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‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’ is the memorable opening line to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1). Beginning with Alcott’s 1868 novel and considering nineteenth century gender roles for women more broadly, I am picking up threads of the experience of ‘girlhood’ through the festive period. My particular focus is on Christmas traditions of piety and theatrical performance, exemplified by the March sisters’ representation as both moral daughters and artistic performers. The so-called confines of girlhood as experienced by a nineteenth century girl to the home is questioned by the theatre world created by the sisters, which I view as a positive construction of girlhood and shaping ideas of coming of age. I will also turn to how nineteenth century girlhood has been depicted in adaptations of Little Women by Gillian Armstrong (1994) and Greta Gerwig (2019), as they imagine the female-centric world of the girls and their relationship to the festive period. By examining young women’s relationship to the festive period in the nineteenth-century, one can see how modern-day adaptations recall the nostalgia and sisterly world of the novel, and equally how Little Women  represents a particular experience of being a young woman coming of age through the moral codes and types of performance they engaged in. What is girlhood? It is important to define the concept of girlhood as Alcott and her contemporaries would have understood it. Girlhood is part of our modern-day vernacular, widely documented on social media, a celebration of the female experience, the good, the bad and the ugly. First documented in literature in Samuel Ricardson’s Clarissa in 1748, and for a 19th century audience, the title itself, Little Women , offers one perspective of the role middle-class teenage girls held in society ( OED ). They are women in training, with a somewhat diminutive adjective ‘little’ to denote youth and inexperience. Frances Armstrong has described the period of the novel as significant to understanding the coming of age of the sisters: ‘"Little womanhood" is a stage on the journey to greatness… Their memories of girlhood can remind them of the advantages of the real littleness of childhood, which provided a safely contained space for the direct and physical acting out of desires’ (Armstrong 454). Armstrong posits coming of age for these girls as a an ultimately positive experience, these formative years leading them to ‘greatness’ in the adult world (454). She draws out a contrast between this nurturing and nostalgic view of childhood and the adverb ‘littleness’, denoting the social and physical limitations to the girls’ world living in Civil War America. They are restricted by their economic situation, the conflict at home and their gender, which limits their education, and yet they find joy in each other as sisters able to express their desires. Turning to Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women  in 2019, she connects girlhood with memory, delineating the female-centric world of the characters. Her first flashback sets up the theme of memory and girlhood as she brings the viewers to Christmastime 1861. The script reads: ‘the sisters, all together again in the past, in the snowglobe of girlhood and memory that is ever present but forever gone, are in a flurry of getting ready for a holiday party’ (Gerwig 11). The nostalgia that pervades the audience’s mind is encapsulated in Gerwig’s stage direction. Their home is ‘a snowglobe of girlhood and memory’, a festive metaphor for girlhood itself, a glistening, beautiful landscape of comfort and a flurry of movement. It is a contained space, and Gerwig poignantly adds that this memory is ‘ever present but forever gone’ (11). The girls are grown up, but the memory of Christmas is what transports us to the past, to the first scene with the sisters all together as a pure moment of joy and coming together that holidays bring. Figure One. Gerwig, Greta. Little Women. 2019. The use of flashbacks in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of the novel serves to enact this idea of both reminiscing on the safety and comfort of childhood as well as expressing frustrations about their economic and physical limits. Gerwig’s non-linear film shifts from childhood to adulthood, perhaps suggesting that the girls never truly leave this behind. Gerwig’s thematic style as a filmmaker is preoccupied with young women escaping their social world, as seen in Lady Bird  and Barbie , but this dream of flight also leads to an acknowledgment of the beauty of their childhood and relationships with women. Critics Dr. Niña Jen R. Canayong and Ms. Rey-ann C. Matalines underline that ‘the matriarchal circle of the family stays completely self-contained and entirely female’, which shapes our reading of the novel as it is an exclusive world (7). The harmonious world of the sisters is not without disputes and family pressure, particularly around their class and lack of mobility, but my focus within this self-containment of the March sisters is the element of fantasy which moves them outside of their social sphere. It may be unfair to say that Alcott confines her March sisters to a conservative narrative. Their options of free time would be limited, and the experience of childhood for women was much shorter than men’s as they reached marriageable age much sooner, as young as twenty for Amy. Girlhood as encapsulated by the title ‘Little Women’ is only small inasmuch as society judges women’s lives to be small, and Alcott (and later Gerwig) resists this in portraying a rich world of sisterly troubles and triumphs, socially and morally confined and yet artistically rewarding, as we will see next. Morality and the festive period for girls I am now turning my focus back to Alcott’s novel and how Christmas represented the pinnacle of expectations of charity and piety for young women in nineteenth century America and England. Beginning with the March sisters’ Christmas celebrations and then considering Christian celebrations through music and the work of Christina Rossetti (Alcott’s contemporary), there is a trend to be found in the moral and domestic role women occupied. The enigmatic, independent Jo March complains about their lack of money in the festive opening chapter of the 1868 novel. It soon transpires that the four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, are in no need of material gifts: they are the heart and soul of each other’s worlds in their warm yet simple home. The wintery scenes which open the novel and famous cinematic retellings of Little Women  are iconic in cultural imagination, especially the Christmas play that the sisters put on and their candlelit singing in an intimate moment of sisterhood. In the iconic opening to the novel, Alcott declares the lack of agency that these young women have in the same moment as marking Christmas as a pivotal moment in a Christian child’s calendar. Specifically for young girls then, Christmastime plays a key part in their social formation and, as we will see later, creative freedom.      Alcott provides a domestic social commentary where Christmas is a key season, accented by joy, childhood, and loss by writing the experience of Christmas for four girls somewhat confined to their home and small town in Massachusetts. Alcott has furnished readers with a lifetime of comfort in the fireside of the sisters’ attic and snowy escapades. The intersection between domesticity and religious teaching is significant in the novel, as Alcott represents the wider societal views of young women educated to be virtuous and moral. So how do 19th century girls spend their Christmas morning? First by reading Pilgrims’ Progress , the religious allegory by John Bunyan which was extremely popular in Protestant households (1678). The presence of this book speaks to the religious education that children undertook at this time, thus the domestic experience of Christmas is intrinsic to understanding girlhood for the March sisters in 19th century society. The Christian values taught by their mother are lucid throughout the novel, and her instruction on Christmas day is a potent metaphor for the piety expected of young women. Marmee instructs her daughters to ‘Look under your pillows on Christmas morning, and you will find your guidebook’, hinting to the spiritual book they will receive as a gift (13). The choice of a religious gift is telling of the teaching of daughters, and their goodness is received from their mother, emphasising the traditionally female role in a household. Importantly, in late 19th century America, celebrating Christmas was normalised, and Alcott was one of the first to depict a middle-class family Christmas in her novel (Murfin). When Marmee asks the girls about giving food to the Hummels, they obey immediately, their daughterly duty foregrounded as the sisters are completely devoted to their mother. Rachel Canayong and Rey-ann Matalines have noted that Beth symbolises the ‘ideal’ model of girlhood: ‘Out of the four sisters, Beth has been the best example in showing the normative behaviour of female sex at that time’ (60). Adding to Canayong and Mataline’s judgement of Beth, her portrayal is the most aligned with stereotypical expectations of femininity as she is devoted, quiet and self-sacrificing. As the pinnacle of the ‘dutiful daughter’, she is the first to agree to give food to their poorer neighbours, and the sisters do this heartily. Indeed, the capturing of this scene in the 1994 film adaptation is beautiful and light, rather than this moment serving as a doctrine, it becomes jubilant as they all break into an acapella rendition of ‘Here we come a-wassailing’. Director Gillian Armstrong’s interpretation focuses on the joy of the festive season and the message of goodwill that the sisters represent. Figure Two. Armstrong, Gillian. Little Women. 1994 ‘Wassailing means going door-to-door singing in exchange for food and drink and it is thought the tradition pre-dates Christianity and formed a mid-winter tradition’ (BBC Music). This song was popular in the mid-19th century and the lyrics reflect the good deed they are doing in offering their Christmas breakfast. This picture encapsulates girlhood and sorority, four sisters walking in the snow with food and a whistling hot kettle, singing joy and welcoming in a snowy day. The author however does not shy away from presenting the desires and vanity of the sisters in their childhood arguments and mishaps. One such example can be seen in Amy’s reluctance to give up her breakfast orange, offering a complication to the notion of being a kind and giving young woman. Figure Three. Ibid. The presence or absence of food reveals a lot about social status, and here oranges are a luxury, as they had only just begun to be widely traded in civil war America. The symbol of the orange and the world beyond the March home is significant, as Shana Klein wrote that ‘Depictions of fruit were not just an accessory to the dining room. They were an accessory to the American empire and a device to endorse America’s growing territorial and economic gains’ ( Southern Cultures ). Situating the female world of Little women within its Civil war context of a plantation economy and the slave trade offers a glimpse at the world outside of the female characters, which they seemingly engage with very little. Here, Amy’s childish desire to keep the orange represents more the process of becoming a ‘good’ girl as stipulated by charitable and pious characteristics expected of American women. Therefore, Alcott outlines the transformation of these young women as they display piety and thus align with nineteenth century Christian expectations. Mrs Hummel describes them as ‘good angels’ in their Christmas offering of goodwill and although they do not attend church, the girls are portrayed in this angelic light through their good actions (17). They are described as ‘good’ and this adjective represents the god fearing behaviour expected of young women. The expectation of sacrifice, goodness and virtue at all times is seen in Coventry Patmore’s Victorian model of the ‘Angel in the House’, a moral woman who populates the domestic sphere (Melani). In fact, a contemporary of Alcott, Christina Rossetti’s, was painted by her brother in a similar fashion to the ‘good’ little women of Alcott’s novel. Her Christmastime hymn, ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ portrays ideal femininity through religious devotion. The speaker, despite their low status, offers their ‘heart’ as a gift, and this may also be found in the unconditional love taught by Marmee in Little Women and learnt by the sisters through their trials and tribulations. Marmee acts as a role model for the Christian, nurturing woman the sisters are expected to become, and this is intrinsic to their social formation as young women. Figure Four. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’. 1848-9 Christina Rossetti in fact modelled for her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1848-9), encapsulating the projection of girlhood in 19th century society. The religious lesson and meek pose of Mary, shown as a saint and accompanied by an angel, fits in with the reading of the novel as a wider commentary on expected gender roles that women struggle with as they grow up and express their desires. However, as we have seen, the sisters are more complicated than stereotypes of traditional moral femininity, and we will next see how the theme of performance both aligns the characters with expectations of young ladies and also resists such narrow societal roles as they experiment through theatre. Performance and spectacle: the pinnacle of girlhood? The theme of performance creates a space for girls to be whoever they desire, and travel far beyond their home. Girlhood in the society of Alcott is delineated by a heteronormative view of womanhood, and another mode of performance which shows the sisters’ inclusion and exclusion is through fashion and class. As a series of ‘repetitive acts’, Judith Butler’s seminal model of the repeated performance of gender asserts that the identity of ‘woman’ is never fixed, but that clothing is one mode of establishing a normative gender appearance (Butler 2543). In the instance of growing up and desiring to leave girlhood behind, Little Women ’s focus on performing being a ‘grown-up’ woman reflects the nineteenth century beliefs of what a woman should look like. Here, the focus on hair and costume to achieve what the young girls consider an ideal woman’s fashion is telling of their youth and act of being a ‘grown-up’ woman. They aspire to the lifestyle of a wealthier middle-class society woman. One comic example of this is when the older March sisters are getting ready for a Christmas ball. Alcott brings humour to the moment where Meg’s hair is burnt, as they are imitating how a grown-up woman would act. There is irony behind the so-called ‘all-important business of `getting ready for the party'’, which connects the performance of girlhood for the March sisters to contemporary readers who see the pressure to get ready for an event (Alcott 25) The desire to grow up and attend these parties is a desire that reveals the eve of womanhood, and perhaps this is a timeless wish. For example, Gerwig phrases Amy’s complaint to her sisters comically as she asks ‘Why can’t we all go to the party?! It’s not fair!’, suggesting her position as a girl wanting to be older and able to join her sisters (alas the youngest sister’s curse!) (Gerwig 11). She is excluded due to her age, class, and gender, but the tension here relates back to Butler’s useful model of performativity around gender roles. Amy’s wish is to conform and grow up, as she sees in her sisters’ participation in the grown-up world of dresses and ballgowns the model of womanhood. Alcott subverts the normative performance of girlhood however through Jo’s characterisation. She subverts codes of ‘proper’ behaviour for girls, exemplified at the party, where she observes the dancing as an outsider. She intentionally looks on from the curtain, symbolising her desire to not fit in and to not become another society woman. She meets Laurie, and in their first dance, another joyous experience of youth is captured by Gerwig’s script: ‘Laurie bows, Jo awkwardly curtsies and then they go dancing wildly up and down a wrap-around porch’ (16). They dance ‘wildly’, another image of youth and unbridled emotion which is much more natural that Jo’s ‘awkward’ curtsey (Gerwig 16). Alcott describes their dance as equally spontaneous and liberating, where Jo is ‘full of swing and spring’ (Alcott 31). This moment is crucial in establishing Jo’s journey to womanhood is non-traditional, as she rebels against the social circle represented by the ball. A harsh truth is made lucid by Canayong and Matalines, as they state that: ‘Following the norm receives acceptance and being deviant becomes a social outcast’, suggesting that Jo becomes a pariah in this resistance to the norm(59). Alcott’s representation of both traditional gender roles, particularly in the moral behaviour we have already seen, and the unconventional Jo, posits a new interpretation of nineteenth century girlhood that is more imaginative than Canayong and Matalines suggest. As the sisters both participate in the world of dressing as young women and following society events, but also keep a critical distance, the novel offers a reading of an alternative girlhood.  Furthermore, re-examining the space of the home repositions it as a place of escapism from the stereotypes of girlhood that I have outlined. The primary way in which the sisters occupy themselves at Christmas is through their acting . The theatre, or attic, is a space reserved for play and imagination, a world which the sisters define and control. As children, the Christmas show that they create is evidently a way to overcome class and gender limitations which prevent them from going out into society to see shows and spend money. We admire their ‘clever’ design of ‘antique lamps made of old-fashioned butter boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory’, (17). Figure Six. Ibid. Evoking the glittery and colourful set design, Alcott underlines the second-hand nature of their set, costumes and props, but adopts a tone of admiration which reinforces how creativity is an incredible gift that marks sisterhood. Through their resourcefulness and imagination, they can make tin into glitter, and such a magical description places Christmas as a font of nostalgic memory for sisters. This spectacle and theatrical space for the sisters offers a wider view of girlhood as a creative time. Indeed, this is shared with other local girls, as Alcott describes their home becoming a theatre: ‘On Christmas night, a dozen girls piled onto the bed which was the dress circle, and sat before the blue and yellow chintz curtains in a most flattering state of expectancy’ (18). Readers are invited to share in the revelry and the homemade nature of their show. Theatre offers a creative outlet which is fulfilling and much more diverse than the stereotype of dutiful obedience in young girls. The message of the novel and its reflection on the role of young women in society may be to upkeep virtue and goodness, but, as I have shown, the portrayal of girlhood as purely pious is too narrow to describe the rich and colourful lives of the March sisters. The novel engages with societal trends where Christmas is a female centric celebration, following the Christian nineteenth century traditions of goodwill and morality. Equally, Little Women offers an alternative model of girlhood through the creative freedom to perform and experiment with the grown-up world of women as well as in their attic theatre. As the film adaptations have shown, the festive joy is a key facet of childhood memories and encapsulates their love and formative period coming of age as young girls. Alcott reflects on gender roles propagated by society and the performance of the girls, through the shared experiences of the sisters, effectively represents the 19th century experience of girlhood as a multidimensional and creative time in their lives. Coupled with the adaptations, the anxieties and joys of girlhood in Little Women  maintains the timeless experience of sisters which resonates with a modern-day audience, even if readers today are often much less restricted by their gender. Bibliography Primary Sources Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women . Vintage, 2012. Armstrong, Gillian. Little Women . Columbia Pictures, 1994. Gerwig, Greta. Little Women, in ‘Read Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ Screenplay’. Variety Magazine , 2019. https://variety.com/2019/film/news/little-women-screenplay-greta-gerwig-full-script-1203447712/ . Gerwig, Greta. Little Women . Sony Pictures, 2019. Rossetti, Christina. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, Poetry Foundation , https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53216/in-the-bleak-midwinter   Secondary Sources Armstrong, Frances. ‘‘Here Little, and Hereafter Bliss’: Little Women and the Deferral of Greatness’, American Literature , Vol. 64, No. 3, Duke UP, pp. 453-474, Sep. 1992. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/2927747 BBC Music Magazine. ‘Here we come A wassailing lyrics’, Classical Music , 30th Oct. 2022. https://www.classical-music.com/articles/here-we-come-a-wassailing-lyrics Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . London: Routledge, 2006. Canayong, Niña Jen R. and Matalines, Rey-ann C. ‘Gender Behaviour and Class Envy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women ’, Asia Pacific Journal of Educational Perspective , Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 55-63, May 2022. Lyceum of the Philippines University , https://research.lpubatangas.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/7-APJEP-42-Canayong.pdf . Estes, A., & Lant, K. ‘Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women ’ Children's Literature ,   John Hopkins UP, vol. 17, no.1, pp.98-123, 1989. Klein, Shana. The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. California UP, 2020. Melani, Lilia.   ‘The Angel in the House’, The Nineteenth Century English Novel , March 2nd 2011. Brooklyn College , http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/thackeray/angel.html Murfin, Patrick. ‘Those Little Women Showed an Early Glimpse of the American Christmas’, Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout , 18th Dec. 2015. https://patrickmurfin.blogspot.com/2015/12/those-little-women-showed-early-glimpse.html

