Women's History Month: historical fiction

Brigid of Kildare: A Novel by Heather Terrell

The history of Saint Brigid is largely apocryphal.  A 5th century Gael and one of three of Ireland's patron saints, her biographers agree on little, but the few details of Brigid's life that can be agreed upon are quite interesting.  The daughter of Dubthtach, a pagan king of Leinster, and Brocca, a Christian Pict and slave, Brigid's exposure to her parents' differing religions shaped her approach to converting the Gaels upon taking her vows.  She founded Kildare Abbey around the year 470 AD.  When a bishop in his waning years, Saint Patrick -- whether intentionally or not -- performed the rite of consecration of a bishop.  As Abbess of Kildare Abbey, Brigid had administrative authority equal to that of a bishop.

Heather Terrell takes this handful of tenuously agreed upon facts and weaves them into a fascinating tale of a bold, intelligent, fiercely independent woman whose unorthodox methods of worship were looked upon with stringent disapproval by the men in power at the Vatican, who believed that women should be relegated to a role of silent and submissive passivity in the Christian faith.  Her Brigid, while perhaps not historically accurate, is -- as the wonderful character Sister Mary puts it -- "one very impressive woman."

In the 6th century, Brigid, daughter of Dubtach, the king of the Fothairt people of southern Gael, and Broicsech, his formidable and outspoken Christian wife and queen, forges her destiny as God's instrument in Gael.  While open to hearing her mother teach her of Christianity, she grows increasingly frustrated and disturbed by the lack of strong and educated women in the Gospels.  Why, she asks, should she adopt her mother's chosen faith when it affords women none of the respect and positions of authority that druidism does?  To prevent Brigid from turning away from a life of Christianity, Broicsech gives her daughter access to the recently banned Gospel of Mary, and Brigid finds in its pages her missing heroine.  Mary is a strong-willed, brilliant, educated woman with a close bond to her son the Messiah.  Brigid decides to devote herself to a life of religion, and vows that the Church will someday recognize Mary's role in the Christian faith once more.

Over fifteen hundred years later, Alexandra Patterson finds herself called to Kildare to provide her services as a medieval relics appraiser.  Sister Mary Kelly, the efficient and practical nun who "keeps" the history of the relics, wants to sell their oldest and most valuable relics to fund the order's efforts to educate the populace about the woman behind the myth, and she believes that Alex is the person for the job.  It isn't long before Alex discovers that the chalice, paten, and reliquary she has been commissioned to appraise aren't the only treasures at the Madonna Chapel -- secreted away inside the reliquary is an illuminated manuscript the likes of which she's never seen before.  Could it possibly be the rumored lost Book of Kildare that Saint Brigid commissioned in the 6th century?

Writing historical fiction takes a deft touch and a keen sense of how much fact and fiction to blend together.  Heather Terrell's Brigid of Kildare is a perfect blend of history and fantasy, and her cast of fictional characters -- in particular Broicsech and Sister Mary Kelly -- are all a delight to read.  The amount of research that went into writing this book was certainly not insignificant.  Readers will learn plenty about the early days of the Catholic Church, and about the enigmatic religious leader who would one day become Ireland's Saint Brigid.

Women's History Month: women's rights

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching by Chrystal N. Feimster

The most widely recognized -- and widely reviled -- portrayal of the postbellum South is a silent film by D.W. Griffith.  Premiering under the title The Clansman, we know it today as The Birth of a Nation.  In the film, Griffith shares an intensely racist and heavily romanticized narrative of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded in 1865 as a means to terrorize the black population in the South into submission.  In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith employed several archetypal characters that, due to a sustained campaign of fear-mongering and violence, became firmly entrenched in the mythos of the post-War South: the avenging white knight, the chaste and delicate Southern woman, the treacherous mulatto woman, and the brutish ravaging black man.  It is these archetypal characters that provided white Southerners a means of justifying the widespread and horrific practice of lynching black men, women, and children.

