Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Overview
How have women read differently from men through the ages? In all manner of ways, this book asserts. This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages.
Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls' access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated female readers of many eras—Babylonian princesses who called for women's voices to be heard, rebellious nuns who wanted to share their writings with others, confidantes who challenged Reformation theologians' writings, nineteenth-century New England mill girls who risked their jobs to smuggle novels into the workplace, and women volunteers who taught literacy to women and children on convict ships bound for Australia.
Today, new distinctions between male and female readers have emerged, and Jack explores such contemporary topics as burgeoning women's reading groups, differences in men and women's reading tastes, censorship of women's on-line reading in countries like Iran, the continuing struggle for girls' literacy in many poorer places, and the impact of women readers in their new status as significant movers in the world of reading.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300120455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2012 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Woman Reader
By BELINDA JACK
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Belinda JackAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-12045-5
Chapter One
Primitives, Goddesses and Aristocrats
The very earliest 'reading' of man-made markings was of those on cave walls, and notches on sticks and bones. And the making of these images, in relation to women and men, may have been different from the start. Were women as much involved in creating them – and 'reading' them – as men?
As image-making is a sign of sophistication in primitive peoples, providing a record of life beyond immediate survival in real time, the degree to which women may have participated is bound up with the possible status of women within these most remote human societies. Archaeologists' discussions about who made these images may to some extent be rooted in their desire to confirm or refute the idea that men and women have lived differently from the very beginning of time. Prejudices and anachronistic assumptions based on gender relations among later peoples may also play a part. And when the transition from image-making to writing occurs, women's involvement or exclusion is often assumed to be a litmus test of women's position within a society and therefore a key and contested subject.
The most ancient images are hand and foot prints and representations of animals and people. The archaeologists who first discover these describe their feelings of awe, sensing a remote but tangible connectedness with peoples of our most distant past. French caves in the Ariège region of south-west France, on the edge of the Pyrenees, were used as burial chambers for men, women and children, and date from 30,000 BC. In one cave the skeletons of a man and woman have been found entwined. The paintings and markings in the famous Lascaux caves date from roughly 28,000 BC. In those caves where conditions have allowed, human markings, mostly hand and foot prints, have survived covering the entire surface of the cave wall up to four metres in height, which would have necessitated a ladder of some description or, less likely, feats of remarkable group acrobatics. We know from the sizes of the hand and foot prints that men, women and children were all involved in this image-making activity. There have been claims that the images of hunters with their weapons, for example, are the work of men, and the animals the work of women. There is little real proof, simply speculation based on anthropological comparisons with other later primitive peoples.
There are striking depictions of pregnant women as well as animals. A woman's footprint has been identified in the highly decorated cave called Pech Merle, near Cabrerets. A grave in the Dordogne called 'L'Abri du Cap Blanc' contains the remains of a female skeleton and the walls surrounding her are covered in images of animals and symbols, the latter bearing striking resemblance to images on later Neolithic pottery which was certainly the work of women. Not dissimilar symbols can be found among tribes south of the Sahara, and among the so-called Amerindians. There is a reverence in the depictions of animals that differentiates them from the images of animals in hunting scenes; some depictions of male bison (often associated with virility and strength) when not being hunted show a creature both calm and gentle. But there is nothing to prove that these differences mean the images were made by men or by women, or, further, to suggest that men and women's roles were fundamentally different, or their vision of things distinct, however tempting it might be.
In any case, cave art made and 'read' by Palaeolithic peoples has survived across time and we are able to 'read' it, to wonder at it and to speculate about its makers' world-view – but all this through a glass darkly. In terms of women's reading what is striking is the liveliness of the archaeological debate about the extent to which men and women might have been involved, despite having so very little to go on. The mysteries of creating and reading images, and men's and women's participation, raise crucial questions, so far largely unanswered, which set the scene for the history of women's reading – and men's attitude towards it.
