Here at AskHistorians, I am primarily known for answering questions on topics like the Scottish crown and politics, British systems of royalty and nobility, social history, and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. By way of an expanded introduction to the sub, I will say that I am currently a fourth-year doctoral candidate in history and Scottish studies and, provided revisions and my defense go well, can begin calling myself "Dr. Historiagrephour" in December of this year.
My doctoral research utilizes computational linguistics and methods of text analysis to examine the ways in which the language of ambition was deployed to support and perpetuate misogyny and patriarchal social structures in early modern Britain. In other words, I employ singular value decomposition to visualize linguistic symbols (words) in a multi-dimensional semantic vector space in order to understand the meanings assigned to specific words and the ways that these words were used in a specific historical period. That is, I collected a corpus of around 300 printed rhetorical and discourse texts (sermons, theological essays, instructional literature [e.g., moral essays and works from the "mirror of princes" genre], humanist literature [both classical Latin texts and neo-classical texts], and cultural texts [plays, poetry, songs, folklore, proverbs, etc.]) known from booksellers' testaments and university and private library catalogs to have circulated within Scotland between the years of 1500 and 1625 and England between the years of 1603 and 1625 and ran this corpus through a Python program that I wrote to create a term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency matrix of all of the words (excluding stop words like articles and prepositions) contained within these ~300 texts. The matrix was then plotted onto a vector and the "physical" distance measured between the words to derive a semantic characterization of the word "ambition" in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Scottish and English consciousness. This analysis relies upon the distributional hypothesis of linguistics, which suggests that words that appear frequently in the same contexts tend to share similar semantic features or meanings with one another.
The results of this analysis reveal that words like "pride", "vanity", "avarice", "envy", "covetousness", and "vainglory" share the closest semantic relationships with the word "ambition" and this is backed up by close readings of these discursive and rhetorical texts so that I can argue that when a woman is described as "covetous" or a man is called "proud", the author of these descriptions is also implicitly describing these individuals as "ambitious" as well.
Now, this vilification of ambition in this period serves a few purposes. First, it discourages the trait of ambition and in so doing, maintains and upholds traditional hierarchies of authority and control. The way the discourse talks about honour and glory and wealth in this period, it is clear that there is a very real belief that there was only so much honour, glory, and wealth to go around, and by desiring more than your fair share allotted to you by God, you were necessarily taking it from other people, and thus, ambition was to be discouraged to ensure the smooth operation of society according to the various estates that made up said society.
The sixteenth century witnessed a massive amount of centralization of power to the crown in Scotland, so I argue that this rhetoric, while not necessarily always originating with the Scottish crown, certainly supported the aims of said crown, and we see James VI/I beginning to engage with this discourse in publications like Basilikon Doron and Daemonologie. Finally, the rhetoric surrounding ambition was used not only to attack women to exert control over women as a group, but also to attack men through attacks upon their wives, and to attack non-white and non-Christian individuals of both sexes. Thus, a person could say that a woman was behaving ambitiously and might accuse her of consorting with witches, or being a witch herself to achieve influence over her politically prominent husband, but in leveling this accusation, the attacker also levels an attack at the husband by suggesting he is failing in his role as a Christian head of his household in being unable to control his wife and therefore, he should not be trusted to govern the kingdom's political affairs. Likewise, men themselves might be called "ambitious" if they were seen to be desiring "illegitimate" power or wealth (i.e., men who were not of the noble classes seeking political office) as a means of keeping them in their place. Non-white and non-Christian individuals were characterized as ambitious by nature to justify suspicion and strict rules of conduct imposed upon them. In this way, the dialog surrounding ambition in this period both perpetuated outright misogyny and upheld patriarchal structures within Scottish and English society. The idea that men were failing as men if they couldn't control their wives illustrates how men impose expectations on other men, and the fact that men who were non-white and non-Christian were also oppressed by this rhetoric demonstrates the complex relationships between the language of ambition and gender, class, and race in this period.
I feel like I've probably written too much already though so I should probably end this here for now.
Women were pulp authors too.
Not only that, they were also often editors, artists, prominent fans and readers. For some pulps, they formed the bulk of the audience. While their role in the whole history of pulp magazines is often downplayed or forgotten, it is important to remember that they were a vocal and energetic minority that played a critical part in making pulp magazines - and by extension comic books and genre literature - what it is today.
There would probably be no Han Solo without the work of Leigh Brackett and Catherine Lucille Moore. Margaret Brundage was one of the most vivid cover artists at Weird Tales, responsible for many of the iconic covers of the Unique Magazine. Morojo helped found the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society; Grace Stillman, Virginia 'Nanek' Anderson, and Lilith Lorraine were poets. Dorothy McIlwraith, Mary Gnaedinger, and Cele Goldsmith Lalli were editors of pulp magazines, Christine Campbell Thomson edited the hardcover anthologies of pulp stories that would prove to be incredibly influential.
I'd like to focus, very briefly, on one pulpster: C. L. Moore.
Catherine Lucille Moore was born in 1911 in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was in college when the Great Depression hit, and had to pull out. Moore went to work at the Fletcher Trust Company (a bank), where she became engaged to one of the tellers and worked in the secretarial pool as a typist. Her entertainment were pulp magazines: cheap, gaudy things that she couldn't bring home to read because her mother disapproved of them, but which fed her love of fantasy.
It was there, typing away after hours, that C. L. Moore wrote her first story...and sent it off. It sold.
"Shambleau" appeared in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales; it would become the most highly-rated story in the history of the magazine, by fan votes. Veteran pulpsters sat up and took notice. The story was published as by "C. L. Moore" - not out of an effort to conceal her gender, but so that her employer would not find out that she had another source of income and fire her.
