Workshop Overview

Powerful women dominate the news, but does their influence reflect true solidarity? This workshop explores how educators can help students distinguish between individual "empowerment" and collective feminism. By analyzing media figures, from government officials to "Trad Wife" influencers, and engaging with the work of bell hooks and Serene Khader, we will define feminism more precisely. Participants will leave with an intersectional framework and a collaborative list of actionable steps to reclaim feminist goals within our schools.

Agenda

1. Women in the News Now: 4 examples of empowered (?) women

What feels feminist? What feels faux?

2. Serena Khader: How do we distinguish faux feminism ?

   

Historical Aside: The muddy history of “choice feminism” in America and the death of the ERA.

3. bell hooks: How can we build a more authentic understanding of feminism?

   

   

4. How can we draw on these values and ideas in our teaching?

   [link forthcoming! I’ll post our list

Link to presentation.

Female education in the ancient world

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Hypatia of Alexandria was adept at navigating the norms of intellectual life. may have been the most successful at navigating them, or perhaps she was merely the last to work with this set of rules. With the rise of the Christian church, the rules of gender and power would change, and for Hypatia, her public position and intellectual authority would not save her. In fact, they became a danger.

Even as women philosophized, computed, composed, cured the ill, and consulted with their male colleagues, a tightening atmosphere of doom loomed over Alexandria. Many women looked at the broken temples and the growing numbers of black-cloaked monks walking the streets and left to establish female communities beyond the city walls. They saw the rules of public discourse changing from philosophical debate to Christian belief and they shifted their strategies. Hypatia stayed. Her very presence would enrage the new bishop.

Cyril was elected bishop of Alexandria in 412 in a contested and messy election. Though his uncle, Theophilus, had the position before him, Cyril commanded little loyalty within the city itself. Many had preferred a more moderate man named Thomas for the position. Cyril already had a reputation for militancy and for particular animosity towards Christian sects and thinkers who favored the ideas of Origen, a Christian Alexandrian from the third century. The particulars of the debate– subtle differences on the nature of Christ’s soul–dizzy the modern mind. Was Christ’s soul always the logos (word) or did it become the logos at the moment of resurrection? Theological debate often masked personal vendetta. Cyril’s defining quality, one that he shared with his uncle before him, was a militant streak that made philosophical debate, with its posing of questions and insistence on exploring possibilities, intolerable to him.

This put Cyril at constant odds with the prefect of Alexandria, Orestes. Cyril considered himself the better Christian. But Orestes was the savvier politician. He courted favor with the Jewish community. He connected himself with Hypatia, the leading scholar of the day, so that he could draw on her influence with the intellectual community, pagan and Christian alike. Cyril took a different tack. He wanted to ensure that ecclesiastical power was the only power in Alexandria that mattered. His uncle had destroyed the Serapeum but let the teaching and learning continue. Now Cyril would put a stop to that too.

Following his election, Cyril escalated his efforts to stamp out paganism and cement his supremacy over Orestes, the city prefect. He summoned some five hundred monks, armed and angry, to descend from their refuges in the mountains of Nitria to accost Orestes in the street. Armed with rocks and shards of whatever they could find, they attack him, calling him a pagan idolator. Despite his protests that he had been baptized, one monk named Ammonius struck the governor in the head with a rock. A group of Alexandrians loyal to Orestes seized and tortured Ammonius to death. Enraged, Cyril sent word to the emperor that a pagan was killing Christians for their faith and that Ammonius must be counted among the saints and martyrs. Cyril’s requests were ignored by the emperor’s officials, pagan and Christian alike. They sided with Orestes, leaving Cyril angry and thirsty for a fight he could win.

Several sources tell us that it was around this time, and in this mood, that Cyril was himself held up one day in the street. There, his path was impeded not by an angry mob, but by an eager crowd of listeners. They were clamoring around the entrance to a private residence, straining to hear the voice of the teacher within. A few were running in and out, shouting summaries and commentaries on what was being said. So unfamiliar was he with the gathering places in his city, that Cyril had to ask one of his attendants whose house it was. For, of course, the teacher was Hypatia and the house was hers. She was captivating her audience with her usual verve and wisdom. It was for her that listeners came from far and wide. It was these kinds of gatherings that earned her the reputation of a philosopher “who far surpassed all others in her own time.”

Even if she was not a Christian herself (and she probably was not, but we do not know for certain), Hypatia must have seen herself as something of a mentor to the next generation of church leadership – cosmopolitan, learned in the old thinkers, rigorous in debate and stylish in writing and rhetoric. Many of her students went on to become bishops of important cities. Athanasius became a father of the church. Around 411, Synesius, Hypatia’s most admiring student, and the one whose letters give us such rich information about her, her teaching style and her vibrant circles of pupils, was made bishop of Cyrene. None of this influence kept her safe, in reputation or in body, from the accusations of a spiteful rival.

What happened next is known to us in multiple ways. First, through consistent references in Greek texts in the Eastern Empire, references so casual as to imply that it was common knowledge. Sometimes, writers do not even bother to mention Hypatia’s name when they tell the story. Everyone knew her. Everyone knew what happened to her. We also have five extant sources: four authors that condemn the violent actions: Hesychius, Damascius, Socrates Scholasticus, and the Suda. And one, John of Nikue, who celebrates it.

Threatened by Hypatia’s hold on his city, Cyril called on his monks again. To embolden them to greater violence, he spread rumors about Hypatia: that she cast devious spells; that she attended and participated in public dances; that she wasn’t just manipulating Orestes, she was sleeping with him. Orestes had become so deluded by her wiles that he had stopped going to Church! The list of insults is a familiar one: manipulation, seduction, dancing, magic, music, sex. Over the thousands of years of culture this book covers, the insults stay remarkably consistent. Whispered a few times, they merge together into an accusation of witchcraft for any woman of influence.

It was broad daylight when the monks seized the reins of her carriage and pulled Hypatia into the sandy street. They grabbed pottery shards and old roof tiles to stab and beat her. They dragged her north to the Caesarium, a newly minted church right on the water. They may have torn off her clothes. The implication of sexual violence exists. So does the shame of nakedness. One source tells us they used the pottery shards to beat out her eyes, another that they used them to flay and dismember her. They were right on the water, another source reports, they used seashells to strip the flesh from her bones. All agree that they mutilated her body and burned the remaining pieces. Whatever they did, it’s not hard for a large group of men to chase down and beat a sixty-year old woman to death.

Orestes, as far as we know, never stood up to Cyril again. Orestes had escaped Cyril’s mob. Hypatia could not save herself. But without Hypatia, Orestes no longer challenged Cyril’s authority. There was no investigation or trial for Hypatia’s murder. The fear campaign worked. When Orosius, a student of Augustine of Hippo, visited Alexandria in the year following Hypatia’s death, he noted no major library and no significant groups of pagan philosophers. Synesius bade farewell to Hypatia from his own deathbed: “Even though there shall be utter forgetfulness of the dead in Hades ‘even there I shall remember thee’ my dear Hypatia.”

Women, power and writing

And thus the story goes, told again and again. The first ones to tell the story were Cyril and his followers. John of Nikku, a chronicler for Cyril, left no one, woman or man, in any doubt as to how to interpret Hypatia’s killing. A woman speaking in public was a witch. Cyril was the saint. Cyril would go on to make an important philosophical contribution to Christian doctrine by carving out a clear and defined place for women. In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, where men gathered to lay down church doctrines that held for centuries. Cyril spoke passionately for the role of Mary as the Theotokos, meaning “bearer of god.” While we cannot know his intentions, he gave women a clear and narrowly defined role in Christian doctrine as the vessel of god. Mary bore Jesus in her body, but was not responsible for him in any way. The Christian doctrine echoes Aristotle’s understanding how women could express ideas without taking part in creating them.

Yet, this isn’t the whole story. Hypatia’s enduring reputation has always offered a counter-narrative of scholarly women. Even though she may not be the first woman mathematician, her accomplishments and wisdom shine brightly. Hypatia is hardly an unknown figure. Her reputation and her impact on the lives of so many meant that forever there would be a whisper of dissent from Cyril’s version of events. In twelfth century Byzantium, plenty of people knew her name. The “Egyptian Lady” became shorthand for a woman brilliant in philosophy and mathematics. As a symbol, Hypatia has enjoyed a long and interesting life as a paradigm of female achievement in otherwise exclusively male halls. Raphael included her in his “School of Athens.” Edward Gibbon in his influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes her death with relish as an indictment of the savagery of religious militants. For him, her death marks the end of free-thinking Classical Antiquity. A nineteenth century English novelist, Charles Kingsley, wrote a popular fictionalized account of Hypatia’s life that casts her as a young, brilliant thinker doing battle with Catholic fanaticism. Queen Victoria loved it. Unfortunately, these traditions often present Hypatia as the female exception that proves the rule that men did all the thinking, teaching, and writing. We now know that a much wider world of female scholarship existed and that it was rarely preserved in writing, which was principally part of the male domain of formal instruction.

Through the history of Hypatia’s history and the history of the library where she left a record of her contributions, we see certain characteristics of learned western culture that would endure for a long, long time. Posterity, instruction, leadership were male domains. Official knowledge and official learning– acknowledged and under the direction of celebrated individuals– was, by definition a male affair. If women did it, it was not official. At the root of this is a theoretical understanding of women as fundamentally lacking men’s authority. Biological notions of sexual difference, that female bodies were undeveloped male bodies, interwove with these notions of cultural differences to create a resilient male gender hegemony.

At the same time, we should not take this “philosophical” stance on women too seriously. For there were plenty of men who were happy to listen and learn from women, provided they demonstrated exceptional ability. Some men may have resented this and turned to their pens to turn their hard feelings into gender theories wherein women are decidedly subservient to men. In general, women did not participate in these written debates about their own nature–just as they did not participate in most written debates full stop. But in the ancient world, wherein speaking was the principal way of transmitting knowledge, we should not underestimate how, through speaking’s more flexible and participative rules, women were able to develop their ideas, offer their insights, and make themselves heard.

Merely counting the women named in various sources does not reflect what seems to be a rich and complex oral tradition of passing ideas from one person, one generation, to the next. This transmission went from mother to son, sister to brother, daughter to father. With the ascendancy of the Christian Church as an institution, intergenerational passing of knowledge would happen more often from man to man, woman to woman– what scholars call a more “homosocial” affair– primarily in monasteries and nunneries. Within this much more gender-segregated system, individual women wrote much more, for themselves and for their communities. Many of their manuscripts survive. So while few traces of the women thinkers of antiquity survive, we have much more robust material by Christian women in the middle ages.

Unanswered questions remain. A tension exists between Hypatia’s prominence and Alexandria’s decline. Was a woman able to hold the highest levels of public esteem only because the city was in a downward spiral into religious oligarchy? Or were there prominent women at other high points in ancient history whose lives and works are lost to us?

Looking forward

The Western World would have to wait seven hundred years for another woman to wield as public influence in philosophical circles as Hypatia did. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was as savvy a politician as any of her time, and a more prolific writer than almost anyone. She navigated the paths to power available to women in her time and place with remarkable acumen to become one of the leading public thinkers of the twelfth-century. Her tools were rhetoric, the written word, and political relationships with powerful men. Unlike Hypatia, who refused to take sanctuary in Christianity, Hildegaard wrapped herself in the protection of the Catholic Church and died an old woman in her bed. Power and authority changed forms and women had to change their approaches, but they could still wield power and authority.

Historically, to institutionalize learning has been to make sure it was male. Later, in a wave of professionalization brought on by commercialization and industrialization , the same tendency would be at play: to do something professionally was to be a man doing it. If women did it, it was not professional and was worth less.This was the case in a range of jobs including teaching, book-keeping, and compiling scientific data.

In the twenty-first century, a lot has changed and a lot has not. Closing gates of intellectual circles to women and writing histories and making lists of notables that include only men are practices that have endured remarkably well. In 1980, there were seventeen female professors with tenure at Harvard University– out of 569. Today, male tenured faculty at Harvard outnumber female faculty three to one. Forbes, a magazine that focuses on expertise in political, financial and technological sectors, regularly publishes lists of the world’s “most powerful or “most innovative” that do not include any women. Is it that women are not powerful or innovative or that, regardless of their respective accomplishments, being a man still qualifies a person for intellectual authority in ways that being a woman does not?

Class Slideshow

1789-1794:

During the French Revolution, women demand every major right you can think of…

• To vote

• To petition government and enact laws

• To be educated

• To work and be compensated fairly

• To bear arms

• “To live equal to men in their rights”

Olympia de Gouges, Etta Palm D’Aelders, Pauline Léon (among others!)

Despite women’s active participation in every stage of the French Revolution, women received the compassion of France’s leaders, but not their respect.

As the new nation emerged, influential statesmen argued that women lacked the moral autonomy to be full, active citizens.

Under these new rules, women could be the beneficiaries of public policy, but not its architects.

Historian Benedict Anderson urges us to understand the nation as “an imagined community” and Lynn Hunt, a leading scholar of the Revolutionary period, adds that human rights depend on an “imagined empathy” that slowly transformed mentalities over the course of the nineteenth century.

Historian Benedict Anderson urges us to understand the nation as “an imagined community” and Lynn Hunt, a leading scholar of the Revolutionary period, adds that human rights depend on an “imagined empathy” that slowly transformed mentalities over the course of the nineteenth century. Empathy is enough for human rights, but political rights, active citizenship, depends on the extension of imagined empathy to imagined moral autonomy, a key ingredient in the consent of the governed. In the years that followed the October Days of 1789, women fought for recognition of not just their needs, but of their moral autonomy. Key to their claims for moral autonomy was a recognition of women as providers, that is, economic actors who contributed to their own maintenance and that of their families.

Five Lenses

to help us teach women’s history, feminism, and gender with integrity, precision, and care

Link to Folder with academic articles

Beyond Resistance: Culturally-Situated Agency

Anchor Article: Mahmood, Saba. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656537.

What do we miss when we understand feminism exclusively as resistance to gender oppression? Too often feminism has been narrowly coded as resistance alone– Either you defy patriarchy or you do not; at times, this distinction divides the world into opposing camps: The feminists on one side and the complicit enablers of oppression on the other. This understanding of feminism, rooted mainly in Western feminist movements limits our ability to perceive the a multiplicity of ways women can exert agency within the limits of time, place, and circumstance. It can leave us especially blind to the agency of women living within rigidly delineated – and rigidly enforced– patriarchal norms. Expanding our notion of feminist action beyond explicit resistance to gender-based oppression helps us see a kaleidoscope of women’s agency across sexual, racial, class, and national difference not just in the contemporary societies but throughout history.

In the accompanying article, Saba Mahmoud’s work on the women’s mosque movement as part of a larger Islamic religious revival provides invaluable lessons on how to discuss and understand women’s agency as culturally and historically contingent. Her work lays out rich possibilities for looking at women’s movements in nonwestern contexts and across socio-economic classes in ways that challenge our default assumptions about freedom and agency.

WAMS Resources: Police Violence/Rodney King | Evacuating the colonies | The Casket Girls |

Life Story of Patsy Mink, author of Title IX |

Race as a Structuring Force

Anchor Article: Burkholder, Zoe, “Race as Nation in” in Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race (1900-1954). Oxford University Press, 2011.

Intersectional approaches have helped teachers and students alike better understand how multiple systems of oppression can be at play in a single life or experience. Without sacrificing those lessons, we want to draw attention to the ways that race has been particularly salient in limiting the opportunities of many Americans. Race has been a organizing method for in conceiving and structuring institutions which perpetuate and enforce inequalities. Sex too has been an organizing principle for political, economic, and educational institutions. As educators, we can draw fruitful parallels between these two systems without collapsing important distinctions.

