonas remained largely unremembered for decades after her murder, even though Baeck and other figures, such as Victor Frankl, encountered her in Theresienstadt. In fact, the first female ordained rabbi was widely considered to be Sally Priesand, who was ordained by the American Reform movement in 1972*. It wasn't until the 1990s, when an archive of Jonas's papers was found in a formerly-East German archive, that knowledge and interest in her surged. It's difficult to understand why she fell out of the spotlight that she richly deserved- perhaps it was gender bias, perhaps controversy over the circumstances of her ordination, perhaps her lack of affiliation with a specific Jewish movement, perhaps the postwar years seeming too stressful and traumatic for the newly rebuilt Jewish communities to be thrown for a loop by the radical concept of female ordination. However, now that she is remembered, she can be given the recognition she deserves for her accomplishments.

​

*Shortly after her ordination, Priesand acknowledged in writing that while she was the first female rabbi who was ordained in a rabbinical seminary, Jonas was in fact the first female rabbi; however, this doesn't seem to have prevented people from recognizing Priesand as first for decades after.

I spent a good chunk of time in my blog earlier this year looking at H. P. Lovecraft's collaborations and revision work with women - 2020 being the centenary of his first published collaboration with a woman, "Poetry and the Gods" by Anna Helen Crofts - but I was trying to look at it from a slightly different way.

Most of the interest in these works focuses on Lovecraft himself, what he wrote, how big of a part he had in the stories. I was more interested in his collaborators: what did they bring to the table? How much creativity and effort did they spend on the stories? And there are some surprising things that come out when you look at the stories and what we know about these women from that perspective.

"Poetry and the Gods" (1920) - by Anna Helen Crofts and H. P. Lovecraft. Anastasia Helen Crofts was a public school teacher and amateur journalist for most of her life, retiring from teaching in 1942; according to “Anna Helen Crofts—The Rest of the Story” she married Joseph B. McCuen and passed away in Williamstown in 1975. “Poetry and the Gods” and another story, “Life” (United Amateur Jun 1921) are her only known published fiction. The story is actually a double collaboration, since Crofts borrowed verse by “Sky Lotus” by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth, published in the July 1919 issue of Asia for her part of the text.

"The Crawling Chaos" (1921) and "The Green Meadow" (1927) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft are fascinating on a number of levels. At the time they first met through amateur journalism, she was Winifred Virginia Jordan, married to an African-American man. She later divorced, took back her maiden name, and became the mistress (and business partner) of noted black poet and editor William Stanley Braithwaite. She was a notable poet and editor in her own right, although little of her work survives, and she was working on novels. Much of the fascination around her relationship with Lovecraft is due to speculations of romantic involvement, although there is no solid evidence of this.

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" (1923), "Four O'Clock" (1949), Alcestis: A Play (1985), and European Glimpses (1988) by Sonia H. Greene and H. P. Lovecraft are part of the one major romantic adventure of Lovecraft's life. Sonia Haft Shafirkin was born into a Jewish family in present-day Ukraine; her father died or deserted the family, and her mother moved to the United Kingdom (where Sonia was schooled) and then the United States, where she remarried, resulting in Sonia's half-sister and half-brother. Sonia followed and married young; she had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and her husband (Mr. Greene, a Russian emigre who changed his name to something more American) appears to have committed suicide, before or after the divorce. Sonia began work in millinery, and obtained a very good position in a New York department store; her efforts at improving her education led her to amateur journalism, and then to Lovecraft. Her daughter (Carol Weld) disappeared shortly before or after the marriage, pursuing a career in journalism; the marriage itself was brief, with financial and health disasters forcing a separation and then an incomplete divorce; she remarried to Dr. Nathan Davis some years later, and survived his death as well. Her memoirs of Lovecraft's life are brief but invaluable.

"The Curse of Yig" (1928), "Medusa's Coil" (1939), and "The Mound" (1940) were revision stories, largely (but not entirely) ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed (later Zealia Bishop) by H. P. Lovecraft as part of his fiction-revising service. She was a single mother, working as a court reporter and attempting to write fiction; her relationship with Lovecraft was more congenial and friendly than that of a regular client, and she often ran in arrears for payment. Their collaborations are noted for being some of Lovecraft's best - and worst - work. Zealia later remarried, but had little luck selling her fiction outside of the revisions.

"The Man of Stone" (1932), "The Horror in the Museum" (1933), "Winged Death" (1934), "Out of the Aeons" (1935), and "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" (1937) by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft mark Lovecraft's most extensive set of collaborations with an individual; common consensus is that Lovecraft virtually ghostwrote all five stories, but it seems likely Heald had at least a bit more influence on the earlier ones. Heald was divorced at the time they met, through their mutual friend Muriel Eddy, and worked as a clerk or bookkeeper. Eddy's memoirs suggest a possible romance between the two, but this seems unlikely. Whatever the case, Heald did host Lovecraft for dinner at least once (she made fried chicken - his favorite), and recalled later their trips to local museums.

I would be remiss not to add Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as C. L. Moore, a leading light of Weird Tales from 1934-1940, who Lovecraft greatly admired and corresponded with at length; he also consoled her in 1936 after the death of her fiance. They "collaborated" only once, both of them participating in a round-robin story, "The Challenge from Beyond" (1935). Moore's part in this story is often overlooked, but she contributed admirably to the tale. In 1940 she married fellow pulpster (and Lovecraft correspondent) Henry Kuttner, and largely ceased writing under her own name, with most of her work appearing either under Kuttner's name or shared pseudonyms. After WWII he got his master's degree and was teaching creative writing when he had a heart attack and died; Moore ended up taking over his courseload. She did considerable writing for television, and re-married to Thomas Reggie. Her last years were plagued by Alzheimer's, and he limited her contact with the science fiction community for fear of confusing her, a great tragedy since she didn't receive all the honors due to her.

