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Studying Women's Lives

Dr. Jill Ker Conway

There are many anthropological and psychological models for studying women. Some of the most influential have been the anthropological concept that woman is to nature as man is to culture, and the psychological view that women's emotional and therefore developmental lives are relational. That is, women's life histories are not developmental stories about the formation of a bounded ego, but rather texts about the formation of complex networks of relationships, within which women find their sense of self.

Dr. Jill Ker Conway

Neither of these seem satisfactory to me because both take as first-order phenomena aspects of being female that I have found to be second-order cultural constructs.

So tonight I want to talk about four factors that I think are useful for analyzing women's lives in past times. The first two, relating to physical embodiment, I take to be first-order universals. The second two are second-order cultural forces that have shown a remarkable persistence in Western history.

The first critical variable is the understanding of the female body. We find the understanding of female embodiment readily documented in medical literature. Much has been made of the medieval/early modern concept of the "wandering womb," a symbol for the degree to which the female body was seen as controlled by reproductive functions. But this imagery was compatible with many views of female physical strength.

The female body was linked to dumb elemental strength in medieval times, as we can see in the folk rhyme, "a woman, a donkey, and a willow tree, the more you beat them, the better they be." But, in romantic imagery the physical strength had become erotic, and part of the erotic appeal of the female body was its weakness.

We can see good reasons for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's supposed physical weakness: tight lacing; heavy, overwhelming, and confining dress; lack of exercise; and poor nutrition with its associated anemia. So we don't need to essentialise this characteristic.

And if we also look for counter evidence that exists about women in these time periods feeling strong and acting like strong people, we can come closer to unraveling some of the nature/culture puzzles about the female body.

For instance, look at Narcissa Whitman (1808-1847). Whitman is famous as the first white woman to cross the Rockies and settle on the Oregon coast near Walla Walla. She kept a diary of her journey west with her missionary husband, a journey that she made on horseback. As she proceeded farther and farther from settled society, she began to record feeling strong, and to note that 10 or 12 hour days in the saddle didn't tire her out, though she'd been thought frail by her family.¹

Akin to Whitman in shedding cultural definitions of the female body as she moved beyond the margins of her romantic culture is Sarah Hall Boardman Judson (1803-45), who was one of the first women missionaries sent to Burma by the New England Missionary Society. The Society would not allow single women into the missionary field and preferred that its male missionaries be safely married. To facilitate this, the Society served as something of a marriage bureau, bringing likely young men and women together. In this way Sarah Hall met her first husband George Boardman and set out in 1827 on the voyage to Burma with him within a day or two of her wedding. As she noted in her letters home, the couple had to do their courting after the wedding, reversing the accepted order of things. On arrival in Burma the Boardmans proceeded up-country to Tavoy as missionaries to the Karen people, in the mountains of what is now the Golden Triangle. Here Sarah, who was a talented linguist, learned the Karen dialects, set up a school, and helped George Boardman in his translations of the Bible into local languages. She seems to have been the more compelling missionary, since she made converts among the children she taught, while George Boardman remained engrossed in his Biblical translations without achieving a single conversion. The couple had three children, of whom only a son, George, survived.

When Boardman died in 1831, Sarah was expected to return to her native Connecticut, but to the astonishment of family and missionary supervisors, she elected to stay and run the mission alone. In her daily diary letters home to the Missionary Magazine Church she said that her missionary calling required her to stay, but a clear subtext of the letters was her love of adventure and enjoyment of her unfettered role. She too had been set free to be strong at the margins of the known world.

What she never mentions in her reports home is the physical danger under which she apparently flourished. We wouldn't know much about her adventurous life were it not for the astonished comments of some British Indian army officers who traveled through Karen territory on a tiger hunting expedition. They came upon Sarah Boardman conducting a church service on a mountain jungle path that, because of the prevalence of tigers, the officers would not dream of venturing along unless heavily armed. We know that her regular route to visit her converts required that she ford alligator-filled rivers carrying her child on her shoulders. But she edited all indications of danger from her letters, leaving her readers with an impression of heroic sanctity, but not a hint of physical strength, daring, and endurance.²

So when women acted as heroically as, say, David Livingstone, the great nineteenth-century African explorer and missionary, they edited the physical courage and love of adventure out of their stories. They could not become the cultural icons Livingstone and his counterparts became, and their experience never reached beyond the home church. It seemed local rather than universal.