In Southern Horrors, Chrystal N. Feimster explores this dark period in the history of the United States through the lens of what the postbellum South and the practice of lynching meant for women, and in particular what it meant for Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ida B. Wells.  They could not have come from more different backgrounds -- Felton, the daughter of wealthy slave owners, was raised to be the mistress of her future husband's plantation, and Wells was born into slavery the year before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was delivered.  Despite their differences, and despite their differing approaches to what each of them saw as the solution to the problem of lynching and mob rule, they had quite a lot in common.  They were both suffragists, journalists, and activists, and when they saw how precarious the safety of women in the South had become, they took up the banner of the cause and didn't set it down until the day they died.

In the years during the war and immediately following it, Felton saw the practice of raping women as something that all women needed protection from, regardless of social class or skin color.  When her "radical" views proved damaging to her husband's budding political career, however, she shifted her focus for the sake of expediency to focus only on seeking protection for white women.  Felton, an unabashed white supremacist all her life, was not afraid of invoking the nightmare figure of the fictional "black rapist" if it bought her cause popular support.  In a now infamous speech made in 1897, Felton claimed that women left alone on rural farms were in imminent danger from roving black rapists and murderers, and that the only solution was to lynch "a thousand a week if necessary."  The corollary, white men raping black women, was popularly thought to be the fault of the black women's loose morals and base natures, and Felton had no qualms about using this imagery either.  In the years that followed, however, her views on the nature of rape -- and the appropriate response to accusations of rape -- swung back toward the progressive end of the spectrum, and over twenty years after her lynching speech, she wrote an impassioned article decrying the disparities in sentencing and punishment between black and white offenders.  By calling lynching an "atrocity," she placed herself firmly in the anti-lynching camp, and re-embraced her previous view that the greatest danger to southern women of either race was white men.

Ida B. Wells, by contrast, was born a decade later into an unstable and tumultuous atmosphere.  She came of age in the time of Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs, when accusations of rape and attempted rape made by white girls and women in the morning were enough to have the accused strung up in a tree and riddled with bullets by the time the sun had set.  Wells saw firsthand the deplorable condition that former slaves and their children suffered under in a post-slavery Mississippi.  Former slave owners no longer had reason to value the black man or woman as a commodity, and as a direct result vented their spleen in increasingly violent and disturbing ways upon the people who had once been their "property."  The lynching of three of Wells' friends in Memphis in 1891 set her on the path that would become her life's work.  After moving to Chicago, she published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that explored the motivations behind the lynching of black men.  Wells quite rightly surmised that the explanation given for most lynchings -- to avenge the honor of white women raped by black men -- was a tale spun from whole cloth to hide the true intentions behind the violent act: to continue the disenfranchisement of the black race.  Black progress threatened white supremacists' ideas of black inferiority.  Wells exhorted black men and women to defend themselves: "The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched."


Change would not be seen until the very end of either of their lives, and the fight for both racial and gender equality would continue long after their deaths.  But they both made significant contributions to the anti-lynching crusade -- Wells through investigative journalism, political activism, and as a founding member of both the NACW and the NAACP, Felton by taking her enormous political cachet and standing as a wealthy white woman to work for reform from within.

Women's History Month: juvenile fiction

Newsgirl by Liza Ketchum

In Newsgirl, Liza Ketchum delivers that rarest of birds: a strong, plucky, stubborn, enterprising, headstrong, brave, likable, and above all believable female protagonist in twelve year old Amelia Forrester.  Fresh off a steamship from Panama, Amelia, her mother Sophie, and Sophie's partner Estelle Duprey have taken a chance at starting a new life in the rough and tumble setting of gold rush era San Francisco.  Sophie and Estelle have high hopes for their future as businesswomen in a city where the men vastly outnumber the women -- they have talent, they have a plan, and they will make things work.  Amelia's greatest hope is that the whispers and the horrible nickname that followed her around school in Boston have been left behind for good.