I run a project called Women of 1000 AD (I know it's convention to say AD 1000, don't @ me). The goal of this project is to use historical reconstruction art to explore the stories of women who lived all around the world in the year 1000. Of course, most of them weren't using timekeeping systems that made that year more special than any other. But besides being a nice round number in my calendar system, it's useful because it sits right in the centre of the Middle Ages, the period of European history I specialised in in my first degree. After doing that degree I felt that in spite of being now qualified in "Mediaeval History", I knew so little about that period in the rest of the world. So this project is my way of teaching myself about women's history around the world while sharing that research with other people through art!

I'd like to give a few examples of the kinds of stories I tell on my website. This will a) demonstrate the huge variety in women's lived experiences across the world a thousand years ago, complicating any narrative that tries to portray women's history as a monolith, and b) demonstrate the variety of methods a reconstructionist has to employ to create an image that conveys a story based on limited archaeological and historical evidence.

Sei Shōnagon [link]

This is the illustration that started my project. Sei Shōnagon was a lady-in-waiting in the Japanese imperial court in the late 10th century. She was a member of the court of Empress Teishi during the time that Teishi was the favoured wife of Emperor Ichigo. Her autobiographical work The Pillow Book records her impressions of life at court with a mix of anecdotes, lists, and generalized opinions about the world. She is pedantically interested in the minutiae of court aesthetics and rank, but she brings these topics to life with a healthy dose of wit, sarcasm, pettiness, and pathos.

I was fascinated to read the account of a woman writing in the medieval period who could write of her life in so much more personal and psychological detail than what is typically available from European women in the year 1000. While there are other works from high-ranking women written around the same time, The Pillow Book remains my favourite for its cleverness, light-heartedness, and above all, its relatability. I mean, a woman from over a thousand years ago creating a list of "irritating things" people do is something you just don't run into very often!

The Heian period of Japanese history is remarkably well-documented, particularly concerning women's activities. It was a period when it was considered inappropriate for women to write in Chinese (although Shōnagon secretly learned it), so they were relegated to the vernacular, Japanese. From the 10th century on, women thus innovated the beginnings of Japanese literature. Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji, is the most famous of these. (Fun fact though: she hated Sei Shōnagon!) The remarkable amount of detail recorded for posterity about everyday life made it much easier to reconstruct what a scene in Shōnagon's life would have looked like.

Martha, Mother of Kings [link]

Although Nubia is best-known for its time as a rival of the great ancient Egyptian kingdoms, it had a long history of medieval Christianity. By the year 1000, Nubia had been Christian for centuries. With ties to the Byzantine and Coptic Churches, Nubia had what we call today an Oriental Orthodox Church, one of the lesser-known branches of Christianity among Westerners. The Christian kingdom in Nubia was called the Kingdom of Makuria.

The cathedral at Faras on the Nile underwent a lot of renovations in the late 10th century coinciding with a time of dynastic power struggles in the Makurian throne. Although the site of Faras is now completely underwater, Polish and Sudanese archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century excavated and rescued remarkable murals from the cathedral walls. (These murals are now split between museums in Khartoum and Warsaw.) One of these incredible murals was of Martha, Mother of Kings, and it was painted in the late 990s. The position Mother of Kings (ńonnen in Old Nubian) was the second most important in the realm, second only to the king. Martha is not the only Mother of Kings painted on the walls of Faras Cathedral; the entire north side of the cathedral was dominated by murals of queens, princesses, and female saints, since in Oriental Orthodox churches women worship on the north side and men on the south side.

Another mural on the north side of the church is one that Martha herself is thought to have commissioned. It's a splendid Nativity scene featuring an enormous Virgin Mary reclining on a couch. All of the other figures around her, such as Joseph and the angels, are dwarfed by her incredible size. She wears an imperial crown like Martha's. The message from Martha's mural is clear: the Mother of God and the Mother of Kings are forces not to be trifled with. Martha commissioned this portrait at a time when it's thought that Bishop Marianos, whose portrait is on the opposite wall, was trying to stake a claim to the Makurian throne from his side of the family. What we have in this mural then is an unusually personalized portrait of a woman who used art and iconography to fight out a dynastic battle on the walls of a cathedral.

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Welcome to the second installment of ‘History Upside Down’, our Spring 2020 Floating Feature and Flair Drive Series. This series it intended to shine a light on people often left out of the ‘standard’ histories, and give voice to the subalterns of history.

Today’s theme is Women’s Histories, and we welcome anyone and everyone to share histories that fit the theme, however they might interpret it. Stories of triumph or tragedy, or cheerful or sad, all are welcome.

Floating Features are intended to allow users to contribute their own original work. If you are interested in reading recommendations, please consult our booklist, or else limit them to follow-up questions to posted content. Similarly, please do not post top-level questions. This is not an AMA with panelists standing by to respond. Such questions ought to be submitted as normal questions in the subreddit.

As is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith.

Coming up next in the series is The Histories of Peoples of Color Floating Feature on April 6th. Make sure to mark it on your calendar!