The process of decoding images is highly significant in terms of human intellectual development and clearly separates us from the animals. A key feature is a shift in the relationship with time. He – or she – now has the capacity to operate both in the here-and-now, and better to imagine, contemplate, record, plan or hallow. In other words, notions of a present, past and future become real. But what exactly is this process of 'decoding', or mentally identifying the 'real' thing evoked by the image? And how is this process related to reading? We know that the Neanderthals, early Homo sapiens and primitive peoples read notches on bones that meant something to them. Primitive man also read more complicated picture messages on bark and leather. The Incas read detailed colour-coded quipus knots as evidence of trade deals and the ancient Polynesians used string-and-notch records to keep track of the generations. All these systems require the reading of a conventional symbol in order to understand events (the hunting scenes in cave paintings), number values (as in different shapes of notch in a tally), or names (in notches or strings).
But true reading, as opposed to looking at or viewing, generally means making sense of a more complex sequence of meaningful signs. These function as the graphic representation of human speech or thought. This kind of 'complete reading' was a remarkably long time in coming. And the reading of long works of poetry and prose, as opposed to records of deals done, or agreements set down to last across time, comes much later. Our notion of being blissfully 'lost' in a book which, as we read – and even for breaks in between – may seem more real than reality itself, comes later still. That the characters' lives, their loves and fears may seem more important than our own, is a very recent phenomenon, relatively speaking.
The process that turned fragmentary signs into a continuous system that functioned as a substitute for speech, occurred in stages. There are a few markers along the way: in ancient Mesopotamia, fragmentary pictograms became both standardised and, crucially, abstract, while retaining their phonetic value. The big shift happened when a sign was interpreted exclusively for its sound within a standardised system of signs. Whole texts could suddenly be read, not as isolated words carrying a one-to-one relationship between sound and object, but as a logical sequencing which replicated human speech. Reading no longer had to do with pictures, but with the representation of oral language. This key shift, of such fundamental importance to human development, happened in Mesopotamia only some 6,000 years ago. The idea of producing standardised conventions to stand for the sounds of human speech spread west to the Nile and east to the Indus (in today's Pakistan), where different languages and different kinds of societies demanded different graphic expressions.
Rockall, Dogger, German Bight: the mysterious names that are broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Shipping Forecast whisk us off on an imagined and perilous sea voyage around the British Isles. Although some areas are known and could readily be identified on a map, others remain familiar but more fictional than real. The names of the world's ancient languages, likewise, bring us into direct but strange contact with the peoples and places of our distant past. Some of these languages are relatively familiar to us because we know a little of their cultures: Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Attic Greek, Old Persian, Latin, Ancient Chinese and Old Tamil. Others are less well-known: Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Ge'ez, Hittite, Luvian, Middle Indic and so many more. It is only because these languages exist in written form that they are known to us at all; more mysterious are the languages that remain undeciphered and wholly impenetrable. The earliest is known as Proto-Elamite and is from the fourth millennium BC. We may never discover whether women were literate in this language. But we do know that some women were fully involved in certain literary activities from the very beginning of human history.
Reading and writing first emerged in the late fourth millennium BC in the context of temple bureaucracies in the towns and cities in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. A very small number of accountants used word and number signs to record assets: land, labour and, most importantly, animals. They wrote on small clay tablets about the size of a cigarette packet. By the third millennium BC accountants were joined by scribes and writing expanded to include records of legal transactions. But across the next thousand years much more exciting material also started to be written down – and read. This includes dramatic tales of political events and hymns to the deities who were often women. And there were authors too, who drew on their imaginations and depended on the scribes.
Remarkably, the first author we know of to sign a work was a woman. Princess Enheduanna was the daughter of the great Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia. She was born around 2300 BC and was high priestess of Nanna the moon god and, in effect, the earliest poetess in human history. Over a period of forty turbulent and warring years she established her position as holder of the most important religious office in ancient Sumer. A large number of compositions have been attributed to her, many dedicated to the sacred temples, their occupants, and the deities to whom they were consecrated. One of the curiosities of her hymns is that some are written in the third person but others in the first – the voice of the poetess herself – and this sets them apart from works likely to have been authored by men. Enheduanna read or listened to hymns in the votive tradition and she responded to them in innovatory ways. There are three hymns to Nanna and three others to Inanna, Enheduanna's personal goddess. One of these, 'The Exaltation of Inanna', has been collated from around fifty clay tablets and 153 lines restored. This is remarkably extensive and complete evidence compared with what little we have of Sappho, for instance, who comes more than sixteen centuries later.