After putting most of their savings toward passage to San Francisco, the Forrester-Duprey family needs to keep a tight hold on every coin they have until their fledgling business begins to turn a profit.  Eternally curious Amelia notices when they disembark that a ragged looking group of boys seem to be earning top dollar for newspapers from Boston that are months old.  She immediately decides that the best way for her to contribute to her family's financial wellbeing is to start selling newspapers herself, but even with her mother's grudging approval, she runs into a major stumbling block: girls can't sell newspapers -- at least, not if the boys from the dock have any say in the matter.  Out of desperation, she takes a pocketknife to her hair in an impulsive move to convince Julius and Nico, the ringleaders of the newspaper boys, to take her on, and Estelle sees to it that she's properly kitted out with boy's clothing when she finds out Amelia's motives behind her drastic act.  Thus disguised, "Emile Duprey" enters the lucrative newspaper business.

Her career barely has time to start before she's quite literally launched in a new direction when she and her young friend Patrick decide to investigate an aeronaut's exhibition of his hot air balloon.  After being invited to provide ballast in the basket while the aeronaut readies the balloon for launch, things go awry, and she and Patrick soon find themselves stranded in the gold fields of northern California.  Separated from her family and adrift in a world where competency is prized above strict adherence to gender roles, Amelia realizes that it's time for her to be true to herself, and decides that if she makes it back home to her mother and Estelle, she'll work in the newspaper business on her own terms -- and under her own name.

While Newsgirl is not without its flaws -- it seems a little fuzzy on exactly when the climax of the story takes place, leading the last fourth of the book to feel alternately rushed and sluggish in places -- Ketchum's strength lies with her strong and fully developed female characters.  She draws the relationships between Amelia and her mother, Amelia and Estelle, and Estelle and Sophie with care and true affection for her characters.  Although the hardships of their new life take their toll on Sophie's relationship with Amelia, their disagreements don't diminish the strength of their bond.  And though Amelia is almost paralyzed by her fear of being recognized as and labeled a bastard for her lack of a father, it doesn't detract from her love for Estelle -- and the scene in which Amelia claims Estelle as her mother is perhaps the most touching one in the entire book.  Their unconventional family provides unconditional support for one another through thick and thin.

Set in a period of time when women lacked suffrage and many other rights, Newsgirl is about one small family of women generously endowed with a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. Even in this day and age, when we can take it for granted that girls can sell newspapers and women can own their own businesses, it is still an excellent book for a young girl to read as she sets off on her own journey to discover her inner brave, stubborn, enterprising, strong, plucky, headstrong, likable self.

Women's History Month: real role models

It's March!  March, that lovely month during which the weather in San Antonio turns from "occasionally really cold" to "occasionally really warm."  When flowers no longer need to fear frost, when I begin to never leave home without sunglasses, when the sliding glass door is wide open all day, when we put away our pants and sweaters in favor of shorts and t-shirts until September rolls around--that's March!  It's also the month we celebrate the fifty-one percent of humanity born without a Y chromosome.  You know who I'm talking about.  They're the ones who invented beer (Egyptian priestesses), developed the theory of radioactivity (Marie Curie), founded Rhode Island (Anne Hutchinson), reformed mental institutions (Dorothea Dix), invented the Gothic horror genre (Mary Shelley), championed the cause for equal rights (Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimke sisters), and put cracks in every glass ceiling they came across.

THESE are role models.  Not the actresses on the idiot box who land in the tabloids for wild drinking binges in between seasons.  Not the singing tween sensations who've grown up so fast they missed out on childhood entirely.  Not the women on the covers of Elle and Seventeen, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives.  THESE are role models.  Pioneers.  Trailblazers.  Heads of State.  Suffragists.  Muckrakers.  Scientists.  Mathematicians.  Poets.  Philosophers.  Astronauts.  Scholars.  Philanthropists.

We have no end of awe-inspiring women to look up to and be inspired by.  Our younger sisters, nieces, friends, and daughters share in the gifts of the amazing women who came before us.  It's our job to ensure that the next generation knows that there are far, far better role models for them to emulate outside of Hollywood.  To end the month in style, I'll devote an entry a day to a noteworthy book that celebrates the history -- and the future -- of women in one way or another.