Zoe Burkholder’s article offers both fascinating historical testimonies from 20th-century American teachers striving to make their classrooms incubators for racial harmony, as well as productive ways to understand how racist thinking shaped communities of color and white communities. Burkholder breaks down terms such as “Racialist models of history,” such as one that privileges the “angl-saxon race” for their contributions to civilization and ignores both Asia and Africa because they have not been part of the “great stream of development.” This is an excellent article for teachers who are already used to discussing race in their classrooms and it works well in conjunction with works by bell hooks (especially Feminism is for Everybody) Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Audré Lorde.

WAMS Resources: Reproduction & Racial Difference | Quapaw Masterpiece |Laundry Workers-Tools of the Trade| We are all bound up together speech | Fannie Lou Hamer

Queer Experiences

Anchor Article: Susan Stryker, “Introduction” in Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008.

How can the life stories and ideas of people on the edges of conventional gender identities shed light on the history of those very conventions? How has the conversation and language around sex, gender, and sexuality changed over time? The experiences of queer people are often dismissed as marginal or too specific to be worth a lot of time and attention in classrooms. By restoring these experiences to history, we not only gain a fuller picture of the human experience, we better understand the history of conventions around sex, gender, sexuality, and the place of romantic love in various societies.

Susan Stryker’s article not only lays out thoughtful ways of understanding current trans movements (and accompanying approaches to language and fluidity) but also traces at times startling connections between individuals at the margins of society and mainstream culture. Stryker urges us to understand the trans identity as “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place” rather than a single destination or category. As history teachers, we can both honor this definition and historicize it, just as Stryker does. For the late 20th-century, her work pairs well with George Chauncey’s work on the recasting of same-sex marriage advocacy as a fight for marriage equality.

WAMS Resources: Life story of Thomas(ine) Hill | Life Story of Christine Jorgensen |Pauli Murray | Marsha P Johnson | Thomas(ine) Hall|Public Universal Friend | Women Soldiers | Charity and Sylvia | Angelina Weld Grimke | Jane Addams

Patriarchal Equilibrium

Anchor Article: Bennett, Judith M. “Chapter 4: Patriarchal Equilibrium” in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

History is not just the story of change but of continuity. A lot has changed since the French Revolution of 1789. As Judith Bennet has shown us through her study of gender and work, when looking at women’s lives, it is especially useful to distinguish between changes and transformations. Women’s work may have changed over the epochs, from brewing to sewing, to spinning, to cleaning, and so on, but women’s work has largely remained low-pay, low-respect. In fact, this has shown to be such a resilient feature of so many societies that when women move into a profession that was highly respected and well-paid, the prestige of the profession itself diminishes and compensation stagnates. This has been widely reported in medicine, universities, and various aspects of the tech industry.

Patriarchal equilibrium can help us teach our students that even when things seem to change radically, powerful drivers of gender inequalities remain. The concept of equilibrium more generally can be usefully applied to race and other systems of oppression as well.

WAMS Resources: Betty Friedan | Anita Hill | Hyde Amendment | | congressional representation

Redefining Power

Anchor Article: Mary C Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski. “A New Economy of Power Relations: Female Agency in the Middle Ages” in Gendering the Master Narrative. Cornell University Press, 2003.

Too often power has either been equated with public authority on the one hand and physical strength on the other. In these cases, women could be properly understood as never having had very much power at all. But these assumptions seem to defy logic and even defy the evidence of so many women doing so much and exerting so much influence both over their own lives and the lives of their families, communities, and even large-scale political entities.

In some cases, these powerful women in the past were acting as men, that is they were the token woman playing a man’s role without disrupting the normative definition of power as male. But even that intellectual switcheroo limits our understanding of women’s power in the past. Since the women’s movement gained sure footing in academia, historians and scholars have been urging us to broaden our understanding of power away from something like dominion, power over others, to something more like agency, power to do things. In making this change explicit for our students, we can open up their eyes to the range of powers available to human beings.

The language and reasoning Erler and Kowaleski use can provide useful ways to articulate the benefits and drawbacks of “choice feminism” and the limited victory inherent to individual women playing important roles in systems or agendas that constrict women’s collective choices.

WAMS Resources: Will/Couverture from 1688 | Madam Sacho & Sullivan’s Army | American Girl Dolls

Demanding Rights

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What is the book about?

The history you know is missing half the story and learning it can change the way you think about power. By presenting a picture of the past without any women, the histories we usually learn today perpetuate outdated worldviews. Despite the many and varied societal structures that have worked to keep women subordinate to men, women have been able to navigate these barriers to impact the course of human history in ways that are still often too little known. Acknowledging these stories radically transforms our understanding of power and women’s access to it, with far-reaching consequences for the present-day.

The Decline of Rome. The Middle Ages. The Renaissance. The Rise of Global Trade. The Enlightenment. The French Revolution. Yet, She Stands provides a sweeping revision of more than a thousand years of history by examining these familiar turning points in Western History through the lens of women’s experiences. New roads opened to women. Others closed. Power was used against them in different ways. Yet, women persevered and stood tall in societies that refused to recognize their value. Drawing on the latest available research Georgina Emerson presents a riveting narrative and an expansive cast of female figures to illustrate how women make choices given the opportunities and limitations of their worlds.

Enlightening, engaging, and often frustrating, Yet, She Stands provides historical context for women’s current struggles to be taken seriously as speakers, writers, witnesses, providers, and leaders. Armed with this new knowledge, readers can continue the fight to build a world where we all stand on equal footing.

Introduction: A Hidden History

Standing up and Giving Birth - Prologue

Speaking in Public - The Spread of Christianity

Writing -The Fall of the Western Empire

Leading - The Middle Ages

Doing Business - The Commercial Revolution

Telling the Truth- The Renaissance

Feeding Families - The Age of Enlightenment

Demanding Rights - The French Revolution

Turning our Backs - The Birth of Nations

Standing Together - Epilogue

Yet, She Stands interweaves case studies and historical narrative to explore the ways women navigated and redefined the rules of power in a particular time and place. In 200, half of the Christian communities of Rome were led by women. By 400, that number is zero. What happened? Why is it that female doctors and mathematicians were commonplace in Ancient Rome, but only one manuscript by a woman survives? Why were most beer brewers in 1300 women but by 1600 no woman ran her own brewery? How did women demanding fair prices for food launch the French Revolution of 1789? Why did women’s novels do more for human rights than any constitution? These are stories about how women make choices given the limitations and opportunities available. Taken as a whole, they offer readers radically new ways of understanding how gender and power shape one another, and how history shapes power.

There are many places to enter the underground Roman city. One entrance is in a small nunnery on the Via Salaria where you can visit the sisters of Benedictine Order of St Pauline. The current members of the order are mostly an older bunch. Even if they were younger, it would be difficult to tell. White collars wrap the women’s faces rightly from their chins to their hairlines giving each of them a pleasing, anonymously oval face. The bodies of their predecessors lie interred and, for now, completely intact in the graveyard next to the convent’s chapel. It’s unclear if the tradition of digging up the bodies once the flesh has decomposed and reburying the bones in the catacombs will continue in light of recent health codes. But the sisters seem unconcerned. Death and storage have always been matters of practical discipline. They have complete faith in the Almighty’s ability, come Judgment day, to find and reassemble their bodies. In the meantime, they make do. 

All of the sisters who lived through the Second World War have since passed away. But it’s a proud moment in the order’s history and the present nuns are happy to tell visitors what happened. 

The Catholic Church did not formally condemn the Nazi regime, but many Roman Catholics, including the Pope himself, objected to the Nazi policy on Jews and sheltered Jewish Romans during the nine month occupation of the city in 1943. The Nazi occupation and persecution reached its pinnacle in October, 1943 when the Gestapo raided the city’s Jewish neighborhood and arrested more than 1200 people. In the subsequent months, Another 600 Jewish individuals were arrested and deported. All were sent to Auschwitz. 16 survived. But some 11,000 Roman Jews survived in hiding.

Lorenzo Camerino, a Venetian mosaicist and Jewish convert, and his family survived with the help of the sisters of St. Pauline. The family were hidden in the catacombs, which must have been dull, damp, and terrifying months. They survived to see the liberation of the city on June 4, 1944. 10 Years later, to thank the sisters for their service, Camerino commissioned a mosaic for the chapel above the entrance to the catacombs. He wanted to honor something the sisters valued so he commissioned a mosaic reproduction of one of the most precious scenes from the catacombs below. It is a very early, late first century or early second century, image of the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, wherein the priest breaks the bread for the congregation.

The sisters gather daily to celebrate mass under the mosaic. Done in the style of Ravenna, this 1954 recreation evokes the ancient mediterranean eyes and flat style typical of catacomb art. The light catches the edges of glass to make the figures shine. At the far left, a bearded figure offers the bread of Christ to his brethren. While the motif of a funerary meal is common in catacomb art, it is rare to find an intact image of a celebrant actually breaking bread for his followers. This gives the image an extra symbolic weight as an example of how early Christians celebrated the Eucharist– the ritual recreation of Jesus’s blessing of the bread and wine at his last supper with his followers. The blessing and sharing of the Eucharist is especially central in Catholic traditions who hold that only priests may conduct this ritual and that something holy transforms the bread and wine. Here the participants chat together and touch one another in casual fellowship. The loaves and the fish represent abundance and remind viewers of Jesus feeding the multitudes, the only miracle other than the the Resurrection that is recorded in all four Gospels. After taking it in, you can go downstairs and see the original.

It’s dark enough in the catacombs below that the shining lines of the mosaic linger on your eyelids– the curve of a head leaning in, the shining eyes of the figures gazing at each other, the white beard of the celebrant. The catacombs smell cold. Mildew gathers on the wall. Touch anything and plaster falls in damp flakes. In the dim light, you can see the original Fractio Panis (“Breaking of the Bread”) faded after 1800 years to bare shapes and forms. It’s only 10 inches tall, much smaller than the mosaic reproduction.

Look carefully, and you see the hair is different. Are those braids? Each figure swells at the breast. Their shoulders slope delicately. Are these women? If they are, could they be celebrating the Eucharist without a male priest? Scholars have long been arguing about this fresco since it was rediscovered in 1893 by the German Joseph Wilpert.

The images are faded enough that any suggestion has the power to shift your eye’s observation. Are your eyes playing tricks on you and making you see only men where there were women? Or do your eyes deceive you now that I have told you there are women there? In any case, what is unsure and impossible to verify, was made fixed and permanent by the artist of the 20th century mosaic: The artists added a beard to the man breaking the bread and officiating the ceremony– which clears up any potential gender confusion. 

Similarly, when Wilpert and his fellow archaeologists made water-color reproductions of the catacomb paintings they found, they invariably showed seven men, taking their inspiration from the nearby tombs of St. Calixto rather than the more ambiguous image of St. Priscilla.

Like these postcard reproductions, the early history of Christianity is usually presented as a male affair. Here is that story, in broad strokes. Christ’s first followers, almost all Jews, gradually gained converts throughout the Roman Empire. The apostle Paul was particularly instrumental in spreading Christ’s message to non-Jews. It was a message of hope and salvation that spoke to Roman society’s most marginalized, those for whom Rome’s message of law, order, military and loyalty– an aggressively now and body-focused philosophy that emphasized male virtues of strength and discipline. That is, the poor, women, including prostitutes, humble folks, occasionally even criminals. For not only would the meek inherit the earth, but god’s love granted forgiveness for all. A double boon for anyone down on his luck, turning to crime, or resentful of Roman authority. 

The faith spread like a virus, moving through cities by word of mouth. In fact, if you compare a map of the spread of Christianity from 50 to 350 with a map of the spread of the Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1360, they look very similar. 

As Christianity spread the early city-dwellers would come to call non-Christians pagans– meaning folk from the countryside. But even as Christianity spread through the Roman Empire’s urban centers, these humble groups attracted the ire of Roman officials. For the state was your religion and the emperor was your god. Not worshiping the Roman gods was akin to an act of sedition. Christians, men and women alike, young and old, were persecuted and martyred (a word that derives from the Greek word for “witness”). But the bravery of these early Christians only emboldened more converts as a disillusioned Roman populace saw the wisdom and comfort of the promise of resurrection and ever-lasting life. 

The Christian faith came to be the dominant faith in the Roman Empire from about 150 to about 400, mimicking its administrative infrastructure. Major moments along this trajectory include the year 60, when Nero, blaming the Christian communities for a fire in Rome, murdered them in retribution. Legend holds that both Peter and Paul died in this particular purge. A period of martyrdoms and persecution followed that only served to generate enthusiasm for the faith. Spurred by a vision–it’s the first two letters of “Christ” and the phrase in Greek, “In this sign, conquer” on the eve of the battle of Melvin Bridge in 312, Constantine makes Christianity the official (though not obligatory) religion of the Empire. It was only a matter of time before the institution arose, modeled on the infrastructure of the empire, where there had been prefects and magistrates, there were bishops (from the Greek for “overseer” or “guardian”) and archbishops. Where there had been rectangular basilicas dedicated to Roman gods like Mars, Jupiter and Minerva, there were now Christian churches with altars facing the Holy City of Jerusalem. 

Thinking men such as Augustine, Cyril, Jerome and Origen provided the philosophy to justify dogmas that were largely agreed upon by vote during a series of councils during the 4th and 5th centuries. Even as the governmental structure of Rome fell away, especially in the Western Empire, Christianity lived on, often taking on a local character in the form of particular saints or traditions. For instance, in what is now France, in what was then the Roman province of Gaul, St. Martin of Tours became a notable figure after a written biography of his life by Sulpicius Severus spread stories of miracles and wonders. You might know a story about a saint who, upon meeting a beggar on a cold evening, split his cloak down the middle so they could share its warmth. That was St. Martin. From about 500 to 1000, active proselytizers like Bede (England) and St. Patrick (Ireland) brought Christianity more deeply into Europe and Asia minor over the next five hundred years. The last places in Europe to convert were the Scandinavian countries in the twelfth century. 

There is nothing untrue about any of this. It’s straight-forward, satisfying, even mildly triumphant. The weak became strong. Outcasts became leaders. It even sort of works with the Christian ethos of suffering for ultimate penance. And it’s about as much information as any student or history buff requires. I have named 12 men, I have not mentioned one woman by name. It is the story of an institution rather than about the experiences of people. Like the Camerino mosaic, this story takes a present assumption (“no women”) and extrapolates it into the past to present a cohesive whole. 

The world this story builds is a male world. There’s a circular logic at work. It’s hard to tell if the assumption of male authority comes from the past or the present. Men matter to the story. Women do not – otherwise they would be included. 

Thoughtful students and teachers might wonder about women in these early communities. They might ask themselves what parts women may have played. 

We can imagine possible answers. 

Women played roles behind the scenes. While we might not know their names, women participated in shaping the institution that was necessarily male because the world before was so male-dominated. Their minds might turn to the Virgin Mary, the mother of god in the Catholic Tradition and called the Theotokos or god-bearer in the Greek Orthodox Churches. Women had their own forms of devotion, linked to both virginity and motherhood. If the readers are girls or women, they will make sense of this contradiction for themselves however they can. Perhaps as a sequence: Virgin then mother with marriage as the socially-sanctioned transition point. 

Or they might see these kinds of histories as boring necessities the way I think about my city’s zoning laws. I know we have them and need them but as long as they don’t really affect me, I do not concern myself very much with them. Some students go a little further down this path to roll their eyes at the whole story. They don’t quite believe it and, more importantly, they don’t really care. What does history matter to me? Some of these women will walk down a wedding aisle on their father’s arm as Ave Maria plays, obedient in their actions if not their hearts. Mentally cross-dressing and enjoying the show. They have both become a woman and can admire the woman they have become and, probably, hold her from themselves with some critical distance.

