Thank you for such a great panel! I struggled to come up with a question because I'm distracted by the quality of the conversation.

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I'll pose this to any of the panelists who'd like to answer- When discussing women's agency, you're all hammering more nails into the coffin of the "separate sphere" idea. Can you address some of the historiographic and terminology challenges where histories of women and womanhood are constructed/constrained by problematic gender notions and historical actors needed to navigate/challenge gendered boundaries?

I asked this in the other thread, but it looks like it would be really good here.

I think its reasonable to say that all of these perspectives must experience a fair amount of push back, especially from various factions against revising history against the traditional narrative. How do you deal with something like that? Are there attempts to convert naysayers and reeducate them? How can you continue to share your history in the face of attempts to silence it?

Thank you panelist this was really good. I've been having a hard time coming up with specific questions, despite watching the panel twice it just sucks me in! Perhaps you'll indulge a more softball question that I think would be good for readers to see. Whats it like being women, writing about women, in a field that often seems (To an outsider like me at least) very male or military dominated?

Do you feel a particular connection to the people you study? Is it personal, or more of a 'business' perspective?

Thank you for this panel everyone! This is another I was lucky enough to watch in editing and loved it. Can you speak any more about the ways women would find to express agency or exert power that might be outside of the 'traditional' methods? Or even within ways that would be considered their traditional area?

I'm going to cheat and ask a more general question. For all the panelist, is there somewhere we can read or see more of your work? Everyone was excellent and I'd like to learn more.

I'd be interested in hearing more about how historians are able to piece together all this history from the bits and pieces of other sources. If women are often left out of the main accounts, it must be very difficult to get any kind of a record or look at the lives of women. Especially the average women on the street. The musical Hamilton spends a fair bit of time talking about "Who will tell your story?" and it seems like those who are trying to tell it for many of these women have a pretty big challenge ahead of them.

Good afternoon and welcome to Q and A for the panel, I Make the Governor Call Me Governor: Rewriting the History of Women's Agency! This panel discussed different ways women have exerted their agency throughout history, especially in spaces dominated by men. The panel features:

Clare Burgess (/u/ClareBurgess) presenting her paper, "Weaponising Grief: The Women of the Guise Family and the Catholic League During the French Wars of Religion"

The French Wars of Religion were a period of extreme turmoil: assassinations, battles and infighting left many women mourning husbands, brothers, and sons. Given the bellicose context, women are often relegated to the sidelines, presented only as pawns to be married off, and given little agency. This is a significant distortion of the truth. Women played a major role in the conflict, and this paper examines just one way in which women wielded power: they weaponised their grief as a tool with which to justify their involvement. Focusing on the triumvirate of Guise women, Anne d’Este, Catherine-Marie de Lorraine, and Catherine de Clèves, who were leaders of the Catholic League from the late 1580s into the 1590s. They conducted political negotiations, waged a vicious propaganda war, and resisted a siege by the royal army. Despite a swathe of contemporary evidence which puts all three women at the heart of League politics, their involvement has been virtually erased. Instead, they are presented as vicious harpies whose ineffectual diatribes were little more than background noise – to date, there is no biography of either Catherine-Marie de Lorraine or her sister-in-law Catherine de Clèves, and Anne d’Este is only now receiving the attention she deserves. This paper will examine contemporary pamphlets, diaries and correspondence to show that all three women effectively politicised their grief in order to further the Catholic cause, and to preserve the power of their dynasty. By demonstrating their central role in the Catholic League and the struggle for Paris, I aim to restore the Guise matriarchs to their rightful position as leaders of a religious and political movement, and as the stewards of the Guise dynasty’s legacy.

Chelsea Hartlen (/u/MoragLarsson) presenting her paper, "Standing Their Ground: Women and Warfare in the Anglo-Scottish Borders"

In both academic and popular representations, the Anglo-Scottish border region of the late medieval and early modern periods has been cast as a violent, lawless and masculine arena. Any mention of Borderers evokes the image of swords clashing and the sound of epic romantic ballads that chronicle the heroism and villainy of border raiders and their kin. In recent decades, life in the borders has been further explored and the culture of violence and conflict better understood with historians like Jackson Armstrong (2020) advancing strong arguments about the positive and organisational role that violent raiding and feuding played in regulating social, cultural and economic relationships. In short, what modern observers and the early Scottish state considered messy and chaotic, the borderers themselves understood as a crucial part of a stable economy and productive conflict resolution. What is missing from recent assessments of life in the borders, however, is the involvement of women. Several scholars have asserted that women were excluded from the raiding and feuding that characterised border society. On the one hand, this is true: it would appear that the English and Scottish men who made their living trafficking goods and livestock across the border tacitly agreed to leave women and children unharmed during their escapades. However, historians have perhaps been too quick to dismiss the involvement of women in the feuding culture of this region. The records of Scotland’s highest criminal court are not the juiciest or most detailed documents but reading between the lines offers a glimpse into the ways that noblewomen related to prominent border families engaged in legitimate uses of violence typically reserved for men. The judicial responses, or lack thereof, to these women suggest that society perceived them as acting well within their social and political roles. ​

And Julia Stryker (/u/JConnellStryker) sharing her paper, "Masculinity, Myth-Making, and Women’s Place at Sea in Maritime Life"

There are a few things everyone knows about ships, sailors, and the seas of the past: about pirates, that the captain goes down with the ship, and, in that superstitious and overwhelmingly male world, women are bad luck on ships. Women, however, have always gone to sea, just like men – as necessity and desire dictated. Their history has not been hidden so much as erased – overwritten by an understanding of the maritime past built on nostalgic mythmaking, itself born of the wracking change wrought by the end of the Age of Sail. ​Nineteenth-century Britain saw its maritime predominance as fundamental to its world-spanning empire, even as the rise of steam redefined maritime life – and concurrently saw the birth of the literary genre, the nautical novel. These novels helped define the popular understanding of the maritime past that persists today – from Treasure Island to Pirates of the Caribbean, Mr. Midshipman Easy to Master and Commander. Women went to sea in record numbers, and even gained professionalized positions aboard ships, over the same period, but, at the turn of the twentieth century, women working at sea still saw themselves as pioneers, breaching forbidden, masculine shipboard spaces. What happened to the history of women’s work at sea that even those living it couldn't see it? Maritime history has, for decades, picked apart the myths and matter of maritime life; just because seafaring was the practical engine of empire, doesn’t mean it lost its mystery. We need to know what was real, what was believed to be real – what are our stories, and what are the stories we tell ourselves? The history of women’s work at sea, and what happened to that history, together reveal the ties and tensions between culture and power, technology and craft, experience and meaning.