The china cabinet in the dining room at St. Nicholas’ Abbey in Speighstown, Barbados. Author Photo This Colonial Era china cabinet from Barbados, along with the portrait hanging above it, encapsulates a Caribbean history steeped in plantation culture. The only similarity between the Caribbean of today and that of centuries past is the year-round heat. A spirit of resentment plagued white, landed settlers and their descendants. Many dreaded the idea of living in the Caribbean, and for those who did, it often became a nightmare. The inhabitants relied heavily on the Americas and Europe for everything—from furniture to food to patriarchal traditions. White landed settlers clung to Old World heteropatriarchal customs as if they were lifelines to Europe, which imposed barriers on white landed women seeking authority on English and French Caribbean plantations. The Role of Women in Plantation Authority White landed Caribbean women occasionally occupied positions of authority as landlords or landladies. Yet, male servants and governors often undermined their authority, creating obstacles for women in these roles. An exchange of letters between Governor Roger Wood of Bermuda and the Countess of Dorset, a landed woman in Bermuda, illustrates this dynamic. In their correspondence from the 1630s, the Governor threatened to deprive the Countess of her indentured servants if she failed to produce enough tobacco. The Countess' indentured servants undermined her authority, leading the Governor to assert, "They should be [paying] the rent they were rated at and afterwards upon halves [as before]…they return no profits [to] your honour nor benefit themselves." If uninterrupted, landed women could control their tenants and earn revenue, allowing them to assert their authority. However, uninterrupted female authority on plantations was a rarity across the English and French Caribbean. Landed men and women operated under the mentality, as penned by Elizabeth Robbins, that women were "Confined at the home, are so Blown Up and Corrupted, with the flattery of Servants and Tenants." Robbins' The Whole Duty of a Woman provides insight into white Caribbean landed men’s perceptions of their female counterparts. Written for other women, Robbins literally outlines the ideal woman's life cycle through her work, which circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, landed white Caribbean men often relegated their female counterparts to mere ornaments. Nonetheless, white landed Caribbean women persisted, finding authority through inheritance, commodification, and participation in the plantation economy. Understanding Primogeniture Before I continue, I must explain primogeniture. This legal principle, granting the right of the eldest son to inherit everything, was weaponized against landed women to prevent them from occupying positions of authority. Colonial Caribbean courts sought to uphold primogeniture, clinging to this European heteropatriarchal custom. In response, landed women pursued legal action through requisition trials, attempting to challenge primogeniture in court. These trials often dragged on for years and frequently ruled against women's interests. However, if there was a will, there was a way. To circumvent lengthy courtroom battles, landed men cleverly drafted their wills to allow their wives and daughters to inherit land, slaves, and the corresponding authority. Such strategically written wills often contained clauses that reassured men that a woman’s authority would only be temporary. For example, a will from Bermuda's infancy stated, "it shall be lawful for the said Neptunia Downham to dispose of or give away three shares of land." Listing a female beneficiary as a creditor was a loophole; men expected generosity from "creditor…Widow HILTON for two shares of land [for] 100 lb Tobacco" instead of outright authority. Allowing women to inherit land bypassed primogeniture and, in doing so, recognised their capacity to occupy and assert positions of authority on plantations. Following or challenging wills in court acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, a woman’s mobility within the systems of plantation patriarchy. What remains of the Governor’s House in St.George’s Parish Bermuda. Author Photo. The Intersection of Patriarchy and Plantation Life White landed Caribbean women faced not only the challenges posed by primogeniture but also the pervasive patriarchy inherent in plantation life. A father was not merely the head of the household; he was also the head of the plantation. Randy M. Browne’s works, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (2017) and The Driver’s Story (2024), along with Paul Cheney’s Cul De Sac (2017), attest to how patriarchy permeated Caribbean plantation systems. Both resident and absent plantation owners relied on male subordinates to sustain their plantations. The European Caribbean colonies were vulnerable to both external and internal threats. It is essential to remember that even landed individuals could not escape the Caribbean’s overall dependency on Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, demographic imbalances haunted the English and French Caribbean. Enslaved people vastly outnumbered non-enslaved individuals, and men outnumbered women among the landed class. Clinging to European heteronormative patriarchy was not conducive to a plantation economy. Yet, landed plantation women played this game, often rigging it in their favour. The remainder of this article will explore a landed white Caribbean woman’s pathway to authority on plantations, from before her marriage to the crafting of her own will. Marriage as a Pathway to Authority Marriage offered a significant pathway for white landed Caribbean women to assert their authority on plantations. The importance of marriage was imported from Europe to Caribbean colonies, where it was believed that "the Marriage state…For here as you marry the person." Entire families invested in their children’s marriages. However, a demographic imbalance between men and women made arranging marriages exceedingly difficult for these white landed families. Women capitalised on their scarcity, leveraging it to negotiate unrealistic provisions in marriage contracts. Given the pervasive debt among landed Caribbean families, requiring both spouses to be debt-free was often unrealistic. Including a lack of debt in the marriage contract further narrowed the already shallow pool of potential husbands. If this selection pool was not already limited enough, absolving (or being willing to absolve) landed wives of their husbands' past or future debts evaporated this already dry marriage pool. Women created positions of authority from their scarcity. Property, particularly slaves, became a point of negotiation. Future fathers-in-law would be contractually obligated to transfer slaves to their future daughters-in-law. This transfer of property simultaneously conferred the corresponding position of authority as a property owner. White landed men ceded their patriarchal authority to their female counterparts, for "it is necessary for men to multiply; it is no less than a man’s responsibility to marry." Joint-Mastery Partnerships Joint-mastery partnerships represented another avenue for white landed Caribbean women to assert authority on plantations. These partnerships were essentially business relationships between a plantation owner husband and his wife. The reasons behind the establishment of joint-mastery partnerships remain complex. However, being in such a partnership enabled landed Caribbean women to participate in the plantation economy with corresponding authority. Theoretically, these partnerships were centred on equality, as husbands and wives conducted plantation business together. In practice, the extent to which wives were genuinely equal in joint-mastery partnerships requires further investigation. Existing evidence suggests that Caribbean courts provided wives in joint-mastery partnerships a platform to assert their authority in the presence of landed men, often before a male judge. Acknowledging a joint-mastery wife’s authority in court was a significant step. Instead of creating courtroom drama, the legal system took the landed female authority of joint-mastery wives seriously. The Heights of Authority: Planters Joint-mastery partnerships were not the pinnacle of authority that a landed white Caribbean woman could achieve on a plantation. Beyond these partnerships, women could hold immense authority as planters, a position typically reserved for men. As planters, they owned entire plantations and tracts of land. Landed white Caribbean women purchased property, such as "belonging to the said Mrs. Agnes Heydon, at 12s for the share of the first payment, and at 13s 14d being for 10 shares" (Using the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator, 12s is approximately £1,208.20 and 13s 14d is approximately £1,409.57). Having property in a landed woman’s name was a significant achievement. These women could utilise their property as they saw fit, with the option to live on-site near their slaves. However, many opted for absentee landownership, meaning they did not reside on or near their property. Absentee landowners were not exempt from the responsibilities of land ownership. They had to manage the high turnover of overseers, who were invariably male; there are no records of female overseers in the English and French Caribbean. These overseers directly managed a landed person’s land. With high overseer turnover, landed white women perpetuated a cycle of subordinating plebeian white men to work on land owned by a woman, for a woman. When an overseer was not quitting, they were managing property belonging to a landed female landowner. If a woman owned multiple parcels of land, she required more than one overseer to manage her holdings. Regardless of the number of overseers, the ownership of land in a woman’s name subtly asserted authority in a predominantly male-dominated system of plantation patriarchy. Wills and Testaments: A Strategic Tool Finally, following the example set by their male counterparts, landed Caribbean women utilised wills and testaments to their advantage. Crafting a will during a landed Caribbean woman’s lifetime enshrined her authority, allowing her to distribute property posthumously. Slaves and land were commonly bequeathed by white landed Caribbean women to surviving relatives, both male and female. One such will exemplified the routine provisions of bequeathing slaves to children and grandchildren: "[has] given to my grandchild, Paul Vaughan, my … boy Robin to hold for him and his heirs so long as the … liveth." However, wills and testaments could only go so far in preserving landed female authority, especially in the Caribbean, where such authority was often contested. White landed Caribbean men could challenge a woman’s will, as illustrated by "widow Durham, Henry Durham, who made a request to have the school lands they now held at halves to be let unto them at an annual rent." Ultimately, the ruling on such challenges would largely depend on the discretion of a male judge. Nonetheless, contesting a will acknowledged the authority vested in a white landed Caribbean woman’s testament. This photo is a striking example of what Caribbean plantations look like today, a haunting shell of what they used to be, outside Basseterre, Saint Kitts, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Author Photo. Conclusion: The Legacy of Authority In conclusion, white landed Caribbean women occupied and asserted positions of authority on plantations. Despite the wealth of primary source evidence supporting the existence of landed female authority in the Caribbean between 1615 and 1776, the historiography remains deficient. Women often appear only tangentially in histories of the Caribbean. Virginia Bernhard’s 1999 book Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda 1616-1782 made significant strides in this area over the past 30 years. However, Michael Jarvis’ 2022 book Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is among many that continue to sideline women. This article has focused solely on landed white women, as there is no evidence of landed black or indigenous women in the English and French Caribbean during this period. The predominance of absentee plantation ownership—where the owner does not reside on the plantation—fostered the misconception that no landed families existed in the Caribbean, as they lived in the comfort of Britain or France. The final image exemplifies an absentee plantation. Returning to the first and second images, it is clear that white landed families did inhabit the Caribbean. Obstacles to white landed female authority in the Caribbean between 1630 and 1776 were created by a suffocating spirit of resentment. Some Old World traditions, such as marriage and estate planning, charted paths for these women to assert their authority within the systems of plantation patriarchy. And if the Old World path was closed, a white woman’s scarcity was leveraged, enabling her to be more than just an ornament in a plantation home. Endnotes A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 71. Elizabeth Robbins, The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: J. Guiffem, 1701), 91. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 2. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 263. Elizabeth Robbins, The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: J. Guiffem, 1701), 65. Jacques Chaussé, Traité de L’Excelence du Mariage (Paris: Chez Martin Jovenel, 1690), 131. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 2. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 278. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 312. Bibliography Archival Sources from the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture Sc MG 383 Printed Primary Sources Chaussé, Jacques. Traité de l’excelence du Marriage (Paris 1690). Foster, Nicholas. A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbados (London 1650). Hollis-Hatchett, A.C., editor. Bermuda Under the Somer Islands Company, vols. 1-3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005). Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London 1657). Robbins, Elizabeth. The Whole Duty of a Woman (London 1701). Secondary Sources Bernhard, Virginia. Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda 1616-1782 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). Brown, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). Brown, Randy M. The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). Cheney, Paul. Cul De Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property, White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Higman, B.W. Montpelier Jamaica a Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom 1739-1912 (Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998). O’Day, Rosemary. Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies (New York: Routledge, 2007). Ragatz, Lowell Joseph. The Old Plantation System in the British Caribbean (London: The Bryan Edwards Press, 1925).

Trigger Warning: Images of Human Remains & Mentions of Rape/Necrophilia Glossary Deviant - Deviating from normal social, etc., standards or behaviour. Hundred - a subdivision of a county or shire, having its own court; also formerly applied to the court itself Perimortem - At the time of death Wergeld - the price set upon a man according to his rank. This would be paid as compensation in the event of death, harm, or a broken oath.  Isotopic Analysis  - analysis of isotopes that are taken from archaeological remains to provide details on how old the remains are, where the individual lived at birth and later in life, and further information A depiction of a young Anglo-Saxon woman and the troubles they faced with men (The End of the Song by Edmond Leighton, 1902) “The dead are not all remembered equally.” - Howard Williams, 2011 It is the 1960s in Oakridge, Basingstoke. The solitary cranium of a young female is uncovered  by a construction crew at a roadside. Oakridge is an exceedingly rare site in that the remains are singular and exhibit a show of brutal punishment and mutilation at the time of death. This is considered to be “the first case of formal facial mutilation” as the evidence is frequently limited due to the deterioration or loss of the soft tissues and a lack of marks left on the skeletal structure. The discovery of this site provides the opportunity for further understanding of local law, mob mentality, as well as legal action that is usually lost on the archaeological record, especially in reference to the Anglo-Saxon period which is dated from 410 AD to 1066 AD. It is theorised by archaeologists that this mutilation was not intended to kill her, but done as an extreme form of humiliation and debasement. This belief is based on analysis undertaken on the perimortem cut marks, which are multiple and precise. This mutilation does not align with a single law, rather is an accumulation of several, which leads archaeologists to believe that this is the work of local people rather than a formal judicial action, and was done as a way to mark her for an offence - a form of scarlet letter. It is remarked upon that the aim was to ensure that these criminals, and in this instance this young girl, ‘lost face’.  Her isotopic results and tooth analysis have revealed that she was between 15 and 18 years old and was not local to the area. Her remains have been radiocarbon dated to between 920 - 946 AD. There is extreme perimortem trauma to her nose and mouth, with no remodelling, further proving that this was inflicted at the time of death. Only the skull was recovered, and it is possible that decapitation was included as part of her humiliation and punishment but this cannot be confirmed. This site is a rare occurrence that aids in the understanding of local law, mob mentality, as well as revealing legal action that is usually lost on the archaeological record due to the loss of organic materials. The cranium itself was found 80 metres south of a parish hundred boundary, as well as near an Iron Age site, which would have been used as a reference point within the landscape. The repeated use of a site over successive stages of occupation and having these earlier connections allows this case to stand out further as it implies some form of ritualism or reverence of space, time, and the ancestors. Selection of images to show the angled and linear cuts to the Oakridge remains (Cole et al., 2020) Anglo Saxon Legal Codes Legal texts are among some of the oldest written documents that survive from many different civilisations across time. In reference to Anglo-Saxon communities specifically, Andrew Reynolds (University College London) comments that whilst legal texts are significant and provide a lens through which to see these communities, that it is also pertinent to be aware that the enforcement of these laws and the standard to which they are upheld will differ depending on where and when you are in the territory. It is also critical to consider that regional and local laws would likely also have been in use and may not feature on the national legal records. Moreover, many laws may have communicated through oral tradition rather than viewing these laws in their entirety in a written form. Law and order saw a change throughout the Anglo-Saxon period with laws being introduced on a national scale, and Christianity becoming a major factor within the formation of new laws and the upholding of new Christian ideals. This is reflected through burial evidence across the UK. These changes also coincide with the major change of the conversion to the Catholic Church in the 9th century. At this time, there was a sharp increase in the country’s lawmaking and the enforcement of laws, with gallows being placed at ports, entrypoints, and they are thought to have been placed within the majority of large towns. Several laws themselves lay out punishments, usually in reference to wergeld  (or ‘man’s price’). These laws commonly focus heavily on the male experience, and later also encompass religious and ecclesiastical laws which are held to the very highest standard. It is thought that women sometimes evaded the law due to the legal codes being heavily tailored towards male perpetrators. This is also seen within the archaeological record where the majority of the deviant remains found are those of young men.  Mutilation was a form of punishment undertaken by the judiciary, short of execution. Many Anglo-Saxon laws decree scalping and mutilation as the primary punishment as wergeld  appears to have been a tangible honour to the Saxon peoples and its right must be upheld. Moreover, King Cnut’s clause 53 (a law) shows a female adulterer losing her nose and ears as punishment, a code that aligns with the damage seen on the cranium at Oakridge. This could also be implemented for thievery, such as with the idea that thieves lost their hands, as well as through activities such as branding, that would not be evident in the osteological record due to the loss of the soft tissues. Despite these being seen as kinder punishments than execution, many likely would have lost their lives due to complications and infections from the mutilation site. Grave Reopenings Historically, the reopening of graves was primarily for the purpose of grave robbing. However, new research by Aspöck has shown that graves from the Anglo-Saxon period were opened relatively close to the date of internment and that it is likely that some of the bodies had not finished decomposing by the time their grave was opened. This brings forth new considerations into the treatment of the dead, as well as how the dead were treated and remembered.  In the case of these deviant cemetery sites it is likely that these graves were reopened as a secondary form of punishment where they are once again humiliated after death. The opening and viewing of decomposing remains reinforces fear and allows for the punishment of the deceased individual to be felt within the community for an extended period of time, maintaining fear and order within the population. There is some consideration that this may have been a ritual occurrence to revisit the deceased, however, the movement of bodies and in some cases, the removal of parts of the remains from the grave, present this as an abusive and degrading act. The reopening of graves may not always be obvious and it is unknown how many graves would have been opened during the Saxon period.  Some theories show that these graves, mostly of younger women, were reopened for nefarious means, specifically for the further debasement and rape of these women. This is theoretical and based on the positioning of the remains, as well as the times of reopening. The graves were cut to the size of the individual, however, after they were reopened the bodies were pushed far up to the head-end with legs akimbo. Rape and necrophilia are unsettling but very real considerations in this instance. Grave desecration was outlawed within the Anglo Saxon code, and these offences may have resulted in legal action themselves.  The reopening of deviant burials is a further aspect of deviance that requires further analysis. These instances of desecration are highly motivated, and by understanding these motivations archaeologists can produce a clearer understanding of the societal and cultural driving forces that allow deviancy to be so prevalent.  What does this tell us? Throughout the period, women were needlessly debased and defiled, even after death. These instances build an image of a society where women were clearly second class citizens who were not even important enough to factor into the legal codes. However, this is not always the case as there are many instances of Anglo-Saxon men championing their female counterparts, such as King Edward the Elder building and endowing an abbey for his daughter Elflaeda. Women of all echelons, with a few exemptions, were not afforded the same opportunities or respect as their male counterparts. Despite these occurrences, it is clear that Anglo-Saxon attitudes were not kind to women and heavily favoured men and even young boys who were considered to be adults around the age of 10! This is again reinforced by the likely mob action against this teenage girl, which resulted in her losing her nose, ears, and her scalp. Further Reading: Aspöck, E. (2011). Past ‘Disturbances’ of Graves as a Source: Taphonomy and Interpretation of Reopened Early Medieval Inhumation Graves at Brunn Am Gebirge (Austria) and Winnall II (England). Oxford Journal of Archaeology , 30(3), pp.299–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2011.00370.x . Aspöck, E. (2015). Funerary and Post-Depositional Body Treatments at the Middle Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Winnall II: Norm, Variety – and Deviance? In: Death embodied: Archaeological Approaches to the Treatment of the Corpse . [online] Oxbow Books, pp.86–108. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1989441.7 [Accessed 19 Apr. 2023]. Cole, G., Ditchfield, P.W., Dulias, K., Edwards, C.J., Reynolds, A. and Waldron, T. (2020). Summary justice or the King’s will? The first case of formal facial mutilation from Anglo-Saxon England. Antiquity , [online] 94(377), pp.1263–1277. doi: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.176 . Hough, C. (2021). Early English Laws: Women and Law in the Anglo-Saxon Period . [online] Earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk. Available at: https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/reference/essays/women-and-law/ [Accessed 29 Jan. 2023]. Lucy, S.J. (1996). Housewives, Warriors and slaves? Sex and Gender in Anglo-Saxon burials. In: Theoretical Archaeology Group, ed., Invisible People and processes; Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology , Theoretical Archaeology Group. Leicester University Press, pp.150–168. Reynolds, A. (2011). Crime and Punishment. In: H. Hamerow, D. Hinton and S. Crawford, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.238–259. Reynolds, A. (2013). Judicial culture and social complexity: a general model from Anglo-Saxon England. World Archaeology , 45(5), pp.699–713. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2013.878524. Reynolds, N. (1988). The rape of the Anglo-Saxon women. Antiquity , 62(237), pp.715–718. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003598x00075141. Williams, H. (2011). Mortuary Practices in Early Anglo-Saxon England. In: H. Hamerow, D. Hinton and S. Crawford, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.238–259.

