newsletter spring 2002

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Pamela McMullin-Messier in Berkeley and Oakland;

Anne Thorpe in Oxford and London

Anne Thorpe: "Before the Bluestockings: Learned Women in Search of Community”

When Margaret Cavendish, the eccentric and prolific writer of plays, poetry, fiction and essays, came to London in 1667, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, spent the entire day trying to catch a glimpse of her. His attempts were thwarted by the dust and crowds that obscured his view. All he was able to make out as her carriage passed him in Hyde Park was the silver-trimmed interior of her coach and the black cap on her head. As a scholar, studying some of these early women writers, I sometimes feel as Pepys must have on that day, struggling vainly to catch glimpses of these phantom-like women, frustrated by the three hundred years worth of dust that obscures and sometimes distorts my view. But it is precisely this frustration—and what effects this frustration has on our scholarly desires and imaginations—that I and other scholars feel in attempting to write about these women that interests me.

My dissertation, “The ‘Learned Lady’: Figure and Fantasy in Women’s Literary History” focuses on the problems and possibilities offered by women writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century as subjects of historical inquiry and as vehicles through which we imagine the past. I am particularly interested in the figure of the “learned lady” because of the ambivalence she provokes on both sides of the historical divide. On one hand, many of these early women writers were touted as exempla, included in compendia of “women worthies” produced throughout the period as testaments to women’s virtue and aptitude for learning. But on the other hand, these writers inevitably stand apart from other women by the fact of their learning, functioning as cultural anomalies or, in the case of Margaret Cavendish, public spectacles to be gawked at. Exceptionalness thus becomes a double-edged sword for these women, allowing them at once to represent other women while underscoring the ways in which they are unlike them.

A chapter of my dissertation focuses on the scholarly treatments of a relatively obscure English woman who enjoyed a brief career as a medieval scholar in the early eighteenth century. Elizabeth Elstob was unlike her contemporaries in that she succeeded in overcoming the obstacles that usually prevented women from attaining an education, and scholars usually emphasize Elstob’s unusual degree of learning, portraying her as a cultural anomaly, or even as an anachronism. This characterization is bolstered by the surprising, proto-feminist consciousness she seems to exhibit in some of her writing. Her 1709 translation of a Saxon homily includes a long preface in which she advances a logical and passionate argument for the education of women. She reasons: “For if Women may be said to have Souls, and that their Souls are their better part, and that what is Best deserves our greatest Care for its Improvement; furthermore, if good Learning be one of the Soul’s greatest Improvements; we must retort the Question. Where is the fault in Womens seeking after Learning? Why are they not to be valu’d for acquiring to themselves? What disadvantage to others?”

But Elstob’s promising scholarly career was tragically foreshortened by the death of her brother. It is not clear that she was ever remunerated for her scholarship, and after her brother died, she was left destitute. The rest of her life was spent eking out a living as a teacher and governess, and she was sadly unable due to poor health and the demands of her young charges ever to resume her scholarly work. Many scholars have viewed this failure as further evidence that Elstob was a historical misfit, because her extraordinary accomplishments did not receive the recognition they to our minds so evidently deserved. One of her biographers, for example, writes: “Her vast learning was unappreciated by all but the few who had the knowledge to measure the scope of her achievements . . . . Clearly Elizabeth Elstob was born into the wrong age. Whether she would have been happier in an earlier one or in a later, one can only speculate.” While I agree that Elstob might have had more success pursuing the life of a scholar if she had been born in a different time, I think it is clear from her correspondence and writing that, however anomalous we find her, Elstob did not want to see herself as a historical oddity or misfit. She instead cast herself as part of a community of learned women with shared interests and goals.

Thanks to a travel grant from the Center for Feminist Research, I was able to spend a week last December reading Elizabeth Elstob’s correspondence and manuscript material, which are housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and at the British Library in London. This research affirmed for me that, at least in her youth, Elstob saw herself as part of a long line of learned women in English history, and part of a community of women writers in her time. Among her correspondence, I found the manuscript for a book she had begun writing that appears to have been a biographical dictionary of learned women. Elstob had begun filling in the entries in a tiny, neat hand, as if she intended to maximize the space in the 184-page volume for a large number of entries. She includes learned women of the recent past, like Anna Maria Van Schurman and Mary Astell, as well of some of her educated contemporaries, like Catherine Trotter Cockburn and Ann Baynard. The book was never completed, no doubt abandoned along with her other projects when she fled London after her brother’s death. (The manuscript, perhaps because of all of its blank pages, was soon reduced to scrap paper by a London bookseller. Sadly, a later owner filled some of these blank pages with recipes for pickling cucumbers and making toothpaste.) Thus, what I find truly tragic about Elizabeth Elstob’s life is that the community of learned women, of which she thought she was a part, whose imagined existence no doubt fueled her strident defense of learned women, was at least partly an illusion. The community she attempted to construct would not become a reality for forty more years, with the formation of the Bluestocking Circle, too late unfortunately to help Elstob realize her dream of living the life of the mind.

Pamela McMullin-Messier : "Understanding the Constraints of Discourse in Population Policy”

My dissertation examines the population-environment movement (by analyzing two organizations: Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth), in terms of how population policy has changed over time and in response to controversy. In particular, I am interested in how various events have influenced how these groups have addressed population and immigration. These events include the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, where the role of women became a focal point in policy discussions, and the 1998 ballot-initiative in the Sierra Club, where there was a heated debate over whether or not immigration should be even discussed in policy and was subsequently voted down. As a result of these two events, population-environment groups have made considerable changes in their policies, in terms of becoming more sensitive to race, class and gender issues and how these relate to population policy, but not without some growing pains and uneasiness from within the organizations as well as unflattering commentary from the media and various organizations on the left and right of the movement’s politics. The issues that this movement is grappling with represents a microcosm of how our society is dealing with population and environmental concerns.

A research grant from the Center for Feminist Research allowed me the opportunity to travel to the Bay Area, in order to conduct archival research and interviews of local activists. My first stop was to examine the personal archives of Dr. Judith Kunofsky, a long-time population issues-related staff member of the Sierra Club and a board member and past president of Zero Population Growth, to give me some perspective on how population policy had originally developed out of these two organizations 30 years ago. I was fortunate to be invited up to Berkeley, after I had conducted an interview with Dr. Kunofsky, in order to have full access to all of her files. Looking at her archives gave me an opportunity that I was not afforded at these two organizations; I was allowed to examine the board of director's discussions, classified population committee reports, and personal memos discussing policy ramifications. These documents have been instrumental in helping me to understand the context of the history behind these issues of immigration and population beyond the outcome of policy.

My second stop was in Oakland to examine the archives and interview a past president of Political Ecology Group, an environmental justice organization that was instrumental in getting the Sierra Club ballot initiative voted down. This group had been involved with Sierra Club in educating the members about shaping population policy in a globalized manner, of looking beyond national concerns for population control and putting a human face on who is affected by policies. But they were also responsible for establishing the negative spin in the media in portraying any environmental groups as racist for trying to discuss immigration and for the term “greening of hate.” Their archives of an analysis of the documents of the various quasi-environmental groups (groups that have population and environment concerns implied, but are in fact immigration control oriented and not environmental) were educational, in helping me to re-frame my idea of the stakeholders who are involved in the movement.

I had been very ambitious in attempting to schedule a number of interviews on top of the research, but at the last minute my plans collapsed when I came down with a flu and high fever and was confined to bed for the last part of my trip. But all in all, I got a lot of work done in a short amount of time and learned more about the various movements involved, where the subject goes well beyond population-environment issues, and was able to come away understanding the underlying context and historical perspective behind these issues.
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