The Beguines – The First Women’s Movement?

Beguines were women who chose to live together. The movement began over eight hundred years ago, mostly in the Low Countries – Holland and Belgium, but also elsewhere in Europe. Beguines were laywomen, not nuns, but they chose to follow a way of life in many ways similar to that of Jesus: voluntary poverty, care for the poor and the sick, and religious (Christian) devotion. They lived independently of men, earned their own money by finding work locally, and deliberately chose not to be a formalised movement.

Despite developing separately across many European countries, there were common elements that these medieval women shared, including their visionary spirituality, their unusual business acumen, and their courageous commitment to the poor and sick. Common to them also was their non-reliance on men, during a time when a woman normally passed passively from her father’s jurisdiction to that of a husband. Maybe the coincidence of the later Crusades, taking many men away from their home countries, allowed many women to grab some independence.

Beguines were essentially self-defined, and resisted the many attempts to control them. They lived in beguinages, which could be a single house for just a few women or even a solitary woman. But beguinages could also be much larger as in Bruges, Brussels, and Amsterdam, where hundreds of women lived together in walled-in groups of houses within a medieval town or city.

No men were allowed to live within the beguinages, though some permitted male visitors. Women were free to leave at any time and a number would leave, to set up their own households, to get married, or to go back home to care for sick relatives.

It would seem that the heyday of the beguines did not last long beyond the last Crusade. Suspicions swirled in some areas about what was going on within the walls of the beguinages. Marguerite Porete, for example, who lived in a beguinage in Paris, was accused of heresy and burned at the stake in 1310. Many others were accused of witchcraft.

Why these women were called Beguines is a mystery, and it may have originally been a pejorative term that the women decided to embrace. In colloquial medieval French, a beguin was a bonnet, and embeguiner was the verb – to wear a bonnet (it could also mean to have a crush on) The bequines certainly used to wear a fairly distinctive style of bonnet. However, it is possible that the origin was the other way around, with a beguine’s distinctive style of headwear becoming a new word for a bonnet.

In later centuries we have had Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, Suffragettes and Suffragists, and waves of feminism from the mid nineteenth century on, as women have always struggled to get and maintain legal, political and social rights on a par with, and independent from, men. But, in many respects, the beguines were there first!

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The Proverbial Woman

It was too wet to go out so I started on some Spring Cleaning. I get the urge every year or so, but it doesn’t last long – just till the next sunny day. However, during last week’s little flurry of activity I found an old book tucked away at the back of a shelf. Small, scruffy, tiny print, and bound in a cheap, red coloured, cardboard cover, it could hardly look less inviting. It was part of Cassell’s Pocket Reference Library series, and was titled Proverbs and Maxims. First published in 1910 and reprinted 6 times before the edition now in my hands was put together (1931). There are probably many subsequent additions for, as the compiler John L Rayner quotes on his frontispiece, ‘a good maxim is never out of season.’

I glanced through it idly – thinking this would be marginally more interesting than dusting the shelf – and looked up husbands (half a page of quotations), men (one and a half pages), wives (two and a half pages) and women (over three pages). I can’t be sure, because the original authors were not cited, but the gist of each proverb/maxim suggests that in most cases, they were opined by a man.

Take those on husbands – ‘if a husband be not at home, there is nobody.’ ‘Husbands be in Heaven when wives scold not.’ And so on (mostly) in the same vein.

Likewise, there is a complacency and tolerance about the proverbs on men: ‘Man, woman, and devil are the three degrees of comparison.’ ‘Man is a bundle of habits.’ ‘Every man is the son of his own works.’ A proverb about old men is a bit disparaging – ‘it’s hard to break an old hog of an ill custom.’ But this is nothing on the general gist of proverbs about women.

Wives in particular, get a raw deal. ‘He that has a wife has strife.’ ‘Wives and wind are necessary evil.’ ‘Wife and children are bills of charges.’ But women in general don’t fare much better. The most complimentary was, at best, patronising. ‘A good woman is worth, if she were sold, the fairest crown that’s made of pure gold.’ Which is better, I suppose, than ‘A man of straw is worth a woman of gold.’

Most however are plain nasty, and stress the importance of keeping a woman in her place. ‘Women are ships, and must be manned.’ Women are the devil’s nets.’ ‘When an ass climbs a ladder, we may find wisdom in a woman.’ And my all-time least favourite – ‘a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be.’

Well, it’s a booklet from a hundred years ago, you may say. Things are so much better these days. True.  When it was first published, women did not have the vote. And it is only in the last 50 or so years that women have been able to open bank accounts or take on a mortgage without permission from their husband or father, that the Football Association has graciously allowed women and girls to play football, and that athletics has permitted women to run in marathons. None of this has happened without a fight by women (and some men), so it’s great that Jasmin Paris, a young British woman, and the first woman ever to complete the Barkley ultra-endurance race in under 60 hours, has dedicated her achievement earlier this month ‘to woman everywhere.’

Because in other spheres, ‘progress’ is not always so evident. The NHS talks about ‘people with ovaries’ rather than acknowledge that these are bodily parts unique to women (though they have no problem talking about men getting checked out for prostate problems), and many UK politicians struggle to say what a woman is for fear of upsetting trans identifying males. The responses to women who object to this obfuscation are often crudely worded versions of the centuries old maxim ‘Let women spin, and not preach.’