By the late nineteenth century, the idea of female physical weakness was given pseudo-scientific backing. The physical law of conservation of energy was interpreted to mean that the human body was a fixed energy system, so that for females, the energy expended in reproduction subtracted from a woman's capacity for other activities. This led Harvard's President Eliot to express serious worries about the higher education of women. He warned Smith College's first faculty and students that energy expended in intellectual work might subtract from women's reproductive ability, and that great care must be taken to ensure that women's studies were not so strenuous as to unbalance their brains. It was, of course, apparent to all that male energy was also expended in reproductive activities, but the amount and duration of energy expended was thought to be trivial and in no sense a limit on male intellectual strength. This idea lingered well into the twentieth century, haunted many an aspiring female intellect, and for white women shaped what being embodied female meant.

For African-American women the story was different. Race rather than sex defined embodiment, and race meant that women as well as men were seen, and saw themselves, as physically strong. It was strength and endurance that enabled African-American women to endure slavery, and since they were outside white conventions that defined females as in need of protection, they could recognize their strength. Recognizing it meant, among other things, being free to acknowledge when they won or triumphed in a conflict. Listen to Harriet Ann Jacobs speaking about her sense of victory when she outwitted her abusive white owner and made her break for freedom. Jacobs is writing about being in hiding where she can overlook the street on which her white tormentor passes by:

Opposite my window was a pile of feather beds. On top of these I could lie perfectly concealed, and command a view of the street through which Dr. Flint passed to his office. Anxious as I was, I felt a gleam of satisfaction when I saw him. Thus far I had outwitted him, and I triumphed over it.³

So we must see race as a variable shaping what being embodied female has meant so far as physical strength is concerned. And that accounts for the compelling power of African-American women's narrative voices.

We may observe the operation of taboos in female self-presentation if we look at the number of instances in which women's bodies are simply left out of narratives. For instance, we know that women on the frontier gave birth, often alone and often with great suffering. But we never read about it. Childbirth takes place offstage, as do other physical ordeals. They simply didn't figure in women's memoirs until very recently.

I have found one striking example of the editing process, which I'd like us to reflect upon, because it prompts important questions about the way we read personal accounts written by women.

Susanna Moodie (1803-1885), a spirited early English settler in Upper Canada (today's Ontario), wrote a lively memoir of the experience of settlement titled Roughing It in the Bush.⁴ In it she mentions that shortly after she gave birth to her third child, her husband left their unheated cabin on their farm outside present-day Peterborough for militia duties related to the Rebellion of 1837. But she doesn't say a word about the fact that she developed severe mastitis while alone and unable to seek help, and that she suffered excruciating pain from a breast abscess that wasn't treated for more than a week, when it was finally lanced for her, without anaesthetic, by a doctor who was appalled by her suffering and begged her to abandon cabin and farm in the face of advancing winter. We know of her ordeal because she wrote her husband about it, but she suppressed any mention of it in her published account of her life.

Feminist literary critics have taught us to look for the silences in women's narratives and to ask questions about what is left out. Moodie's two versions of her experience are excellent examples of the need to do just that. Feminist critics have alerted us to women's silences regarding their sexuality, but what I want us to focus on tonight is the fact that Moodie's self-censorship, like Boardman's, means that we don't have powerful models of female courage, except in women of other races, not because they don't exist but because they were never reported.

To emphasize what I see as the consequences of this suppression, let us look at two similar kinds of adventure as reported by male and female narrators. Here I am drawing on the accounts of intrepid African explorers. The ones by men have become part of the adventure lore that, as we say, "every schoolboy knows." The ones by women were relatively unknown until revived by feminist scholars, and I venture that it's safe to say that no schoolgirl knows them.

Here is Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) describing his journey in disguise to Harrar in modern-day Ethiopia. Harrar, at the time of Burton's journey, was a Muslim state that had never been visited by Europeans. Burton, famous for a journey to Mecca disguised as an Arab pilgrim, traveled to Harrar, again disguised as an Arab, to map routes suitable for British expansion and to learn about the potential wealth of the area. Notice how clear he is about his role in history and the tone in which he claims it. Burton is describing here his sensations after arriving in the forbidden city, meeting its ruler, and settling down in the quarters his host has given him:

I . . . sent a common six-barreled revolver as a present to the Amir, . . . and we prepared to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. The interior of our new house was a clean room, with plain walls, and a floor of tamped earth. . . . I contrived to make . . . a bed with cushions . . . and, after seeing the mules fed and tethered, lay down to rest worn out by fatigue and profoundly impressed with the poesie of our position. I was under the roof of a bigoted prince whose least word was death; amongst a people who detest foreigners; the only European that had ever passed over their inhospitable threshold, and the fated instrument of their future downfall.⁵