The Historiography of Women The phrase ‘winners write history’ helpfully encapsulates how men have treated women throughout history. How is a ‘winner’ defined other than the one with control over both the pen and the sword? The idea that men have always been the main characters on the world’s stage has been upheld by one persistent system; patriarchy. This system has attempted to sideline women’s stories in all realms, be it medicine, war, poetry or art. One quotation that summarises this atavistic but sustained belief comes from Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys; ‘In an anti-male era, it’s important to remember that men built the planes, fought the wars, laid the railroad tracks, invented the cars, built the hospitals, invented the medicines and sailed the ships that made it all happen.’ If this is to be believed, Pankhurst herself would hang her head in shame.  With the fourth wave of feminism advancing through society there has been an increasing volume of historiography surrounding women’s histories and contributions to politics, culture and science. This series ‘Winners Write History: Or is it just Men?’ aims to explore this historiography and the evolving discussion on the true nature of women’s history and how it is represented. History itself arguably cannot be rewritten, but it can be better represented and better understood. In fourth wave feminism we are battling with the infinitesimal intricacies of sociopolitical equalities. It is important to remember, however, that all movements are started by and propelled by continuous questioning, even of the movement itself. How have women been treated in their lifetimes, in spite of or because of their achievements? How has this treatment impacted ongoing perceptions of these individuals and of women’s contributions to society in general? Ultimately, how have men used their control over historical narratives to shape our idea of gender in society? Alice Perrers Alice Perrers Perrers is a lesser-known royal mistress from the mediaeval period of British history, living alongside the court of Edward III in the 14 th  century. Perrers is a classic example of the vilification of women in history by men who sought the power she wielded. This process was aided by her sexuality, supposed promiscuity and the enforcement of gendered expectations. A more famous example of this is the life and memory of Anne Boleyn, the ‘great whore’ whose extraordinary rise to power angered courtiers and countries alike and whose memory has been sullied continuously by misinformation spread during her lifetime. As mistress to Edward III (r.1327-77) Perrers possessed an extraordinary amount of independence in an age where women were still considered property and had little to no legal protection or rights. Perrers’ life defied these constraints on mediaeval women even in the highest of circles. This did not sit well with her contemporaries. Alice differs in an important way to the story of Anne Boleyn; her rise defies the stereotype of sexualised women elevated by men around her and simultaneously defies the image purported by her contemporaries of an evil manipulative shrew that has lasted the centuries.  Historiography generally agrees that many of Alice’s contemporaries have given an inaccurate account of her character and events in her lifetime. However, the overall narrative of a manipulative woman still influences her image today. These sources, namely Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart, are pivotal to the depiction of mediaeval warfare, royalty and politics including the Hundred Years War, Edward III’s kingship and that of his counterpart Philip VI of France. Their understanding and depictions of women’s roles, however, is severely lacking in accuracy, let alone empathy. Alice has been depicted as a manipulative gold digger, using an ageing Edward III for her own financial gain, offending his pious queen, Phillipa of Hainault as well as the Christian sensibilities of the court. Phillipa’s queenship has also been used against Alice as evidence of her inferiority and immorality. The mere connotations of ‘mistress’ already have inbuilt ammunition against women like Alice who worked for their livelihoods. Alice became one of the wealthiest people during her lifetime through various means that have been erased by antagonistic contemporaries and biased historiographical works. This wealth was all but lost by her death as Edward III died before her, leaving her undefended against the Good Parliament. With modern understanding of the reality women faced in these years, Alice’s life deserves a sympathetic reassessment to better understand the complexities of mediaeval life. A Woman Born and a Woman Made   Perrers' Lover, Edward III Mediaeval historiography is subject to a paucity of sources remaining today to tell us about life in this period. This has made the invisibility of women in society ever more present. Little is known about Alice’s origins, even the time and place of her birth is contested with most estimating around 1348 in the south of England, possibly London. Her parentage is also unknown, but it is generally agreed (Given-Wilson, Ormrod, Tompkins) that her father was a jeweller of the Salisbury family making her suitable for a traditional education of French, basic literacy and numeracy as well as the economic abilities necessary in her family’s industry. Alice was also born in a time of economic prosperity for the mercantile class of London, so prosperous in fact that the first sumptuary laws were implemented dictating what the lower ranks of society could eat and wear so as to not compete with nobility. Alice therefore received a comparatively privileged upbringing and benefited greatly from her family’s business, making her relatively well suited for court life.  English chronicler Thomas Walsingham wrote that Alice was born to a thatcher. Whilst a jeweller was not a noble profession, it did rank higher than a thatcher and this debasement of Alice’ birth has evident intentions. We don’t have to dig deep to decipher Walsingham’s bias as he calls Alice a ‘shameless, impudent harlot’ and rallies against her role at the king’s side. Criticism of royal favourites, be they mistresses, advisors or soldiers, is an age-old tactic of indirectly criticising a king himself without facing the consequences of doing so (see the fate of Henry VIII’s courtiers). Edward III has been described as the ‘perfect king’ (Mortimer) however he has also been subject to heavy criticism for his later kingship. In the years before his death Edward is criticised for his personal conduct and his military record, the time when Walsingham was writing his chronicles again furthering his bias against Edwardian rule. Walsingham was also a monk of St Albans Abbey, which became a rival of Alice Perrers in her rise to prosperity, furthering his bias against the royal favourite. Although a prominent English chronicler, Walsingham’s account of Alice’s life has largely been dismissed as unreliable. Contextual clues can also be used against this chronicler’s description of Alice, as a low-born, ill-educated woman would not be elevated to the position of lady-in-waiting to a queen. It can be concluded that Walsingham exploited societal expectations of mediaeval English women, being the categorisation of obedient, quiet and subservient Christians vs disruptive, promiscuous and disobedient ‘harlots’ against Alice in her rise to prominence.  Perrers is the name by which Alice is generally known as her maiden name cannot be certified; she is also sometimes referred to as Alice de Windsor following her second marriage, however both unions left little evidence of their occurrences. Alice’s first husband was ostensibly of French descent so it is fair to say that her understanding of the language would have made her suitable for life at court, where French was the primary language until the Statute of Pleading issued by her lover Edward III in 1362. As with most royal mistresses, Alice’s husband was known to the king through his work, in this case as a jeweller offering Alice the opportunity to meet the king herself.  It was common in these times for women of the peasant and mercantile classes to marry a man of the same profession as their father. Alice had begun to exercise her knowledge of her family’s trade, carrying out business herself following her first husband’s death in 1364.  Alice’s official entrance into court was as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Phillipa, to whom Edward was reportedly devoted to throughout their 41-year marriage. This role opened the door for Alice’s most rewarding career move. As a royal favourite, Alice received many gifts and, through a diversity of means, became one of the richest people in the realm. This wealth was only protected, however, by the presence of the king and after his death Alice was exiled by the Good Parliament and her lands stripped. Although this has been referred to as her fall from grace (Moorhouse), Alice went down fighting. A Career Woman   Reese Witherspoon, Glamour Women of the Year Awards, 2015 The primary issue contemporaries and historians have taken with Alice is the vast wealth she amassed in her lifetime, ostensibly at the expense of Edward’s purse and pride. Some of the most infamous royal mistresses throughout history have amassed great wealth through their influence like Madame de Pompadour, Barbara Palmer, and Diane de Poitiers. In many ways Alice’s treatment in history has not been so different from her counterparts as the work of women not of the blood at royal courts is often degraded or dismissed. This is habitually achieved through the hyperfocus on the sexual life of a mistress and, although this is often a key part of such a career, it is not the backbone of its success. Palmer maintained her influence in the Caroline court through patronage, Poitiers allied herself with Henry II’s closest courtiers and Alice secured her wealth with the knowledge and skill learned through her time spent in her family’s industry. The lens through which Alice’s wealth has been assessed has been a misogynistically motivated and cynical one. Edward’s wife Philipa was ailing by the beginning of his relationship with Alice and died before they became public. Edward himself was ageing and Alice has been accused of manipulating the weakened, mourning king to her own financial gain at his expense. I argue, however, those without official power, in the feudal world, cannot manipulate those with ultimate power - the king. Undoubtedly, Alice took advantage of the situation, utilised her skills and exploited the system to her benefit but this does not warrant the image of a ‘manipulative shrew’ to which she has been subject throughout the centuries. It could even be argued that her actions in her time when an unmarried woman could not own property, stand in court, or, (God forbid) vote, is admirable. However the connotations of the profession ‘mistress’ perforates today’s understanding of women’s lives in royal and noble history. Oversexualisation of women both vilifies and victimises these women as it reduces their achievements to a sexual conquest, disenfranchising their independence or contributions to the world of politics, art, literature or economics. Alice, in addition to a romantic and sexual partner of the king, was also a skilled businesswoman and property investor using her skills and good fortune to increase her net worth and secure her independence and protection when society offered her none.  The evidence that Alice formed alliances at court to protect her economic interests following the uncertainty of her early widowhood has been used to represent alternating portrayals of her life and personality. As always in historical analysis, context is key. Alice undeniably used her sex to her advantage, utilising her close relationship with the king to line her coffers. Yet she had already amassed a considerable fortune relative to her birth and made her family proud with her position in the queen’s court as a lady-in-waiting. Men born into similarly modest backgrounds throughout history have faced starkly different treatment from society and historians alike. To quote Reese Witherspoon, ‘ambition is not a dirty word’, but when it comes to women in the royal court, their successes have not been treated kindly. Instead, they are often debased and slandered in an attack on women outside of biblically archaic expectations of a meek and modest woman; ‘That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands’ -  Titus 2:4-5 Drawing from Fiona Tolhurst's insights, royally associated women have faced unjust criticism and condemnation for exhibiting traditionally masculine traits like ambition, financial autonomy, and intellectual prowess—qualities that are often commended in men. Where Edward VI’s 1 st  Duke of Northumberland had a ‘determined ambition’ as he worked to control the young king and implement the soon-to-be Nine Day Queen, Jane Grey. Meanwhile, Tolhurst helpfully encapsulates the plight of women’s characterisations in history through the lens of Empress Matilda, who for modern historians is ‘both too feminine in her weaknesses and too masculine in her aggressive exercise of power.’ Witherspoon’s speech at the Glamour Women of the Year awards is obviously from a wildly different context than the life of Alice Perrers, yet serves to illustrate the way in which she has been remembered. Her ambition was her cause for success but also her adverse memorialisation. Hollman’s biography of Phillipa and Alice illustrates the sympathetic approach to women’s history we should be taking today with our understanding of the realities these women faced without an icon like Witherspoon to inspire them. Without looking at Alice through rose-tinted glasses, we can remove the ‘caricature’ recognised by Hollman and assess the mediaeval figure through a less biassed criteria.  It can be argued that mistresses throughout history have partaken in one of the most controversial jobs in society. They exchanged sexual relationships for wealth and protection and used the position this work gave them to further their interests and those of their friends, families and allies. The narrative of a rapacious, manipulative, vindictive woman is based on the shame associated with sex work. Even the word ‘mistress’ pertains certain connotations around femininity and promiscuity despite the many successful careers shared by women in countries across the world (Hürrem Sultan, Madame de Montespan). Looking at the context of her time, Alice had very limited pathways to bettering herself. Alice’s supposed promiscuity has made it all too easy to dismiss her meteoric rise as a misuse of her feminine virtues and thus she has been treated harshly throughout history. Alice was involved in the business of her family, her husband and later for herself when she became a widow in 1364. The beginnings of Alice’s extensive property portfolio began in Kent with a deal exchanged between herself and John de Mereworth, a knight at Edward’s court. A major part of economic and social success in these courts was to be seen to be successful and owning property such as this would have significantly aided Alice onto her path of wealth and fortune. Behind the scenes, this land deal was even more impressive and is highly indicative of Alice’s hidden potential as a financial investor and property manager. This deal was the beginning of Alice’s independent income and has no relevance to her relationship with Edward; the introduction was made through her role at Phillipa’s court attained through her own means. This business attitude was sustained throughout her time at Edward’s side as she only became richer and richer until his death. Bothwell has described the role of ‘mistress’ as a passive one whose ‘ position, her wealth, and even her fate were dependent upon the will of the king’. If this is to be proven true, should Alice not be heralded as the ultimate ‘girlboss’ who navigated these constraints and surpassed all expectations? Woman to Woman  Phillipa of Hainault  The feudal system of Edward’s reign thrust high expectations of mediaeval kingship upon him. Chivalric values embodied by the Order of the Garter formed by Edward in 1348 demanded military prowess, achieved at the Battle of Crecy, and domestic domination, achieved through the obtainment of an obedient wife. In Edward’s case this was the pious and loyal Phillipa of Hainault, who herself deserves a historical re-analysis. Jean Froissart, a French chronicler of the Hundred Years War described Phillipa as the ‘most gentle Queen, most liberal, and most courteous that ever was Queen in her days’ and this has been the general consensus of Phillipa’s queenship since her death (Hollman). Our old friend Thomas Walsingham similarly described Phillipa as ‘the most noble woman’ from which we can infer an additional motivation behind his slander of Alice’s name.  If one meets the societal expectations of womanhood and femininity, one must fall short to perpetuate general masculine superiority. Phillipa’s maternal, beautiful, charitable queenship heightens the standard by which Alice is contrasted, painting an image of a white sheathed maiden angel on one shoulder and a red cloaked horned devil on the other. Comparing women in order to maintain power over them is an age-old strategy of the patriarchy that remains present in modern society; think Olivia vs Sabrina or Haley vs Selena. Evidently the standards to which Alice and Phillipa were, and continue to be, held vary greatly from today’s modern pop icons. Gentle femininity and obedience have been key characteristics of the ‘perfect woman’ for centuries in most cultures; the fact that Phillipa was able to publicly meet these requirements has served as fuel for the fire surrounding the continuous deformation of Alice’s character when compared to the pious queen. Alice has also been vilified through the victimisation of Phillipa in her final years as she watched her once faithful husband conduct his affair with the decades younger Perrers. To this, I refer to my earlier argument that those without official power in the feudal world, cannot manipulate those with ultimate power, such as the king. This means that Alice did not ‘steal’ her husband from her and should not be cast in the role of master manipulator.  By separating these women as individuals whilst simultaneously recognising their coexistence we can better assess their characters, faults and virtues. Gemma Hollman’s comparative work on Phillipa and Alice seamlessly highlights the two women’s characters including their respective flaws without using either to elevate or vitiate the other. The Queen and the Mistress exemplifies changing attitudes towards women in history and especially those who lived in a time with strongly enforced gender expectations with a more empathetic analytical approach.  The Rise and Fall of an Empire  Artwork of Alice reportedly taking the rings off a dying Edward III’s fingers The evidence of Alice’s shrewd cunning is apparent on multiple fronts, not least in the physical manifestations of her wealth. Her portfolio of 56 properties across 25 counties by the time of her lover’s death made her one of the richest people (not just women) in England, transcending all gender expectations. This manifestation of wealth has been used as evidence of her ‘greed’, rather than her immense success (Ormrod). Notably, 15 of her manors were gifted to her by Edward III while the remaining properties were acquired through Alice’s own financial acumen by Alice herself owing to intricate land deals, agreements and negotiations.  Alice's tale is a fascinating account of a woman’s ambition, fortune, and the prejudices that often accompany the elevation and memory of successful women. This success, however, inevitably stirred resentment, leading to a concerted effort from her adversaries to strip her of the wealth she had meticulously accumulated and fought to protect as she foresaw the vulnerability Edward’s death would expose her to. The Good Parliament was formed in 1376 in response to Alice’s excessive accumulation of landed wealth.  Mediaeval historiography faces the challenge of a great paucity of sources due to the obvious problem of time. Most material has decayed in centuries past and so few people were literate, written sources are also scarce. This has meant a heavy reliance on sources with ostensible biases, including court documents, chroniclers as aforementioned and religious material. In Alice’s case the primary sources on her life come from the former, namely documentation of the trials of the Good Parliament and her demise. These trials represented public sentiment towards the royal mistress who had achieved so much in her lifetime. Alice’s contemporaries resented her for the wealth she had amassed with the aid of Edward III, who for so long had been the figurehead of chivalric kingly values as Froissart wrote ‘his like had not been seen since the days of King Arthur’. There is little evidence that Alice had any real parliamentary or military influence and although she was better educated that most would give her credit for, she was not so politically inclined. The influence she is accused of wielding over Edward was primarily financial as she exploited her position to benefit her coffers, arguably conflicting with the chivalric dictum of domestic control i.e. control over one’s household, including its women. Edward has been recorded as the ‘perfect king’ and this deference to a woman, a low ranking one at that, did not suit this narrative of a great and noble king (Mortimer). This was unacceptable to a proud and patriotic community as the English. Alice represented a threat to traditional masculine and chivalric values, further transcending gendered expectations of strict feudal society.  Edward’s politicians and courtiers also blamed her for his later downfalls including ill health, military losses in France and costs to the royal coffers. The Good Parliament, so named after their desire to reform the corrupt royal house, exiled Alice from the realm and seized her worldly goods. By this time Alice had secretly married Sir William Windsor in order to protect herself from what she saw coming as her lover was dying and those in power despised her. This marriage was further ammunition to use against the royal mistress as a supposed betrayal of the king’s love. A targeted decree was made against Alice declaring;  some women have pursued various business and disputes in the king’s courts by way of maintenance, bribing and influencing the parties, which thing displeases the king; the king forbids any woman to do it, and especially Alice Perrers, on penalty of whatever the said Alice can forfeit and of being banished from the realm. Gesta abbatum Monasterii Sancti Alba This declaration showcases Alice as a conniving gold digger defying the rules of femininity set out by the mediaeval patriarchy and feudal system that demanded a strict hierarchy in society that placed women in the lowest ranks. The ‘bribing and influencing’ found in the royal courts has been rife throughout all of history and is arguably what the nation is built on. The reason for the direct attack on Alice for these crimes which all courtiers and politicians were guilty of, is plain (misogyny, if you weren’t sure). It is a disappointment but not a shock, then, that this depiction has been the one to stand the test of time.  The seizure and exile were not so effective in reality as planned. Under Richard II parliament again rallied to condemn Alice for her manipulation of the ageing king and misuse of royal power. In this court Alice was tried as a femme sole  as she was believed to be unmarried and as such was not granted the protection offered to married women (a wife could not be tried as an individual as she was the property of her husband, along with all her worldly goods). This fact was not unbeknownst to Alice. It is unclear when she married for a second time but following her conviction William Wyndsore petitioned the result of the court on the basis of an unfair trial (Ormrod). Perrers had secretly married Wyndsore, Lieutenant of Ireland. A risky move, as it ostensibly painted Alice as a disloyal mistress betraying the love and kindness of the late king. Then again, Alice anticipated the danger of being an unmarried woman at the court of her lover’s son, now king, surrounded by enemies and wannabes. After constant petitioning, Wyndsore secured a substantial portion of his wife’s lands. Without this marriage Alice would have been left with nothing. It is this alliance that prevented her from total ruin in the end, although she suffered great losses at the hands of a vengeful consortium of men masquerading as a parliament.  The image these courts aimed to paint of Alice as a universally hated seductress and gold digger, responsible for the depletion of royal treasury is contradicted by the circumstances of the bloody Peasant’s Revolt close by to Alice’s homestead. Alice’s properties were not attacked unlike many of those similarly convicted by the Good Parliament and Alice herself was never threatened with violence unlike her counterpart Richard Lyons who was killed in the street by leader Wat Tyler.  The artistic licence taken with Alice’s reputation by her contemporaries reached levels of absurdity when it was rumoured she thieved the rings off a dying Edward’s fingers when left alone with him on his deathbed. This can be easily disproved by the apparent fact that no king would be left alone on his deathbed, unguarded especially  by such a loyal and loving family as Edward’s had proved to be. Walsingham has proven to be more of a dramatist than a chronicler as Alice supposedly; ‘artfully removed from the royal hands the rings, which the king wore on his fingers to display his royalty… so, in this way bidding the king farewell’ Yet, no such rings existed and no such action was taken. Alice was no thief in the night and had more foresight than to act on whim.  Undeterred by vicious hearsay, legal constraints and feudal expectations, Alice fought fiercely against the forces determined to dismantle the empire she had worked decades to build. She bore losses to the wealth and honour of her children by the king, her own capital and reputation but died having lived an astoundingly affluent life. The resulting legacy is one of tenacity, wisdom and cunning tragically tinged by misogynistic rumour, false accusation and outright attacks on her wealth and character both in her lifetime and years after. Conclusion The aim of this article has not been to perceive Alice Perrers through rose-tinted glasses or to resituate her as a heroine or tragic victim of her time or the androcentric narrative of mediaeval history. Feminist history does not seek to put women on a pedestal. Rather, by employing the facts and information available, we can evaluate women like Alice in a manner akin to the treatment men have traditionally received, with a degree of empathy, respect and even sympathy for the times in which they lived. Alice did not live as a victim and should not be remembered as one, although the men who envied her success threw everything they had at her to take it. While Phillipa led a life of piety and ‘womanly’ obedience, Alice defied these constraints of femininity yet neither better or worse than the other. Both experienced loss, affluence, and even a degree of power. Both have been subject to the gendered bias of their contemporaries and historiography that followed. There is one question left to ask in light of this. If Alice manipulated Edward III, used him for her own gain, rinsed him for all he was worth and lied and cheated to protect herself, in a time where women had so few rights or protection, would that be so bad?  Bibliography  Biddulph, Steve, 2015, Raising Boys , Thorsons. Bothwell, James, 1998, ‘The management of position: Alice Perrers, Edward III, and the creation of a landed estates, 1362–1377’, Journal of Medieval History,  Volume 24, Issue 1, Pages 31-51. Dawson, Ian, 1993, The Tudor Century 1485–1603, Nelson. Given-Wilson, C., 2004, Perrers [other married name Windsor], Alice  (d. 1401/02) , ODNB. Hollman, G., 2022, The Queen and the Mistress: The Women of Edward III, The History Press, Cheltenham. Holmes, G., 1975,  The Good Parliament , Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lewis, Jone Johnson, 2020,  Alice Perrers ,  ThoughtCo,  < https://www.thoughtco.com/alice-perrers-facts-3529651 > Accessed November 2023. Lewis, K., 2013, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England, Routledge. Moeslein, Anna, 2015, ‘Reese Witherspoon's Moving Speech at Glamour's 2015 Women of the Year Awards: 'Like Elle Woods, I Do Not Like to be Underestimated’, Glamour . Moorhouse, D., The Hundred Years War: Alice Perrers , < https://thehundredyearswar.co.uk/alice-perrers/ > Accessed November 2023. Mortimer, Ian, 2006, The Perfect King. The life of King Edward III, Pimlico.  Ormrod, W.M., 2006, ‘Who was Alice Perrers?’,  Chaucer Review  40, 219-229. Ormrod, W.M., 2008, ‘Alice Perrers and John Salisbury’,  EHR  123, 379-392. Ormrod, W.M., 2008, ‘The Trials of Alice Perrers’,  Speculum  83, 366-396. Ormrod, W.M., 2004,  Edward III,  < https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-8519?rskey=14rXk7&result=1 >Accessed November 2023. The Royal Women, Alice Perrers: The Manipulative Mistress , < https://theroyalwomen.com/2022/03/22/alice-perrers/ >Accessed November 2023. Thompson, E.M., 1874, [T. Walsingham], Chronicon Angliae, ab anno Domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388 , Rolls Series, 64. Tompkins, L., 2015, ‘Alice Perrers and the Goldsmiths’ Mistery: New Evidence Concerning the identity of the Mistress of Edward III’,  EHR  130, 1361-1391. Westminster Abbey, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault,  < https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/edward-iii-and-philippa-of-hainault > Accessed November 2023.