'The Exaltation of Inanna' is a hymn to the goddess Inanna which celebrates her many attributes, and makes intriguing, albeit obscure, allusions to Enheduanna herself. Within the Sumerian tradition, Inanna is usually praised for her feminine qualities. But Enheduanna casts her as a goddess of war, as well as of love and fertility as was the convention. Feminine and masculine qualities are combined, and in one striking image Inanna is likened to a great bird, swooping down to scare away the lesser gods. The hymn then continues as the poetess's own account of her past triumphs and present difficulties. As high priestess she has been sent into temporary exile from Uruk as a result of the actions of Lugalanne, possibly her brother-in-law. She begs for help to crush a rebellion against her father, Sargon. Under the leadership of Lugalanne, the rebels have destroyed the temple of Eanna, one of the greatest in the ancient world. Lugalanne has also dared to claim he is her equal. Furthermore, in what must be the earliest written accusation of sexual harassment, Enheduanna describes the inappropriate advances that he has made towards her: 'He has wiped his spit-soaked hand/ on my honey-sweet mouth'. Lugulanne has also threatened her with a ritual dagger (such as was sometimes used to castrate priests) and he tells her, 'it becomes you'. The symbolism of the dagger is twofold: as an instrument of castration it mocks Enheduanna's loss of power, and as a phallic symbol it may also suggest that she has been raped. She remains determined not to submit and begs the goddess to overthrow her usurper and abuser: 'O my divine ecstatic wild cow/ drive this man out/ hunt him down/ catch him'. She appeals to her as it is she who 'crush[es] rebellious lands .../ smash[es] heads' and 'gorge[s] on corpses like a dog'. By the end of the poem Enheduanna has triumphed: 'the holy heart/ of Inanna/ returns to her'.
The precise nature of Enheduanna's literacy remains a vexed question, as is the distinction between written and oral literature generally in Mesopotamia. By the middle of the second millennium, poems, like parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh, were being composed by literate people in a scholarly environment. But whether Enheduanna wrote her poems herself or a scribe or scribes worked with her is unknown. Kings of the period do occasionally boast that they can write, but this may have been a metaphorical literary conceit to do with authority and the permanence of the historical record. The question also arises whether we can sensibly talk about one person developing a poem and writing it down or dictating it to an individual scribe. A more persuasive picture is perhaps that a commission was given to a 'scribal school' or some other college of scribes to put together a series of Enheduanna's poems. But in any event what is ascribed to Enheduanna was written by her or others – to please her.
Whether or not she could read we cannot know. But the literary devices she exploits in her compositions draw on other Sumerian writings which she must have known. Her 'Exaltation' is highly structured and divided into three parts: an exhortium (or introduction), an argument, and a peroration (or forceful conclusion). Each part is made up of eighteen units, like a stanza, and most of these are three lines long. To have been able to compose as she did, Enheduanna must have been familiar with the literary conventions, including formal poetic structures, of her time. In this sense a link can be drawn between Enheduanna and women thousands of years later, who read or had read to them what was available and felt moved, as a result, to compose themselves. Their compositions sometimes refuted aspects of a tradition and presented something new, often relating to the supposed differences between the sexes and men and women's allegedly innate characteristics. In Enheduanna's case we can see the powerfully androgynous way that the goddess Inanna is portrayed. In one of her hymns, 'Lady of the Heart', Inanna delights in violence – 'fighting is her play/ she never tires of it' – and she 'goes about' to the tavern (or brothel). Her ultimate, all-consuming powers are summed up in the lines that describe her wearing 'the carved out ground plan/ of heaven and earth'. Not only is Enheduanna one of the earliest known composers of literary material, she was also devising characters which departed from the tradition. Her poems remain extremely unusual, not only because they are ascribed to a specific author, but also because of their striking originality. Enheduanna was a major literary influence for some 500 years.
Under the Akkadians, properly 'literary' writing appeared from around 2500 BC, but unlike the 'Exaltation', these are mostly unascribed. However, they do offer interesting insights into the position of women and the qualities sometimes associated with them, irrespective of their social position. In the main these literary pieces are hymns to the gods and goddesses, songs to the king, cult dirges and exorcisms of evil spirits. Others are myths which often bear striking resemblance to classical myths: one tells of the goddess Inanna's travels into the underworld, for example, not unlike the story of Persephone's descent into Hades. Other stories memorialise the divine order of the world and tell of Uruk's kings – Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and most famously, Gilgamesh. The role of women in this epic is striking.
