A niche for herself in history
Women's pursuit of power, influence, and lives of significance
Who participated in the toils of Sir William Herschel? Who braved with him the inclemency of the weather? Who shared his privations? A female. Who was she? His sister. Miss Herschel it was who acted by night as his amanuensis; she it was whose pen conveyed to paper his observations as they issued from his lips; she it was who noted the right ascensions and polar distances of the objects observed; she it was who, having passed the night near the instrument, took the rough manuscript to her cottage at dawn and produced a fair copy of the night work on the following morning; she it was who planned the labours of each successive night; she it was who reduced every observation, made every calculation; she it was who arranged everything in systematic order; and she it was who helped him to obtain his imperishable name . . . Many of the nebulae in Sir William Herschel's catalogues were detected by her during these hours of enjoyment. Indeed in looking at the joint labours of these extraordinary personages, we scarcely know whether most to admire the intellectual power of the brother or the unconquerable industry of the sister.
Blake Morrison, who was the last journalist to interview Valerie (Mrs. T. S.) Eliot (full text here), is known for his family memoirs. The most recent of them, Two Sisters, was especially interesting to me because he included many examples of what I think of as #Thanksfortyping figures - the unknown women behind famous men. (I contributed a chapter about two of these figures, Valerie Eliot and Sophia Mumford, to the book based on the 2019 Oxford conference: Thanks for Typing, published by Bloomsbury Academic.)
Many of these women were wives, but there have been many sisters, too, amongst them the astronomer Caroline Herschel, who was awarded Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. The text above comes from the awards ceremony. Morrison writes:
As a tribute to someone who discovered eight comets it's less than generous. But the putdown would have come as no surprise to Caroline, who colluded in constructing an image of herself as the Cinderella of astronomy, the innocent heroine who achieved fairytale success thanks to the princely brilliance of her brother. ‘I am nothing,' she wrote in her memoirs, ‘I have done nothing; all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only the tool which he shaped to his use — a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as much . . . I did what he commanded me.'
William Herschel, in fact, insisted that Caroline receive credit for her discoveries (he had himself discovered Uranus, the first “new” planet in many centuries, so he was well ahead and not worried about competition). This story reminded me of a fascinating account of a New England astronomer named Maria Mitchell whose story is told in Figuring by Maria Popova.
There have always been women who fulfilled grand ambitions - ambitions well beyond the expectations of their family and class - through alliances with powerful men. You may already be thinking of modern examples. After all, the “strongman” style of leadership still has appeal, and the Cinderella story is far from forgotten. But I am also interested in women who themselves were not great hidden artists or scientists and yet wanted to be something more than a footnote in a great man’s life.
When I was working with scholars including James Macgregor Burns on the Encyclopedia of Leadership, there were not enough women. Perhaps that’s one of the things that made me curious about women exerting power from the margins. I found little written about this aspect of leadership, but there are many examples of women’s varied paths to power in societies where they were allowed no official role and were often considered less intelligent, less capable, and less trustworthy than men. And some women associated with powerful men rose in their own right to the pinnacles of power. In the Tang dynasty, for example, a minor concubine used her intelligence, steely determination, and remarkable political acumen to become Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in the history of China.
I was relieved to discover that many women were frustrated with the narrow roles their societies offered. They managed to have influence, even though they often had to exert power in oblique ways or by influencing their husbands, brothers, and sons. (Mothers, incidentally, have been even more important than wives or other sexual partners. The mothers of kings or prospective kings have exercised both official and unofficial power, generally to benefit their sons but occasionally not. Irene, mother of the Byzantium Constantine VI, “decided that her only child, Constantine VI, was not competent to rule . . . She had him blinded and then ruled in her own right.”)
I first wrote about these historic paths to power when Hillary Clinton was running for president. At the time, I was dismayed to think that the first woman to be a presidential candidate in the US was the wife of a former president. That model has been common in some parts of the world, in various authoritarian regimes, but I found no other example in a western democracy. (If you can find one, I’d like to hear about it.)
Concubines became empresses, courtesans directed kings, and salonnières were the center of intellectual and political life in Enlightenment France and in London at the height of the British Empire. In the twentieth century, there were Washington hostesses who wielded power behind the scenes.
Of course women’s looks and sexuality have often been central to their roles on the sidelines of power. Attractive women have sometimes achieved positions of power that would not have been available to other women. More importantly, women’s ability, or inability, to bear (usually) male heirs has often shaped their destinies. For courtesans, some of whom, in both Europe and Asia, achieved considerable status, wealth, and influence, skill in lovemaking was prized, but in general women’s sexuality was considered risky: Elizabeth I of England was probably a more effective leader as the Virgin Queen.