Glossary ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) - A looting group created by Alfred Rosenberg, initially their goal was to collect archives, books, and other Jewish cultural goods to examine and develop anti-Jewish studies. In 1940 they became a plundering group for all types of valuables from their "enemies" when the seizure of cultural holdings - ranging from art pieces to antique furniture - was authorised by the Führer. Reichsmarschall - Second in command to Hitler, a position created for Herman Göring who was commander of the Luftwaffe and an avid art collector. He made sure to take thousands of the looted pieces for his private art collection - going as far as stealing from Hitler. MFA&A - The Monuments, Fine Art and Archives Division of the Allied Forces created in the United States. Members of other Allied countries, mainly from the United Kingdom and France made up the division with both men and women having important ranks in it. Born in the commune of Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs in France, Rose Valland (1898-1980) is - in my humble opinion - one of the most important women in art history, despite not being an artist herself. Volunteering as an art historian and assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume, Valland's job consisted of cataloguing artworks housed at the museum. The first record of her work at the Jeu de Paume was in 1933 of the painting ' Paysage ' by Else Berg, acquired by the French government. Berg was a Dutch woman with both German and Jewish heritage - an intriguing coincidence considering the work that Mademoiselle Valland would carry out in the years to come. Portrait of Rose Valland taken in the 1930s Paris, previously a beacon for cultural development, became a central location for the Nazi government. There the ERR catalogued much of the art plunder before shipping it to hidden locations around the Third Reich. Modern databases tell historians that 20% of all art in Europe was stolen by the Nazi regime. While most remain missing, from the 10% that were recovered by the Allied army, much was only found because of the list put together by Rose Valland. She was the only French worker kept at Jeu de Paume after the Nazi occupation of France. Undermined for being a woman, she was able to work from the inside in favour of the French resistance and continue her previous work with a new motivation: cataloguing to save European culture. Life before the War Little is known about her personal life before the period during which she volunteered and later worked at the museum. However, something known to those that study her story is the fact she was queer. To twentieth century standards, Valland was an "out and proud" lesbian. After the war she shared an apartment in Paris with her partner, author Joyce Heer, and they were buried together in the Valland family crypt. Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was a centre for the lesbian community, but during the war they were forced to hide. Sadly, little of the Parisian lesbian subculture survived the Occupation. Valland was extremely well educated in the arts, having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Lyon as well as studying art history at the École du Louvre and at the Sorbonne Université. Regardless of her large number of academic achievements, she began her career at the Jeu de Paume as a volunteer - only receiving her first paid position during the Occupation. The atmosphere of the heritage world after the Great War and the fears of the war to come were well noticed by the art historian - something she wrote about in her book ' Le Front de L'Art: Défense de Collection Française' (1961) . Valland wrote about the pre-war preparations that took place both at the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre under orders of the Director of French National Museums, Jacques Jaujard, who already faced the perils that the previous war had posed to the cultural world. She describes how the staff of Parisian museums began to 'box up' the valuable paintings and statues so they could be sent to safe locations and, the more noble ones - such as the Mona Lisa - were hidden around the country. In 1938, Jaujard trusted Valland with the responsibility of overseeing the collections and running the Jeu de Paume whilst the curator was ill. She remained in the position as, not long after, in 1940, Nazi forces occupied Paris. The Occupation Throughout her book ' Le Front de L'Art: Défense des Collections Françaises' (1961), Valland describes that soon after the Nazis took over Paris they began to remove French workers from governmental and civil work positions - this included museum officials. However, she was able to stay employed throughout the entire war period - regardless of their many attempts to fire her. Nonetheless, they undermined her for being a woman, believing she would be compliant and obedient. They were unaware that not only did she quickly understand their cataloguing system and began one of her own, but also that she understood German, listening in on all of the officers' conversations about plans and information on the Reich. During the four years of occupation, Valland kept a careful log of the large collection of art pieces that passed through the Jeu de Paume. The pieces were divided between the private collections of the Führer, the Reischmarschall's and the pieces chosen for the Linz Museum Project. She recorded the artist, the provenance, and the title of the pieces - the ones that were kept and the ones considered degenerate by Nazi officials, which were destroyed. Valland filled books with this information, which would become some of the most important files for the Allied forces. Scanned pages from Valland's catalogue, it is possible to see names such as 'Degas', 'Gauguin' and 'Picasso' listed. Valland also achieved what many believed impossible: she uncovered six of the locations the ERR sent their plunder for 'safe-keeping'. These were five castles - Neuschwanstein, Köge, Nickolsburg, Chiemsee and the Seiseinegg - and the Kloster Buxheim Monastery. They also used of salt mines located around the Third Reich. The only art that was not kept in any of these places was Göring's personal collection, which made the pieces he selected harder to locate. Her thorough research into the Nazi's own illegal art market, was one of the main reasons as to why the MFA&A were able to locate and repatriate around 60,000 pieces of stolen art - with 20,000 alone being found at Neuschwanstein Castle. Beaux-Art Captain Valland Rose Valland (left), Edith Standen (center) and Hubert de Bry (right) posing with art crates in May 1946. As the war neared its end, the Allied forces created the MFA&A - later receiving their famous nickname: the Monuments Men. A division formed by art historians, museum officials, architects and artists of all calibre composed by both men and women. A division that understood the threat faced by art and culture and were determined to save, restore, and repatriate the lost art. Rose Valland became invaluable to this division, as she held both the up-to-date information and deep knowledge of art. Like most professional organisations of the time, the MFA&A was mainly composed of men, but they had women in high ranks and working in important roles in the army. While they did not go to the front and fight to recover the plundered art, they were responsible with completing provenance research, organisation of restitution documents and helped analyse and locate Nazi hiding spots so platoons could go out and look for the loot. Rose Valland was one of these important women. Though she was not part of the MFA&A, she enlisted and became part of the French First Army in 1945 to continuously work for the safeguarding and return of art - granting her a Captain rank in the French army. She worked closely with the Allied division and became close with several members - describing in her book the friendship with Lieutenant James Rorimer, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one with complete trust between them. He was the one to whom she entrusted her list. For her efforts in assisting in recovering tens of thousands works of art, as well as her work during the war years, she received a series of medals and became the most decorated woman in the French Army. In the Monuments Men and Women website (which only changed its title to include 'Women' in 2022), she is listed to have received: the Legion of Honor, the Medal of the Résistance, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, became Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters appointed by the French government and, in 1948, she was awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom. Even though she received several military medals throughout the years, she was only recognised as a professional and granted the official work title of art curator in 1953. Rose Valland receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1948. Overlooked but not forgotten While Rose Valland might not (yet) be part of World War II discussions in academia, she certainly has not been entirely left out of the narrative. Films, biographies and books about her continue to be published. At the Jeu de Paume, a plaque was placed to honour her work and in Lyon an exhibition was put together presenting her story. All of this shows that her importance has not been entirely forgotten. Captain Valland might be remembered by few but with these acts she is able to come to life a little more through every new representation. In cinema she has been represented in two films, The Train (1964) and The Monuments Men (2014) but, in both feature films, her actions were diminished. The most recent film, which used Valland for character inspiration, even put the character back in the closet through an attempt of creating a romantic narrative with the Rorimer inspired character. Hollywood's change in her identity to construct - what they believe to be - an "interesting" narrative shows how little research was done on Valland and her importance and participation in the war efforts. An exhibition named Le Dame du Jeu de Paume was curated in 2009 and displayed through to 2010 at the CHRD (Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation) in Lyon, portraying the history of the art curator and her importance to France. A few books worth mentioning that have been published are her own, Le Front de L'Art (1961) that had a new edition printed in 2014 - with two articles and photos being added to the print -, Le Carnet des Rose Valland (2011) by Emmanuelle Pollack, which unites all of her manuscripts in one publication, and the most recent Rose Valland, l'espionne à l'oeuvre (2023) by Jennifer Lesieur, a biography about Valland's life and impact in art history. Plaque unveiled in 2005, located by the entry of the Jeu de Paume museum at the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. Even though the majority of the publications about her originate in France, many of the French themselves are not familiar with one of their national heroes. I was recently in a bookshop in Paris hunting down Valland's book and other pieces written about her and upon asking one of the shopkeepers whether they had it in stock, they wrote her name down incorrectly when checking. Her book about the war period stopped being published a few years after it was first released and - even though Valland expressed a desire to do so - it was never translated into English, something that diminished the outreach of her important work. The Saviour of Culture Rose Valland during her retirement, Collection Camille Garapont / Association La Mémoire de Rose Valland When the history and culture of Europe was at risk of being lost forever, Rose Valland made sure that this heritage would not disappear. A task that seemed impossible to complete, her efforts to continuously keep art safe and where it belonged is one of the biggest legacies left by Valland. She participated largely in the work for restitution of looted artworks for the French and Jewish families all over Europe. Captain Valland must be remembered and presented to the public. Without her, it is likely that tens of thousands of artworks would have been forever lost because of looting during the war. Further reading Campbell, Elizabeth. 2021. ‘Monuments Women and Men: Rethinking Popular Narratives via British Major Anne Olivier Popham’, International Journal of Cultural Property , 28.3: 409–24 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739121000308 Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation. 2010. ‘La Dame Du Jeu de Paume’, CHRD | Musée d’Histoire | Lyon Dans La Guerre, 1939-1945 https://www.chrd.lyon.fr/chrd/edito-musee/la-dame-du-jeu-de-paume Christie's. 2023. ‘Celebrating the Contributions of Women in Art Restitution, on the 25th Anniversary of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art’, Christie’s https://www.christies.com/features/celebrating-the-contributions-of-women-in-art-restitution-12668-1.aspx ERR Project. 2015. ‘Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR): Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume’, Errproject.org https://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/about/err.php Flanner, Janet. 1947. ‘The Beautiful Spoils - Collector with Luftwaffe’, The New Yorker (Condé Nast) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1947/03/08/the-beautiful-spoils-3 ‘Valland, Capt. Rose | Monuments Men and Women | Monuments Men Foundation’. [n.d.]. Monuments Men and Women Foundation https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/valland-capt-rose Valland, Rose. 2016. Le Front de l’Art : Défense Des Collections Françaises : 1939-1945 (Paris: Réunion Des Musées Nationaux)

What Does a Bartender Do? As the summer turns to autumn, sunny pub gardens and rooftop bars filled with drinkers fizzle out. I find myself reflecting on my friends in the hospitality industry, pondering the question, "What does a bartender do?" A more intriguing proposition, however, is "What did bartenders do?" The roles of bartenders, particularly female bartenders, have significantly influenced economics, civil rights, and social norms in both American and British contexts. In this article, I aim to unpack the role of female bartenders in the economics of the past and present, using London and New York as case studies. I will conclude by discussing the modern bar scene and the increasing appeal of alcohol to women. A Personal Journey into Bartending Having worked as a bartender for over five years, I have a personal interest in the origins of drinks, their influences, and the trending bars that shape our social experiences. Initially, I believed that female bartenders were a minority in the hospitality sector—a fluctuating statistic depending on the country and type of establishment. Research proved challenging, as I struggled to find reliable statistics on the percentage of female bartenders. However, the data I did uncover suggested a near 50/50 gender split in both the USA and UK (Martin, 2025). As of 2023, the total number of employees in pubs and bars reached approximately 470,000, an increase from 460,000 in 2019 (Statista, 2024). So, is bartending still a male-dominated profession? While stereotypes persist, the reality is more nuanced. Historically, women were integral to bars, taverns, and inns, often serving in front-of-house roles. Landladies and barmaids were essential to the functioning of respectable establishments (Powers, 1995). Yet, as the decades progressed, fewer women found employment in the hospitality workforce. When and why did this seemingly favourable occupation change? The Impact of Prohibition One significant turning point in both economic and domestic spheres was Prohibition in the USA during the 1920s and 30s. The United States faced heavy economic losses and a surge in illicit alcohol smuggling (Sutcliffe, 2025), affecting both men and women across various sectors, not just hospitality. As the USA modernised, larger cities like New York began to scrutinise the "virtue" and "respectability" of women in the workforce. This topic is explored in Diane Kirby's 1997 article, Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs . After World War I, returning men reclaimed jobs that women had filled during their absence, including positions in traditional male drinking establishments. This shift led to laws in multiple states that barred women from entering bars. Women had bolstered the wartime economy only to be sidelined once the war concluded. Despite the lack of a nationwide law prohibiting women from working as bartenders and barmaids, individual states and cities enacted their own regulations. According to these laws, no respectable woman should be found in places where alcohol was served (Kirby, 1997), lest she be deemed indecent and suffer reputational damage. Women could drink privately or at parties, provided they were chaperoned by a man. Establishments that employed women faced legal repercussions and economic losses, as male patrons expressed their displeasure (Powers, 1995). The Hotel and Restaurant Employers and Bartenders International Union (HREI), formed in 1890, imposed strict regulations against women in the industry (Powers, 1995). However, female membership in the union grew from 2,000 in 1908 to 181,000 by 1950, indicating a clear trend towards the feminisation of the hospitality industry. Despite this rise in female membership, campaigns against women in bars emerged after World War II in the USA, targeting those soliciting drinks from men. Known as "b-girls" or "bargirls," they were branded as sleazy and immoral (Sholtis, 2020), often compared to prostitutes. This stigma effectively socially banned women from drinking publicly in some states. The Changing Landscape Post-Prohibition After Prohibition ended in 1933, by 1948, 17 US states still had laws forbidding women from bartending. By 1960, this number had grown to 26 (Silverman, 2025). Yet, women remained the predominant customers when ordering cocktails in states where they were permitted entry into bars. Female-only spaces occasionally existed within bars or pubs, and even hotels had designated Ladies' rooms and tables. The women who frequented these establishments were often the mothers, sisters, daughters, or wives of men who worked or owned them. Meanwhile, men continued to drink ales and hard liquors, both illegally during Prohibition and afterwards. In the United Kingdom, the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act preceded the Equality Act of 2010, initiating the dismantling of outdated and sexist laws. While there were no laws outright prohibiting women from entering bars or pubs, it remained socially acceptable to refuse service to women until a 1982 London court case ruled this practice as an infringement of rights (Kirby, 1997). This legal loophole stemmed from the perception that bars and pubs were traditionally male spaces, and women would not desire entry. However, the reality was that bars and pubs were losing male customers, leading me to believe that women indeed influenced economics and alcohol sales. For instance, from 1900 to 1933 in the USA, drink orders shifted from straight liquor to mixed drinks, as I will elaborate on in the following sections. Women’s movements, such as the UK’s Suffragettes, began to advocate for equal rights, resulting in an increase in female patrons in bars (Sholtis, 2020) as a form of protest. The Role of Women in Shaping Cocktail Culture The influences of changing alcoholic consumption patterns, including available spirits, trends, and economic positioning in society, fundamentally altered how women (and men) ordered drinks in bars. One influential figure in this transformation is bartender Ada Coleman, affectionately known as "Coley" (1875-1966). She became the first female Head Bartender at the American Bar in The Savoy Hotel in London in 1903 (Sutcliffe, 2025). Born in 1875, she began her professional bartending career at the age of 24 in London’s Claridges Hotel before quickly rising to work at The Savoy alongside another female bartender, Ruth "Kitty" Burgess. Ada became renowned for her eccentric personality, innovative drinks, and impeccable service. Many bartenders credit her with trailblazing and creating classic cocktail recipes. She is best known for crafting the ‘Hanky Panky’ cocktail for actor Sir Charles Hawtrey, who requested a surprise drink (Sutcliffe, 2025). This cocktail, a delightful mix of gin, sweet vermouth, and Fernet-Branca, is a variation of a sweet martini known as a Martinez. The Hanky Panky was a major success and remains a staple at The Savoy today. Ada served there for 23 years before retiring as the highly respected Ladies Cloakroom attendant in her mid-60s. Ada ‘Coley’ Coleman pictured in 1920 at The Savoy (Wikipedia, 2025) As previously mentioned, women significantly influenced economics through alcohol sales, as drink demands evolved after Prohibition. The barmaids and bartenders who navigated these changes are described as "legends" by Kirby, capable of making or breaking the trade. The commercialisation of women’s spaces also drove up the demand for drinks and leisure venues, yet much scholarship surrounding these topics tends to overlook this impact. When women popularised cocktails and transformed bars into spaces of leisure in both the USA and UK, it coincided with the economic freedom they gained in the workforce (Kirby, 1997). Consequently, women could advocate for their right to drink in public bars, as they represented a growing clientele. The new cocktail culture not only generated revenue but also fostered creativity in bars after Prohibition ended (Sutcliffe, 2025) and, in the UK, before, during, and after World War Two. Women ventured into movie theatres, drive-throughs, amusement parks, dance halls, and hotels, challenging traditional societal norms. This shift unsettled many men in power, as women gained both freedom and disposable income. The Modern Bar Scene: A New Era Connecting alcohol to women’s liberation is explored in detail in Elizabeth Sholtis’ 2020 article, Shaking Things Up: The Influence of Women on the American Cocktail . This piece examines drink orders and classic recipes that women popularised or invented. Sholtis begins with the aftermath of Prohibition. Prior to this period, cocktails featured fewer and simpler ingredients. However, once alcohol became readily available again, bars needed to entice customers back with flair. Some women ordered hard spirits, just like men, opting for rum, brandy, whisky, gin fizzes, and Old Fashioneds—the latter being a traditional male drink. Yet, many women preferred to dilute their drinks, using egg white and sugar syrup, known as a ‘Flip’. This concoction is akin to a modern-day ‘Sour cocktail’, which typically includes citrus juices. When hosting parties, women would often prepare a punch recipe: a mix of water, citrus, sugar, liquor, and nutmeg. This approach catered to female tastes, prompting the economy to respond with bars and hotel bars adding these drinks to their menus. This adaptation led to increased revenue for these establishments, as more customers spent time and money within their walls. Gin emerged as a common ingredient in new cocktails because it could be easily mixed with water or fruit juices (Sholtis, 2020). This versatility gave rise to one of my favourite cocktails, The Bees Knees. Attributed to The Ritz in Paris during the 1920s, it has its origins in Prohibition. The Bees Knees consists of lemon juice, gin, honey, and sometimes egg white. Like the ‘Flip’, it avoids the harsher taste of pure gin, appealing to many women’s palates with its floral sweetness. Other cocktails in this vein include variations like ‘The Last Word’, the ‘French 75’ with champagne, and the classic martini with vermouth. The images below are from my previous workplace, The Castle Hotel, where I was involved in creating and photographing these drinks, circa Christmas 2024 and March 2025. Over time, I have learned that family ventures and businesses involving women in taverns or inns became self-sustaining professions before being made illegal. Bartending is a relatively recent profession, gaining recognition over the last century alongside advancements in unions, such as the HREI. Social conventions and laws have evolved, including a new zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment in the workplace. This evolution has forced bartending and drinking cultures to adapt, as discussed throughout this article. As we enter the 21st century, a new drinking culture emerges, drawing inspiration from remnants of the past scattered throughout pubs and classic hotels. I find great enjoyment in the London nightlife; trends are constantly emerging, creating a dynamic evening out. From 2023 onwards, we have witnessed a rise in intimate spaces, smaller music venues featuring themed drinks, and bars inspired by popular culture, such as those themed around Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter . Additionally, we see popular themed bars like Art Deco speakeasies, dungeons, retro discos, or tropical rooftops (O’Neill, 2025). Mixology is gaining popularity, with conceptual experiences for handcrafted cocktails (O’Neill, 2025). Late-night venues remain a favourite among young adults in the workforce. Overall, in London, going out to bars has transformed into a meaningful, intimate event rather than a casual hangout. In contrast, New York City adopts a more casual approach to engage customers, with business owners excelling at managing casual food spots alongside quality drinks, emphasising the "clubstaurant" concept. Wellness, social interaction, and mental health have become central to emerging trends in the Big Apple (Kumamoto, 2025). The flashy venues, glamour, and excessive alcohol consumption have seemingly taken a backseat. Notably, New York City hosts female-only bartender competitions like "Speed Rack," where many up-and-coming bartenders showcasing innovation are women (Archibald, 2024). Nevertheless, traditional pubs, clubs, and popular bars continue to thrive despite the rise of gimmicky trends. Both cities boast fantastic drinks and quality food, focusing on customer experience and branding in recent trends. I believe these bars and clubs appeal more to women than men, as they offer fewer legal constraints, safer spaces, and a wider array of drink choices, including themed or mixed cocktails rather than just hard liquor, beer, or wine (Kumamoto, 2025). Female bartenders are influential in the New York City bar scene, notably establishing some of the city's most exclusive cocktail bars, such as Clover Club, Temple Bar, and Leyenda (Archibald, 2024). In my view, this grants female bartenders greater freedom and creative space. I also believe that women are more drawn to bars where other women are visible—both as employees and patrons. This observation has been evident throughout my article, highlighting that women are essential customers who contribute to the profits of establishments and the local economy. We have witnessed the upward mobility of women in bars and as bartenders, thanks to their influence on consumer patterns. More women are choosing to defy historical social values and drink in public. Alcohol, bars, and pubs hold significant cultural and economic value, and I believe this will remain constant, even amid demographic changes. We have seen consumers and alcohol foster diversity and creativity in the workplace, prompting changes to 20th-century laws in America, especially (Sutcliffe, 2025). Cocktails, in my opinion, were among the fastest-growing drink items between the 1930s and 2000s due to their appeal and marketing as a "woman's drink," leading to a behaviour where women dominated that specific market. As explored in Kirby and Sholtis’s articles, diverse drink orders from new female patrons have resulted in significant economic success for bars and pubs, with many classic drinks, like Ada Coleman’s Hanky Panky, being invented. Currently, the demand for new bars, spaces, and events remains unwavering across all gender demographics. Both London and New York City showcase talent in curating these venues, catering to women and fostering innovation, offering fresh perspectives on the overall drinking culture. We must not forget that today’s cocktail culture was propelled to the forefront by women who simply wanted a drink. Sources Archibald, A. (2024). Meet 6 “Spirited” Women Who Are Changing NYC’s Cocktail Scene. online] NYC Tourism+Conventions. Available at: [https://www.nyctourism.com/articles/meet-the-women-changing-nyc-cocktail-scene/ [Accessed 28 Jul. 2025] Kirby, D. (1997). Barmaids: A history of women’s work in pubs. online] Academia. Available at: [https://www.academia.edu/97374044/Barmaids_A_History_of_Womens_Work_in_Pubs [Accessed 19 Jun. 2025] Godwin, E. (2019). A Potted History Of Women In Bars. online] Broadsheet. Available at: [https://www.broadsheet.com.au/perth/food-and-drink/article/potted-history-women-bars [Accessed 23 May 2025] Powers, M. (1995). Women and Public Drinking. online] History Today. Available at: [https://www.historytoday.com/archive/women-and-public-drinking-1890-1920 [Accessed 19 Jun. 2025] Holtman French, A. (2021). How Women Fought for the Right to be Bartenders. online] Available at: [https://daily.jstor.org/how-women-fought-for-the-right-to-be-bartenders [Accessed 6 May 2025] Sholtis, E. (2020). Shaking Things Up: The Influence Of Women On The American Cocktail. online] Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review. Available at: [https://vtuhr.org/articles/10.21061/vtuhr.v9i0.4 [Accessed 18 Jun. 2025] Silverman, S. (2025). Female Bartenders Barred (1937). online] Available at: [https://uselessinformation.org/female-bartenders-barred-1937 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2025] O’Neill, L. (2025). Forget Wine Bars, London’s New Bar Culture Is All About Casual Late Night Eateries. online] British Vogue. Available at: [https://www.bing.com/search?q=-+Lauren+O%E2%80%99Neill+%E2%80%98Forget+Wine+Bars%2C+London%E2%80%99s+New+Bar+Culture+Is+All+About+Casual+Late+Night+Eateries%E2%80%99+2025%2C+British+Vogue&qs=ds&form=QBRE [Accessed 3 Jun. 2025] Statista (2024). Number of employees in pubs and bars in the United Kingdom. online] Statista Research Development. Available at: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118453/employment-in-pubs-and-bars-uk/#statisticContainer [Accessed 3 Jun. 2025] Martin, D. (2025). Exploring The Demographics of Bartending: Are Most Bartenders Female? online] TheBlog Journal. Available at: [https://theblogjournal.com/are-most-bartenders-female [Accessed 3 Jun. 2025] Kumamoto, I. (2025). Out Late: What insiders and partygoers are predicting for NYC nightlife in 2025 online] TimeOut. Available at: [https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/out-late-what-insiders-and-partygoers-are-predicting-for-nyc-nightlife-in-2025-022525 [Accessed 4 Jun. 2025] Sutcliffe, T. (2025). Ada Coleman online] Difford’s Guide. Available at: [https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/2857/people/ada-coleman [Accessed 10 Jun. 2025] Sutcliffe, T. (2025). A Brief History of Cocktails online] Difford’s Guide. Available at: [https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/2294/cocktails/a-brief-history-of-cocktails [Accessed 10 Jun. 2025] Images: Wikipedia (2025). Ada Coleman online] Available at: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Coleman [Accessed 21 Sept 2025] Acknowledgments: HERstory Project The Castle Hotel, Taunton

Cook, Susan, Alethia Lethe Tanner, Https://Www.alethiatanner.com/, 2014 Given the outcome of the most recent American presidential election, the story of Alethia ‘Lethe’ Tanner (c. 1785–1864) feels particularly necessary to recount and reclaim. Her narrative underscores the often-overlooked but vital role Black women have played, and continue to play, at the forefront of the fight for democracy in America. Lethe, an enslaved woman in the early nineteenth century, surmounted enormous obstacles to purchase her freedom and become a community leader in modern-day Washington, DC. She not only secured freedom for herself and eighteen relatives but also made significant social and financial contributions to local churches and schools that were critical to the newly freed population in Washington. Her efforts were rooted in her entrepreneurial beginnings as a produce cart vendor on what is now Lafayette Square, just outside the White House. The Misrepresentation of Lethe Tanner A precursor to note is that while Alethia is often referred to as “Alethia Browning Tanner,” this name is historically inaccurate. Key documents, such as her manumission papers and her final will and testament, consistently show that she signed her name as “Lethe Tanner.” Lethe, likely a shortened form of Alethia, reflects the name she preferred and will be used accordingly in this article. The first appearance of “Browning” in connection to Lethe occurred in 1868, four years after her death, in the report Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia . This report contains many factual inaccuracies, such as misrepresenting the means Lethe used to purchase her sister’s freedom. Such errors undermine its credibility as a source for remembering Lethe’s life and reflect a recurring pattern of government documents inaccurately depicting the identities of enslaved individuals. Reconstructing Lethe's Life Reconstructing Lethe’s life requires us to fill in the gaps left by archival silences, an endeavor historian Annette Gordon-Reed describes as an “imaginative enterprise.” To minimise conjecture, we turn to firsthand accounts, such as those of Susan Cook, Tanner’s four-time great-niece, whose memory has been preserved through generational rediscovery. Interviewing Cook has been indispensable to this article, offering unique insights into the significance of Lethe’s story and the lessons it holds. Given, however, the scarcity of these accounts, interpretive frameworks are useful to understand and reconstruct Lethe’s life. Her story is often placed within the self-emancipation historiographical narrative, advanced by scholars like James McPherson and Michael Johnson, which emphasises the agency of enslaved people in securing their freedom through independent resistance, separate from abolitionists and external forces. However, this framework is ill-suited to Lethe’s story and fails to do it justice. The narrow focus on the Civil War era overlooks earlier acts of resistance in the early nineteenth century and remains heavily androcentric, often neglecting the experiences of enslaved Black women. Moreover, and most importantly, its emphasis on exceptional acts of freedom obscures the broader, collective dimensions of resistance that shaped enslaved people’s lives and aspirations. Instead, I adopt Tamika Nunley’s commendable concept of ‘self-making’ as a more fitting lens for interpreting Lethe’s life. Unlike the traditional self-emancipation narrative, which centres on the singular act of achieving legal freedom, self-making explores the ongoing process of constructing a self-determined identity, even within systems that denied enslaved individuals legal or social recognition. Freedom vs. Liberty This article maintains a clear distinction between freedom and liberty: while freedom often marks the breaking of legal barriers, liberty reflects the broader, ongoing struggle to fashion an identity and live on one’s own terms. Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “afterlives” resonates strongly here, arguing that America’s ideals of “democratic individuality” often failed to extend to formerly enslaved women who continued to face systemic constraints rooted in race and gender even after manumission. Lethe, as a free woman in a slave-holding region with no tangible power or resources to rely on, exemplified this struggle. Her afterlife was defined by sustaining her produce cart business until 1853, purchasing the freedom of her relatives, and establishing a school — all of which reflected her enduring commitment to community and liberation. Early Life and Path to Freedom Originally enslaved on the Chelsea Plantation in Upper Marlboro, Maryland — first by Tobias Belt and later by his daughter, Rachel Belt Pratt — Lethe began her path to freedom as a produce vendor on today’s Lafayette Square. Through her earnings, she was able to purchase her own freedom, a significant moment documented in July 1810 when she provided $275 to Joseph Daugherty. Given the legislation of the time barring a direct transaction, Daugherty paid Pratt on Lethe’s behalf. The purchasing of her own freedom was not a transactional, isolated act of emancipation; it was rather the culmination of a longer history of her “small” — as Cook describes — everyday acts of self-making which served as catalysts for lasting change. This narrative challenges conventional accounts that often exclude figures like Lethe from exploration within the archival record, merely reducing them to generalised and simplified examples of emancipation. Moreover, her freedom was the product of sustained identity formation, resistance, and self-determination within a system built to suppress her very existence. Cedric Robinson’s outline of ‘racial capitalism’ further contextualises her within this system that relied on the persistent subjugation of Black people in the American labour economy. Lethe’s navigation of this system reflects her awareness of how her race and gender shaped her proximity to the law and how self-making involved managing diverse pathways between her imposed social position and reimagining herself outside their confines. Viewed through this lens, Lethe not only resisted the structures of power that sought to define her identity but actively destabilised them; challenging the misconception of passivity, showing that resistance was not confined to overt or isolated acts but included the transformative power of striving for identities that transcended the legal and social constraints of their time. A Commitment to Family and Community Fifteen years after her initial manumission, Lethe remained persistent, paying approximately $1,400 in multiple installments to secure the freedom of her sister Laurana Cook in 1826, along with her six children — reflective of her selflessness and commitment to family over her own financial benefit. Drawing on N. Z. Davis’s micro-historiographical framework, which focuses on human agency within systemic contexts to reveal broader social practices and collective mentalities, Lethe’s story demonstrates that freedom was neither a singular nor isolated act. Instead, it was part of a larger, interconnected network of community efforts that made her emancipation — and that of those around her — possible. Hartman’s concept of afterlives is evident in Lethe’s post-emancipation life, as her establishment of the Bell School in 1807 fostered an ethos of community-driven resilience and self-determination, particularly for young girls, enabling Black women to articulate their readiness to assume societal roles otherwise denied to them. Lethe’s legacy also included providing her nephew, John F. Cook Sr., with the space to establish both his church and school in her home; institutions which played a crucial role in educating and raising the next generation of key figures, including Charles Hamilton Houston, who would go on to drive the Civil Rights Movement. These vital educational institutions symbolised Lethe’s commitment to creating a self-sufficient community, showcasing the vibrancy and resilience of free Black Washingtonians in the early nineteenth century. By the time of the Civil War, this commitment of personally freeing more than eighteen individuals contributed to the District’s transformation into a majority-free Black population, growing from 2,549 in 1810 to 11,131 by 1860. The Ongoing Struggle for Freedom Yet, the shadow of slavery persisted, as enslaved women faced exploitation from neighbouring counties in response to the declining Chesapeake tobacco economy between 1800 and 1820. For free Black residents during the Antebellum period, the dangers were severe, with violence and laws that made their freedom precarious. Without freedom papers, they could be legally abducted and sold back into slavery in the Deep South. This underscores the deeply entrenched systems of power designed to maintain the status quo — structures that have endured for centuries. For Lethe, self-making was not solely about achieving freedom, both before and during her afterlife, but also redefining her relationship to her context, her space, and her community’s future. Indeed, the sociological context of Lafayette Square carries layered spatial significance. Lethe’s reality unfolded in the shadow of the White House and Congress; buildings which imposed the normative and legal powers of the legislative and executive branches of government, where both de jure and de facto influence was felt upon those in proximity. Her daily occupation of this public space directly challenged the exclusion enforced by these surrounding powers, exemplifying sustained resistance to systemic oppression. Rather than relying on isolated acts of defiance, Lethe actively shaped an identity that transcended her immediate circumstances. The Legacy of Alethia Tanner Lethe’s life, situated at the intersection of personal agency and spatial significance, exemplifies how Black women’s self-making was both an act of resistance and a means of reshaping their environments. As Nunley asserts, Lethe transformed the square into a stage for experimentation and the assertion of freedoms at a time when the nation’s capital was still defining itself. Underscoring, however, the paradoxical nature of the District itself: while the nation’s founders envisioned the city as a beacon of Republican virtues, it instead embodied the contradictions of a country built on the lack of freedom of many. Most importantly, through the claims she made, the life she built, and the identities she forged, Lethe laid the foundation for a free Black Washington, asserting agency and equality in a space that professed liberty while excluding Black women from its vision of freedom. Defiance of these codes underscores the navigational strategies these women must have employed. Historians have uncovered aspects of these women’s experiences through sources like runaway advertisements, vigilance networks, kidnapping cases, and judicial accounts, including criminal records. Reading these sources against the grain reveals how the Black codes of the time shaped the legal parameters of Black women’s claims to liberty, even after manumission in their ‘afterlives’. What is particularly striking about Lethe’s case is her absence from criminal records, suggesting she navigated the law with remarkable skill and resilience, in an atmosphere overtly against her. This absence speaks to the power of perseverance — a legacy embodied in her daily acts of showing up and refusing to be erased. Remembering Lethe in this way defies the long-standing narratives that underestimate the agency of enslaved women. Instead, it offers a deeper understanding of the resilience and creativity Black women employed in envisioning, surviving, and giving meaning to liberty in nineteenth-century America. The Importance of Remembering Lethe As a first-generation Washingtonian, I was deeply moved to learn about Lethe’s remarkable history. It was surprising — and somewhat disheartening — that her story had remained so unfamiliar to me, and I assume to many others. Lethe’s contributions are pivotal not only to the history of Washington DC but also speak to the resilience and ingenuity of marginalised individuals whose voices have been overlooked in traditional archives and grander historical narratives — particularly in women’s history, where their values are often dismissed since they are rarely articulated according to their own terms. Uncovering and honouring Lethe’s life demonstrates the value of ‘anecdotal’ history in amplifying the experiences of those too often excluded from conventional historiography. Personal stories like hers are deeply impactful and vital for understanding the complexity of the past. By piecing together her legacy, we can better appreciate her profound influence and ensure her story takes its rightful place in the broader tapestry of American history. Cook’s recollections, alongside public commemorations, serve as a bridge between Lethe’s life and her enduring influence. Alessandro Portelli’s insights on oral history are particularly valuable in this instance, as they highlight how memories, even when factually inaccurate, can capture the emotional truths of historical events. Lethe’s legacy is preserved through public commemorations and contemporary accounts from descendants like Cook, reflecting how these spaces become a continuum of her contributions, enshrining her legacy for future generations. Events and spaces such as Alethia Tanner Day and Alethia Tanner Park continue to honour her memory, hosting activities centred on the same values of community building she championed back in the early nineteenth century. As Cook describes, “it’s a full-time job” to uncover Lethe’s story — research continuously emerges, reshaping our interpretations of her. Though her story has often been overlooked, its resonance with people is undeniable. “The heroes we seek aren’t always those in power,” as Cook says, “knowing these stories of people who toiled without the fanfare or the accolades from the powers that be,” reminds us of the strength and determination of ordinary individuals. These untold stories need to be celebrated. The individual nature of her story is deeply impactful, helping us understand that these were real people with names, and that their lives truly mattered. To fully understand her story, one must consider the turbulent environment in which she lived: Washington DC was in its early stages of development, with the capital city still under construction. The conflicts and challenges of that time resonate with the struggles and complexities of today, making her story all the more relevant. Lethe’s legacy reflects not only her resilience but also the countless untold stories of others like her. Her story endures not only in the historical record but also in the collective memory of those who honour and preserve it, as Cook reflects, “she was a linchpin to the successes that my family was able to have after that,” underscoring how Lethe’s influence shaped the course of the lives of her family and likely many others. There is still much to uncover about Lethe and other “self-makers” of her time. Lethe’s memory, therefore, transcends her individual achievements, highlighting the transformative power of collective agency in formulating new identities and strategies for liberation — defying the racial and gendered boundaries of their time and leaving legacies that influenced subsequent generations. Bibliography Primary sources   Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools: In the District of Columbia , HathiTrust (Department of Education: Commissioner of Education, June 1868) < https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000947607p&seq=9 > Susan Cook, ‘Lethe Tanner Was Here’, Lethe Tanner Was Here , 2014 < https://www.alethiatanner.com/transcriptions > Tanner, Alethia ‘Lethe’, LAST WILL and TESTAMENT: ALETHIA LETHE TANNER , 1847 < https://www.alethiatanner.com/transcriptions > Tanner, Alethia Lethe, and Senator Richard Mentor Johnson, BILL of SALE: Oscar Fitz, Allen Cook, William Cook, Alfred Cook, Betsey Cook, John Cook, and Their Mother Laurana Cook , 1826 < https://www.alethiatanner.com/transcriptions > Thornton, William, and Joseph Daugherty, MANUMISSION: For Lethe Tanner (Recorder of Deeds, 1810) Secondary sources Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1991) Arzate, Héctor Alejandro, ‘The Long History of Black Street Vendors in D.C.’, DCist (WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio, 2023) < https://dcist.com/story/23/03/14/dc-alethia-tanner-black-street-vendors/ > Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) Crawford-Lackey, Katherine, ‘Public Protest as a Claim to Citizenship: Twentieth-Century Occupations of Washington, D.C. And Their Role in Public Memory’ (2020) < https://www.proquest.com/docview/2396699103?sourcetype=Dissertations%20 &%20Theses> Daniels, Omari, ‘Alethia Tanner Day Honors Enslaved Woman Who Bought Her Freedom’, Washington Post , 24 July 2022 < https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/23/alethia-tanner-day-noma- park/> Gordon-Reed, Annette, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009) Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Johnson, Michael P., ‘Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators’, The William and Mary Quarterly , 58.4 (2001), 915 < https://doi.org/10.2307/2674506 > Jones, Carla J., Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA., and Oxford University Press (USA) African American Studies Center., ‘Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade’, ed. by Jennifer Mojica Santana, Enslaved.org < https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-126837/ > McPherson, James M., ‘Who Freed the Slaves?’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 139.1 (1995), 1–10 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/986716 > Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) Nunley, Tamika Y, At the Threshold of Liberty (UNC Press Books, 2021) Robinson, Cedric J, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (United States: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) The White House Historical Association, ‘Self-Emancipation in Lafayette Park’, WHHA (En-US) < https://www.whitehousehistory.org/self-emancipation-in-lafayette-park >