Now, contrast Burton's tone and self-imagery with that of another great African explorer, Mary Kingsley (1862-1900). Kingsley was the daughter of an upper-middle-class English family, and her father, a doctor, had strong scientific interests, especially in Darwinian biology. Both Kingsley's parents endured ill health, and she nursed them faithfully, while becoming more and more interested in her father's Darwinian ideas. After both parents died, Kingsley was free to indulge her scientific interests, and inspired by Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, she set out to explore the Ogouwe River and its tributaries, rivers that flow through modern Gabon and the Cameroons. At the time of her journey, the region was unknown, and the specimens of flora and fauna she collected form part of the famous African collections of the British Museum.

Her journey took her through tribal areas where cannibalism was practiced, but unlike her male counterparts, she treated the subject so dismissively that her fearlessness doesn't feature in the narrative. She too was making history, but she makes her travels sound almost like a genteel British lady's excursion. Here's a description of being marooned at low tide in a crocodile-infested lagoon:

A mighty Silurian, as the Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavored to improve our acquaintance. I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew and I paddled into the middle of the lagoon hoping that the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance.⁶

a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame. The hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled.⁷

Her reductive tone and pseudo-comic treatment of her personal danger make her seem somehow not serious as an explorer, someone on a jaunt, just passing through for a lark. But she was serious, and her contribution to the understanding of African flora and fauna was great. She was also an agent of British imperialism just like Burton, but because she doesn't claim the role, we almost don't notice what she's up to. So the silences here suppress both physical daring and political motivations. But she's a good lesson for us to remember that imperialism was not just a male game and that women's political instincts and motives get edited out as well as their valor.

One of the consequences, then, of female embodiment and the cultural conventions that shape talking about it in the first person, is that great women are not there for us in a curious way. Because if one leaves out courage and political motives, one has screened out much that forms our notion of greatness. It's customary, of course, for those who wish to essentialize women, to say that those notions of greatness are male and should be modified to include other less physical and political ideals. But I am arguing for another point of view. I think women need to become conscious of their bravery, their risk taking, and their political selves, because these are prerequisites for acting decisively in many spheres of life.

Just to drive that point home, let me use two of my heroines to underscore the way great women have presented themselves in the past. Both Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wrote memoirs that concealed their strong drive for power in order to do good by turning their most powerful acts of will into accidental moments of conversion.

Addams was shaped by the experience of the Civil War and by her family's reverence for Abraham Lincoln, who had been a political associate of Addams's father in Illinois Republican politics. Very early in life she was encouraged to model herself on Lincoln, and as a result she formed the aspiration to do great things for democracy. A brilliant student of history and what would later be called sociology, she came to believe that the economic and cultural gap between immigrant workers and the white American-born owners of America's emerging industrial machine was a threat to democracy, not unlike the evil of slavery that her father's generation had fought.

Her travel in Europe, extensive reading of Marx and Engels, Liebknecht, French utopian thinkers, and a systematic exploration of women's religious communities and reform institutions, such as London's Toynbee Hall devoted to the poor in the East End, brought her to develop a plan for a community for young educated women to be located in Chicago's worst immigrant slums, where the young college women could use their languages and understanding of European cultures to bridge the gap between new immigrants and America's middle class.

This plan was the result of years of study and reflection, part of Addams's quest to find a role for herself as an educated woman who did not want to marry and who wanted to serve her country. But in her memoir she makes its development seem almost independent of her will:

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It may have been before I went to Europe for the second time, but I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who have been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn from life itself.⁸

Notice the deliberate distancing of the self from the action, the ideas begin to form themselves. And notice the use of the conditional: the plan may have been formed at a certain point in time, but she can't tell us when. In fact, her planning was deliberate. She knew what she wanted to achieve and set about making it happen. But one would never know that from her self-reporting. Things are made to seem as if they just happened to her. We have a modern locution for this. I often hear women say dismissively about some achievement, "Oh. I was just in the right place at the right time."

