Allow me to tell you all a little bit about this blog, and what I intent to achieve with it.
I’ve always had a particular, for lack of a better word, obsession with female historical figures, far more so than their male peers. This is probably a result of a number of factors; the first being that I am 100% unashamedly a feminist and the second being that excluding my grandad (aka the greatest man on the planet), the biggest influences on my own life have all been women. Which is why the lack of women in my historical education always seemed perplexing at least to me. I remember learning about Henry VIII and his six wives in school and that’s all they were. Wives. They were utterly defined by their relationship to Henry, who somehow managed to be largely (no pun intended) portrayed, not as the abusive, power hungry monster he evidently was but as some sort of hero. In the tale of the six wives particular emphasis was placed not on their individual achievements, but on how he ruthlessly discarded each of them (bar the last). After all we’ve all heard the rhyme, “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. Beyond that I learnt very little about them. They were not given their own story; they were just merely part of his. Not once during my primary school years did anyone ever mention Catherine of Aragon being the brains of the victory at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 (Henry wasn’t even in the country!) or the extent to which Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr’s theological belief had a profound impact on the country. It wasn’t until I started reading more history books myself that I discovered how fascinating each wife was in their own right.
This discovery led me to investigate further about all the historical women, I’d learnt very little about and something that I realised whilst doing this was, that women have been monumentally screwed over by history. I mean they’ve been demeaned, degraded, forgotten, ignored, slandered and attacked in EVERY way possible, by their male contemporaries and by historians and yet the history books are littered with extraordinary women who despite the limitations of their gender, managed to endure and in some cases even managed to change the world. Women are quite frankly absolutely incredible and their stories deserve to be told; from the women who ruled countries and built empires and even destroyed empires, to the women whose names were not considered worthy of being recorded. One of the most famous slogans of recent years is “The Future is Female”, but in many ways, so was the past. I believe that the study of women and the role they’ve played throughout history, is a deeply necessary attempt to reclaim a past that’s been written for us. By telling the stories of women that history has failed, this blog will also seek to challenge the frankly embarrassing double standard that exists between male and female historical figures. It’s no secret that women in general are held to a different standard to men, and this applies to historical figures too; female figures from history are often defined in absolute terms, as either good or bad with no middle ground or room for ambiguity or debate. Women don’t get to be deeply complex and flawed anti-heroes, nor are they always considered worthy of redemption. Male historical however are, and I’ve read a ton of academia in which historians (usually male, usually white, and quite frankly usually older) have bent over backwards to offer a male historical figure redemption, that they simply do not deserve, and in the process revealed a great deal about the damage, the patriarchy has done, not just to women but to men too!
As well as challenging these double standards I will try to highlight those who have not received the attention I feel they deserve. Through film and television, everyone knows the stories of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots and the tale of Anne Boleyn has been told a thousand times with varying degrees of success, however there is such an immense wealth of incredibly complex female historical figures that I believe deserve their moment in the spotlight. These women will be from a variety of nations, backgrounds, religions and ethnicities and one of my first profiles will be of a woman whose largely unknown in the UK but who wielded extraordinary power in the Middle East in the 16th century and who kick-started an entire era of female supremacy. This blog will hopefully highlight women like her and the often insane lives they led. That’s not to say, the likes of Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn won’t crop up here and there; the latter was after all my first historical obsession and I’d quite happily discuss her all day, but for the purposes of this blog, she’ll be taking a back seat to some of history’s more criminally-underrated women.
In case you’re wondering the name of this blog, is a reference to “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”, a polemical text written by John Knox (1513-1572), a notorious misogynist, theologian, minister and all round terrible guy, who believed female leaders were against the teachings of the bible. I doubt he’d be a fan of this blog then.
Thank you, for reading this introductory post and I’ll see you all with a new post soon!
The Monstrous Regiment of Women 