It’s that time of the year where romance is in the air (or maybe it isn’t) and the perfect opportunity to watch a classic rom-com presents itself. Please excuse me as I indulge myself; romantic comedies happen to be my favourite film genre, so interesting to me that I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about 1990’s rom-coms. Did I do it as an excuse to rewatch some (not-so-guilty) guilty pleasures? Yes. But did I also want to examine the representations of women, sexuality and feminist discourse in these surprisingly complex films? Absolutely.  We all know the well-versed story of girl meets boy, they fall in love, face adversity, overcome said adversity, and live happily ever after. The end. The romantic comedy is “a genre that has continually been vilified for its poor artistic quality”, and the fact that, even today, it is regarded with contempt signals the low cultural value society places upon women’s interests. So the various mechanisms and ideologies that are in place within the rom-com, influencing perceptions of womanhood and romance, are not always highlighted within mainstream discourse of these films. On the face of it, most of them depict women falling hopelessly in love, sacrificing themselves or their dreams in the pursuit of a husband, which doesn’t seem very 'feminist'. At a time where pop culture was promoting Girl Power, romantic comedies were proposing a more nostalgic, traditional and hegemonic version of womanhood. Film scholars Steve Neale and Tamar Jeffers McDonald, building on Neale’s work, have coined this period of rom-coms as ‘new romances’ or ‘neo-traditional romances’, noting conventions of conservatism in the films of this time. I also suggest that there is a distinction to be made between the ‘rom-com’ and the ‘chick-flick’; the latter is associated with “a return to femininity, the primacy of romantic attachments, girlpower, a focus on female pleasure and […] the value of consumer culture and girlie goods[…]”, while the new romance is focused entirely on securing the most traditional and modest ending for its characters. Notably, the rise of ‘postfeminism’ emerged around this time. Purporting to offer women choice over the way they lead their lives and citing the redundancy of feminism now that gender equality has supposedly been achieved, postfeminism often  promotes conservative life choices for women, reinforcing gender expectations rather than dismantling them. In these new romances women are encouraged to hold a complex and contradictory position; pursuing success in both their professional and personal lives, which inevitably results in unequal roles in relationships and failure in not meeting society’s expectations. It is important to note that the romantic comedies of this time, and postfeminism more generally, favour white, heterosexual, middle-class women, therefore failing to recognise diversity and disparity within womens’ experiences which means that this version of womanhood is not accessible to all. If you couldn’t already tell, I’m not exactly the biggest believer in postfeminism’s promise that women can have it all.  The neo-traditional rom-coms embody the postfeminist inclination for conservatism and conventional femininity; women are encouraged to seek out romance, yet be virtuous, to view marriage as the pinnacle of life, but not appear desperate, and above all strive for a life of domestic bliss. Women enjoy these films and identify with their characters, yet the female representations are not necessarily empowering nor aligned with contemporary feminist thought. But I, and millions of others, still love classic rom-coms like Sleepless In Seattle  or Notting Hill , and they don’t necessarily empower women and their life choices. There must be something at work within these films for them to have experienced such prolonged popularity, but is it at the expense of feminist principles? Sex (or a lack of) in neo-traditional rom-coms The de-emphasis of sex is central in the romantic comedies from this period, presenting women who are less interested in having sexual, physically-fulfilling relationships than they are in forming an emotional connection with ‘the one’. The ‘neo-traditional’ woman possesses a certain innocence and conservatism as she desires romance, a husband and family just as much as, if not more than, individual success in life. In You’ve Got Mail , when asked about having ‘cyber-sex’ with her chatroom friend ‘NYC152’, Kathleen (Meg Ryan) primly responds, “it’s not like that”, insinuating that the concept is shocking, or simply too sexy to be something she engages with. Apart from Pretty Woman ’s Vivian (a sex worker), the new romance woman is a desexualised being. The neo-traditional woman’s sexuality (her hetero sexuality) is inherently foregrounded by the genre, which showcases the perceived stability and romantic supremacy of heterosexual relationships, but her body is never a site of sex appeal. Women are therefore rewarded with a relationship and success in return for enacting post-feminism’s conservative version of femininity. Casual dating is not relevant to these women, instead abstinence is framed as the responsible, ‘right’ decision before meeting ‘the one’. This sets an expectation for women to be selective in their choice of romantic or sexual partner if they want to be completely romantically fulfilled. Postfeminist ideals of ‘having it all’ are pertinent to every aspect of women’s lives, and these rom-coms aid in creating that precedent. A traditional modern woman: Kathleen unknowingly falls in love in real life with the the man she speaks to online. You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron (Warner Bros., 1998) Of course, an exception to this trope is rom-com icon Bridget Jones (Reneé Zellweger). She engages first in a lustful, thrilling love affair with her boss  Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) and later a passionate, albeit tumultuous, relationship with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). She enjoys her independence as a modern woman, free to enjoy sex and casual dating, but also acknowledges that she still lives under the patriarchy. In order to feel feminine and attractive she attempts to quit smoking and lose weight; she painfully waxes, shaves and plucks her body hair and dreads the prospect of becoming a spinster, despite being just thirty. While Bridget does represent a new kind of womanhood for the new millennium, she also represents the postfeminist hangover from the 1990s, believing that the conventions of traditional femininity will bring her lifelong happiness in the form of a man who loves her. Since the film’s release almost 25 years ago, it has been debated online and in academia alike whether Bridget Jones’s Diary  is a piece of feminist work. I don’t think this film seeks to radically empower women and I don’t see Bridget as the ultimate feminist icon. But what she represents, a simultaneous awareness of the patriarchy yet conformity to its gender expectations, is something most women can relate to. For that reason, Bridget represents a very real and sympathetic version of womanhood and femininity which I believe makes her at the very least a female icon. She isn’t perfect, but neither is the woman watching her at home. New romance women in the workplace While women in new romances are depicted as professionally successful, as Diane Negra notes, these films “offset the threat of the urban ‘career woman’ by establishing her use of workplace resources as a means in the pursuit of romance”, constructing a retrograde image of modern working women. In Sleepless In Seattle Annie (Meg Ryan) uses her journalist resources to locate Sam (Tom Hanks) after hearing him on the radio, while Vivian accidentally finds love working as Edward’s prostitute in Pretty Woman . Bridget Jones has a flirty (pretty inappropriate) workplace relationship with her boss, which would certainly bring up some red flags and an email to HR in our current society. Kathleen’s first face-to-face meeting with Joe (Tom Hanks) in You’ve Got Mail is in her independent bookstore, ‘The Shop Around the Corner’. Throughout the film they shift from acquaintances, to rivals in the book-selling business, and eventually become lovers, connecting Kathleen’s career to the romantic plot. So while the women in neo-traditional rom-coms do not necessarily enter their professions seeking romance, the continuous use of this narrative reinforces the representation of women not taking their work seriously, encouraging their regression out of the workplace and into domestic roles. This rejection of the workplace in the pursuit of love directly challenges the matter of ‘having it all’ that I mentioned earlier. Under postfeminist thought, women are expected to balance a high-flying career, a fulfilling romantic relationship and maintenance of rigorous beauty standards. These romantic comedies profess to depict women embodying the harmonious achievement of all three of these categories by the end of the film with their happy endings. But what they actually portray is the struggle to attain this equilibrium; in many of these films the female protagonist is required to sacrifice an element of herself in order to reach the conservative postfeminist pinnacle of a heterosexual relationship. “Big, Huge”: Vivian can only embark on her journey to ‘having it all’ once she looks the part. Pretty Woman, dir. by Garry Marshall (Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1990) In Sleepless In Seattle , Annie is opposed to the idea of destiny at the beginning of the film, however once she hears Sam’s voice on the radio one night she suddenly believes that she belongs with this man she has never met. She embodies a simultaneous dichotomy of passive follower of fate and active believer in her own choices as the film sees Annie forgo her principles (dismissing destiny) and  search to find the mysterious man to whom she is inexplicably drawn. This demonstrates how, under the guise of postfeminist ‘choice’, destiny presents women with “well-regulated liberty” rather than complete free will. In the neo-traditional rom-com, postfeminism is ideologically linked with the concept of destiny; what is framed as a magical alignment of soul mates in actuality justifies the reinstatement of women in a position of domesticity. Similarly, in You’ve Got Mail , Kathleen renounces her career, personal judgement and independence after Joe (her love interest) puts her out of business and conceals the truth about knowing her true identity on an over-thirties’ chatroom. Bridget Jones also feels compelled to leave her desirable publishing job because of her love interest. Although it is her decision to leave the publishing firm, the uncomfortable position Daniel puts her in (by having begun a relationship with someone he is in charge of’ and subsequently cheating on her) speaks to the choices modern women have to navigate, prioritising a relationship over a career, which confirms the difficulty of truly being able to have it all. She ultimately quits because of a man who makes her feel desperate and embarrassed. Crucially, in many of the romantic relationships portrayed in the neo-traditional rom-coms their foundations are built upon duplicity and power imbalance between man and woman. Joe knows Kathleen’s online identity, closes her bookstore, and still romantically pursues her, while Edward in Pretty Woman  is aware of his growing feelings for Vivian and continues to engage in their relationship, despite its transactional nature. Vivian and Kathleen are not equal to Edward and Joe in terms of knowledge, power or economic standing during the foundational moments of their relationships, thus setting a precedent for the behaviours and power dynamic that women should expect from aspirational on-screen relationships. This simply reiterates postfeminism’s roots in conservative heterosexual identity. These films are able to construct romance from male agency and female passivity by depicting such relationships with ‘happily ever afters’ and the promise of a stable future in the form of blissful domesticity. Having it all: Anna achieves fame, family and romance in Notting Hill, Roger Michell (Universal Pictures, 1999) Interestingly, Anna (Julia Roberts) in Notting Hill  subverts this trend. She does not forfeit any part of herself or lifestyle, instead ending up with a more desirable way of life than she has at the beginning of the film. Through gaining a relationship with William (Hugh Grant), Anna is able to maintain an acting career, husband, children and fame, but only because he is the one to devote his life to her, rather than her to him. But it is clear that Anna is only able to achieve this position as the epitome of the postfeminist woman because of her social standing as a wealthy white woman. So while she represents something idealistic for the postfeminist rom-com, she is not necessarily an example of modern intersectional feminism. Feminists vs rom-coms? The neo-traditional romantic comedies can be held partially responsible for maintaining the perception of romance and women’s popular entertainment as trashy or outdated; by guiding their female characters into positions of passivity these films represent typical conservative postfeminism. Therefore the relevance of their representations of womanhood is considered limited to contemporary women. Despite this, real women do relate to the neo-traditional romantic comedies. Their depictions of postfeminist struggle (balancing feminism, traditional femininity, and individuality) are familiar to all women, demonstrating that these rom-coms are not totally incorrect in their representations. Enjoying neo-traditional rom-coms does not necessitate an absolute agreement with the types of romance, relationships and female representations that these films propose. Perhaps, the ‘feminist’ thing to do is to celebrate these films on the basis that their cultural value is overlooked and sneered at; the reclamation of women’s popular entertainment (made by and for women) can be empowering in its own right. In boxing things into binary, opposed categories of ‘feminist’ and ‘not feminist’ we are at risk of losing the nuance and contradictions of being not only women, but simply human. Just as these romantic comedies are not perfect or consistent in their ‘feminist’ stance, people are flawed and complicated. It would be wrong to say that the rom-coms of this era are models of perfectly enacted feminism (whatever that may be); but why must everything a woman enjoys be dissected and proved ‘worthy’? Why can’t I be a feminist while also enjoying something romantic, nostalgic and entertaining? The people who watch these films form their own interpretations of the representations of women, romance and society depicted on-screen from their own experiences. To quote Michele Schreiber, it is wrong “to pigeonhole these films and [...] ignore the many complex issues with which they engage, and to assume that women spectators cannot find a variety of pleasures in the same texts that they simultaneously understand to be limited in their representations of women’s choices.” Who doesn't love a rom-com? Sleepless In Seattle, Nora Ephron (TriStar Pictures, 1993) This is where I stand with my enjoyment of rom-coms. Like Schreiber says, I trust my judgement and media literacy to recognise that the era in which some of my favourite films were made differs from the world I live in today. If anything, it is fascinating to study how certain attitudes and conversations around topics like body image, patriarchy and femininity have evolved over thirty years. I simply enjoy these films for the comfort and entertainment value that they offer, and many women love them for this reason. With iconic moments, brilliant acting partnerships (hello, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts), and heartwarming stories, anyone can find something to enjoy about romantic comedies. So the verdict is: yes, you can love rom-coms and still be a feminist. But maybe I’m biased… Sources Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young, Introduction: chick flicks and chick culture’ in Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies , ed. by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (New York, Routledge, 2007), pp. 1-25 Guilluy, Alice, “Guilty Pleasures”- European Audiences and Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) McDonald, Tamar Jeffers, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower Press, 2007) McRobbie, Angela, ‘Postfeminism and and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and The New Gender Regime’, in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture , ed. by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 27-39 Neale, Steve, ‘The Big Romance or Something Wild?: Romantic Comedy Today’, Screen , vol. 33.3 (1992), 284-299 Negra, Diane, What A Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group, 2008) Schreiber, Michele, American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) Filmography Bridget Jones’s Diary , dir. by Sharon Maguire (Universal Pictures, 2001) Notting Hill , dir. by Roger Michell (Universal Pictures, 1999) Pretty Woman , dir. by Garry Marshall (Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1990) Sleepless In Seattle , dir. by Nora Ephron (TriStar Pictures, 1993) You’ve Got Mail , dir. by Nora Ephron (Warner Bros., 1998)

Russia - JANUARY 01: Empress Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796). Canvas. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Zarin Katharina II von Russland (1729-1796)] Introduction  Almost three centuries after her birth, Catherine the Great continues to be memorialised and edified in modern media with anachronistic shows like Elle Fanning’s  The Great . Her life remains an example to modern women in a patriarchal society taking power for themselves away from mediocre white men. At the age of 16, Catherine was shackled to perhaps the most incompetent emperor in Russian history, Peter III,  but she wasn’t going to let that hold her back. Catherine made the Mojo Dojo Casa House of the Russian Empire her Barbie Dreamhouse. However, as a historical figure and not the icon Barbie, Catherine cannot be idolised as a feminist icon simply because she succeeded in what she did as a woman. As a globally known figure, Catherine is rightfully perceived from numerous perspectives and with varying degrees of sympathy, respect and admiration from her homelands and from those she oppressed and marginalised. Catherine’s reign was largely shaped by her Enlightenment ideals that motivated her lofty goals of a more equalised society. These goals of equality were implemented sparsely and, unsurprisingly for an absolute ruler, unequally.  Early life Known as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, she was neither Catherine nor Russian. Born Sophie Friederike Auguste, Prinzessin von Anhalt-Zerbst, 21st April 1729 in Prussia, now Poland, she was chosen as wife to the future emperor as a teenager, marking the beginning of a terrible and miserable 18-year marriage. Upon her marriage she was forced to take the name Catherine Alekseyevna by Peter’s predecessor and aunt, Empress Elizabeth. Catherine’s mother was determined to raise her daughter to the heights of society, with the pinnacle aim of a royal marriage to fulfill the goals she herself did not achieve in life.  Catherine’s pro-enlightenment ideals displayed throughout her rule were hinted at in her childhood. Educated by French tutors, as befitting a child of noble birth, Catherine learned the language of the ruling 18th century elites as well as etiquette and Lutheran doctrine. She learned Russian upon her arrival into her new homeland and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. Reportedly a dedicated student, Catherine demonstrated genuine devotion to her adopted country and its values, more so than her husband who openly preferred his native German lands. Her intelligence and attitude made her more popular than her inept husband, gaining her the support of the military for her coup d’état.  Coup d’état  Empress Elizabeth died in 1762 leaving Peter III to ascend to the Russian throne. His reign was to be embarrassingly short lived. In the winter he became Emperor and by summer he had lost his throne and his life. On the 28th June 1762 Catherine seized power with the support of the military and most significant sects of Russian court. The couple’s German roots were virtually all they had in common. Even Peter’s predecessor Elizabeth viewed him as an incompetent fool, and his fleeting reign as Emperor served to prove her right. Peter’s unpopularity was so great, in fact, that Catherine recognised a threat to his life and her own in the likelihood that someone would attempt to assassinate him for his pro-Prussian, anti-Russian military stratagem. Alienating his courtiers, the military and the public, Peter all but condemned himself.  Following his failure to rule, Catherine swiftly took control of the country with little bloodshed, emphasising her husband’s unpopularity and her argued legitimacy as ruler through her character. With the support of courtiers, politicians and military, Catherine felt confident to strike. Catherine was aided in overthrowing Peter by her lover Grigory Orlov, stationed at St Petersburg during the takeover. Although her lovers have been a footnote in the history of her reign, often aiding her in military and political strife, they have not come close to the glory of her time on the Russian throne as one of its most charismatic, intellectually progressive and triumphant rulers.  Legacy  Catherine is known to have numerous lovers throughout her marriage and reign, many of whom played significant roles in the politics and military conduct of her country. This has been used against her image as ruler as the idea of a woman sleeping her way to the top has been applied; this can be easily dismissed as a woman who is already ruler of a country does not have much farther to ascend.  Catherine’s ideals resonated particularly with the sects of Russian court sympathetic to the Enlightenment found in western Europe. As a friend and lifelong supporter of the French enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, Catherine held much more progressive ideals than Russia was accustomed to. This included the education of girls, opening a number of schools to equalise the rate of education in the vast Slavic lands beginning with the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, reserved for daughters of the nobility. The schools Catherine established, later for children of all classes and sexes, barring serfs, were notably separate from the church in order to create a society loyal to her governmental system and not the Orthodox church which had historically controlled the education system.  This secularisation of society was motivated by Catherine’s Enlightenment ideals including the right to representation, education and self-determination. These ideals also allowed her to learn more about vaccinations, a scientific sin opposed by the church. Determined to abolish serfdom and reform Russian society, Catherine fell short of many of her lofty goals set out early in her reign. However, she achieved more than her critics ever expected. Catherine became the first person in Russia to undergo the procedure of inoculation against smallpox in 1768. By 1780 some 20,000 Russians had been inoculated. Catherine’s cultural influence on her people - and they were undoubtedly her people - is colossal and undeniable.  What should be remembered in respect to Catherine’s strength and unique style as a ruler, is that these qualities did not erase those she shared with rulers that came before and after her. Imperialism flourished under Catherine and, although a measure of success for many rulers in the past, the understanding of this form of oppression has altered with our understanding of human rights over time. Catherine claimed to be ruling for the benefit of the ‘common good’, another ideal of the Enlightenment advocated by a particular inspiration to this enlightened despot, Rousseau. In many ways she surpassed her contemporaries, motivated by these ideals, but in many arguably more important ways, she was just the same. Five million people remained in serfdom under Catherine, the partition of Poland in the latter 18th century between Austria, Russia and Prussia erased the country from the European map until the Second World War, to the benefit of Catherine as ruler and absolutism was reconfirmed as the powerhouse of Russia.  Bibliography  Clements, Barbara Evans. A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present . Indiana University Press, 2012. Miate, L. "Catherine the Great." World History Encyclopedia , 22 Aug. 2023,   https://www.worldhistory.org/Catherine_the_Great/ . Accessed 19 March 2024. Oldenbourg-Idalie, Z. "Catherine the Great." Encyclopedia Britannica ,   https://www.britannica.com/biography/Catherine-the-Great . Accessed 19 Mar. 2024. Raeff, Marc. Catherine the Great: A Profile . Macmillan, 1972.