Others believe the story. It is history after all. Facts, archeology, centuries of bookkeeping and convention will support them in thinking that women just don’t matter all that much. It might hurt her feelings or confirm some inner sense of unworthiness. 

Boys in particular can have their own conscious and unconscious reactions to women’s absence from the history of one of the world’s most influential institutions. But at least some of these boys and young men (like their female counterparts) will begin to take for granted that it is men’s names that count, men’s words that matter. Whether they spend much time considering it or not, they don’t need to wonder very long about where they themselves fit into the story or of what value their own contributions might be. 

This is especially befuddling to people who have come of age since nearly all American universities open their doors to female students and embraced co-education as the norm. College enrollment reached gender parity around 1985. In the 1990’s, female enrollment outstripped male enrollment. Those born after 1980, usually take a kind of before/now binary approach to gender equality that assumes male domination in the past and gender equality in the present. This has been a trend in feminism for quite some time. In her introduction to The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir wrote “Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore.”

As a teacher of history, I don’t think we should dismiss the impact of these male-only recreations of the past. They leave young people with unanswered questions that the dominant hegemony of the day will answer for them. In moments of anger, fear, doubt and grief, those cardinal emotions that fall under today’s umbrella of stress, they will find themselves repeating what they have learned about power in their schools, churches, governments, and newspapers. This happens with race, class and sexuality, too. A woman falls silent. A man’s word goes. A mother steps back from her career (166,000 women stepped back from their careers in December of 2020) or from giving advice to her children. 

Lacking more robust truths about women, we fall back on clichés. The Virgin Mary comes up again but not as some aspirational impossibility. Instead, she brings her dark twin with her: the whore, the slut, the bad mother, the unfaithful wife. Capitalism, with its claims for meritocracy, introduces intelligence and diligence as factors for women’s lack of financial success. Women don’t work as hard. They aren’t as capable.. These clichés lurk behind the polished marble edifice of a story about men that claims to be a story about everyone. 

We need a new way of thinking about the spread of Christianity and the establishment of the Catholic Church. Once that includes the contributions of women and addresses the complexities and nuances of how we all participate in and navigate gender roles. 

This more complete story should include how many of the most widely-told stories of early Christian movement appealed to women in particular. 

Let’s travel back to the year 50 or so in the city of Rome. Claudius was the emperor. Jesus had been tried and crucified some 20 years prior and there were already scattered groups of believers in various cities. Paul was making his slow peregrination counter-clockwise around the Mediterranean from Jerusalem and was at this point, probably, in a coastal city in Asia Minor perhaps Colossae, where Philemon and his wife Apphia led a church. Or perhaps he was already in what was then Macedonia, where he met Lydia, a seller of purple and known as the “first European” convert (Acts 12-14).

Rome was prospering. The cult of Imperial power, strong, tall, indomitable and orderly, pervaded people’s lives. The letters of Paul attest to the early establishment of Christian communities in Rome. And they were gathering, often times, at the invitation of women, rich influential women to be sure. 

Women like Lydia of Philippi were early converts and supported Paul in his journey to spread Christianity:  “Now when she and her household had been baptized, she urged us, saying, 'If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and stay.” (NIV, Acts, 16:15). Many were married or widowed and thus in command of their own households and occasionally, considerable wealth. 

These women were telling people about the teachings of Christ. They were explaining the afterlife in heaven. They were recounting the miracles. They told the stories that would become, once the gospels were written, the imaginary backbone of a major world religion. Perhaps they told the story of how Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a handful of yeast. Everyone around her would know what yeast was and what it was for, bread was the staple of everyone’s diet in the Roman empire, and in the city of Rome especially where farms were somewhat distant and food had to be carted in. But the story would be especially resonant for those who bought the flour and cooked the bread,  and ensured that their families were fed– that is, women. A woman might have called her cook in with a jar of frothy, wet yeast, and tipped the slightest bit into her palm and show it to those gathered around her. Yeast drips down between your fingers and stick to your palm. Its bubbles pop into a rich, milky coral pattern. 

The smell, beery and acidic, would hit her listeners’ nostrils as she explained that the kingdom of God was like this leaven, and that if you fold in enough flour, a quarter measure for a family, maybe 8 measures for a village,  even 100 for a city (she may have warmed to her topic and begun exaggerating to prove her point). From this tiny handful of yeast, I can feed an empire. Here is the line from the book of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough (NIV, 13:33).” That’s what the kingdom of God never runs out. It feeds you, your family, everyone until you are satisfied. In a world where hunger was a familiar spectre lurking just around the corner, the message was comforting on both a material level and a spiritual one. 

 Just as Jesus used the language of farming and planting to reach the laboring poor, he used the daily activities of the home, often performed by women, to bring the reality of his message into people’s lives.  Women in particular might feel their own power to make the tiny monumentally important when they heard that the kingdom of heaven was really like a handful of yeast, living matter, in your hand which you can duplicate again and again to feed a whole villages.

Jesus counted women among some of his earliest and most important followers. According to the book of Luke, women paid for and provided food and shelter for Jesus and his followers. That trend persisted in the earliest gatherings of believers– they didn’t even call themselves Christians yet, it was fairly common that women were the ones in charge of the gatherings, not just as hostess to a male speaker, but as speakers and teachers. Of the 36 people Paul addresses in his letters, 16 are women, which is about 45%, a number that approaches parity. His letters imply and explicitly state that women are among the earliest proselytizers of Christianity – not merely his underlings, but his colleagues and partners in bringing the faith to a wider audience. 

Women were central leaders of a significant portion of early Christian communities. These numbers go into rapid decline around 200 and by 400, no Christian community is formally led by a woman. Instead of taking women’s absence for granted– or worse, presenting it as a “natural” or automatic process– we should teach our students about how institutionalization often limits female roles. Then they can see for themselves how these forces are still at work in today’s world.

Just as the mosaic reproduction draws over women’s early roles in the church, the conventional narrative of history classroom writes women out of the story. At this point, not only should we restore women’s roles to the story, we should examine how and why women’s roles get written out of histories. And the implication it can have on the present moment. 

The distant past is not a mysterious, male-only space just as the present is not a utopia of gender equality. The past constantly informs the present and by presenting a more complete picture of our shared past, we can better understand how gender dynamics continue to play out. 

Further Reading

Denzey, Nicola –  The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).

Eisen, Ute –  Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies. (Collegeville, MN, Liturgical Press, 2000) Transl. from German original.

On the many and varied roles of women in the early church - https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/women-in-the-early-church 

Image sources

Orans - https://robincohn.net/visiting-the-catacombs-of-priscilla/ 

Mosaic, Postcards and Original Catacomb image- http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/4090/1/cecalupo.pdf 

Tomb of St. Callixtus - https://www.catacombesancallisto.it/en/le-origini-delle-catacombe.php 

The Salon de Carré, where the Salon had been held every other year since 1737, was a collage of color. Like a cavalry in full regalia, the paintings on either side dazzled the views and gave a hint of something more splendid to come.

This year, the most discussed paintings hung above the door. Hanging closely together, they start at shoulder height, just above the ornate molding of the room. A tall man looking straight ahead sees only the feet of the lowest portrait. In this case, the bare feet of Socrates’s disciple. His master’s shackles wind around his feet like a snake. This young man is loyal and strong enough to offer his teacher the hemlock that would poison him, but too tender-hearted to watch him drink it. Monsieur’s eyes dance off the red of the young man’s robes and gazed upward to the strong, virile chest of Socrates himself. Preaching his last lessons even as he imbibes the poison that will end his life. 

The middling and nouveau riche joined the normally aristocratic crowd. The men and women who milled about chatted casually about the paintings they saw– making snap judgments– “A triumph,” “a disappointment,” “a travesty,” “a noble effort,” “a poor likeness.” Thomas Jefferson was in attendance.  He liked Davide’s “Death of Socrates” the best and mentioned “the many portraits of Madame Le Brun” as quite popular. He ignored the painting of the death of Socrates by J.F.P. Peyron, which hung to the right of Davide’s. This second rendition of the classic scene was part of the larger trend of looking to the pagan past for wisdom, but its artistry didn’t make an impression on Jefferson.

As the crowds chatted, they shared the stories behind the paintings. In Jacques-Louis Davide’s (1748-1825) “Death of Socrates,” Plato sits at the end of the bed. His eyes closed as if dead. But really, he waits to take the place of his teacher–and to preserve his legacy through writing. The ink pot, pen and scroll lay at his feet. He would, upon the death of Socrates, continue his tradition of radical teaching and he would do so in writing, preserving the legacy of antiquity forever.

Socrates was the most famous and most principled of disobedient citizens. David stood to the side, silent as usual, thanks to the scar and benign tumor on the side of his mouth which, while it didn’t prevent speech, impeded him from the quick repartée so fashionable at the French court. Here was a man who could only express his ideas through art. 

Through his painting, Davide evoked the ideals of Socrates that Plato would record and explain in his masterpiece, Phaedre: The immortality of the soul and the permanence of ideal forms. The broad, solid chest of Socrates hints at the virility and intransigence of Davide’s philosophy. This was a man who believed that reason and principles were not only the driving force of the universe, but that they should be the driving force of the state. Viewers of the painting found their hearts beating faster as they imagined the possibilities of a world built on the ideals of Socrates brought back to life.

Follow the finger of Socrates upwards to the imposing figure of Madame Adélaïde, aunt to the king, Louis XVI. In her hand she holds a white linen cloth. It’s much too large to be a handkerchief, so it cannot be for her tears. In fact, it is more like an artist’s cloth or a burial shroud. Perhaps she is wiping the dust off the engraved faces the way she wiped the sweat from their foreheads when they were dying of fever, or when she cleaned their faces once each one of them–all of them– succumbed to tuberculosis. The princess contracted the disease too, probably from nursing her sick relatives, but she survived.

Like so many women, Madame Adélaïde, takes on the burden of caring for the sick and, when the worst happens, she remembers and honors the dead. Here, she looks up above the viewer in calm contemplation– a far cry from the men rending their clothes and their beards in mourning in Davide’s painting below. This is sadness, composed. Mourning, institutionalized. 

In the frieze above her head, the drama of the death of her father, king Louis XV,  plays out: Male doctors shouting out, women weeping, and at the far left, a man guides a young boy in the matters of state. 

Look more closely and you notice that beneath the three faces, that of her father, Louis XV, the late king, her mother, the late queen, and her brother, the late dauphin, you can read the inscription: “Their image is the charm [greatest pleasure] of my life.” In her right hand she holds the pen with which she wrote the inscription. Plato is not the only writer on this wall. It’s an incongruous image: A woman’s pale hand holding a pen amid richly textured silk. The artist, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), liked to portray women in lavish dresses undertaking creative work. Here, the artist seems to say, yes, the princess mourns her family, yes, she honors them, but she still creates and writes and participates in the world. She may have nursed her closest relatives through horrible illness and into death. But serving her family has been the magic and pleasure of her life.

She writes. She thinks. She plays an active role in the governance of the state. Any savvy member of the court would know this was the woman, who, when Louis XVI ascended to the throne in 1754 at the age of 20, sent the young king a list of the men he should choose for his cabinet. He followed her directions to the letter, choosing all the men she recommended to lead the country. The princess connected the generations with her feelings and her pen. Such is the role of the royal family: to care for the people and connect the generations. 

Let your eye keep traveling to the right and there sits the queen herself, sitting as if enthroned, but there is no throne. There is no scepter, there is hardly a fleur-de-lis. You see it if you squint into the murky background on the pedestal. Stare at it for a long time and you might notice that the crown sits, only partially visible, and half off-stage. These are not the symbols that matter to the young queen. What matters to her is her family. And just as Princess Adelaïde connects the generations, so too does Marie Antoinette. The symbols of her power are the children she bore. This image stands in firm refutation of anyone who was calling the queen frivolous or wasteful. 

In this portrait, bodies are soft. The queen’s flesh glows and has the roundness of porcelain. The artist, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun (1755-1842) could make faces lively. In her self-portrait with her daughter, their eyes dance with life. Their lips part ever so slightly, caught in a joyful moment between saying one thing and another. Their cheeks press gently into one another. Their arms wrap in an endless swirl: mother’s arm extends into daughter’s arm, back into mother’s. Follow it with your eye and you can’ tell which is which.  You get the sense that the daughter and mother hold one another– spontaneously and joyously. But only momentarily. There is a motion to the bodies. This is a quick, affectionate embrace that is but a pause in two busy, energetic lives.

In her portrait of the queen and her children, the faces of all four members of the royal family have a stillness and stateliness to them. Le Brun hints at their loving relationships.The princess embraces her mother with affection. She leans on her mother’s arm for protection, comfort and love. The children each express something of the spontaneous, uncontrolled motions of children. The Princess practically hangs on her mother’s arm. The baby grabs at the lace on his mother’s bust and reaches a hand towards her older brother who, like his mother, gazes out at the viewer. This grave, but rosy-cheeked, boy draws back the curtain of the empty bassinet and points us to the empty pillow.

A chatting viewer below falls silent when she realizes what the boy is pointing to: the bassinet is where the queen’s recently deceased baby daughter would have been. Princess Sophie Hélène Béatrice  was born on July 9 1786 a large, healthy baby but is believed to have contracted tuberculosis. She died at less than a year old. She had been included in the family portrait but she died on June 19 1787, only a few weeks before the painting was exhibited. Le Brun had to paint over her. 

Many of the artist’s practice sketches survive. They depict a bundle of fabric around a plump, happy baby, sleeping with fat cheeks and a hint of rose on her lips and cheeks. Babies and young children of France often died young. This portrait told the educated public and anyone who overheard their talk: Even the queen suffers as you suffer.

Stepping back, you can take in the message as a whole. Here we have the greatest minds and highest principles of the Classical tradition presented as the foundation of Royal love and generational continuity. The minds of men and the hearts of women both have a role to play. They balance one another.

A more cynical viewer might wonder:  But where is the king in this story? He might remember that Socrates died for standing in defiance of an unjust state. Can the grandeur of the royal family, no matter how relegated to the background, ever be reconciled with the austere and virile clarity of Davide’s Socrates? Does he point his finger upwards at Madame Adélaïde to honor her or to condemn her? Is Marie-Antoinette the embodiment of caring reason, or its antithesis?

The murmuring crowd would keep these treasonous thoughts to themselves–at least until they were behind closed doors. But women were powerful chess pieces in the game of public imagination.

In less than two years’ time, the young dauphin would die in his bed while representatives of the third estate, calling themselves the National Assembly, took refuge from the summer storms in the king’s tennis court and refused to disband until they had established a constitutional monarchy. The Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20 1789 is the first formal move towards toppling the Ancien Régime and launching the French Revolution of 1789. 

Many women, variously well-to-do, working class, and peasant, would fight for the Revolution’s ideals. Its leaders were quick to embrace the values of Davide’s Socrates: virility, reason, fortitude, strength and courage. They were too quick to dismiss the values communicated by Guiard‘s Madame Adélaïde and Le Brun’s Marie-Antoinette: Tenderness, care, calm in the face of mourning and the spontaneity of love. This failure to adapt the care-giving and maternal role of the Ancien Régime would eventually erode female support for the Revolution. 

Did those in attendance at the Paris Salon of 1787 realize that their snap judgments and idle chatter were laying out the principal tensions that would not only launch the Revolution of 1789, but undermine its mission? 