There are a number of versions but each is essentially an adventure story and, in the telling, an exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of human life: the human propensity for ambition, the values of love and friendship, the experience of loss and the knowledge of our mortality. Gilgamesh is at once man, hero, king and god, and must discover how best to live and how best to prepare for death. In each version the basic structure is the same: Gilgamesh must leave Uruk, undertake a journey, experience trials, successes and failures, and then return home. In one version he loses his dearest friend, Enkidu, and despairs. He gives up all idea of achieving fame and sets out to discover the secret of immortality. It is a woman, a tavern-keeper, who tries to bring him to his senses:
Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.
Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu, earlier in this version, was humanised by a prostitute, and here Gilgamesh is encouraged to accept normal life by a barmaid. Ordinary, even despised women represent good sense and extol the virtues of mundane life as opposed to the quest for heroism and immortality which flirts constantly with death. Alongside hymns to goddesses are stories that tell of remarkable but humble women, which must have pleased the illiterate women who had these tales told to them or read aloud.
The early literary writings from this part of the world exist thanks to scribes. Who were they – and could one of them be our first identified woman reader? It is an intriguing question, and one that we can in fact answer. Records for the Babylonian city-state of Sippar between 1850 BC and 1550 BC include the names of its official scribes. In Mesopotamia scribes provided their writings with their own 'colophon', a unique inscription at the end of the document giving name, place of drafting, and the date. Of the 185 scribes who are named, fourteen were women. A further nine named scribes appear in a ration list (for oil) from the Mari palace in the same period. There is also a personnel list from the palace which mentions six female scribes employed there. And as it is reasonable to assume that writers must have had at least a limited reading ability, one of these – the first of them to learn to write – is probably our first known woman reader.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Woman Reader by BELINDA JACK Copyright © 2012 by Belinda Jack. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Primitives, Goddesses and Aristocrats 20
2 Reading in the Not-So-Dark Ages 49
3 History, Mystery and Copying 70
4 Outside the Cloister 89
5 'To Reade Such Bookes … My Selfe to Edyfye' 114
6 Competing for Attention 144
7 Answering Back 184
8 Books of Their Own 228
9 Nation-Building 257
10 The Modern Woman Reader 276
Endnotes 295
Index 310
What People are Saying About This
An utterly gripping history of women and reading, brilliantly conceived and told depth and detail for the first time. Belinda Jack's remarkable book is destined to be a landmark in its field.—Claire Harman, author of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Engaging, lively and vigorous. The Woman Reader is a landmark work that no feminist—or for that matter, general reader—should miss.—Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth
Interviews
A Conversation with Belinda Jack
Q: How did you come to write this book?
A: I became interested in just how different men and women's reading has often been. Men have worried since ancient times about what women read but the reverse has hardly ever been the case.
Q: What were the most striking stories uncovered in the course of your research?
A: It's been fascinating tracing women's responses to misogynist writings that they then re-wrote—across the centuries and different cultures. And I was astonished by so-called medical works in the nineteenth century recommending that unstable women should be prevented from reading novels. One eminent physician recommended books on beekeeping!
Q: Is the story essentially one of slow improvement?
A: In some ways, but not altogether. I was struck by just how similar attitudes to women's reading were in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe and in Ancient Rome. In both contexts women were encouraged to read only insofar as it provided them with a moral training, or helped them to be good mother-educators. The other parallel was that literate women reflected their husband's social status.
Q: Were you ever discouraged from reading or denied access to certain books?
A: Both my parents were keen readers but my father didn't think I should read stories in which people died—which ruled out a good deal! They used to call me either a "bookworm" or a "great reader." Even when quite young I saw how very different those descriptions were.
Praise for Belinda Jack’s George Sand:
“[Jack’s] approach is psychological but with a light touch. . . . Thorough without being pedantic. . . . A pleasure to read.”—Library Journal
“Focused and engaging.”—New York Times Book Review
Customer Reviews