I often describe myself as a queer researcher, and despite the multiplicity of meanings that phrase holds for me, I am still often taken aback when people ask me to explain exactly what that means. It is a personal title as much as it is an academic and professional one. I call myself a queer researcher because my identity falls under the umbrella of queer; because many of my research subjects similarly fall under the umbrella term queer, usually in more ways than one; because I am fascinated and excited by the ways artists queer identity, challenging its supposedly stable confines. However, the answer I often give people first is that my academic focus has primarily been utilising queer theory to research queer subjects who are queering identity in their cultural outputs. But this ‘simplified’ sentence itself hides a multiplicity of meanings and definitions because what exactly is queer theory,what is queer, and what is it to queer?  Reflecting on everything queer meant to me, I became curious as to the history of the word queer and how it had taken on so many meanings, not only in my life but in our social, cultural, and academic worlds. This article looks to trace the history of the word queer and how it has come to be an adjective, a noun, a verb, an insult, an identity, a theory, a methodology, a way of life and so much more. It is undoubtedly an imperfect history. As scholars like Kadji Amin in his article “Genealogies of Queer Theory” explain, there is “intrinsic difficulty in defining queer theory” (18), let alone the word queer given its multiple meanings, usages, and pasts, all of which are deeply personal to many. For instance, it is worth considering queer’s colonial roots and legacy, with some noting the word itself does not easily travel outside Western contexts. Though I will try to tell a full story of the word, my own narrative is still limited, impacted by my social positioning as a white Western queer academic. Nonetheless, I will try to give some sense of how we have gotten to a place where queer has become such a mad-libs ace.  "Snob Queers" Oscar Wilde in New York in 1882 From the 16th century, the word queer in English was an adjective describing something or someone weird, eccentric, or unconventional. However, in the late 19th century people started attaching the word to homosexual identities. Indeed, it is important to note that the modern idea of a set “homosexual” identity didn’t start to develop in Europe until the late 17th to early 18th centuries. To cut a very long (and much more nuanced) story short, before this period, homosexuality occurred in Europe, but it was not seen as a set identity. Rather, homosexuality was a practice one could participate in, or even a phase of life, often something done when one was young. Throughout the mediaeval and early modern period, practising homosexuality was illegal in much of Europe, but it was a practice one could get away with if kept quiet and done within certain social bounds. However, the Enlightenment’s obsession with categorisation coupled with the need to justify colonisation led Europeans to create a stream of new socio-cultural identities ranked from most to least civilised. Driven by a need to differentiate white colonisers from the colonised, settled ideas of what it meant and looked like to be straight or gay, Black or white, man or woman were developed. Such hierarchically structured binary views of identities solidified within European thinking and were violently exported globally via colonisation. A hierarchy of social identities formed, which, by the dawn of the 19th century, was taken as naturally occurring fact. With this came a strong belief that there was a right and wrong way to express one’s identity, where everyone was expected to mimic the behaviour of ‘civilised’ white men and women. Amongst these new dejected or ‘wrong’ identities was the homosexual.  The word queer’s attachment to this relatively new homosexual identity was popularised thanks to the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Wilde had sued the Marquess of Queensbury for accusing him of being a sodomite. The issue was,  Wilde had been having an affair with the Marquess’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, colloquially known as Bosie, for nearly four years. The defamation suit went horribly wrong as the details of Wilde and Bosie’s long sexual affair were made public. What followed was another wildly popular public trial of Wilde for sodomy. In the court case covered by nearly every major news outlet of the time, a letter written by the Marquess of Queensbury was read aloud accusing Wilde, and other supposedly homosexual men, of being “snob queers.”  The insult stuck.  Newspapers covering the trial, especially in America, rapidly picked up the phrase. Soon Americans adopted the new colloquialism beyond coverage of the trial as an easy insult to describe gays and lesbians. By 1914 the term seems to have become common parlance, travelling back to the UK. However, a 1934 dictionary entitled The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang  notes that the term queer is an adjective describing a “Homosexual. Derogatory from the outside, not from within.” Additionally, letters from the period show some describing themselves as queer to denote their homosexual identification. Taken together, this suggests that while to the heterosexual English-speaking world queer was an insult, homosexuals as early as the mid 20th century were claiming the term as an identity they willingly attached to themselves without shame.  The Effect of the "Gay Plague": Reclaiming Queer A 1986 “Silence=Death” Poster which became an enduring symbol of LGBTQIA+ AIDS activism The HIV-AIDS epidemic in the 1980s fundamentally reshaped the LGBT+ community, redefining LGBTQIA+ activism as well as academia. With this came a full and public reclamation of “queer”. HIV is a viral disease transmitted through bodily fluids which overactivates a body's t-cells, those primarily responsible for fighting infection, to the point of destruction, leaving those affected extremely vulnerable to disease. At its most advanced stages, HIV becomes AIDS, at which point the immune system is nearly non-existent.  HIV and AIDS made its way from Africa to the Western World as early as the late 1960s. By the mid-1980s gay men, as well as Black men and women and intravenous drug users, were dying at extortionate and disproportionate rates from the disease. The highest number of cases however, were amongst Gay men as HIV passes more easily via anal sex than vaginal. The disease quickly became known as the “Gay Plague” , and as such, was resolutely ignored by the American government with President Ronald Reagan having little interest in acting.Indeed in 1982, after 1,000 Americans had died of the disease, Larry Speakes, Reagan’s press secretary, laughed off a question by reporter Lester Kinsolving as to whether the administration planned to do anything about the disease's spread, showing just how flippantly the Reagan administration viewed the disease. Between 1981 and 1990, 100,777 deaths in the U.S. were attributed to AIDS. 59% of these deaths were gay or bisexual men, 21% were intravenous drug users. Unsurprisingly, such a massive death toll within a single community fundamentally changed the face of LGBTQIA+ organising.  LGBTQIA+ organising in America had grown exponentially in the post-war years. And by 1969 when the infamous Stonewall Riots occurred, a “Gay Liberation Movement” could be officially introduced. As its name suggests, this movement largely avoided using the term ‘queer’ or even ‘homosexual’, preferring terms like gay and lesbian. Though this movement undoubtedly had more radical edges, often pushed by people of colour, trans individuals, and others with intersectional identities, by the 1990s the mainstream Gay Liberation movement’s politics had become quite assimilatory. When the movement gained public recognition in the 1970s and 80s, it was white gay men whose voices and issues were centred, as the movement pushed for acceptance of gays and lesbians (often alone) into the normative structures of heterosexual society. Normative structures are those considered socially acceptable or ‘natural’, such as the idea that the ‘proper’ family is a heterosexual nuclear unit consisting of an active male father, passive female wife, and their children. LGBTQIA+ identities are generally non-normative, meaning they break with settled, stereotypical understandings of how male and female identity are meant to manifest. However, the mainstream gay liberation movement downplayed these non-normative characteristics by looking to mimic those of stereotypical heterosexual couples, such as the right to marry. What the AIDS movement made abundantly clear was this type of activism and inclusion would not protect gay men from the increasing violence inflicted by the state’s inaction during an epidemic ravishing their community. What emerged was a movement for Queer  liberation, and the mad-lib usage of queer began. A Queer Nation Protest in NYC (1990) Before this period, there were LGBTQIA+ individuals identifying as queer, as an identity marker denoting their homosexuality. This trend grew exponentially in the 1990s, with many proudly protesting as queer individuals and collectives during the AIDS epidemic. Through these organising efforts, many came to see queer as an umbrella identity under which a range of non-normative, LGBTQIA+ identities could organise. However, the term “queer” used to denote a non-normative identity was not solely limited to the LGBTQIA+ community. As Cathy Cohen notes in her seminal article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997), if queer is defined as a non-normative or ‘unconventional’ identity or social positioning, then it is not only LBTQIA+ individuals who could organise or identify with the adjective. Indeed, per her title, she denotes that “Welfare Queens”, or heterosexual Black single mothers on welfare, similarly exceed the boundaries of normative heterosexual identity by breaking the mould of the nuclear family, living without a ‘bread-winning’ patriarch. Cohen, alongside diverse activists and academics, used queer to denote not only LGBTQIA+ identities, but any non-normative identity, allowing for broader coalitional political organising under the label queer. Unfortunately, in popular parlance, the idea that queer is a term for all non-normative identities has largely been lost. Instead, today queer as an identity is often used solely to denote the umbrella of LGBTQIA+ identities, rather than any non-normative social position.  Alongside the reclamation of queer as a celebratory alternative identity came a new “queer” politics. The AIDS epidemic had clearly illustrated to the LGBTQIA+ community that assimilatory politics based largely in Civil Rights strategies of the 1960s had done little to stem the crisis of violence their community currently faced. As such, activists turned to a more radical politics, inspired by the Black Liberation Movement and radical Black scholars. These organisations, like the Black Panther’s, turned to alternative lifestyles and structures of community aid, celebrating their differences rather than looking for access to and acceptance from white society. It is here that the idea of “queer” became a verb, a type of politics one could enact rather than any set identity. In the scope of queer politics, to queer was to live outside of the bounds of the heterosexual, white, middle-class nuclear family. The goal of queer politics became dismantling the restrictive confines of a ‘proper’ identity, looking instead to celebrate ‘other’ ways of living. In other words, they looked to queer  identity.  Instead of looking to gain access to the structures of white capitalist society, queer activists looked to build new structures outside of these norms. This new queer politics is summarised in brash poetics by QUASH, or “Queers United Against Straight-acting Heterosexuals”, in 1993, stating:  Assimilation is killing us. …Getting a corporate job, a fierce car and a condo does not protect you from dying of AIDS or getting your head bashed in by neo-Nazis. The myth of assimilation much be shattered…Fuck the heterosexual, nuclear family. Let’s make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression. Thus, queer  became an action, a way of living and doing politics by publicly enacting different social structures and ways of life outside socially acceptable limits. To queer  was to upset or deconstruct socially accepted notions of something to open considerations of other possibilities, so to queer  sexual identity was to upset the notion that heterosexuality was natural and good and everything else a perverted subversion. By the mid 1990s, queer carried a multiplicity of meanings and usages to different groups. It was a noun used to denote an identity, an adjective used to insult those thought to be homosexual, and a verb used to describe a new way of living and enacting politics.  Queer in the Academy: Queer Theory Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles published in 1990 which argued ‘gender’ was a social construct is still considered by many as a foundational text of Queer Theory The AIDS epidemic’s effects were not contained to activism, rippling through the academy as well. The developments occurring in the 1990s in relation to LGBTQIA+ studies and activism are largely inseparable, as many academics were also activists and vice versa. As people started identifying as ‘queer’, academics were increasingly interested in understanding identities. This was accompanied in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with the burgeoning growth of identity knowledges like Women Studies, Black Studies, and Latino Studies. By the 1990s, academics began to shift the focus of identity studies away from the confines of predefined societal groups. There was a growing understanding that by studying identities separately, those holding multiple identities or not fitting into pre-defined identity groups at all were overlooked. By the 1990s debates around these topics came to a head with the crisis of the AIDS epidemic.    So, while activists were trying to upset ideas of identity, scholars were following a similar pattern of deconstructing preset identities. A body of work quickly developed  challenging predetermined identity categories, aiming to trace the mechanisms of power that constructed and enshrined normative identity while tracking methods to upset these mechanisms. This work soon came to be known as “queer theory” – largely defined by its focus on upsetting settled ideas of identity, though there are those who may still debate this definition. To understand this multiplicity, it is important to tell at least some of the genealogies of queer theory in the academy.  Traditionally, the genealogy of queer theory is traced largely to the work of three theorists: Foucault, Butler, and Sedgewick. All three scholars prompted in some way the interrogation of preset, presupposed identities, focussing on homosexuality as their case study. Paradoxically, this early focus on homosexual identities soon came to define the discipline. Indeed, queer theory in many academic circles replaced older Lesbian and Gay studies entirely, becoming a shorthand for a new identity study. To this day, this tension causes rifts amongst queer theorists who  debate what exactly the focus of queer theory and queer studies should be. Is queer theory another identity-study or is it the exact opposite, a study looking to dismantle identity?.  Importantly, this is not the only genealogy of queer theory. As scholars like Amin have noted, this popular genealogy of queer theory is incredibly Euro-American centric. All three authors named are white, and their early subjects were often equally white with limited discussions around race. But another tradition of queer theory exists which does account for a myriad of social identities, often referred to today as queer of colour theory. This theory’s use of queer differs slightly from and even pre-dates the popular reclamation of the word by activists and the academy at large. People of colour in their scholarship and activism had long challenged the limits of identity, a history which has only recently been understood and claimed by the academy as an alternative origin and influence to queer theory.  Gloria Anzaldúa whose 1981 essay “La Prieta” uses the word “queer” to describe racialized identities that do not fit white societies understandings of proper social behaviours and customs. Queer of colour theory was heavily influenced by the work of women of colour theorising in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, something leading scholars in the discipline like Munoz are quick to acknowledge. Many of these academics and activists were lesbians or bisexual women whose non-normative sexual identity, race, class, and gender influenced their writing. This discipline traces its genealogy back to theorists like Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, among many others. It is within this tradition of Black, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and decolonial organising that we see the first printed use of the term queer as a theoretical provocation. In a 1981 piece the brilliant Chicana feminist, writer, artist, poet, and powerhouse Gloria Anzaldúa used the term queer to denote racialised identities on the ‘borderlands’ of abjection. From this genealogy a body of queer of colour theory developed, populated by scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Sara Ahmed, Juana María Rodríguez, among many others, investigating and challenging the complex matrices of power that normalises settled identity categories.  Clearly then, understanding queer theory and the operations of queer in scholarship is no less difficult than understanding the term’s use in popular parlance. It seems no matter where you look in the English-speaking world, queer carries with it a multiplicity of meanings. So, where does that leave us?  A Queer Tomorrow? Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers. Queer means many things to many people. So, perhaps all we can do is be mindful of how we use the word – to make sure we define, to the best of our abilities, the way we are using it. For me, as for many others whose history is intertwined in one way or another with the word, its meaning will likely always be personal.  Queer is a reminder of just how slippery language can be, how it can attach itself to many things, even those that are paradoxical. To many, such multiplicity of meaning can be overwhelming, confusing, and exhausting. Indeed, many activists and academics are keen to abandon the word altogether. But I see a promise in queer’s multiplicity. The very fact that the word has become so loaded with rapidly changing meaning and connotations creates a sense of hope. If a word can come to be so multi-faceted, then can we not let our identities be the same? In some ways, the history of the word queer is a metaphor for many of the things the word itself has tried to accomplish. Queer exists in fluidity, existing differently moment to moment, without ever losing its importance of continuity. In that way it is stable, it holds value and meaning even as those meanings change. I hope for a world in which we can all one day do the same. “The future is queerness’s domain… Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” - José Esteban Muñoz (2009)  Further Reading  Amin, Kadji. 2020. “Chapter 1: Genealogies of Queer Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies , by Siobhan B. Somerville, 17-29. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. “La Prieta.” In This Bridge Called My Back, by Cherríe Moraga, 198-209. Albany: State University of New York Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter.  New York City: Routledge. —. 1990. Gender Trouble; Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.  London and New York City: Routledge. Center for Disease Control (CDC). 1991. Current Trends Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection/AIDS -- United States, 1981-1990 .  25 Jan. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001880.htm#:~:text=From%201981%20through%201990%2C%20100%2C777,deaths%20were%20reported%20during%201990 . Clarke, Mollie. 2021. 'Queer' History: A History of Queer.  9 Feb. Accessed April 15, 2024. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/queer-history-a-history-of-queer/ . Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies  3 (4): 437-465. Fitzsimons, Tim. 2018. LGBTQ History Month: The Early Days on America's AIDS Crisis.  15 Oct. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-history-month-early-days-america-s-aids-crisis-n919701 . Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality an Introduction.  Edited by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York City: Vintage Books. Hanhardt, Christina B. 2024. “Queer History Article.” Organization of American Historians.  Accessed April 20, 2024. https://www.oah.org/tah/queer-history/queer-history-1/ . HIVInfo. 2023. HIV and AIDS: The Basics.  25 July. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-and-aids-basics#:~:text=AIDS%20stands%20for%20acquired%20immunodeficiency,%2C%20illnesses%2C%20and%20certain%20cancers . Lemmey, Huw, and Ben Miller. 2022. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History.  London and New York: Verso. Lopez, German. 2016. The Reagan Administration's Unbelievable Response to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.  1 Dec. Accessed April 15, 2024. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids . Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia  22 (1): 186-209.---. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia  25 (4): 742-759. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. n.d. Queer.  Accessed April 15, 2024. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queer#h1 . Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.  New York City: New York University Press. —. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota. Rodríguez, Juana María. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings.  New York City: New York University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies.  Durham: Duke University Press. —. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.  Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory.  New York City: New York University Press.

Olivia (Whitmore) Guinness Why is so little known about the matriarch of Ireland's most famous beverage? Guinness will always be one of Ireland’s most famous exports, besides Paul Mescal and Riverdance. However, not many people outside its motherland know a lot about its history and the man behind the “the black stuff”. Arthur Guinness’s eponymous brewing business has been churning out Ireland’s favourite drink since 1755, and it has been housed in the same brewery in Dublin since 1759, which continues to produce the stout. While today, the storehouse is home to a world famous tourist attraction, Guinness’ Brewhouse 4 is the largest stout brewery in the world. Given that St. Patrick’s Day reminds us of all things Irish, now seems the right time to look at the country’s most famous business and try to find out more about one of its most elusive figures, Arthur Guinness’ wife, Olivia Guinness.   When I visited the Guinness storehouse in December of 2022, one line in a short informational video about the family explained Olivia Guinness had 21 pregnancies. She was not mentioned again besides her staggering number of births, and while her life may not have had a direct impact on the brewing of stout, this meagre attempt to present her is inherently gendered. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that that has stayed with me, and it’s something I think about every time I see the iconic glass. When I visited again a year later, I was upset to see that the video had been replaced with a demonstration of a new product Guinness Nitrosurge, and I considered that maybe this was something worth exploring. Was it a coincidence that the company’s new machinery had replaced information on such an important part of the Guinness family? Most likely, yes, though I couldn’t help but feel bitter that the only mention of the woman so heavily involved in the continuation of the Guinness name had been erased from the tour. Why was it not implemented into another part? I spent the rest of the tour waiting for that video to reappear, but only when I started researching her further, did I understand perhaps why this had happened. An invention from 2021 had more recorded history than a woman born in 1742. She doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Olivia Whitmore was the daughter of grocer William Whitmore and Mary Grattan. Not much is known about Olivia’s paternal line, but there is much to be said about her mother. Despite Olivia being left fatherless, her maternal family owned land in Kildare which at the time granted Olivia a high social standing and funds that easily provided for her. This meant by the time Olivia Whitmore became Olivia Guinness, she had a sizable dowry that gave her new husband, and budding brewer, Arthur opportunity to rise in society's ranks. The bulk of the historical record for Olivia Guinness starts here, documenting her place in the marriage, and subsequently, the marriage's place in the business. She was just nineteen on her wedding day - Arthur was thirty-six. Their relationship presents itself as transactional in the eyes of history; Olivia’s respectable dowry of £1,000, equal to about £200,000 in today’s currency, combined with connections to her gentry family provided Arthur a decent start to married life, and the rare chance for a brewer to gain the social respectability he needed in the rural towns of Ireland. For Olivia’s widowed mother, marrying her daughter off to this ambitious man was an opportunity to reduce the instability caused by William Whitmore’s death and provide a somewhat secure future for her beloved daughter.   Beyond her wedding is where history has admitted it knows next to nothing about her - even her family has agreed that knowledge about the matriarch of the Guinness line is limited. Historian and direct Guinness descendant Patrick Guinness brought forward these limitations in his 2008 title Arthur’s Round: The Life and Times of Brewing Legend Arthur Guinness . This was the first biography of his descendent and remains the leading work on the family’s history, and yet there are only 15 very brief references to Olivia’s life in the index. The only information the archive assistants at Guinness Archives at the Guinness Storehouse could offer me was sourced from this work. So, here, we come back to what we do know and what drew me to this enigma of a woman in the first place. Olivia Guinness had 21 pregnancies over two decades with 10  children surviving into adulthood. The lack of detail about her births and her time as a mother means historians have often had to make somewhat weak assumptions about it. One such example is that Patrick Guinness surmises that Hosea, the eldest Guinness son, had a difficult birth, alluded to by his name meaning “Jehovah is saved”. I can’t say I’m easily convinced by this, mainly because it reads as though he just needed to say something, however nonsensical, about his distant grandmother. What does it say about the value placed on historical women that the one fact that remains about Olivia relates to how many times she fell pregnant?   Olivia Guinness remains a powerhouse of 18th century femininity and what it meant to be a woman. The longevity of the Guinness line ultimately comes back to her and her extensive bloodline. Olivia Guinness bore the six men that would continue the name, while supporting her husband and his business ventures for 42 years. There is something to be said about the fact nothing is said - she did her marital and biblical duty by providing the family Arthur needed, and the reason no one thought to pass on stories of her life, is that providing others life was the greatest achievement of them all. She did her duties so well that nothing else mattered. The births over the span of 20 years demonstrate that she and Arthur were sexually active - either through love for one another, or religious devotion. Given the norms governing 18th century femininity in Ireland and beyond, Olivia’s body would have been her greatest asset in demonstrating her position of power - churning out 21 pregnancies in just over 21 years was impressive even in a land where contraception was only legalised in 1979. With a maternal mortality rate as high as 1 in 5, Olivia’s survival, given the sheer number of births she experienced, is awe-inspiring. Olivia had her last child in 1787, when she was 45 and her husband was 63, which must have been a great relief for her. Despite the 10 children that survived in adulthood, there is no evidence of the suffering she undoubtedly experienced with the 11 children she sadly lost.   Equally little is known about how the couple met. Many historians speculate the couple met through introductions by family friends, or Arthur’s family’s proximity to William Whitmore’s grocery shop on Essex Street. This absence of knowledge also feeds into the questioning of why this relationship was of so little importance to wider family histories. Were details of the couple’s relationship  deemed mere women’s gossip of romancing, or perhaps there was no romancing at all to tell of? From what we do know, and evidence suggesting the transactional nature of the union, the latter does seem more likely. Did Arthur merely see Olivia as a way of moving up the social ladder, and the carrier of his legacy? It seems as though we will never know, as Arthur never spoke of it, and Olivia appears to have no public voice - not even a diary or letters can be traced back to her.   So, back to the question that started this all back in that little cinema in the historic brewery. Why is it so hard to find anything about this biological wonder of a woman? If her own family knows so little, what hope is there for the rest of us? With all my research, I think I have had to admit defeat on finding even a snippet of what made the woman who she was - she is destined to be the subject of tourists gasps for the rest of eternity where they learn about her spectacular mothering, alongside learning the temperature of wheat roasting. However, I think there is something to be tapped into here: the women behind some of the world’s oldest and most famous businesses are often made invisible without much of a fight. Were the achievements of Olivia’s husband so great that the trials and tribulations of her life were dismissed in favour of what she could provide for him? While her husband and his droves of sons remain at the forefront of Irish memory and glorification, Olivia and her daughters most certainly had a part to play in the magic behind the machine. Bibliography: Patrick Guinness, Arthur’s Round: The Life and Times of Brewing Legend Arthur Guinness, London, 2008. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Guinness: Irish Company, 18th March 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Guinness [date accessed 14/01/2024] Katie Birtles, A Brief History of Ireland’s National Drink, Guinness, 6th April 2022, https://www.trafalgar.com/real-word/a-brief-history-of-irelands-national-drink-guinness/ [date accessed: 12/01/24]