 Images Sources: 

1. Engraved view of the Salon of 1787 by Pietro Martini (1738–1797). Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/393346?sortBy=Relevance&ft=Pietro+Antonio+Martini&offset=0&rpp=40&pos=2  Accessed: 3/1/23.

2. “The Death of Socrates” (1787) by Jacques-Louis Davide (1748-1825).  Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105 Accessed 3/3/2023. 

3. Detail of Martini’s Engraving with paintings superimposed. “Salon de 1787” o Paris Salon Exhibitions by John S. Hallam. https://sites.google.com/a/plu.edu/paris-salon-exhibitions-1667-1880/salon-de-1787. Accessed: 3/3/2023.

4. “Madame Adelaide de France” (1787) by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803). Oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles. Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Ad%C3%A9la%C3%AFde#/media/File:Madame_adelaide_de_France.jpg Accessed 3/1/23. 

5. “Marie Antoinette and Her Children” (1787) by Élizabeth Vigée Lebrun (1755–1842). Oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles. Public Domain. 

6. “Self-Portrait with her daughter” (1789) by Élizabeth Vigée Lebrun. Oil on Canvas. Louvre. Public Domain. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lisabeth_Vig%C3%A9e_Le_Brun#/media/File:Self-portrait_with_Her_Daughter_by_Elisabeth-Louise_Vig%C3%A9e_Le_Brun.jpg Accessed: 3/3/2023

7. Sketch of Princess Sophie (1786/7) by Élizabeth Vigée Lebrun. Pastel. Public Domain. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Sophie_H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_B%C3%A9atrice_of_France#/media/File:Sophie_Beatrice_of_France1.jpg Accessed: 3/3/2023

8. Detail of Martini’s Engraving with paintings superimposed. 

Final Draft

It’s 4am and I couldn’t sleep because I am nervous about getting married in nine (or is it now eight?) days. Rolo, our collie, came into the office to sleep near me. He feels it is his duty. Banana, our dachshund, chose instead to take my spot in the bed. He’s asleep with his head on my pillow. I may have to wash that pillowcase. I’m writing now because if I don’t, I’ll just lay in silence and worry. 

Everyone has their own ways of writing. Some things come easily and other things are very very hard. I won’t tell you what comes easily to me. It wouldn’t be helpful. Effortlessness can be a status symbol. This is especially true for those of us who went to all-girls school. I get it. No one wants to show everyone else how hard something was for them. Writing is one of the hardest things that you can do because you need to cut through so much noise and information–and you need to do it on your own. You face your personal doubts and insecurities. I think, while at my writing desk, that I have repeated to myself every awful, belittling thing anyone has ever said to me. I don’t have any good advice beyond this: These things aren’t true. Even if they are a little true, if they are unkind, you should ignore them. Imagine someone saying these things to a child learning to read– even if there was an ounce of truth in it, that she should practice, that she is behind her classmates. She can be treated with kindness and love or meanness and impatience. You are that child. Choose kindness and love. 

This is the writing process that works best for me. It took more than 10 years to figure it out. I began writing seriously in the summer of 2010. Time is an essential ingredient. It’s akin to leaving a tomato sauce to simmer or letting bread rise. I have to make the thing then go off and do something else. Preferably something physical that doesn’t feel like work. Gardening. Playing with the dog. Yoga. But yoga can feel like a chore so I don’t hold myself to that. 

I write a draft of something, usually by hand. My thoughts flow better that way. I have trained my mind and my right hand to move at the same pace. You can train yourself to do this on a computer or a tablet too, but it is harder since there are so many ways to distract yourself on these devices. I push myself to complete every sentence. That takes me deeper into the ideas. Images emerge that I hadn’t thought of before. Sometimes, especially if I am outside, I end up describing what’s going on around me. Right now, the sun has moved across the sky so most of the garden is in total shade, a relief in Texas. What plants aren’t in shade are dappled with green shadows from the new leaves on the trees. These leaves are so fresh that they glow. In my historical writing, these bits will get cut. In my personal writing, sometimes, they are the best part. No matter what, they remind me that I have to let the world in when I am writing. I may be alone, but I do not have to be isolated.

It’s important at the writing stage not to judge yourself too much and to try to write down what you really mean. For me, that means multiple sentences that sound pretty repetitive. These will get cut, so it’s no big deal.

If I can’t think of anything to say, I picture a scene in my mind and try to describe it. Memory is spatial. Place has a powerful effect on our minds. Remember that as the remote world tries to tell you otherwise. 

Writing takes a certain amount of will and a certain amount of pleasure. Make it fun for yourself or you’ll never keep it up. Reward yourself with muffins, candy, TV you love, pedicures where your big toe gets a lightning bolt, or whatever makes you smile. Just as you take your craft seriously, you should also take your pleasure seriously. 

Anyway, write out that first draft. They are always messy and hard to follow. Then leave it for a while. I like to set aside the pages in a neat stack on a clear part of my desk or the bookshelf in my office. My perfect writing office would have a long thin workbench with neat stacks of paper stretching into infinity. 

Let the pages sit. Overnight is best. Three hours will do. Your unconscious mind works on it while you do something else. This is the part where you let go and don’t need to make an effort. When you come back to it and re-read the words, they won’t be yours anymore. Read it aloud, start marking it up and making changes. Does the order make sense? Can you use fewer words? Do you repeat the same idea? Which version of the idea do you like best? Pay attention to where you put your adverbs. These situate your reader and should come before whatever they describe. 

Now, the piece exists outside of yourself which, ironically, means you can edit it into something that bears more of your personal stamp than the original free-flow draft does. Because you let time and your brain work on it, your draft has turned into something you could never have planned from the beginning, something unpredictable in the best sense. After you do this with a few pieces, you will start to recognize a consistency in your work. As in, it is consistently clear and bears a style that distinguishes it as yours and no one else’s. This is thrilling. 

Good luck. The most important thing is to keep doing it. Keep writing and, when you are ready, show it to someone who will be happy to help you get better, which means giving you a very tiny amount of advice and a whole lot of cheerleading. Judgments come easily. Sincere encouragements serve us better. 

Fourth Draft

March 30 2022 2:30-2:40pm

Third Draft

March 30 2022 2pm-2:10pm

“Advice on Writing for Ann’s Class”

It’s 4am and I couldn’t sleep because I am nervous about getting married in nine (or is it now eight?) days. Rolo, our collie, came into the office to sleep near me. He feels it is his duty. Banana, our dachshund, chose instead to take my spot in the bed. He’s asleep with his head on my pillow. I may have to wash that pillowcase. I’m writing now because if I don’t, I’ll just lay in silence and worry. 

Everyone has their own ways of writing: Things that come easily and things that are very very hard. Effortlessness can be a status symbol. I think this is a hold-over from my own experience at an all-girls school. I get it. No one wants to show how hard something was for them. Writing is one of the hardest things that you can do because you need to cut through so much noise, so much information and you need to do it on your own. You have to face your own personal doubts and insecurities. Sometimes, I think I have repeated to myself every awful, belittling thing anyone has ever said to me. I don’t have any good advice beyond this: These things aren’t true. Even if they are a little true, if they are unkind, you should ignore them. Imagine someone saying belittling things to a child learning to read– even if there was an ounce of truth in it, that she should practice, that she is behind her classmates. She can be treated with kindness and love or meanness and impatience. You are that child. Choose kindness and love. 

Time is an essential ingredient to writing. In the same way that leaving a tomato sauce to simmer or letting bread rise. I have to make the thing then go off and do something else. Preferably something that doesn’t feel like work and that is physical. Gardening. Playing with the dog. Yoga. But yoga can feel like work so I don’t hold myself to that. 

This is the process that works best for me. It took more than 10 years to figure it out. I began writing seriously in the summer of 2010. 

I write a draft of something, preferably by hand. My thoughts flow better that way. I have trained my mind and my right hand to move at the same pace. You can train yourself to do this on a computer or a tablet too, but it is harder since there are so many ways to distract yourself on these devices. I push myself to complete every sentence. That takes me deeper into the ideas. Images emerge that I hadn’t thought of before. Sometimes, especially if I am outside, I end up describing what’s going on around me. The sun has moved across the sky so most of the garden is in total shade, a relief in Texas. What parts aren’t in shade are dappled with green shadows from the new leaves on the trees. In my historical writing, these bits will get cut. In my personal writing, they are the best part. No matter what, they remind me that I have to let the world in when I am writing. I may be alone, but I do not have to be isolated.

It’s important at the writing stage not to judge yourself too much and to try to write down what you really mean. For me, that means multiple sentences that sound pretty repetitive. These will get cut, so it’s no big deal. If I can’t think of anything to say, I picture a scene in my mind and try to describe it. Memory is spatial. Place has a powerful effect on our minds. Remember that as the remote world tries to tell you otherwise. 

Writing takes a certain amount of will and a certain amount of pleasure. Make it fun for yourself or you’ll never keep it up. Reward yourself to muffins, candy, TV you love, pedicures where your big toe has a lightening bolt, or whatever makes you smile. Just as you take your craft seriously, you should also take your pleasure seriously. 

Anyway, write out that first draft. They are always messy and hard to follow. Then leave it for a while. I like to set aside the pages in a neat stack on a clear part of my desk or  bookshelf in my office. My perfect writing office would have a long thin workbench where I could stand and hammer out my edits.

Let your unconscious mind work on it while you do something else. This is the part where you let go and don’t need to make a conscious effort. Let the pages sit. Overnight is best. Three hours will do. When you come back to it and re-read the words, they won’t be yours anymore. Read it aloud and start making it up and making changes. Does the order make sense? Can you use fewer words? Do you repeat the same idea? Which version of the idea do you like best?

The piece will exist outside of you which means you can edit into something that, ironically, bears more of your personal stamp than the original free-flow draft does. Because you let time and your brain work on your draft, it has turned into something you could never have planned from the beginning, something unpredictable in the best sense. After you do this with a few pieces, you will start to recognize a consistency in your work. As in, it is consistently clear and bears a style that distinguishes it as yours and no one else’s. This is thrilling. 

Good luck. The most important thing is to keep doing it. Keep writing and, when you are ready, show it to someone who will be happy to help you get better, which means giving you a very tiny amount of advice and a whole lot of encouragement. Judgments come easily. Sincere encouragements, like writing, take work. 

Second Draft

March 30 2022 12-2pm 

It’s 4am and I couldn’t sleep because I am nervous about getting married in nine (or is it now eight?) days. Rolo, our collie, came into the office to sleep near me. He feels it is his duty. Banana, our dachshund, chose instead to take the spot I left in bed. He’s asleep with his head on my pillow. I may have to wash that pillowcase. 

Everyone has their own ways of writing. We have things that come easily and things that are very very hard. I won’t say what comes easily for me because sometimes I think we compete over ease and effortlessness. I can pretend that “I woke up like this.” or that my hair is just naturally voluminous and straight in all the right ways. I’ve learned that the best writing comes with patience. 

Time is an essential ingredient to my writing. In the same way that leaving a tomato sauce to simmer or letting bread rise. I have to make the thing then go off and do something else. Preferably something that doesn’t feel like work and that is physical. Gardening. Playing with the dog. Yoga. But yoga can feel like work so I don’t hold myself to that. 

This is the process that works best for me. It took more than 10 years to figure it out. I began writing seriously in the summer of 2010. I write a draft of something, preferably by hand. My thoughts flow better that way. I have trained my mind and my right hand to move at the same pace. You can train yourself to do this on a computer or a tablet too, but it is harder since there are so many ways to distract yourself on these devices.  I push myself to complete every sentence. That takes me deeper into the ideas. Images emerge that I hadn’t thought of before. Sometimes, especially if I am outside, I end up describing what’s going on around me. The sun has moved across the sky so most of the garden is in total shade, a relief in Texas. What parts aren’t in shade are dappled with green shadows from the new leaves on the trees. In my historical writing, these bits will get cut. In my personal writing, they are the best part. No matter what, they remind me that I have to let the world in when I am writing. I may be alone, but I do not have to be isolated.

It’s important at the writing stage not to judge yourself too much and to try to write down what you really mean. For me, that means multiple sentences that sound pretty repetitive. These will get cut, so it’s no big deal. If I can’t think of anything to say, I picture a scene in my mind and try to describe it. Memory is spatial and place has a powerful effect on our minds. Remember that as the remote world tries to tell you otherwise. 

Then I leave it for a while. I set aside the pages in a neat stack on a clear part of my desk or  bookshelf in my office. My perfect writing office would have a long thin workbench where I could stand and hammer out my editing. 

Effortlessness can be a status symbol. I think this is a hold-over from my own experience at an all-girls school. I get it. No one wants to show how hard something was for them. But writing is one of the hardest things that you can do because you need to cut through so much noise, so much information and you need to do it on your own. You have to face your own personal doubts and insecurities. Sometimes, I think I have repeated to myself every awful, belittling thing anyone has ever said to me. I don’t have any good advice beyond this: These things aren’t true. Even if they are a little true, if they are unkind, you should ignore them. Imagine someone saying belittling things to a child learning to read– even if there was an ounce of truth in it, that she should practice, that she is behind her classmates. She can be treated with kindness and love or meanness and impatience. You are that child. Choose kindness and love. 

Writing takes a certain amount of will and a certain amount of pleasure. Make it fun for yourself or you’ll never keep it up. Reward yourself to muffins, candy, TV you love, pedicures where your big toe has a lightening bolt, or whatever makes you smile. Just as you take your craft seriously, you should also take your pleasure seriously. 

Anyway, write out that first draft. They are always messy and hard to follow. Then let your unconscious mind work on it while you do something else. This is the part where you let go and don’t need to make a conscious effort. Let the pages sit. Overnight is best. Three hours will do. Then come back to it. When you re-read it, it won’t be yours anymore. It will exist outside of you which means you can edit into something that, ironically, bears more of your personal stamp than the original free flow draft does. Because you let time and your brain work on your draft, it has turned into something you could never have planned from the beginning, something unpredictable in the best sense. After you do this with a few pieces, you will start to recognize a consistency in your work. As in, it is consistently clear a bears a style that distinguishes it as yours and no one else’s. This is thrilling. 

Good luck with your writing. The most important thing is to keep doing it. Keep writing and, when you are ready, show it to someone who will be happy to help you get better, which means giving you a very tiny amount of advice and a a whole lot of encouragement. Judgments do come easily. Sincere encouragements are hard. 

First Draft

March 30 2022 4am

I was a history teacher and a fan of Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. That book is 608 pages and weighs about two pounds. When I used it to teach, I always made a big show of hefting it up on my forearm and thumbing through dozens of bookmarks to find the right spot. My ninth-graders eyes would widen with fear and I would chuckle to myself. When I ordered Women and Power, I was expecting another heavy tome. Here would be the readable, accessible but exhaustive, history of women and power. I taught Global and European History to high school students as well as a course on feminist theory and I had been looking for books to expand my teaching about women in the past. I should have noticed that the website said the book only weighed four ounces. 

Mary Beard’s book is not a history of women and power in the past. It is a call to action. A call for everyone, everywhere, to rethink how we understand power in order to radically alter the ways women can and do use it. “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power,” she writes. “Surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?”1 This project (the book, the blog, the nonprofit) is my answer to Mary Beard’s call. I am writing the book that I thought she had: A new history of women and gender that can transform how we define power in the present.

415 Writing In Alexandria

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What is at stake?

