Well-Behaved Women

 This is not the blog I planned to write today, but I'm ticked off and so everyone has to hear about it. It all started when I first saw this tshirt...

Possibly not this exact tshirt from the lovely Spark Company but they certainly have this currently.  The description reads "This Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History tee is an essential for any feminist's closet. Fun to wear when you're smashing the patriarchy. Because who cares about being ladylike!" and she costs £28, which I also have feelings about, but their clothes are lovely and money goes to help female charities, so here we are. The same tshirt appears in the Royal Palaces shop, A Mighty Girl shop and any number of etsy/redbubble/god, even Shein. All of them saying women have to be the feisty rulebreakers in order to matter.

However, I do not like this sentiment, for one reason - again, we are telling women what to do.

I understand the idea that we should not accept the status quo as the patriarchy does not exactly help us (rude) and so we should disobey. Smash stuff up! Slash paintings in the National Gallery (please don't)! Chain yourself to something or get trampled by the King's horse (again, please don't)! However, I don't agree that is the only way a woman makes history and also buys into the Socio-Patriarchal ideals in order to smash the system. Or something.

My contention is that again we are telling women what to do - you have to be rebellious, you can't be 'ladylike' or else you are part of the patriarchy. You must never, never be well-behaved. By whose standards? Why can't I make history in an orderly manner if that is available to me? Why would that make me a bad feminist? Also, didn't some of the top women I like not feel the need to smash stuff up? What about Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale?

Good old EFB (seen here with Byam Shaw) was fairly well behaved and did amazing art, although admittedly she did not exactly get remembered until recently.  Okay, how about Evelyn De Morgan...

Come on now, EDM has to count as a well behaved woman who made history as she was very successful and didn't offend anyone's sensibilities in the meantime.  Her work can be challenging but she didn't punch anyone or accost a horse. So it is possible to be well-behaved and make history!

Only, that isn't what the statement means. Let's go back to the 1970s...

Me, 1973

Okay, that's unfortunate, let's try again...

This smashing woman is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who is responsible for the phrase in question. In a 1976 article (on Puritan funeral practices), Laurel said 'Well-behaved women seldom make history,' meaning that historians have a nasty habit of overlooking women who are just getting on with stuff. 

Scotland Forever! (1881) Lady Butler (well-behaved)

The phrase, in essence, is a criticism of historians, not women. That historians have a habit of overlooking the contribution of women unless they are punching horses or showing everyone their pants. Now, I agree, almost whole-heartedly (we'll come to that) that it is a historian problem, not a woman problem, and further to that, it's become an 'everyone problem' as historians have set the standard for what is 'good' and 'noteworthy' to the detriment of everything else. I am forever haunted by a question I received on a panel at the National Portrait Gallery for the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition in 2020. A lady in the audience asked (I think seriously) if the reason women artists had been forgotten was because they were not very good. That took my breath away, especially as within the exhibition were some amazing paintings, but I hear that repeated in various forms. I have heard another feminist commentator say that women in the past weren't as good as men as they didn't have the opportunity to be so - well, the second part is sort of true but still some are insanely good. 

Fanny Cornforth (1874) Dante Gabriel Rossetti (both not well-behaved)

So, using our new best friend Laurel's quote in the sense she meant, how about the reverse of that - do naughty women always make history? It does ensure that the (normally male, let's be honest) historian sees you as your contemporaries will clock you first and flag you as a problem.  I also think historians (including me) do make the mistake of seeing bad behaviour in the past as ever-so modern and noteworthy, when it could just be bad behaviour. There is always the challenge of excusing bad behaviour because of the strictures of society rather than giving the woman the agency to be equally as awful as a man, and held equally as accountable. I would counter that plenty of badly behaved women slipped through the cracks as they were the wrong social class. Fanny Cornforth is arguably an example - judged as 'badly behaved' by her contemporaries who were in a hurry to forget her, however, threads of her still kept appearing at least until the 1930s, then again in the 1960s. She was 'badly behaved' and the historians kept her in as a warning to others, but I supose that is still making history of a type.  What about Alexa Wilding?

Alexa Wilding 1970s

Alexa had three children out of wedlock, which cannot been seen as behaving in Victorian terms, yet she is one of the most elusive of the models. Arguably, she covered her tracks so well that none of her contemporaries realised what a scallywag she was, so no-one tipped off the future historians. Also, although she is one of the most recognisable faces of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, could she be accused of 'making' history, rather than just appearing in it?  How about an artist then?

Maria Zambaco (1870) Edward Burne-Jones

By any stretch of the imagination, Maria Zambaco did not follow the societal rules set out for her. She had an affair, she left her husband, she was notorious by their standards to the point that all sorts of stories still circulate - my favourite being the attempted suicide and rolling around on the pavement until the police turned up which I very much doubt happened. Great story though. Anyway, we all know her and her amazing art, right? I mean, if riotous women make history, then Maria must be right up there! Only she's not. In fact, the only place she seems to occupy is Burne-Jones' crazy lover.  I mean, in one way, she is remembered in history but not in the way she would probably have liked...

Mary Emma Jones (1874) Emma Sandys

I will bring this ramble to a conclusion and say that I disagree with the tshirt but I agree with Laurel to a point. I think women, full stop, have a problem making history. The default is always to the man and it always has been. I'm not saying that all historians are sexist, but our ancestors held entirely different views than us on the position of women and therefore we have to get beyond that in-built sexism in order to see who in the past is worth a look at. By using the interpretation that you have to be difficult, law-breaking, and frankly appalling on the tshirt, you are part of the problem. You can be all those things (good on you) but equally, you can be the opposite (good on you as well).  Furthermore, there has to be an understanding that for most women, there were boundaries that stopped them fulfilling their potential, but that doesn't stop them being fascinating (possibly more so for people like me who like to hear what was achieved despite society). We also need to not over-compensate for women - not everything is gold and not every bad decision is fine because it isn't such a big deal now. People are complicated.

I will finish with a slightly naughty story - I recently had the pleasure of meeting a very famous male art historian who was having a very busy day and was obliged to say hello to me because of the event we were attending. He vaguely mentioned he might have heard of my work (I think he was being polite as I got the feeling he hadn't and why should he?) and I asked what he was working on-

 "I'm writing a book on [insert extremely famous male artists on which there are already thousands of books]"

"Of course you are," I replied. I didn't mean to be rude, so apologies if you are reading this, Famous Male Art Historian (I doubt you are), but in that moment I felt disappointed that you weren't going to write about a woman, or a working-class person, or a person of colour, or in fact any other artist than one that even I know a load about. Write a book about the famous male artist if you want, but how about writing a book about Mrs Very Famous Male Artist, and how she fitted into his life and work, or didn't, or what she did with the money, or the art, or even what she served him for lunch while he was painting that very famous masterpiece we all know so well.

Women Seldom Make History.

That's a depressing tshirt, but sadly it's true and it's only a problem for us now if we don't go back and turn over the pebbles of history to see the interesting stuff underneath. We can't fix what the past historians did, but we can make a valiant effort to not repeat their prejudice and complacence.