Introduction

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‘From all these sources I wove the whole fabric of my truthful history.’

ANNA COMNENA, ALEXIAD 11.VII

My grandmother, Constance Alexandra Corinna Johnson, was born in the Northamptonshire village of Moreton Pinkney in 1902.

A son, Walter, died soon after birth. Two girls, Kathleen and ‘Little’ Anne, were also casualties of the sorts of fates common to large families before modern emergency care and advanced antibiotics: deaths by scalding, when a pan fell from a stove, and a rare throat infection. Seven daughters and four sons survived to adulthood. The boys made careers in the military, in the building trade, in farming and business. Some of the girls were put out to service when their school education ended at the age of fourteen; three of them received formal training as nurses, having served inevitable apprenticeships on the wards and in the mortuary of St Cross. The older girls raised their younger siblings. Without exception they were articulate, capable and striking in looks. They suffered the common childhood diseases of their era: diphtheria, measles and scarlet fever. They scrumped apples and flirted with the posh boys at the big school.

At the age of fifteen or sixteen, my mother, Thelma, was sent to skivvy for the wife of a master at Rugby School. In 1945 he became headmaster at Berkhamsted – Graham Greene’s alma mater; my mother, aged seventeen, went unwillingly with them and sent her wages home. It was an unhappy servitude and it ended disastrously when my mother and Berkhamsted’s head boy, Warwick Adams, were found to be courting. My father was sent down.

Thelma and her sisters married well; raised children; were housewives. They were also artists, seamstresses, nurses, florists, letter-writers, mentors, home-makers and decorators; aunts, mothers-in-law, sisters and daughters. They were curious and aspiring. Their children were the first generation in the family to go to university. My grandmother, in later years, maintained her skills as a professional laundress and managed to salt away the bulk of her wages, so that when Harry retired in 1960 she was able to purchase six adjacent, derelict, one-up one-down cottages in Harry’s home village, Crick, for a hundred pounds each. They knocked them together and renovated them to create a home where children and grandchildren could gather: a Boxing Day houseful numbered fifty. Harry died in 1974; Connie survived him by eighteen years and died at the age of ninety.

My grandmother, my aunts and my mother, who raised three children single-handed, may or may not have been typical of their generation or of those that went before. They seemed, and seem, remarkable both as individuals and as a family.

There is a common thread of restlessness, a refusal to accept fate passively, in the lives of the women in my family and in those of the small gathering of women whose stories are told in this book.

I have often been taxed by students with the lack of women’s stories in history. It is not so much that women’s lives are absent from either the historical or archaeological record; more that they are neglected, or that they don’t fit neatly into the grand narratives – men’s stories, if you will – of sweeping change. During the research for many books I have collected a lot of material concerning women’s history, archaeology and anthropology. It is time for at least some of this material to see the light of day. But this is a personal collection; there are many, many more women whose stories might be included. I have taken the slightly indulgent view that the lives of those women whom I find most interesting will also interest readers. These are not, generally, the queens and femmes fatales or heroines of popular culture, nor those who have necessarily achieved power or greatness in the ordinary sense. Some of the women in these pages have come down to us with no name. Sometimes I can do no more than infer their existence from fragments of artefacts or whispers off-stage. But I do not underestimate the importance of all those lives whose faint echoes must speak for the millions of women about whom we know little or nothing.

In each chapter of this book, arranged in broadly chronological fashion, biographical sketches are interwoven with stories exploring aspects of contemporary women’s lives and experience that seem to me to speak to one another. Many of these stories emerged from a course that I taught at the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Newcastle upon Tyne, called ‘Seven Women’.

Four themes have struck me very forcibly in the compilation of these stories. First, that in the design, production and distribution of textiles and other so-called craft media, women have historically found an alternative means to tell their stories, to develop sophisticated creative techniques, to forge econo-mic enterprises and bequeath an artistic legacy to following generations in parallel with, but quite distinct from, the overwhelmingly male clerical preserve of the written word – at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Secondly, women’s authorship, either through their own narratives – letters, hagiography, song, poetry, embroidery, weaving or ceramics – or in the retelling of their stories by men, is for the most part understated and therefore easily ignored or misconstrued. And then it is also striking to see how widowhood has provided a path of liberation for so many women and empowered them to exercise the capital of patronage and independence that property and security confer. Lastly, it is possible to detect, across the generations, countercurrents in which enlightened men have been covertly or overtly complicit in promoting and supporting women’s achievements and interests: fathers training daughters, uncles teaching nieces to read, patrons commissioning works, secretaries transcribing their words, friends offering support and understanding; even opponents admitting defeat.

Emerging from these themes is a conviction that history is polyphonic – that it must be told by many voices; that the ear must be tuned, and tuned finely, to the individual and the collective at one and the same time.

Note: dates are given CE (Common Era). Quotations have been referenced in endnotes and there is a list of sources and recommended further reading at the end of the book.