In its 700 year lifespan, Alexandria’s library became the foundation of the West’s text-centered cultural tradition, amassing, at its peak, as many as half a million works. But the name of only one female author comes down to us through history: Hypatia. Nonetheless, women led and contributed to some of the most innovative mathematics, philosophy and medicine of the day. In this chapter we explore the barriers and limitations on women writing and later efforts to preserve their work. How have women navigated these barriers to cultivate rich intellectual lives and lead scholarly communities? What tactics, from violence to shame and deliberate neglect, were used against women who dared distinguish themselves as public intellectuals? In contemplating the traces of women’s legacies, we explore the limitations of focusing too narrowly on the written word and seek other ways for reconstructing and understanding the past. 

415 CE

Alexandria, Egypt in the early fifth century was still a city of action, art and philosophy–but one that was self-consciously in decline. The best days of Alexandria, the students, teachers, and philosophers wrote to each other, were the days before. Before the Serapeum was destroyed. Before the Jews were expelled. Before the grim-faced and black-cloaked Christians patrolled the streets demanding proof of faith from even the most powerful citizens.

The leadership of Alexandria was at a stalemate. On one side, Orestes, appointed by the Roman Emperor as the prefect of the city. He stood with the philosophers, a mixture of pagans and Christians, dedicated to the art of public debate and  the pursuit of knowledge. Hypatia, the city’s most prominent teacher and philosopher, stood with him, regularly holding court with the young, the ambitious, and the curious who would lead this generation and the next. In fact, our sources tell us, it was not so much Hypatia who stood with Orestes, but rather he who stood with her, enjoying the shine of Hypatia’s prestige and influence. On the other side was Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, who commanded little loyalty in the city itself, but held influence over groups of increasingly militant Christians. Orestes resented the sway Plato, Aristotle and the other old thinkers held over his citizens. They were too preoccupied with mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. He was not a man for nuanced debate and discussion. As one critic put it, his answer to any philosophical argument was “Believe” full stop.

Hypatia rode forth into the city’s narrow and crowded streets where she greeted her students, Christian and pagan alike. Hypatia clothed herself in the white tribon of the philosopher. It was a simple linen garment that distinguished its wearer, usually a man, as a professional intellectual. She held court in prominent houses. Before her murder at the hands of Cyril, she influenced a generation of leaders around the Mediterranean.

Yet, we know nothing of her personal thoughts or inner life. We know her only through the words of the men around her. More than 1500 years after her death, we perceive her distantly through the kaleidoscope of men’s writing about her– their admiration, impressions, their perspectives. Our best source for Hypatia’s life and scholarly influence are the letters of one her students, Synesius of Cyrene. 156 of his letters survive. Some address Hypatia herself. Many others contain references to her work. As explorers of the past, we have to glean what we can from these letters and a smattering of contemporary accounts, most of which focus on her death, to reconstruct who Hypatia was and what she accomplished. 

Her words echoed along the streets, as eager students “united under the star of Hypatia”  and clamored for room in her courtyard. She gathered her followers to conduct, as one Synesius put it, “inquiry into the whole imaginative soul.”  In Hypatia’s presence, her students found a fellowship of like-minded thinkers to discuss the mysteries of the universe. “We are united in mind, which is the best part of us, to honor each other’s qualities.”

From about 390 onwards, just as Christian bishops were destroying pagan shrines and cutting public funding for pagan teachers, the most influential voice in Alexandria was that of a woman.  The increased chaos of the city did little to deter Hypatia or her students. Hypatia must have been used to heading out into streets littered with cracked stones and broken statues.

What distinguished Hypatia was not only her mathematical acumen and expertise in astronomy and philosophy, but her public standing. She was the leading intellectual of the day. The historian Damascius describes her as “in speech articulate and logical, in her actions prudent and public-spirited, [the] rest of the city gave her suitable welcome and accorded her special respect.” She maintained the tradition of acting as an impartial advisor on matters of governance. “The archons [local leaders] handling the affairs of the city would always go see her first… for if the practice of philosophy had declined, still its reputation was seen to be revered and respected by those managing the important affairs of the state.” With Hypatia’s help, the city’s prefect, Orestes, was able to maintain the scholarly community of Alexandria even as Christian militants grew in numbers. 

Hypatia’s Education & Career 

Hypatia first established her reputation in the 370’s and 380’s by working with her father, Theon, to copy and write helpful commentary on Euclid’s Geometry, the foundational text of Western Mathematics. Theon was the last known member of the Museum of Alexandria, the spiritual descendent of the great library. There, scholars stored and consulted scrolls. Socrates Scholasticus, a fifth-century historian, wrote that Hypatia received her scholarly training in formal and informal assemblies of thinkers. They met under the collonaded pathways of the Museum and the Serapeum, a pagan temple that doubled as a library, and in the courtyards of private villas. She read the great works of celebrated mathematicians, heard them discussed and eventually came to offer her own insights. 

Philosophy in the Greek tradition encompassed mathematics, astronomy, and even engineering. Hypatia distinguished herself in all these realms. She taught a range of subjects from conic sections and infinite series of fractions, to Neo-Platonic philosophy. She constructed astrolabes and medical instruments. The extant sources, meaning the written sources that survive until today so that we can read and analyze them, all agree and even take for granted that she was a brilliant and famous thinker. One contemporary critic wrote that she lacked the sophistication of a true philosopher and was a mere “geometer.” Embedded in that jibe is corroboration of her skills as a mathematician. None of the ancient authors comment on a woman teacher as a novelty. Her gender did not preclude her from learning, teaching and advising.

Scholarly traditions have differed on Hypatia’s birth year and age at her death. We know her birthplace with certainty; in fact, she probably never left Alexandria for any significant period of time. But Western preoccupations with female youth have affected estimates for her birthdate. The same scholars and Romantics that would never present Socrates as anything less than an old man always portray Hypatia as a young woman. Think of Raphael’s “School of Athens.” In another famous portrayal of Hypatia, a Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley casts Hypatia as a young prodigy involved in romantic intrigue as much as philosophy. He describes her youthful body at the time of her death. 

For hundreds of years, scholars and students alike followed the date implied in the Suda Lexicon, a tenth-century Byzantine Encyclopedia, that she was born around 370. Damascius calls her a young woman–as well as beautiful and chaste and well-proportioned. That would have made her a teenage prodigy since we know she was leading scholarly assemblies before 390. One of her greatest critics, John Malalas, says that she was an elderly woman of 60 when she was killed in 415, meaning she was born around 355. But then, he may have been using her advanced age as an insult. That said, he was probably right. It is likely that Hypatia was at least 30 by the time she became the leading intellect of her city in the 380’s, and was therefore born around 355. This aligns with the most recent estimates for her father’s lifespan.

 There is strong evidence to suggest that Hypatia and her father embraced Egyptian conventions around womanhood which supported female autonomy, learning and financial independence much more than Greek traditions did. Theon was referred to as “Aigytios” as often as he was “Alexandreus.” Further evidence of Hypatia’s Egyptian heritage and mentalities are all the incidental ways that Hypatia conducted herself – moving freely and unaccompanied about the city in her own chariot and, it certainly seems, in possession of her own house where she could host assemblies and converse with city leaders. Such things were much more common for Egyptian women than for Greek women. 

While Hypatia’s legacy has survived in the self-consciously Western, European and white traditions of history, her roots may lie more deeply in Asiatic and African traditions of female leadership. In fact, several historians have noted that women of the Ptolemaic period in Alexandria often weighed the benefits of legal independence (more Egyptian) against social standing (more Greek). It is possible that in the slow landslide of Greek culture in the city and the rising influence of new types of prestige, including Christian ones, that Hypatia didn’t have to make those kinds of trade-offs. She could conduct herself with typical Egyptian egalitarianism that, in earlier eras, may have been a strike against women of similar skill and ambition. 

Before the end of her life, Hypatia would write on a number of complex mathematical subjects including stereographic projection and new methods for long division in her father’s name. She prepared (and possibly composed) the only text on record as being part of the library of Alexandria that acknowledges a female contribution: “Theon of Alexandria’s commentary on the [third] book of the Mathematical Syntax of Ptolemy, the edition having been prepared by the philosopher, my daughter Hypatia.”

While we know that Hypatia came to be the most respected philosopher of her day in Alexandria, we don’t know how Hypatia came to have so much knowledge and command such wisdom. As a woman, her path to learning and scholarly authority would not have been straightforward. Did his young daughter happen to overhear gatherings of mathematicians in their courtyard? Did Theon notice his daughter’s especially sharp mind and make it his priority to educate and mentor her? Did he provide for her direct instruction or was he surprised one day when someone posed an especially difficult question and Hypatia spoke out into the silence of a thoughtful room? 

Female education in the ancient world 

For girls in the ancient world, education was an idiosyncratic affair, usually done in the home and dependent on the whims and tastes of her parents, especially her father. If Hypatia’s educational training was anything like that of the other educated women of Antiquity, it  was a mixture of formal tutelage and mentorship from her parents and their circle. Perhaps her mother taught her to read. This was a common, if not widespread, practice in the Greek-speaking world. Usually girls who were taught to read sat in on the lessons that parents provided for their sons. It was therefore far more likely for a girl to read if she had a brother. This is a convention that held true well through the 18th-century. Hypatia is an exception to that trend since she had no brother that we know about. That said, there is plenty of evidence that women in antiquity were active readers. Some of the earliest evidence we have for girls and women reading come from vase paintings, which show girls reading scrolls just as often as they show boys doing so. 

Boys of the elite class were educated for leadership, business and civic life. Girls and women were nominally (but not actually) barred from these realms. Ancient texts are rife with warnings from men to other men that women should be kept in the home: “If you prosper, found your household, love your wife with ardor, fill her belly, clothe her back, ointment soothes her limbs. Gladden her heart as long as you live! She is a field, good for her lord. Keep her from power, restrain her.” Read in the context of the evidence we have for women’s participation in public life, these warnings were more aspirational than descriptive. 

Women nonetheless acknowledged these conventions even as they went ahead and educated themselves and their daughters anyway. Often, women noted their desire to educate their sons as the reason they learned to read themselves: “Eurydice of Hierapolis set up this tablet, when she had satisfied her desire to become learned; for she worked hard to learn letters, the repository of speech, because she was a mother of growing sons.” Very few sources explicitly say that women learned to write for other reasons, but they certainly had other reasons. Kasia Szpakowska, a historian of Egyptian women in antiquity, has found “documentary evidence from letters, administrative texts, and scene captions reveals that in reality women held important positions outside the home as priestesses, temple workers, managers, and producers of linen — one of the most important commodities of the time.” Women learned to read and write to enrich their intellectual lives, ensure their professional success and conduct their daily business.

Hypatia, at the center of her thriving philosophical circle, was one of many learned women. She had considerable influence over political affairs and matters like property disputes, perhaps as much as Orestes, the patriarch of the city, did. Just as she was able to navigate the division between the domestic and the public, she danced between pagan and Christian worlds. Synesius recounts that she was able to gain protection from Theophilus, an obdurate Christian, for some of her followers. As Damscius said, “when an archon was elected to office, his first call was to her.” It seems, like the city she dwelt in all her life, Hypatia was able to mix and explore elements of disparate and competing cultures. Other women may have been able to do the same.

 Through her teaching and advising, Hypatia participated in building the bridge from Classical culture, specifically Neoplatonic views, to Christian culture. Hers was a period of changing norms, a falling away of older power structures. Many wondered how to make sense of Christianity’s emerging moral and political system. To their confounded, “philosophically frantic” minds, Hypatia brought wisdom and comfort. She reconciled contradictions, she applied sound principles to difficult problems. She ensured the survival of vital mathematical knowledge. And she did so in an intellectually vibrant and engaging way.

The City of Alexandria

Hypatia’s pluralism reflected the oldest traditions of Alexandria. For seven hundred years, the city was a center of cosmopolitanism. Citizens blended ideas and architectural motifs from as far west as Spain and as far east as the Himalayas. Descend into any of the city’s tombs like the famous Kom El Shoqafa and depictions of canopic jars float over images of Persophone’s abduction. In one carving, the Egyptian god Anubis wears the garb of a Roman soldier. Strabo, a travel writer from the early first century, tells us that if you looked at the city from the mountains above you saw tall white towers framing the central harbor. Municipal buildings and temples in red, yellow, and gray stone swept like a scarf between the harbor to the northeast and Lake Mareotis to the southwest. The Alexandrian harbor was known for its depth. Large ships could moor closely to the docks, where storehouses waited in orderly rows for the cargo to be unloaded. Out of these ships came the wine, statues, books, and ideas that sustained the city’s ever-changing tastes. 

Art Historians may raise their eyebrows at tomb decorations where Egyptian soul birds fly over Greek sirens, but cultural blending was part of the essentially Alexandrian ethos. Even in decline, it was a place of cultural mixing, where Jewish populations didn’t have to study Hebrew so closely because there was a perfectly good translation of their scriptures into Greek. 

To the east of the city, on the southern shore, stood the symbol of the Alexandrian way: The Serapeum. Serapis was the principal deity of the city for more than 700 years. He was a mixture of Osiris, Apollo, Ra and any other god that inspired his followers. He was the quintessential syncretic god: if you had a deity in mind, Serapis could absorb that deity into himself. When early Alexandrians built his temple under the first Ptolemy, they laid bilingual Egyptian and Greek foundation plaques at its base. Serapis was both wholly Egyptian and wholly Greek–making him wholly something else entirely.

The Serapeum stood tall and majestic– as long across as two football fields. Roman architects with their typical penchant for grandeur and order had expanded on the Greek building, already 300 years old, and added another row of columns in red granite. A fourth-century visitor said only the Roman Parthenon was more impressive. A Christian commentator of the fifth century said that it looked expensive, which was of course the point. 

Surrounded by colonnades, hallways and classrooms, stood the temple itself, barely large enough to contain a statue of Serapis that, by some accounts, was six meters wide and grazed the temple walls. The statue was made of wood, gold, silver and bronze. A small window had been placed in the statue’s sanctuary in such a way that, as the sun rose, it shone on the statue’s metallic lips so that people said the God Serapis “was receiving the kiss of the sun” every morning. Every night, as the shine of the statue glowed orange then dimmed into blue black darkness, Alexandrians said to one another, “the sun has bade farewell to Serapis,” content in the knowledge that the cycle would begin again, as sure as the sun would rise.

Just as Hypatia was coming to prominence, things in the city began to change. In 391, the emperor, Theodosius, issued policies to limit pagan worship in favor of Christianity. One by one, Christians took over the old shrines. At first, they did so peacefully. Christians moved their assemblies from beyond the city walls and began holding them in homes around the city. Gradually, they removed the statues from the shrines, for, in the words of Christian Chroniclers, “it would not be easy otherwise to convert them from their former religions.” 

In 395, the emperor banned public worship of any god other than the Christian God.  Under the watchful eyes of the Alexandrian bishop, the conversion of sacred spaces from Osiris or Isis-Aphrodite became rougher, more violent. Priests weren’t just ignored or told to stop performing their rites. They were beaten. Occasionally, they were killed. Monks from the nearby monasteries of Nitria patrolled the narrow streets to demand signs of Christian faith from passersby. Alexandria, the legendary center of pluralism, famous for its heady mix of religions, traditions and ideas, acquired a new reputation for violent mobs. 

Scholars debate the exact year the Serapeum was destroyed, but by the year 400, it was gone. Headless columns cut dark silhouettes against the clear blue sky. The stones were dismantled for a future church. The statue of the great Serapis was melted down into cups for the mass and reliquaries for saints’ bones and splinters of the cross Jesus died on. Christians left the colonnade and the floor stones, claiming that the latter were “too heavy” to move. These, they said, would become the entryway for a magnificent new Church to the west.