Photograph of Màiri Mhòr with her spinning whorl. 1 January 1890. Wikipedia Commons. < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mairi_Mhor_nan_Oran.jpg > [accessed 18 December 2024] Ma thog neach eisir ann an cliabh, No maorach ann am meadhon mara, Théid an cur fo ghlais ‘s fo dhìon, Le laghan diongmhalt’ dìon an fhearainn. If someone lifts a creel with an oyster, or in the open sea they find a clam, they’ll be apprehended and locked away, under the law protecting the land. -Brosnachadh nan Gaidheal / Incitement of the Gael In the mid-eighteenth century, an Enlightenment-driven push for economic progress and agricultural 'improvement' swept through Scotland, dramatically altering the Highland way of life. The concept of dùthchas , the inalienable right of clansmen to protection, security, and a share of ancestral land, was forsaken as chiefs, who had once acted as custodians of communal land, became commercial landlords focused on profit. The first phase of the Highland Clearances (1780-1825) saw clan chiefs adopt new agricultural practices to maximise estate income. Prior to ‘improvement’, the social structure of Highland township, called the baile , had consisted of common land and the traditional run rig system. This was where arable land was divided into strips and rotated among tenants, and families took collective responsibility for agricultural work and survival. However, this system was abandoned as common grazing land was fenced off, the baile was dismantled, and crofting communities were established alongside large-scale sheep farming.  Land became the clan chief’s personal property, and their clansmen became their tenants. These tenants, known as crofters, were assigned small landholdings insufficient to sustain their families. Forced to take on supplementary employment in local industries, like fishing or kelp, to survive, they were further disadvantaged by short-term leases that provided no guaranteed access to land, leaving them vulnerable to evictions and displacement by sheep farming. The region was further strained by the second wave of clearances (1825-1855), which was marked by recurrent famine, the decline of the kelp and fishing industries, widespread evictions, and mass emigration to industrial centres such as Glasgow, and beyond.  The daughter of a crofter and one of the most influential and celebrated Gaelic poets of all time, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (‘Big Mary of the Songs’) was born Mary MacDonald at Skeabost on the Isle of Skye in March 1821. She witnessed the devastating effects of the Clearances on her community and, at age 50, became a key political voice in highlighting the Highlanders’ struggles, especially those displaced by the Clearances. Her poetry and songs, as this article will highlight, sought to preserve the endangered Gaelic language and culture, galvanised a sense of identity, protested against unjust rents and land practices, and incited support for the Crofters’ Wars of the 1880s.  In place of a formal education, her childhood on Skye equipped her with ‘ample experience in the management of cattle and all that pertains to the conduct of a house in the olden days, from cooking to cloth making, and, further, in storing her mind with the lays and lyrics of her native isle’. Poetry and song were intrinsic to Gaelic society and village bards remained important figures and spokespersons for their communities until after the Second World War. They recorded ‘the human experiences of the Gaels… they react to every major event affecting the lives of their community, and their songs mirror their folk-history’. These songs, which were passed down orally through generations, relied on use of ‘formulae, fugitive passages, runs, [and] stock characters’, and, most importantly, the acceptance of the piece by the community to survive. In many ways, Bateman explains, Màiri’s compositions were ‘an extension of the 18,000 lines of traditional poetry she knew by heart’. Although she could read English and Gaelic, she was never taught to write and relied on existing rhyme schemes to compose her songs- blending new words with old tunes. However, it wasn’t until 1872, when she was 50 years old, that Màiri began to share her poetry. Amidst the Great Highland Famine of 1846, which blighted potato crops for a whole decade and initiated a momentous surge in emigration, Màiri relocated to Inverness to marry a shoemaker called Isaac Macperson at the age of 27. Upon his death in 1871, she was pushed to find employment to support her four surviving children, and found work as a domestic servant. Unfortunately, this was short-lived as Màiri was accused of stealing clothing by her employer. Despite claims of her innocence, she was charged and sentenced to forty days of imprisonment. It was this humiliation and miscarriage of justice which changed the course of her life as she later claimed: S e na dh’fhulaing mi de thamailt a thug mo bhàrdachd beò  (‘It’s the injustice I suffered that brought my poetry to life’).  This mortifying experience lent her poetry an ‘unrivalled emotional drive’ and an abiding resentment of the establishment which encouraged her to link her sense of personal injustice to that of the crofters. Bitterly, in Tha mi sgìth de luchd na Beurla  (I'm tired of the English speakers), she expressed frustration, lamenting that if she was ‘in my own land, where I was first raised, there was not any English-speaker in the service of the Crown, who would look on me unjustly’.  The same year, Màiri joined the waves of mass emigration which served as a safety valve in the Highlands for the ‘rurally impoverished, hungry and evicted’, and relocated again to Glasgow, and then Greenock in 1876. In Glasgow she enrolled at the Royal Infirmary and studied nursing and obstetrics at the Royal Infirmary for five years before practising as a midwife. Here she was welcomed by a vibrant community of Highlanders, regularly participating in Gaelic music hall culture and performing at social gatherings and cèilidhs. In 1892, she competed at the first ever National Mòd in Oban, a celebration of Gaelic language and culture which gave poets another platform to showcase their talent, though she did not win a medal. Màiri’s poetry played a significant public function for her newfound community of displaced Highlanders for whom her songs were created to be nostalgic and comforting.   In ‘When I Was Young’, she painted a highly romanticised image of her childhood on Skye and mourned the modernisation of the island where lies ‘Andrew’s croft, overgrown with nettles’, and the steamship which carried her away: Nuair chuir mi cùl ris an eilean chùbhraidh, ‘S a ghabh mi iùbhrach na smùid gun seòl, Nuair shéid i ‘n dùdach ‘s a shìn an ùspairt, ‘S a thog i cùrsa o Thir a’ Cheo; Mo chridhe brùite ‘s na deòir le m’ shùilean, A’ faibh gu dùthaich gun sùrd, gun cheòl When I turned my back on the fragrant island, And boarded the steam-ship with has no jib, when she blew her horn and began her churning and made her way from the Isle of Mist, my heart was broken, my eyes tear-filled, leaving for a land without cheer or song By reminding emigrants of their endangered way of life and promoting Gaelic culture in urban centres, Màiri’s music helped foster a growing ‘migrant Gaelic cultural consciousness’ which, in turn, contributed to the ‘politicisation of crofter unrest’. As Newby highlighted, a surge in temporary migration brought urban Highlanders into direct contact with radical reform philosophies, such as Irish Land Agitation.  As a result, second-generation Highlanders in urban Scotland became some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the crofters agitation in the 1880s. Furthermore, Gaelic songs and poetry served as a powerful medium for distributing information to Gaelic speakers who couldn’t read English and, therefore, were marginalised by the printed press. As such, poets could wield significant political influence. This tradition stemmed from medieval Gaelic Scotland where, through the public praise or ridicule of clan chiefs, skilled poets were tools for the endorsement of the social and political status quo. With the decline of traditional Gaelic learning throughout the 17th century, the role of poets developed. Poetry was increasingly written by less formally educated, largely unpaid, or even illiterate poets, who shifted their focus from clan chiefs to celebrating the common man and leaders as heroes. By the 19th century, as Meek illustrates, every community in the Highlands possessed its own poet. As the struggle for land rights gained momentum after 1874, poets emerged as spokespersons for their communities.  While this role was not exclusive to male poets, as Gaelic culture has a strong tradition of female poets, women were often challenged by a paradoxical ‘threshold’ status. There are many examples of women possessing a high status within Gaelic oral tradition, such as Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, and Ò Baoill has advocated that the better-known women poets after 1600 were ‘public poets’ in the sense that their work dealt with political rather than personal or lyrical subjects. However, it is also true that their gender made them vulnerable to suspicion, and even accusations of witchcraft. For example, both Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread Nighean Lachlainn were reportedly buried face down. Ò Baoill linked this to a Norse tradition for burying witches, suggesting that these two female poets may have been viewed ‘by the tradition-bearers as wielders of sinister supernatural powers’. McKean likewise has identified these traditions as acknowledgment or punishment for their bardic activities. As a result, women were often confined to composing lullabies and wool-felting songs, rather than the male-dominated grand panegyrics dedicated to clan heroes. In this light, Màiri’s accomplishments can be read as exceptional as her commentary on the Highland clearances transformed her into an icon of Gaelic poetry. On the other hand, however, older women were often assigned roles as ‘storytellers, teachers, and advice-givers’. It should be considered that the highly emotional nature of the clearances, along with the role of women as preservers of family and tradition, may have enabled Màiri to assume this matriarchal poetic role, gaining widespread societal approval, and becoming a powerful voice in defence of the Highland people. Her exceptional success and status within Gaelic tradition can then be partly attributed to societal upheaval which created a space for women’s voices within public and politicised discourse and allowed her to break through barriers that typically confined women to domestic genres. Màiri’s poetic and political voice was recognised and harnessed by Highland politicians. During her trial in 1872, Màiri was offered support by John Murdoch, the editor of the Highlander  newspaper, a high-profile advocate for land reform, Gaelic education, and Scottish home rule. Support was also offered by Charles Fraser Mackintosh, the Liberal MP for Inverness and a proponent of land reform, who acted on Màiri’s behalf during the trial. Whilst likely that Mackintosh's actions were elicited by Murdoch’s influence, the nature of Mackintosh’s interaction with Màiri remains unclear. What is certain, however, is that their relationship continued as two years later, during his campaign for the Inverness Burghs, Mackintosh enlisted Màiri’s help to create a sympathetic image among his constituents. This involved composing songs in support for land reform, such as  Nuair a chaidh na ceithir ùr oirre which named Mackintosh alongside other leading land campaigners. As Meek noted: ‘The power of poetry was no romantic delusion; it could help to make or break the prospective candidate.’ Unlike other ‘township bards’ or ‘community poets’, such as Alexander MacLean of Glendale, Skye, and John MacLean of Balemartin, Tiree, Màiri’s allegiance was not confined to a single district. Her mobility- from Skye to Inverness to Glasgow- and her active role in rallying support for Mackintosh elevated her profile and allowed her to cultivate a ‘greater bardic persona’. As McKean notes, her village, ‘if she were to be called a village bard, would have to be the entire Gàidhealtachd [Gaelic region], wherever Gaels were downtrodden’. Màiri’s most famous works, ‘The Song of Ben Li’ and ‘Incitement of the Gaels’ were composed upon her return to Skye in 1882 at the age of 61. This coincided with the outbreak of the Crofters War at the Battle of the Braes. Despite Richard’s findings that there were approximately fifty known instances of Highland resistance between 1780 and 1855,  historians of the Highland clearances have long puzzled over the Highlanders’ failure to actively resist landlord policies before the 1880s. Resistance was typically ‘highly localised, sporadic and uncoordinated’, and were often desperate, spontaneous responses to the threat of eviction that easily crumbled in the face of police or military intervention.  The first example of direct action by Skye crofters occurred in Valtos, Skye, 1881, in the form of a rent strike against their landlord’s high rent and threat of eviction. The success of this altercation, as Newby highlights, had two crucial short-term consequences: it sparked significant publicity which spread unrest throughout the island, creating a ‘siege mentality’ and an ‘air of confrontation’; and it was widely publicised through the wider British and Irish press. The scene was then set for the famed ‘Battle of the Braes’ which kicked off other widespread acts of protest on Highland estates.   In the decades preceding the battle, evictions had caused serious overcrowding of the land in the township of Braes. The landowner, Lord MacDonald, exacerbated the situation when he denied the crofters access to common grazing land, instead leasing it to a sheep farmer. Despite being forced onto smaller, less fertile plots, the crofter’s rent was not reduced. When the tenancy for the land came up for renewal in 1881 due to the new tenant’s inability to pay rent, a petition was sent to ask for the restoration of former pastures. This was staunchly denied. In retaliation, the crofters proactively organised a movement to regain the grazing rights they had lost 17 years prior, and defiantly grazed their livestock on Ben Lee and withheld rent payments until their right was redressed. On rent collection day, the 8th of December 1881, none of the Braes tenants paid their rent and were threatened with eviction.  Màiri described the events in ‘Incitement of the Gaels’. In contrast to elegies, such as ‘When I was Young’, which lamented the social and physical changes on Skye, this song followed the tradition of stirring the bravery of warriors before battle, and aimed to incite crofters to engage in acts of land agitation. In response to the rent strikes, the landowners: Sgrìobh iad àithne dhaingeann dhian, Do’n ionad air nach dèan sinn labhairt, Na h-aingle is am fear nach b’fhiach A thighinn a riaghladh lagh an fhearainn. They wrote an urgent pressing letter, to the accursed angels and that scurrilous man, stationed at the place we will not mention to come and enforce the law of the land The ‘scurrilous man’ in question was Sheriff William Ivory. In April 1882, a sheriff officer left Portree with witnesses to serve eviction notices to eleven tenants identified by the landowner as ringleaders. On the way, however, they were met by a large crowd of protestors who chased them back to Portree and burnt the papers. Having obstructed the officer from fulfilling his legal duties, the protestors committed the crime of deforcement. In response, the authorities contacted Sheriff Ivory, instructing him to gather 50 officers from Glasgow and Inverness to apprehend the guilty parties. Nuair leugh Ivory an àithne, Chùnnt e chuid a b’fheàrr d’a aingil Ivory counted out the best of his angels, having read all that was in the demand While the arrests themselves were not disputed, as officers passed through the township of Gedintailor on their return journey to Inverness, riots started when it became clear that the men were being removed from Skye. As the officers traversed a narrow gorge and crossed the burn, Allt nan Gobhlag , a crowd gathered and the Battle took place.  Nuair a ràinig iad na glinn, ‘S ann bha na suinn nach dèanadh mearachd Air an crioslachadh le fìrinn, ‘S cha robh innleachd air am prannadh. When Ivory and his army reached the glens, before them stood the men that wouldn’t falter girded about with righteousness, Evil had not made them slacken. In addition to praising the brave men who stood against Sheriff Ivory and his forces, Màiri highlighted the role of women in the ‘Song of Ben Li’, thanking ‘ The kind women who carry themselves so courteously, their skulls were broken on the slopes of Ben Li ’. While the vivid imagery arguably delivers a shock value and capitalises off sensitive attitudes which would be disgusted by the violent treatment of up-standing women, it also accurately reflects female agency. As Richards later recognised, ‘Highland riots were women’s riots’.  The Scotsman reported on 20 April 1883: ‘one poor woman, said to be enceinte, was seriously hurt- cut terribly about the head with a stone or baton. She was left bleeding and fainting on the road side. Another old woman said to be about seventy years of age, was hurled down a steep hill and badly injured’. Despite the violence of the account, It was also largely thought that women could protest with impunity and were less likely to be injured by constables and army troops compared to their male counterparts.  Praising the community’s courage, the poem is an active appeal to crofters on Skye to resist their landlords’ extractions. Significantly, Màiri lays the blame on Ivory. Nicknamed ‘the Satan’ in the ‘Song of Ben Li’ Màiri exhibited a vendetta against the man, who she perceived as a threat against her local community, and celebrated his sudden death in 1886 with a mock elegy which held him up to public censure and ridicule. Most poets craved the preservation of the traditional Gaelic community and even after the clearances, the concept of dùthchas  remained entrenched. The Napier Commission, in 1883, observed that the poor still held  ‘much reverence for the owner of the soil’. Typically, nineteenth century Gaelic poets blamed tenants, tacksmen, sheep-farmers, and even sheep for the Highland plight; they rarely singled out individual landowners, and criticisms of the landed class were often anonymous.   Màiri was not immune to this trap and was guilty of romanticising a ‘golden age of kindly cooperation and harmony’ by not critiquing land-owners or referencing the 1846 famine. However, this is perhaps less surprising due to the fact that the Laird of Skeabost, Lachlan MacDonald, provided Màiri with a rent-free cottage upon her return to Skye.  She often blamed the English for the conditions on Skye, as Tanner highlights, ‘though it was very plain that not one clearance had been made in Skye by anyone who had not a name as Gaelic as her own’. Instead of traditional hardships or natural disasters, as Devine highlights, it was the intrusion of a new, foreign, economic order, imposed from the outside that threatened the local community, and alarmed the poets. The presence of lowland shepherds, officials, and gunboats, and the removal of people, were a perceived violation and infringement of the traditional system of mutual support between tenants and landlords. Following the battle, five crofters were found guilty and charged with ‘deforcing an officer of the law in the execution of his duty’ before the Sheriff Court in Inverness Castle in May 1882. However, the crofters continued to protest, and tenants continued to graze their stock on Ben Li. Further writs were issued in 1882, with deforcement committed again when the sheriff officers attempted to serve summonses on the 2nd of September and the 24th of October 1882. Finally, at the end of 1882, Lord MacDonald compromised and the crofters were victorious, able to graze their sheep on Ben Li. Although the Battle of the Braes did not directly lead to immediate legislation protecting crofters’ rights,  it coincided with the emergence of ‘an effective political campaign for crofters rights’ and was instrumental in the establishment of the 1883 Napier Commission. Throughout 1882, authorities became increasingly cognisant of the parallels of the Highland and Irish land questions. Irish agrarian protest had pressured the British government into passing the 1881 Irish Land Act and critics of land reform were increasingly highlighting the growing influence of ‘Fenianism’ among crofters. More than any other factor, such as growing public support for the crofters’ cause and the determination of the Highland League which was formed in 1884 (who advocated security of tenure, fair rents, and the redistribution of land to crofters, and were instrumental in raising public awareness and widespread support),  Macoll argues that it was the anxiety of the governments to stem the rise of Highland agrarian and political discontent before it reached Irish proportions that pushed them to establish the Commission, and forced government legislation on the crofters’ behalf.  Indeed, Cameron similarly posited that the formation of the Commission and following legislation was the first time that the British government acknowledged the persistent and unique nature of the Highland issue and paid sustained interest in the region. This culminated in the drafting and passing of the Crofters’ Holding (Scotland) Act of 1886. This was a major victory for the movement as it limited the powers of landlords to evict their tenants and granted several key rights to all crofters, regardless of their rent. These included: security of tenure, the right to fair rents (determined by impartial bodies), and compensation for land improvements. It also recognised their right to use natural resources like common grazing land and materials like peat, seaweed, and heather. While it did not fully resolve the crofters’ demands (for example, it failed to protect the needs of landless cottars or redistribute land), it was a significant step forward and set the stage for further land reform. As Cameron explained, ‘it did not give the crofters the world, but it made them secure in their own little patch, and that was no small gain.’ The land agitations of the 1880s were perceived to be a series of battles by contemporary poets and the public, beginning with the first documented legal victory for Highland crofters at the Bernera Riot of 1874 in the Outer Hebrides; the Battle of the Braes in 1882; and the General Election of November-December in 1885. When the Voting Act of 1884 extended suffrage to many crofters, Màiri was called upon again to support parliamentary election campaigns, particularly for Land Law Reform Association candidates in the 1885 and 1886 elections. The Crofters Movement had nominated candidates in all the crofting counties and northern burghs, and five were successfully elected for parliament-including her friend, Charles Fraser Mackintosh. As Devine stipulates, it would be wrong to see a causal relationship between the general election of 1885 and the 1886 legislation as the main clauses had been drafted the previous year with minimal involvement by the five candidates. However, Gaelic poets had a remarkable involvement in this victory because they empowered people to discriminate between candidates and participate in elections. In doing so, the franchise was portrayed as a weapon no less effective than the sword, with the ballot box as a battleground.  Màiri Mhòr nan Òran remained on Skye until her death on the 7th of November 1898, aged 77. It is thanks to Lachlann MacDonald that her prose was preserved as he paid for the transcription of some 8000 lines of Màiri’s poetry, which was published in 1891 in a volume entitled Gaelic Songs and Poems . Due to her involvement in ensuring the success of the crofter candidates in the 1885-6 elections, Màiri has been crowned the Bard of the movement. Through her works, which functioned both as tools for cultural preservation and incitement and galvanised the crofters’ fight for land reform, she remains an iconic figure in Gaelic literature. As Batemen argued, the political forthrightness evident in her work would not be seen in a published form by Scottish women poets until the 1980s. In 2022, she joined the only three Gaelic (and male) writers to be honoured in Makars’ Court in 2022, where Scottish wordsmiths have been honoured since 1998. Here, her words continue to inspire Gaelic speakers to protect their cultural heritage, as her commemorative flagstone reads: Cuimhnichibh gur sluagh sibh/ Is cumaibh suas ur còir (Remember that you are a people / And stand up for your rights). Màiri Mhòr nan Òran’s commemorative flagstone at Makar’s Court - Pickering, Dave.Màiri Mhòr nan Òran is the latest addition to Scotland’s literary greats at Makar’s Court.October 2022. Photograph. North Edinburgh News. < https://nen.press/2022/10/13/mairi-mhor-nan-oran-is-the-latest-addition-to-scotlands-literary-greats-at-makars-court/ > [accessed 18 December 2024] Bibliography Bateman, Meg, ‘Women’s Writing in Scottish Gaelic Since 1750’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing , eds. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh University Press, 1997),  pp. 684-701 Bloomfield, Morton W. and Charles W. Dunn,  The Role of the Poet in Early Societies  (Cambridge and Wolfeboro: D. S. Brewer, 1989) Boos, Florence, “We Would Know Again the Fields…’: The Rural Poetry of Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Stevenson and Mary Macpherson’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature , 17.2 (1998), pp. 325-347 Cameron, A. 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