Here is Margaret Sanger, a driven radical, obsessed with the need to enable women to control their fertility, telling us how she came to be interested in poor women and their struggles with repeated pregnancies. Sanger, as a young mother, supported herself by serving as an obstetric nurse attending women in their own homes for their deliveries. She was interested in poor women because she wanted to be able to document the effects of poverty and repeated pregnancy on women's health. So she worked hard at publicizing her availability to work on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the poorest immigrant population lived. Naturally because of her efforts, many of her calls to attend deliveries came from there. But here's how she describes what she made happen:

But more and more my calls began to come from the Lower East Side, as though I were being magnetically drawn there by some force outside my control. I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor, and never experienced that satisfaction in working with them that many noble women have found. My concern for my patients was now quite different from my earlier hospital attitude. I could see that much was wrong with them that did not appear in the physiological or medical diagnosis. A woman in childbirth was not merely a woman in childbirth. My expanded outlook included a view of her background, her potentialities as a human being, the kind of children she was bearing and what was going to happen to them.⁹

What is important here is that the operation of Sanger's will is being concealed under the romantic language of being drawn by destiny, not her own political motives and passions but an outside agency, to her cause.

So when reading women's accounts of their lives, be wary of not only the silences but also the use of the passive voice, the conditional, and romantic directions by external agencies like fate or destiny. They are disguises we need to penetrate.

What do we lose when we can't see great women leaders or heroines in the round? The absence of models of physical courage and strength, until the recent wonderful growth in women's athletics, means that the Barbie syndrome really can operate unchecked on young girls. The absence of political motivations and the will to power means that we leave that entire segment of human experience out when we educate young women. There could be no more astute political figure in modern American history than Eleanor Roosevelt, but until Blanche Wiesen Cooke's current biography of her we've always had her presented, not as a politician, but as a wronged wife.

And, of course, it's possible to view female moral development as relational if women edit all concerns with individual will and power out of their self-presentation. That's why there is so little attention to the central political question of power and its restraints in feminist theory, despite the evidence of strong political leaders like Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher.

But most importantly, these silences have given women role models to follow, not heroines to inspire and emulate. Young men today can instantly name their heroes, but research has shown that young women can rarely name their heroines. That's why I spend so much time studying the lives of strong women leaders. We need to get past the self-censorship to the strength, courage, and daring that are as characteristic of women as men, if we only know how to look for those qualities.

¹ Whitman's diaries and letters have been published in several versions, the fullest account of her travels is found in Clifford M. Drury's The First White Women over the Rockies (1963-68), which also lists the manuscript sources on Whitman's life.
² Sarah Hall Boardman Judson's life is documented in a hagiographical biography by Emily C. Judson, Memoir of Sarah Hall Boardman Judson of the American Mission to Burmah (New York, Sheldon and Co., 1872).
³ Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, 1861). Facsimile edition in Classic Slave Narratives series, ed. with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York, Mentor Books, 1987), 426.
⁴ Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush or Life in Canada (New York, G. P. Putnam, 1852). Michael Peterman, Susanna Moodie: A Life (Toronto, ECW Press, 1999) explores the gap between the text and Moodie's life with great insight.
⁵ Richard Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, or, An Exploration of Harrar, vol. 1 (London, Tylston and Edwards, 1894), 208-9.
⁶ Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, Congo-Francais, Corisco and Cameroons (London, Virago Press, 1982), 87.
⁷ Kingsley, Travels, 273.
⁸ Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York, Macmillan, 1910), 85.
⁹ Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York, W. W. Norton, 1938), 86-87.

About the Author

Dr. Jill Ker Conway presented this year's Lowell Lecture on April 27, 1999. Sponsored jointly by the Lowell Institute of Boston and the Harvard Extension School, the Lowell Lecture series has been an annual public event for almost 20 years.

Dr. Conway is an internationally acclaimed authority on women's lives, both as the author of best-selling autobiographies and as an anthologizer of women's memories. Beginning with The Road from Coorain (1989), the story of her early life in New South Wales, and followed by True North (1994), which traces her life from 1960 when she left Australia to 1975 when she accepted the presidency of Smith College, Dr. Conway exhibits her mastery of the genre of autobiography. Similarly, her scholarly work in women's lives dates from the 1960s and includes such major studies as Learning About Women, edited with Susan Bourque and Joan Scott (1989); Written By Herself, Autobiographies of American Women (1992); The Politics of Women's Education, edited with Susan Bourque (1993); Written By Herself, Vol. 2, Autobiographies of Women from Britain, Africa, Asia and the US (1996); and, most recently, When Memory Speaks (1998).

Dr. Conway received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 1969. She has taught at the University of Sydney, Harvard, the University of Toronto, Smith College, and since 1985 she has been Visiting Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her distinguished career in higher education administration includes serving as vice president for internal affairs at the University of Toronto (1973-75) and as the first woman president of Smith College (1975-85).

She has been awarded honorary degrees from more than 30 colleges and universities, is a trustee on various foundation and university boards, and serves as a director of several major American corporations.

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