Next came the writing campaign to discredit the cult of Serapis. Christian scholars wrote far and wide to dispel the aura surrounding the god and his statue as nothing but tricks of light and games with magnets. They gloated about the church they would build in place of the Serapeum. The destruction of this great pagan shrine was license to the most militant Christians that they could bully whom they pleased. The days when they had to vent their frustrations in furtive punches and attacks were over. They could destroy what they wanted. They could do it in public. They could do it in broad daylight.

When Hypatia held court in the open air, the streets were lined with the pieces of the old buildings waiting for their new positions in half-completed churches. Hard-pressed citizens could sort through the rubble to snatch up a few old tiles to patch a leak in their roof or find a stone prop up a leaning wall. Meanwhile, the incessant stream of feet gradually wore shattered tiles into a fine orange dust which swept across the sandy streets.

You can destroy a building and melt down statues. It is more difficult to silence a conversation. Amidst the squabbling and violence, the streets of Alexandria continued to be full of philosophy. Lovers of knowledge still came to Alexandria. They spoke and gathered where they could, mixing and mingling with the more adamant Christians just as they had mixed and mingled with sailors, traders and thinkers since Alexander the Great founded the city. Scholars like Hypatia thrived even as the city’s architecture changed.

Walk north from the old Royal quarter towards the water and you would hear voices of groups of people still gathered to talk and to listen: to explore the mysteries of the physical world as well as those things they could not see and feel. They spoke in Egyptian and Greek dialects, formal Latin of the Western Empire, along with various versions of Latin typical of port cities along the North African and Asiatic coasts of the Mediterranean. They stood outside of philosopher’s houses in groups, straining to hear the answers to the most pressing questions of the day. Men and women rushed about the streets, clad in simple linen robes, heads bent together in deep conversation– gesturing inward and upward as they puzzled aloud the nature of the permanent and the impermanent, the ideal and the example. They argued loudly about the possible relationships between the movements of the stars and the inner workings of the souls. Did all of creation emanate from a single being? Was that being the Christian god? These were the questions of the day: How could you reconcile the pagan way of thinking with the revelations of Christianity? These were the questions that spurred Hypatia and her students to discussion, even as they infuriated the local Christian leaders. 

Hypatia’s contributions to philosophy, science, and mathematics

It is her father, Theon’s name, that appears throughout conventional histories as the last member of the Museum of Alexandria, but Hypatia had the superior mind. Philostorgius, her near-contemporary, stated that intellectually, she greatly outshone her father. There are no records of his influence on any major leader of the day, whereas we have ample evidence of Hypatia’s Alexandrians coming to her for wisdom and advice. The letters and historical accounts we have attest to a vibrant, mostly male, cohort of philosophy-enthusiasts who would go onto hold public offices of considerable influence, first in the governmental sphere and later, as religious and secular governance merged, in the Church. Her most notable disciple was probably Athanasius of Alexandria who drew on Neoplatonic teachings to shape Christian doctrine and become one of the most important church fathers. Other disciples include Theotecnus, Theodosius, and Gaius– all notable, if not widely influential scholars. Another of Hypatia’s disciples was Flavius Taurus Seleucus Cyrus, a famed epic poet, and influential Christian bishop. Through her influence on these men, Hypatia shaped the intellectual development of her city and even Christianity.

In addition to her influence over the spiritual lives of her pupils and the communities they came to lead, Hypatia contributed significantly to the mathematical work of her day. With Theon, she transcribed and clarified two foundational texts of western mathematics: Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest. These new editions ensured that the knowledge would be available for study and elaboration by future generations. The Suda Lexicon indicates that she also wrote commentaries on Diophantus, Appolonius’s Conics and the astronomical Canon, a method for using long division to approximate the positions of celestial bodies. No direct copies of these works survive, but scholars who have studied the substance and style of the extant manuscripts believe Hypatia’s editions were integral to the preservation of these works.

Elegance and clarity of expression, in both writing and speaking were virtues Hypatia instilled in her disciples. Synesius once complained in a letter addressed to her that, “Some of those who wear the white or dark mantle [professional philosophers and Christian clergy respectively] maintain that I am faithless to philosophy, apparently because I profess a grace and harmony of style.” It is her style and elegance that modern historians have used to put forth a convincing argument that Hypatia is the actual author of all of Theon’s most lucid work on Euclid’s Geometries. Wilbur Richard Knorr and Michael Deakin have carefully compared Theon’s earlier works with his later ones, those he most likely completed with Hypatia’s help, and found that the later works reflect a more sophisticated, literary mind and notably different writing style. Theon’s earlier work lacked the style and clarity that made the later commentaries on Euclid invaluable.

Hypatia constructed instruments with practical purposes such as astrolabes and hydroscopes. Once again, Synesius is our source for this information. In one letter to a colleague, Paeonius, describes an astrolabe he made with Hypatia’s help. Astrolabes are devices for observing the movements of the stars and have many applications in navigation and keeping the time. The use of the hydroscope is more obscure. In a letter to Hypatia herself, Synesius asks for her help in constructing an instrument to measure the density of liquid. From the letter, we can infer that he had a medical purpose in mind. The poor man was on his deathbed and perhaps wanted to distill a liquid medicine or, more likely, measure the density of his own urine to calculate the required dosage of a diuretic. We do not know if Hypatia ever answered him. But the evidence suggests a woman actively philosophizing, debating, numerating, constructing, writing and generally participating in every aspect of intellectual life. The only difference between Hypatia and a man of similar talent, energy and ambition is that he would have taken on an official position in religious or civil life the way so many of her students did.  He would have signed his work under his own name.

Women in the larger scholarly life of the Greco-Roman World 

In fact, it was not at all strange to have a woman participate in the scholarly life and work of Greco-Roman Antiquity. Hypatia was exceptionally talented and perhaps unique in other ways, but she was by no means the only woman participating in the practice, oration and conversation that was the essence of philosophical inquiry in the ancient world. Contemporary accounts, and a few dating back to as early as the third century CE, make casual reference to women’s participation in these scholarly circles. Contrary to her 21st-century reputation, Hypatia is not the first female mathematician of record. As the records stand, the first female philosopher-mathematician about whom we have information was Aesara. Her fragmentary work “On Human Nature” explores the tri-partite soul, similar to the Platonic division. She argues that a soul should balance its many disparate elements in order to balance the household, which in turn, balances society. Aesara was probably not alone. There is strong evidence that Pythagoras had a wife and daughters who participated and contributed actively to his work in the third century BCE, seven hundred years before Hypatia.  

 One realm of intellectual and public activity in which women actively participated was medicine. While we have only one extant manuscript authored by a woman, there are numerous traces of their contributions. Evidence points to women as experts in obstetrics, meaning professional midwives, as early as the fifth century BCE. In the fourth century BCE, we find references to female doctors treating any number of ailments in both men and women. Medical literature and documentary evidence, things like bills, administrative records and even casual jokes, indicate that female physicians were common in the ancient world. Women were granted civic honors for their medical practice and received municipal funding to do their work. Many epigraphs, tomb inscriptions, corroborate the trend. In one example from the third century, Geminia was called a “savior of all through her knowledge of medicine.” Pantheia of Pergamum died around 150 BCE and her husband, Glycon, a fellow doctor, commissioned this epitaph for her: “You raised high our common fame in the art of medicine, and even though a woman, you did not fall short of my skill.” Iulia Saturnina who died around the same time was called “the best doctor.” Pliny the Elder, the historian, and Paul Aegineta,a noteworthy medical writer, among others, describe the work of female physicians.

One particularly useful source on what work female physicians were doing comes from Antiquity’s most well-known physician: Galen who lived from about 130 to 210 CE. Galen’s enduring reputation rests on the large body of texts he left behind that were copied again and again. In these texts, he cites numerous female physicians for their expertise. From these citations, we know that women were by no means exclusively bound to the messy informal, workaday world of bodily care. Galen’s criteria for citation was above all efficacy and experience. He valued written authorities on medicine because, for Galen, medical tradition was a distillation process that eliminated imperfections and mistakes through trial and error. A woman’s name attached to a medical recipe (prescription or formula for a remedy) could serve as a mark of approval or sign of efficacy as well as a man’s name could. Women participated in the highest discourses on medicine. They could be medical authorities. 

One manuscript by a female medical authority in the ancient world survives. The author was Metrodora and the manuscript dates from some time between 100 and 300 CE. Of the two original books, only one survives, called “Concerning the feminine diseases of the womb.” Metrodora does not cover obstetrics but concerns herself exclusively with diseases. She divided her work into sixty-three chapters in seven general sections. It is a highly organized, cogent medical text that draws on the knowledge of the most sophisticated medical authorities of her day and offers new insights. It is possible but unlikely that Metrodora was the only woman of the period to put her expertise in writing. Her manuscript offers evidence that women may have been writing about medicine much more than the extant sources indicate.

Hypatia and everyone in her circle would have known of and perhaps consulted female physicians. And while we might confer a medical doctor similar or even more respect than we would a doctor of philosophy, it was not so in the ancient world. 

Medicine was by no means an elite practice. Alexandria, like Egypt in general, was teeming with physicians at every level: from the casual purveyor of herbs and remedies to the court physicians. These practitioners of healing came from every social class and had every degree of education. Some were even slaves. But women doctors, even elite ones, were clearly well-known. Their numbers were small, but not so small as to warrant any sort of commentary. They cared for men and women alike, and concerned themselves with bodies both healthy and in distress. Hypatia would not have seen herself as the same type of person as a mere doctor, but, as the letter Synesius wrote her asking for advice on constructing a medical instrument shows, she was not above concerning herself with the body. 

Where medicine was more bookish–meaning it involved the study and comparison of written theories and remedies rather than examining and treating bodies–women were less involved. They were less involved as medical writers and less likely to be the subjects of written medical inquiry. The result, in history, is that despite evidence of women’s widespread involvement in medicine, we have relatively few sources that give us the details of what exactly they were doing. There was a whole world of female medicine and care, for daily and monthly ailments, as well as for major health concerns, about which we have little information. 

The same may be true for the world of philosophy and mathematics. Hypatia, after all, was a philosopher who never wrote down any philosophy. She wrote texts for mathematical instruction. Typical in the ancient world, hers was a scholarly circle that wasn’t particularly bookish. Bookishness was male, but thinking, doing, curing, questioning, debating was something that both women and men could do. 

Women thinking was the norm. Women offering expertise was the norm. Women speaking, too. But women writing was another matter entirely. While women discussed all matter of ideas and pushed the fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine ethics forward, there were probably no scrolls authored by women in the library of Alexandria, not in 300 BCE when it was built, not in 30 CE when Julius Caesar burned its warehouses and Cleopatra snuck onto his ship to strike a bargain with him, and not in 415, when Hypatia was murdered by a political rival. 

Zero is not a common number in history. Women have managed to do almost everything and make contributions in almost every field. Women hunted the stags. Women fought the Crusades. They have ruled dynasties and run companies. For an activity to be truly and really exclusively male, it has to be heavily institutionalized. Women’s absence was the result of careful and consistent gate-keeping – power used against women – rather than any lack of activity on their part. 

Scholarly activity was by no means exclusive to libraries. Libraries were places where works were compiled for posterity and for the instruction of future leaders. These realms, schooling and leading, were coded male. By looking at how the library was put together (and of course, in 600 years, methods came and went) and later preserved and passed down over the years, we can see that from the very conception of the project, maleness was a qualifying factor. For an author’s work to be part of the library and, later, to be worth keeping, he had to be a man. To be female was to be disqualified.

How did the library come to be?

Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria in 331 BCE on his way to conquer the known world. In a decision lauded for its political savvy, he chose not to attempt to suppress Egyptian culture or supplant Egyptian leaders. Egypt was the cultural powerhouse of the day and its population and military tradition meant that if Egyptians began to find Hellenic occupation tiresome, there would be trouble. So Alexander worshiped at the local shrines, walked in the steps of Ra and Osiris. He kept the local governors in place, demanding only a (relatively) small tax. He wanted to leave some lasting public symbols of his authority, but didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Perhaps following a dream, perhaps following the well-known currents of the Mediterranean, he chose a small island and port city to name for himself. There, Alexander installed the first of the Ptolemies, Sotor. It was he who founded the library and built the Serapium.

There are two origin stories for the library of Alexandria. The first is that the founding collection was copied in Rome from the book holdings of Aristotle himself.  Strabo reports that Aristotle built up a large library at his Lyceum for the erudition of the boys and young men destined by birth and station for leadership. The second is that it was based on a smaller selection of works copied at Mieza in modern-day Macedonia for the education of Alexander himself– it therefore contained more work of poetry, ethics, politics and rhetoric, which were intended specifically for the education of a young man destined for political leadership. These stories, whether true or not, held sway on how works were chosen for the library. Ptolemy Soter followed Aristotle’s model, even if he did not draw directly on his exact collection. It was a place to compile the most important works for the erudition of the most important people, people who would go onto hold public office. Those were, by definition, men.

Scholars at Alexandria did the necessaries to establish a standard text and make it available to the small class of the learned public. They compared multiple editions, filled in missing words, corrected spelling and ensured legibility. They either removed or discouraged the circulation of other copies. This was not always, or even often, the respectable enterprise it seems to be. From Galen we know that this was often a matter of plunder. Ships were searched upon their entrance to the harbor. If any books were found, they were either taken outright or held until copies could be made. Once, Ptolemy III borrowed the scrolls of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from Athens. Promising to return them, he left 15 young men behind as collateral. He never returned the books and the young men were never heard from again.

Compiling these books was an act of power. These were works of established merit and fame, works necessary for the education of young men of consequence.  It was at no point a gender-neutral endeavor. Prestige, merit, fame, all of these were by convention and practice coded male in the ancient world. If there were works by a female author or ascribed to a female author in the first place, it is highly likely that they were either expunged or integrated into works ascribed to notable men. 

What did the library look like?

We are not quite sure what the main library of Alexandria looked like in its heyday. In the 1980’s, archeologist Adam Rowe found what is believed to be a smaller, secondary library next to the Serapeum. Ancient texts refer to it as the “daughter library,” so we assume that it is similar in appearance to the original one, but smaller in scale. 19 identical rooms have been excavated, each four by three meters (about 13 by 10 feet). An adult of about five feet, six inches tall, could walk across it in five or six paces. Each room probably held one or two shelves, either on opposite walls or in the center so readers could walk around them. They were arranged by subject, but as far as we know, unlabeled. Enthusiastic scholars had to learn the locations of important scrolls, competing with each other in this trick of memory. Several ancient sources note that Callimachus, a famously prolific ancient poet, was the only person who could find any scroll he wanted. 

Scholars developed a certain amount of intimacy with a rack of scrolls, rolled tightly around an umbilicus, a cord of leather,  and laid on top of each other in diamond, square, and triangle-shaped openings like so many ears of corn. When you pulled out a scroll for the first time, you wouldn’t know what you were opening. You selected a scroll, wondering what mysteries of mathematics or metaphysics would come to you from the distant past. The paper, made of pressed papyrus reeds, was thicker than paper in the 21st century, but still dry and delicate. Scholars felt themselves not just to be discovering new horizons, but to be preserving the precious material of a disintegrating past. Nowadays, scientists don’t have to concern themselves nearly as much with the preservation and transmission of past discoveries. They can hand their students a textbook, a pin drive or even tell them to consult the internet. The pressing need to preserve the past is a concern that the wealth and technology of the 21st century has made disappear from our minds. But without Theon and Hypatia, the work of Euclid would be lost. And without countless scribes and thinkers, named and unnamed, the work of Pythagoras would be lost too. Without the benefit of extensive copying, the works of many women were lost.   