For three years, she continued on, writing and selling stories periodically, working her way up at Fletcher Trust. In 1936, her fiance committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Lovecraft was one of the friends that wrote to console her on her loss, trying to keep her engaged in correspondence. Six months later, Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and another of Moore's correspondents, committed suicide with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Moore actually broke the news to Lovecraft. To Howard's grieving father, Moore wrote:
Nothing that I can say now would help you—I know, for four months ago I too suffered bereavement under very similar circumstances. The young man whom I was to marry this year was accidentally shot in the temple and instantly killed while leaning a gun which he thought unloaded. So I can understand what you are enduring now, and I know that nothing but time will help you find life worth living again. In one respect you are luckier than I, for you have memories of a full and happy life with your wife and son that nothing can take away.
—C. L. Moore to Dr. I. M. Howard, 26 Jun 1936
Dr. Howard was so moved by the letter, that he had it published in the town newspaper, the Cross Plains Review for 3 July 1936.
Strangely enough, it was Lovecraft who introduced C. L. Moore to her next fiance. Henry Kuttner was a young writer and fellow-correspondent, Lovecraft put them in touch. They began writing to one another, he visited her in Indianapolis, but it was not until 1940 that she finally quit her job at Fletcher Trust and married them.
After the marriage, Moore's name largely dropped from bylines in the pulps. She was still writing, but she was writing with Kuttner, sometimes they would be writing a story and one of them would get up from the typewriter and the other would sit down and finish the page. They published stories under Kuttner's name, or a handful of joint pseudonyms like Lewis Padgett. That kept them going - as Kuttner completed his service during WWII, and after as he was getting his degree at the University of Southern California. He was teaching a course on creative writing there in 1958 when he suffered a heart attack and died.
Moore filled in, finished the course, and continued teaching - eventually getting her own long-delayed college degrees. She still wrote, although mostly for television. Remarried in 1963 to Thomas Reggie, and after that largely ceased writing.
Her later years saw her nominated and winning several awards for fantasy; tributes marred only by the onset of Alzheimer's, and eventually her death in 1987. It is difficult to express in so short a passage her history - from the early praise to being nearly "lost" for decades as her byline disappeared from pulps, to her eventual rediscovery and praise - but Catherine Lucille Moore was one of the great women pulp writers, daring and different that she shone like a bright star in a sometimes dull and crowded sky.
Not to be forgotten.
The Papyrus Stories blog has some posts on marriage in ancient Egypt, love spells, and the trials of infants in a dangerous world: sickness and death, abandonment, and snatching https://papyrus-stories.com/2018/06/28/baby-exposed-baby-snatched-roman-egypt-style/
The digital transgender archive is one of many contributors to archive.org's collection of documents regarding gender.
Two other interesting items:
Sylvia Rivera -- Y'all Better Quiet Down 1973. Rivera is credited by some as starting the 1969 Stonewall Riots and though she does not endorse this although she was certainly present and active at the beginning (source: Stonewall by Martin Duberman). In this video she addresses the crowd at Christopher Street Liberation Day (held to commemorate the Stonewall Riots; what later became known as "gay pride"). She gives them shit for insufficient solidarity. More context and transcript here.
Women East And West book published 1935 by Magnus Hirschfeld.
Assyrian tablet Tel Halaf 23, a muster roll from around the 8th century BCE, has a surprising statement about one soldier's gender. A post from 2016 tries to unpack what this brief note could be saying and how anything we say tells as much about us as about the text https://bookandsword.com/2016/03/12/snark-or-piety-on-an-assyrian-muster-roll/
For my MA in North American Studies I wrote a paper on the influence gender had on the behavior of black slave masters in the Antebellum South of the US. In this essay I wondered the following:
"It is known that there were black slaveholders in all the slave owning states of the United States. Not all of them, but most were former slaves and children of (former)slaves and of them, some were the children of white slave owners. The relation between the identities seems like a dystopian juxtaposition: children of white slave owners, becoming black slave owners. In the heavily gendered society of the Antebellum South, it might be astounding to imagine some of these black slaveholders being female, but they existed. In what sense, if at all, where they different in their identity as slaveholders than the black men?"
My conclusion was the following:
" In conclusion the following statements can be made: first of all black male slaveholding was long seen as an act of benevolence, due to historians as Carter G. Woodson, who first posed this concept and knew a lot of academic following. This argument was and still is contested, without a clear verdict on the outcome. Though it does seem as if when looking from a gender angle, female slaveholders, at least in Louisiana, were more inclined towards the benevolent nature of slaveholding, as they mostly owned family and friends, who they wanted to emancipate.
Secondly, the identity of black slave owners, male or female, is a complex one, from various points. Not only in an economical and societal sense, but also in a psychological sense when looking at concepts of “morality,” internalized racism and for females specifically, internalized misogyny. This adds more layers of complexity to the concept of black slaveholding, that have not been researched properly in the main body of scholarship on the subject.
All in all it can be said that more research has to be done, especially involving the gendered aspect of black slaveholding. The exclusion and barely mentioning of women in the main body of scholarship on black slaveholding is disappointing, but not surprising. There is still a lot to be done, but it would be a compelling and rewarding task to undertake."
The research was a compelling one and once again underlined for me the value of an intersectional approach to history.
Welcome to the tenth 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 Gender Histories, and we welcome anyone and everyone to share histories that fit the theme. 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 Enslaved People Floating Feature on May 22nd. Make sure to mark it on your calendar!