In the twentieth century, there have been influential wives and daughters, some of whom became politicians themselves. Beautiful young women like Imelda Marcos or actresses like Madame Mao or Eva Perón are in the tradition of the ambitious concubine. Eleanor Roosevelt was probably the most successful in achieving her own place in history - campaigning and participating in public policy during her husband Franklin’s presidency and serving as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly after his death - though she never held elected office. Some recent national leaders, including Park Geun-hye of South Korea and Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, came to power through a male relative. Indira Gandhi, India’s third prime minister, and the former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra rose to power in countries that had previously been led by male family members.
Women leaders often provoke accusations of weaknesses and susceptibilities, and questionable loyalties. In Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, Anne Walthall points out that, “For commentators around the world, women and power constitute an unholy mix. Women, it is assumed, do not know how to use power; they play favorites, corrupt officials if not the king, squander the state’s financial resources, and lack the courage to resist enemies.” Attacks on female rulers were often personal; gossip about female rulers’ sexuality - from Catherine the Great to Hillary Clinton - has often overshadowed attention paid to their policies.
On the other hand, there was a belief that women’s taste, elegance, manners, and artistic accomplishments had a civilizing effect that wasn’t only beneficial in the drawing room but in business and politics too, as Walthall points out: “The historical sociologist Norbert Elias claimed that court societies are responsible for what he called the civilizing process, by which people learn to negotiate increasingly complex sets of interdependencies that require self-restraint and careful planning.”
Women have often been seen as adept at what we now call social networking. In terms of political leadership, this networking focused on building alliances, soothing grievances, cementing loyalty, and sometimes encouraging intrigue. The traditional role of the female spouse of a male leader in Western countries has included acting as a hostess and social role model to other women and also building personal connections and promoting common feeling between distant leaders.
Literature is full of women rising due to their wits, charm, or pure goodness as Jane Eyre does in Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel. Other women in fiction suffer when they break conventions—Hester Prynne, for example, in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Carrie Meeber in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. They also suffer because of their powerlessness. In English literature, for example, there is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Strong female characters also appear in much earlier works, including Chaucer’s Wife of Bath; Hua Mulan, a fabled woman warrior in ancient China; and of course Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth.
British Anthony Trollope made women’s ambition a central thread in the six novels referred to as the Palliser series. The action takes place in and around the British parliament at the height of the British Empire, in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Although all the politicians are men and his female characters eschew what was then called “rights for women,” the plots are sometimes driven by women who are in the thick of political life, consulted by friends in government as well as by their own relations.
Trollope wrote elsewhere that he considered marriage and motherhood a sufficient and fulfilling career for women, but his female characters in these novels come close to breaking with the author who created them. Alice Vavasor, the heroine of Can You Forgive Her? the first novel in the series and set in the 1860s, breaks off an engagement because her fiancé wants a quiet country life. She cannot bear the idea of retreating from London and public life. In fact, she is often teased for her political interest. Another character, Lady Laura Standish, persuades her father to join the government.
That women should even wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable, and the cause of the Rights of Women generally was odious to her; but, nevertheless, for herself, she delighted in hoping that she too might be useful,—in thinking that she too was perhaps, in some degree, politically powerful.
Trollope also introduced a prominent male character, Phineas Finn, for whom two books in the series are named, who has particularly close relationships with women and rises in large part because of his good looks, easy charm, and capacity for doing tedious research - like Caroline Herschel, in fact. Organizational and research skills, along with transcription and typing, seem to have played a significant role in some men’s choice of partners.
I like to think that for all her protestations about being merely a tool (a role made clear in the illustrations I've included above), Caroline Herschel knew perfectly well that she was an important astronomer. We shouldn’t take her excessive humility in written texts too seriously - that was required by the tenets of her time.1 I like to think that she dreamed of a day when she, and other women like her, would receive full recognition.
One of Trollope’s politically inclined fictional heroines, Lady Glencora Palliser, wife of the prime minister, wants “a niche for herself in history.” Women have often sought a niche in history and a bigger world for themselves, as well as the ability to control their own destiny, and found their own quiet paths to power long before the women’s movements of the twentieth century.
Here’s to International Women’s Month, and to international women!
I’m reminded of Emily Hale’s self-effacing explanation of why she saved and deposited 1,100 letters from T. S. Eliot at Princeton. It was done, she wrote, because of his importance as a writer, his status as a great man in literature. He destroyed her letters and at the instigation of his second wife Valerie Eliot denied that he had ever loved Hale, who was then, for decades, denigrated by Valerie and the Eliot establishment. But she did not go silently: the letters she preserved make it impossible to erase her from the story and make Eliot’s love and dependence on her, over many years, abundantly clear.