The library was not just a storehouse of knowledge, it was a place of teaching and learning. Young men of Alexandria received their education in or near the collections of scrolls. Archeologists have excavated slightly larger recessed rooms with graduated walls for listeners to sit and a small raised square in the middle for the speaker to stand on: more of a stone soapbox than a podium. In a manner of schooling probably modeled on Aristotle’s Lyceum, groups of 12 to 14 boys gathered daily to hear their teachers and learn their letters. This small group of elite boys and men were preparing for a future of public influence and authority. A boy could have in mind that, were he to make an important enough contribution, one day, he could sign his name to his own scroll. 

Why didn’t the library include any female authors?

When it came to admitting women’s work into the library’s canon, theory overcame the daily reality of their presence. Even if Aristotle’s actual collection was not the source for the Library of Alexandria, his views on what qualified as worthy influenced its curation. Aristotle had a clear theory of not just male superiority, but male authority over women. According to Aristotle, men are more expert "by nature" than women at leading. In The Politics, he explains that women are to be ruled by men in a “political manner.” The female possesses the "deliberative faculty," meaning the capacity to think, but that she “lacks authority.” In Aristotle’s worldview, a woman can think but she doesn’t really know what she is thinking. 

What does it mean to have rationality without authority? Aristotle uses the Greek term, akuron, meaning “without authority.” Akuros can pertain to persons, denoting that they have no power or authority; or it can apply to laws or sentences, in which case the term means "no longer in force, canceled, annulled, or set aside." It’s a fitting way to describe how women’s writing has been treated throughout history. For Aristotle, women were like children, they lacked self-control (authority) over their own desires, urges and passions. The theory is insidiously flexible. Any observation of a woman can justify it. If she says something intelligent, she doesn’t really know what she is saying. If she says something foolish, she confirms the inferiority of the female mind. 

Male authors occasionally mentioned that they heard ideas from a sister or a female relative. One wonders then, if a man writing down ideas he heard from women felt himself to be taking elements of the landscape for a painting. Monet did not plagiarize the water lilies, he used them as inspiration for his own accomplishments. While a woman might share fascinating ideas, they’re not quite hers. It’s the way a child might make an observation that is startling in its accuracy and originality. A child sees the world with fresh, untrained eyes. Their naïvité is an asset. In this theoretical model, women do not improve themselves through gaining expertise. They can only stumble across insights. Naïveté, like virginity, is not earned. It is something you’re born with and then can only lose. 

Galen, the same physician who was happy to collaborate with women physicians, supplied the biological basis for Aristotle’s theory of female inferiority. Apparently based on studying baboon bodies, Galen developed and wrote a theory that female fetuses were the result of a lack of heat in their mother’s wombs. In this understanding of reproduction, a man provides the seed and the woman acts as a kind of oven. When a fetus gets fully cooked, a boy is born. When the oven isn’t hot enough, a girl is born. Certain generalities about men and women’s bodies seem to justify this patently false understanding of sexual differentiation. Broadly speaking, women tend to have less muscle, to be a little cooler to the touch than men. Ancient thinkers came to associate an ancient table of opposites, hot and cold, dry and wet, solid and porous, good and bad, with the binary of male and female. We find these associations repeated again and again in ancient sources until they became accepted wisdom. Western physicians widely cited Galen on sexual differences into the twentieth century. Galen’s ideas fed into a larger notion that women were underdeveloped men.

This was the theory anyway. Probably many men and lots of women thought differently. The sources show us that many men were happy to converse and collaborate with the women of their acquaintance. It was a regular enough practice that no one bothered to say that it was noteworthy or strange that they were bandying about philosophical, mathematical, metaphysical ideas with women.

Aristotle’s theory that women had reason but not authority extended into a practice wherein women developed ideas but did not write them down. Women were thinkers, not authors. Writing was something men did for other men. The late 20th century cliché that “women dress for other women” has an ancient corollary: men wrote for other men. Even the poetry of Sappho, the most well-known of ancient female writers and certainly a famed poet, comes to us only through quotation by men. We have no scroll by Sappho or ancient copy of her work alone.

Could there have been more scrolls by women?

Perhaps women authored many scrolls, but these scrolls have been lost to us through the ages of selective copying and compiling. The emergence of one woman’s name through twentieth-century scholarly efforts illustrates the difficulties of reconstructing an accurate picture of thinking women in Antiquity. Pandrosian, a woman mathematician, lived one or two generations before Hypatia and was active in mathematical circles around 340 CE. Her name comes to us through a collection of writing by Pappos of Alexandria, her contemporary.

  The history of Pappos’s manuscripts is important to the story. The collection of Pappos is divided into eight different books, the third of which is addressed to Pandrosian. These works survived in a single manuscript, known as Vaticanus Graecus 218, which was found in the Vatican Library in the 16th century by Federico Commandino, an Italian Humanist. This manuscript was probably copied in Byzantium in the ninth or tenth century. This was a typical journey for Greek works of mathematics: from Alexandria in Antiquity to Byzantium around 900 and into Vatican libraries over the course of the Renaissance. There, in the fervor for reviving Classical learning, they were transcribed, translated and published in print. The work of Pappos was subject to at least two more transcriptions. At some point in the eighteenth century, it was copied in France and kept in their National Archives under the label Paris 2440. In 1875 in Berlin, a German man, Fridericus Hultsch, used this manuscript to publish a dual language edition with Greek on the left and Latin on the right. This was the definitive edition of Pappos’s work and used as the basis for French and English editions.

Manuscripts may have been copied many times in between these periods of scribal activity. Each point of transcription was an opportunity for the scribes to edit or change the work. Sometimes they made mistakes, sometimes they made deliberate changes. We have no way of knowing if it was a mistake or a deliberate change when, sometime between the Vatican manuscript and the 1875 Berlin edition, Pandrosian’s name was changed into the masculine form “Pandrosio” and the form of address (in the Greek and in the translation) changed from feminine to masculine. 

In the 1950’s, the error was discovered by a particularly assiduous scholar Athanasius. Treweek painstakingly reconstructed the original Vatican manuscript by deciphering where the ink had marked the opposite page. Over the next thirty years, scholars confirmed and built on his findings. Without his work, we would never know that Pandrosio was really Pandrosian (though perhaps we should have known since “Pandrosian” was the name of a minor Greek goddess and the name itself means “all dewy,” hardly a typical masculine nomenclature). We can infer from the text that in the fourth century, Pandrosian proposed a way of calculating arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means through iterative, increasingly accurate approximations. While not completely developed (that we know of) it is an approach that modern mathematics has shown to be quite effective.

Pappos disagreed with her analysis but refers to her as “an important person, reputed to be a geometer” and that “certain people who claimed to learn mathematics from you set out the enunciation of the problems in what seemed to us an ignorant manner.” So Pandrosian was both a mathematician and a teacher! For Pappos, her gender went by without comment, but for some scribe, maybe Hultsch in the nineteenth century, it seemed more likely or more accurate that she was a man. The gender biases of history worked to obscure this one woman’s work and only painstaking scholarly investigation brought this tiny reference to light. It is safe to assume that many other women’s contributions to scholarly work–and perhaps their own written work–were similarly copied out of history or, as was the case with Hypatia, attributed to a man instead.

The compilation of learning is never politically neutral. These periods of organized scholarly activity, Alexandria under the Ptolemies, Byzantium in the 9th century, Italy in the 15th century, France in the 18th century, Germany in the late 19th century, all align with attempts to centralize and solidify political power by drawing on scholarly prestige. Sappho’s work made it out of Antiquity. We have records that she was widely read in sixth- and seventh- century Byzantium, but no one bothered to copy her work in the ninth century. Thus we are left today with only fragments found in the works of other (male) authors. At these key periods of political consolidation, leaders intertwined scholarship with an illustrious and imperial past. Scribes and professors copied elite works to forge a living connection with their own times. 

Later historians compounded these effects by focusing on the noteworthy among the noteworthy. They whittled down the lists of significant thinkers that had already been carefully selected from the contemporary sources. Historians dwell at length on these notable men in philosophy, public virtues, medicine, science, but haven’t spent much ink on ways in which women were actively excluded from the records. The result is a partial view of the classical antiquity’s intellectual scene masquerading as a complete view and a decided lack of critical inquiry into how certain spaces, intellectual and historical, were carefully coded as male spaces. 

A moment of reckoning

These were the cultural norms that women navigated in late antiquity to participate in the intellectual culture of the day. Hypatia may have been the most successful at navigating them, or perhaps she was merely the last to work with this set of rules. More people know her name than any other woman’s name, except for perhaps Sappho. With the rise of the Christian church, the rules of gender and power would change, and for Hypatia, her public position and intellectual authority would not save her. In fact, they became a danger. 

Even as women philosophized, computed, composed, cured the ill, and consulted with their male colleagues, the tightening atmosphere of doom loomed over Alexandria. Many women looked at the broken temples and the growing numbers of black-cloaked monks walking the streets and left to establish female communities beyond the city walls. They saw the rules of public discourse changing from philosophical debate to Christian belief and they shifted their strategies. Hypatia stayed. 

Cyril was elected bishop of Alexandria in 412 in a contested and messy election. Though his uncle had the position before him, Cyril commanded little loyalty within the city itself. Many preferred a man named Thomas for the position. Cyril already had a reputation for militancy and for particular animosity towards Christian sects and thinkers who favored the ideas of Origen, a Christian Alexandrian from the third century. The particulars of the debate– subtle differences on the nature of Christ’s soul–dizzy the modern mind. Was Christ’s soul always the logos (word) or did it become the logos at the moment of resurrection? Theological debate often masked personal vendetta. Cyril’s defining quality, one that he shared with his uncle before him, was a militant streak that made debate over big ideas– the posing of questions and insistence on exploring possibilities–intolerable. 

This put Cyril at constant odds with the prefect of Alexandria, Orestes. Cyril considered himself the better Christian. But Orestes was the savvier politician. He courted favor with the Jewish community. He connected himself with Hypatia, the leading scholar of the day, so that he could draw on her influence with the intellectual community, pagan and Christian alike. Cyril took a different tack. He wanted to ensure that ecclesiastical power was the only power in Alexandria that mattered. His uncle Theophilus had destroyed the Serapeum but let the teaching and learning continue. Now Cyril would put a stop to that too. 

Following his election, Cyril escalated his efforts to stamp out paganism and cement his supremacy over Orestes. He summoned some 500 monks, armed and angry, to descend from their refuges in the mountains of Nitria to attack Orestes in the street. Armed with rocks and shards of whatever they could find, they called him a pagan idolator. Despite his protests that he had been baptized in Constantinople by the bishop there, one monk, named Ammonius, struck the governor in the head with a rock. A small group of Alexandrians loyal to Orestes seized and tortured the monk to death. Enraged, Cyril sent word to the emperor that a pagan was killing Christians for their faith and that Ammonius must be counted among the saints and martyrs. Cyril’s requests were ignored by the emperor’s officials, pagan and Christian alike. They sided with Orestes, leaving Cyril angry and thirsty for a fight he could win. 

Several sources tell us that it was around this time, and in this mood, that Cyril was himself held up one day in the street. But not by an angry mob, instead by an eager crowd of listeners. They were clamoring around the entrance to a private residence, straining to hear the voice of the teacher within. A few were running in and out, shouting summaries and commentaries on what was being said. So unfamiliar was he with the gathering places in his city, that Cyril had to ask one of his attendants whose house it was. For, of course, the teacher was Hypatia and the house was hers. She was captivating her audience with her usual verve and wisdom. It was for her that listeners came from far and wide. It was these kinds of gatherings that earned her the reputation of a philosopher “who far surpassed all others in her own time.” While we don’t know the particulars of her speech, it’s fair to say that she was both satisfying and stoking her listeners into that philosophic frenzy Synesius loved so much. 

Even if she wasn’t a Christian herself (and she probably was not, but we do not know for certain), Hypatia must have seen herself as something of a mentor to the next generation of church leadership – cosmopolitan, learned in the old thinkers, rigorous in debate and stylish in writing and rhetoric. Many of her students went on to become bishops of important cities. Athanasius became a father of the church. Around 411, Synesius, Hypatia’s most admiring student, and the one whose letters give us such rich information about her, her teaching style and her vibrant circles of pupils, was made bishop of Cyrene. None of this influence kept her safe, in reputation or in body, from the accusations of a spiteful rival. 

What happened next is known to us in multiple ways. First, through consistent references in Greek texts in the Eastern Empire, references so casual as to imply that it was common knowledge. Sometimes, writers don’t even bother to mention Hypatia’s name. Everyone knew her. Everyone knew what happened to her. We also have five extant sources: four authors that condemn the violent actions: Hesychius, Damascius, Socrates Scholasticus, and the Suda. And one, John of Nikue, who celebrates it. 

 Cyril called on his monks again. To embolden them to greater violence, he spread rumors about Hypatia: that she cast devious spells; that she attended and participated in public dances; that she wasn’t just manipulating Orestes, she was sleeping with him. Orestes had become so deluded by her wiles that he had stopped going to Church! The list of insults is a familiar one: manipulation, seduction, dancing, magic, music, sex. Over the 7000 years of culture this book covers, the insults stay remarkably consistent. Whispered a few times, they merge together into an accusation of witchcraft for any woman of influence.

It was broad daylight when the monks seized the reins of her carriage and pulled Hypatia into the sandy street. They grabbed pottery shards and old roof tiles to stab and beat her. They dragged her north to the Caesarium, a newly minted church right on the water. They may have torn off her clothes. The implication of sexual violence exists. So does the shame of nakedness. One source tells us they used the pottery shards to beat out her eyes, another that they used them to flay and dismember her. They were right on the water, so seashells may have been involved. All agree that they mutilated her body and burned the remaining pieces. Whatever they did, it’s not hard for a large group of men to chase down and beat a 60-year old woman to death. 

Women, power and writing

Orestes, as far as we know, never stood up to Cyril again. Through his authority as the city’s prefect, Orestes saved himself from Cyril’s mob. Hypatia could not. But without Hypatia, Orestes no longer challenged Cyril’s authority. So the fear campaign worked. When Orosius, a student of Augustine of Hippo, visited Alexandria in the year following Hypatia’s death, he noted no major library and no significant groups of pagan philosophers. Synesius bade farewell to Hypatia from his own deathbed: “Even though there shall be utter forgetfulness of the dead in Hades ‘even there I shall remember thee’ my dear Hypatia.”

And thus the story goes, told again and again. The first ones to tell the story were Cyril and his followers. John of Nikku, a chronicler for Cyril, left no one, woman or man, in any doubt as to how to interpret Hypatia’s killing. A woman speaking in public was a witch. She was a witch. Cyril was the saint. Cyril would go on to make an important philosophical contribution to Christian doctrine by carving out a clear and defined place for women. In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, where men gathered to lay down church doctrines that held for centuries. Cyril spoke passionately for the role of Mary as the Theotokos, meaning “bearer of god.” While we cannot know his intentions, he gave women a crystal clear and narrowly defined role in Christian doctrine as the vessel of god. Mary bore Jesus in her body, but was not responsible for him in any way. The Christian doctrine echoes Aristotle’s understanding how women could express ideas without taking part in creating them. 

