Voices

Let us now praise great women.

Pick up any anthology of Medieval or Renaissance writers and look for women writers among the men. It is not that women did not write, but that their writings have not been treasured, reprinted or anthologised. Yet there have been women of great eloquence whose writings combined intellectual clarity with perceptions of the heart. Should not their work become a part of our intellectual history and developing consciousness? Read women who startle by voicing cries we would call 'modern'; we need to read women who arrest with their courage and unwavering high principle. Listen to actual women's voices, value them, and realise that Shakespeare did not make his characters out of thin air.

Just as the victor got to write the history of battles, so men wrote women down as illogical, emotional and too talkative. Indeed, by men's definition it would have been impossible for women to talk adequately to modify men's ideas of either gender. Men's messages about their wives have been perpetuated through the ages, proving little more than that they are the ones who can afford headstones.There was a view graven in stone that women's talk was burdensome:

Charity, wife of Gideon Bligh,
Underneath this stone doth lie.
Nought was she e'er known to do
That her husband told her to.

Another:

Her manners mild, her temper such!
Her language good, and not too much.

And,

Underneath this sod lies Arabella Young,
Who on the 5th of May began to hold her tongue.

Or,

Here lies
Anderson of Pittensere
maire of the earldom of Moray,
with his wife Marjory,
whilk him never displicit.

Through suppressive 'jokes' or negative praise such as these carved in stone, an image of reprehensibility in talkative or assertive women was developed into an ethic, endorsed by selective quotes from the Bible, by the laws of England and in 'good conduct' books for women. 'Good conduct' meant silence and service, and a doctrine of silence necessitated men's enforcing women's submission, because silence does not come naturally to all people in one gender. That this heavy social pressure never completely worked gives credit to those women of spirit, intelligence and gifted expression who have risen and survived in every age. One such voice departed having sardonically carved an addition to what was in her husband's words:

As I am now, so you must be;
Therefore, prepare to follow me.

To follow you I'm not content,
Unless I know which way you went.iv

Women have never all been silent and dutiful, and there are penetrating individual voices which still speak to us about the issues we share in a gendered world. Some writings have survived in print, giving testimony of courage and vision. Their plights evoke compassion and admiration for their achievements. Their existence helps to amplify the variety of women characters in Shakespeare's plays, though it does not explain why his contemporaries remained in monophonic sound, in repetitive mode. Listen....


iv All of these epitaphs can be found in Everybody's Book of Epitaphs, compiled by W. H. Howe (London: Saxon & Co., 1995).