 But this isn’t the whole story. Hypatia’s enduring reputation has always offered a counter-narrative of scholarly women. Even though she may not be the first woman mathematician, her accomplishments and wisdom shine brightly. Hypatia is hardly an unknown figure. Her reputation and her impact on the lives of so many meant that forever there would be a whisper of dissent from Cyril’s version of events. In 12th century Byzantium, plenty of people knew her name. The “Egyptian Lady” became shorthand for a woman brilliant in philosophy and mathematics. As a symbol, Hypatia has enjoyed a long and interesting life as a paradigm of female achievement in otherwise exclusively male halls. Raphael included her in his “School of Athens.” Edward Gibbon in his influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes her death with relish as an indictment of the savagery of religious fanaticism. For him, her death marks the end of free-thinking Classical Antiquity. A nineteenth century English novelist, Charles Kingsley, wrote a popular fictionalized account of Hypatia’s life that casts her as a young, brilliant thinker doing battle with Catholic fanaticism. Queen Victoria loved it.

Through the history of Hypatia’s history and the history of the library where she left a record of her contributions, we see certain characteristics of learned western culture that would endure for a long, long time. Posterity, instruction, leadership were male domains. Official knowledge and official learning– acknowledged and under the direction of celebrated individuals– was, by definition a male affair. If women did it, it wasn’t official. At the root of this is a theoretical understanding of women as fundamentally lacking men’s authority. Biological notions of sexual difference, that female bodies were undeveloped male bodies, interwove with these notions of cultural differences to create a resilient male gender hegemony. 

At the same time, we shouldn’t take this “philosophical” stance on women too seriously. For there were plenty of men who were happy to listen and learn from women, provided they demonstrated exceptional ability. Some men may have resented this and turned to their pens to turn vitriol into more theories of gender wherein women are decidedly subservient to men. In general, women did not participate in these written debates about their own nature–just as they did not participate in most written debates full stop. But in the ancient world, wherein speaking was the principle way of transmitting knowledge, we should not underestimate how, through speaking’s more flexible and participative rules, women were able to make themselves heard, develop their ideas, and offer their insights. 

Merely counting the women named in various sources does not reflect what seems to be a rich and complex oral tradition of passing ideas from one person, one generation, to the next. And this passing happened from mother to son, sister to brother, daughter to father. With the ascendancy of the Christian Church as an institution, intergenerational passing of knowledge would happen more often from man to man, woman to woman– what scholars deem a more “homosocial affair.” Within this much more gender-segregated system, individual women wrote much more, for themselves and for their communities. Many of their manuscripts survive. In this book, Hypatia is the last woman whose experiences we have to trace primarily through the words of male writers. 

Looking forward

The Western World would have to wait 700 years for another woman to wield such public influence in philosophical circles. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was as savvy a politician as any of her time, and a more prolific writer than almost anyone. She navigated the paths to power available to women in her time and place with remarkable acumen to become one of the leading public thinkers of the 12th-century. Her tools were rhetoric, the written word and fruitful political relationships with powerful men. Unlike Hypatia, whose political influence made her powerful enemies who found her to be an easy target in a crumbling city, Hildegaard wrapped herself in the protection of the Catholic Church and died an old woman in her bed. Power and authority changed forms and women had to change their approaches, but they could still wield power and authority. 

Historically, to institutionalize learning was to make sure it was male. Later, in a wave of professionalization brought on by industrialization and commercialization, the same tendency would be at play: to do something professionally was to be a man doing it. If women did it, it was not professional. This was the case in a range of jobs from teaching to book keeping and compiling scientific data. 

A lot has changed and a lot has not. Closing gates of intellectual circles to women, writing histories and making lists of notables that include only men are practices that have endured the years remarkably well. In 1980, there were 17 female professors with tenure at Harvard University– out of 569. Today, male tenured faculty at Harvard outnumber female faculty three to one. Most major history textbooks in English mention women on fewer than one in 10 pages– and almost always describe them in their domestic roles. Forbes, a magazine that focuses on expertise in political, financial and technological sectors, regularly publishes lists of the world’s “most powerful or “most innovative” that don’t include any women. Is it that women aren’t powerful or innovative or that, regardless of their respective accomplishments, being a man qualifies a person for power in ways that being a woman does not?

Grades: Grades 8-12, college and beyond

How would I teach this?

Ask your students to read the letter aloud or listen to it once before you ask them to do anything with it. Then introduce an exercise that draws on their writing skills and deepens their comprehension.

My first thought was to have students read and listen to Woo’s letters and do a Windows/Mirrors Exercise. To do this, students make two columns: “Windows” for things they hear that are new to them; “Mirrors” for things that reflect their own experience. As they listen to the letter for the second time, they write down parts of what they hear in one of the two columns.

I choose this piece because it reminded me so much of my conversations with my own mother– a white Cuban woman who keeps her past to herself. There are lines that make me cry whenever I read them. I was happy to feel these connections across difference-which Audré Lorde tells us are so generative in movements for justice and understanding.

But in reading Woo’s letter a few times, I thought that doing a Windows/Mirrors exercise with students would only reinforce barriers of gender, race and class instead of making those divisions more porous. Sometimes, asking students to read something with the question “Is this me or not me?” makes that division, that “or,” too solid.

Instead, I would ask my students to find moments of feeling. These can be feelings that Woo expresses or feelings that the student has. Don’t pressure them to identify the feelings just yet. That can feel intimidating. But have them underline or mark off these moments of feeling. Then list the page numbers on the board, read a few passages aloud as a class and try to find the words to describe the feelings.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

“What deepens the chasms between us are our different reactions to these forces. Yours has been one of silence, self-denial, self-effacement; you believing it is your fault that you never fully experienced self-pride and freedom of choice.” (Woo, page 139)

What are the feelings here? (This list is by no means exhaustive. Note that many of the feelings overlap. That is fine. Just get the students generating language.)

Frustration

Grief

Sadness

Anger

Loss

Tenderness

What are the reasons behind these feelings? (This is something students could write privately about, discuss in pairs, or talk through as a class. I’d be wary of this last option since sometimes when feelings are the topic, a few students do most of the talking.)

Frustration at her lack of connection with her mother / at her mother for not understanding her / at American racism

Grief at the loss of connections she could have had with her mother

Sadness at her mother’s pain

Anger at a global economic system that made her mother suffer so acutely / anger at her mother for being silence

Loss at what she and her mother could share if her mother would recognize and deal with her own pain

Tenderness as she tries to heal her mother’s pain

Being something of a teacher without a class right now, I made up this list myself. It is perhaps revealing of my own feelings of loss for the relationship I could have had with my own mother. If you do it with students (or other teachers), you will find that more varied feelings come up.

By finding moments of feeling rather than concentrating on similarities and differences, you ask students to deepen their connections with the author, with themselves, and with others without focusing so much on where the boundaries lie. You ask students to explore the personal behind the political with precision and, I hope, without judgment. It is an exercise that encourages students to see these particular feelings as, if not universal, then shared by many.

Stray thoughts:

• What is it like listening to a white woman read the words of an Asian American woman?

• This piece was written in 1980. What language feels dated? (For instance, the gender/sex distinction)

• Would the author appreciate my idea of finding the universal in her particular experience or does that recreate the same pattern that she condemns of white people presenting their experiences as universal?

• I choked up three times in reading it aloud. I wonder if the listeners can hear it.

I’ll be home all day. Writing and in meetings. It will be fine until 3:30 or 4, at which point the dogs get louder, my patience gets shorter and I have begun to feel that nothing I do is enough. But all that will come later.

Now, I’m remembering the spring in Paris with my first girlfriend, Marie. I was 25. She was 23. We spent weekday mornings around a 11 am a lot like this, peaceful, uninterrupted joy.

I often considered lying to her that I had paying work so that I could go off on my own and write poetry. My wife now never requires the lie. Hell, she’ll kick me out of the house and put a pen in my hand she loves me so much.

With Marie, I can still remember the moment my heart and my whole body stirred for her. We were at the Saturday Writers’ Workshop at Shakespeare and Co. I on the bench to the left and she on the sunken wing chair by the window. She laughed and said something about someone’s story. It was the sound that did it. Her voice had a kind of harmony to it. I loved it right away. Later, I learned that she split her time growing up between France and the States. She gave me a book called Third Culture Kids to explain herself. I never read it but the gist was that if a child grows up in two places, say France and the US, they are neither French, nor American, nor exactly Franco-American. For Marie, that was true. She was something else entirely. She took photos of all the artists at Spoken Word Paris and anyone who goes to an event or an art show at Chat Noir on rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud should know that Marie and I were the first ones to make it an art gallery. But then, not really. It was Alberto, and before him, I’m sure there was some Merovingian bard who sang counter-culture ballads on that very corner. In Paris, there is never a first. But there is always an ending, for Americans and Brits especially. The city is an ossuary of nostalgia.

I remember being very in love but also very sad with Marie. I didn’t think it would last and it didn’t. We had broken up by the time she held her show which I helped her plan the very earliest stages of. But we had our moments dancing in wet grass… somewhere… near a friend’s houseboat on the Seine beyond Paris. And throwing open the tall windows of her room to watch the morning light turn into afternoon light on the stone of the Boulevard St Germaine. The colors change from oily green to yellow to blue to a bright white that makes each carved line of stone shine black. And she thought I was beautiful and fun– especially with my hair down. She didn’t like my gavroche cap. (Which I loved!) I thought she was kind, sweet, funny and interesting. She had been all sorts of places. We cooked and made love in her family apartment’s great big kitchen.

Does a journal entry need an ending? The dachshund sleeps on my right arm, but I’ve bulked up so I can still write. Marie is somewhere. More radical and a better activist than I. I think I heard that she went to Lesbos during the Syrian refugee crisis. She’s certainly found love again. That I did hear– and I was happy for her. As I know she is happy for me.

Most Americans graduate high school having heard the names of fewer than 10 women in all four years of history class. The stories we tell in schools have a way of coming back to us and shaping our perceptions of the world. Without a complete understanding of women and men in the past, how can we hope to build a more equitable future?

If you’re a casual reader, I hope you learn something new. If you’re a teacher, I encourage you to use these lessons and share these resources with your students. My goal with Teach About Women is to ensure that all students graduate high school with an understanding of how women have shaped and continue to shape our world– and to have a bit of fun learning about some lesser known aspects of history.

In addition to short histories, I offer lesson ideas for teaching about women and gender equity, and the occasional musing. It is, after all, a blog.

Thanks for reading,

Georgina Emerson

History Teacher & Founder/Director of Teach About Women 

​Like most rough and ready pieces of moral philosophy, the platinum rule has its benefits and its limitations.

I spent the first day of my feminist course discussing it in some depth with my students. We do a lot of work with personal stories so I wanted to explore ways of being empathetic and understanding…

Read more

Back to suffrage. In 1920 white women all over the country could finally vote. Women in Wyoming had been voting since 1869. Black women and other women of color would have to wait until the Voting Rights Acts of the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s to exercise that right.

National female suffrage, even with significant limitations, in the United States was a huge win for the women’s movement. Any history teacher worth her salt will be sure to mention it. Then she’ll get down to the serious work of teaching her students about the past–which, in most classrooms around the United States, means talking almost exclusively about men.
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In fact, any teacher concerned with her students passing an exam at the end of the year won’t spend very much time on women at all. The tests hardly mention them. (The primacy of standardized tests in education is certainly part of the problem, but that’s an issue for another post.)

Take the case of my home state, New York, where half a million high school students sit for social studies Regents exams every June. The US History and Government Regents exam typically includes three to five questions about women. There are usually two on the Global History exam. Both name, on average, one woman per test.

“Economics, the Enterprise System, and Finance” never mentions women or gender and includes no material on sexism or racism.

The near-absence of women on these tests reflects the lack of women in state learning standards, the guidelines teachers use to design their lessons. The New York State guidelines for grades 9-12 mention “women,” “gender”  and the names of individual women about 20 times in total.

The most notable gaps are in the twelfth grade courses. “Participation in Government and Civics” addresses gender once, parenthetically: “the degree to which rights extend equally and fairly to all (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual orientation) is a continued source of civic contention.”

“Economics, the Enterprise System, and Finance” never mentions women or gender and includes no material on sexism or racism, two factors which so often impede women seeking leadership and fair pay.

New York’s guidelines are better than those of many other states. The guidelines in North Carolina, Arizona and Illinois never mention women or gender at all. According to a study conducted by the National Women’s History Museum in 2017, when history guidelines do include women, 63% of the time they are white; 53% of the time they are in domestic roles; 2% of the time they are in the workforce.

Some states try to cover their bases with a catch-all list. Oregon’s K-12 guidelines remind teachers 16 times to include “individuals from traditionally marginalized groups (women, people with disabilities, immigrants, refugees, and individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender).” Connecticut’s favored list: “various groups including indigenous Americans, various religious groups, women, slaves, and others.”

Connecticut’s favored list: “various groups including indigenous Americans, various religious groups, women, slaves, and others.” 

These lists shunt women and other marginalized groups into a second-class category. They become the side dishes from which you can choose to accompany your main course of white, male history.
​
Rosa Parks is the woman who appears most often in history guidelines around the country. In the context of these catch-all lists and guidelines that otherwise ignore race and gender, her inclusion feels a little bit like a two-for-one special.

Textbooks provide little help to busy teachers looking for material. Rather than weaving discussions of gender roles and women into the central narrative, textbooks like the 2009 edition of McDougal Littel’s World History tend to include women in short, separate sections with headings like “women’s roles.” Students are left to wonder if the farmers, artisans, inventors and pioneers in rest of the chapter were all men.

Exams, state guidelines, and even textbooks are not the last word in secondary education. Teachers can and do pursue topics beyond their requirements. Private school teachers can ignore them entirely. But these low numbers are a concrete example of a much wider trend: History teachers around the country largely ignore the past of women.

In a time when women continue to fight to be taken seriously as leaders, paid equitably and respected in their bodies and minds, we urgently need to teach young people to see women as full and active participants in the human experience. Women’s concerns are human concerns. And human concerns, so often presented as exclusively male or gender-neutral, are women’s concerns: war, money, art, property, representation, achievement, justice and the environment.

Understanding women’s past and how gender roles change over time is as much a part of being an educated citizen as the scientific method.

We need to teach history so that women’s absence is questioned and explored rather than taken for granted. For example, between the death of Catherine the Great in 1796 and the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, there was not one female head of state in Europe. Victoria of England was a figurehead and had nothing like the political power of say, Elizabeth I. Instead of breezing by this startling 180-year absence, teachers should ask their students, “How and why did the transition to constitutional monarchy lessen European women’s roles in politics?” Asking these kinds of questions will shift students’ mindsets about the nature of power and progress.

Still, standardized tests, guidelines and textbooks make it hard to teach about women. What can be done?
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Rewrite the guidelines and textbooks to include rich material on women. Make sure that the material reflects the diversity of women’s experiences. Asian, black, Latinx, Native American and transgender women’s experiences should be the center of various units of study, rather than add-ons to a narrative about white male progress.

Create online databases for teachers. These resources should include both primary and secondary sources: women in their own words as well as women’s stories integrated into larger narratives.

Historians and K-12 educators should collaborate to adapt the material that already exists at the university level for younger students. The New York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History has already created a free curriculum guide for teachers called “Women and the American Story.” Groups like the American History Association and National Women’s Studies Association should build on these efforts.

Educate teachers about these resources. Schools of education and mid-career professional development programs should train teachers to discuss women and gender, to dissect notions of masculinity and femininity, and to ask questions about the past that pertain to women’s lives.

The stories teachers tell have a way of shaping our perception of the world. A history teacher’s stories are particularly potent because they have, for young people with emerging world views, the weight of truth. We have to stop presenting a picture of the past incomplete to the point of being false.

If Americans don’t have context for understanding women in the past, how can we begin to imagine a future of gender equity?

Graphs used with the permission of the National Women’s History Museum. For the complete Report on the Status of Women in the United States Social Studies Standards, click here.

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