Further afield, the situation is much worse, particularly in Afghanistan where women and girls have no rights and are not allowed to leave home without a male relative as a chaperone. No school, no work, no entertainment, no sporting activities – not even a walk in the park. Women out unaccompanied risk arrest, physical punishment, prison or even death (though the purity police, aka the Taliban, aren’t averse to a bit of punitive rape of such ‘loose women’ alongside these other measures). And allegations of adultery are now likely to end in death by stoning – just for the woman, of course. This in a country where 50 years ago young women dressed like me and, like me, were free to go to university and to work. No wonder the suicide rate among women and girls is so high there at the moment.

So well may we snigger at the old fashioned, misogynistic, attitudes evident in this little book of maxims and proverbs. But scratch the surface and many such sentiments are still around in western ‘civilised’ countries. And they are pretty much Government policy in some countries, notably Afghanistan and Iran.

And now the sun is out, and it is unlikely to rain for the next few days, so my spring cleaning has come to an abrupt halt. Long may the sun shine!

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Counting Dead Women – Vigil in Coventry

Next Saturday, the 25^th November, is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (and girls). More specifically, it is about ending male violence against them. Yes, not all men are violent killers, and some women commit murder too, but you only need to look at the international news to get an idea of the sheer scale of femicide everywhere: the targeted violence against women in Iran and Afghanistan; the Jewish women raped and murdered by Hamas; the casual violence, often ending in death, against females in India, Pakistan, Arab countries, Africa; the trafficking of East European women into forced prostitution in the West; the Russian army’s rape and killing in Ukraine ….

Closer to home, in the UK over two women a week, on average, are killed by men, often a current or former partner, father, brother, or son. This is the theme taken up by a group of women in Coventry who are holding a vigil for the third year running to highlight the number of women and girls killed in this country by males – just because they are female.

The Coventry vigil will be on the 25^th November in Smithford Way from 9am to 5pm, with the names of the women who have been killed read out on the hour, every hour. A number of councillors will speak during the day, there will be music and singing from the wonderful Nehanda between 12 and 2pm and, advice and information about women’s support services in the city will available all day.

Not least, the celebrated Scottish poet, Magi Gibson, has allowed us the use her poem – Dead. Women. Count. to introduce the reading of the names.

It is sad and thought provoking and, I think you will agree, entirely apt for such an occasion. Just read it below to see for yourself.

Dead. Women. Count. – by Magi Gibson

She counts dead women. Not women

wiped out in war zones by bullets and bombs, nor

the 63 million missing in India – Rita Banjeri

is keeping count of them. Nor is she counting

the Korean Comfort Women, piecing

together what’s left of their bones

in the fire pits where they perished. No,

she keeps count closer to home. Not just

the victims of those wild-eyed strangers they drilled

us to evade: stay with your pals when you leave the pub,

don’t walk down darkened lanes, don’t take shortcuts

through woods alone, don’t get into vans,

don’t wear short skirts, too high heels,

low cut tops, don’t end up a headline

a corpse, a break-a-mother’s-heart statistic in a ditch.

Not, not just those! She’s counting women

killed with knives, shotguns, ropes, with septic

tanks and fists, with poison, cricket bats and fire

each killed by a man who said he loved her once,

a boyfriend, husband, partner, ex, a man she trusted

in her home. A man who thought her life

no longer counts. But she is counting,

every week, every one.

And we are counting with her.

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Men Don’t Gossip

I have it on the highest authority (and I’m not talking about my husband) that men don’t gossip. They may confer with each other over open car bonnets, or when propping up the bar while the women folk natter about quantum physics, the crisis in the Middle East, or the price of nappies. But the men are having a discussion, the women – well the women are just gossiping.

In fact, I’ve just found in my reading of the book Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, that there is some foundation for this distinction. In the Middle Ages, pregnancy and birth were almost exclusively female affairs (apart from the inception, obviously). A group of women would support the mother-to-be whilst she was having the baby and in the weeks that followed whilst she was ‘lying in’ and was confined to her room or apartment. (The wealthier the woman, the more prolonged this confinement could be – poorer women didn’t have the space or the luxury of time for much lying in. But, whatever your social class, a baby’s birth was still very much managed by the women around you).

After the lying in, a woman would go to church for – hopefully – thanksgiving for the birth of a healthy baby, and for purification. She would ask some of these women to be godmothers for the new baby or, in Old English, a godsip or godsibb – literally a god-relation. It is easy to see the slide in spelling towards calling a woman so chosen a gossip.

By the sixteenth century gossip was regularly applied to the women attending the birth and lying in. And if you are going to be stuck in a room with a bunch of other women, you are bound to chat about all and everything, from tips on breastfeeding the new-born, getting your figure back and avoiding getting pregnant again too quickly, to the shocking price of parsnips in the market, to world affairs.

It’s easy to see how the noun became a verb and gossip became a stereotype activity for all women given any opportunity to get together.

And why, despite the evidence of our eyes, men don’t gossip.

But that’s another story.

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Mother Tongue

I’ve just purchased a Kindle copy of Mother Tongue, by Jenni Nuttall. I’ve glanced through it, and I’m very much looking forward to reading further.

We use the term mother tongue to mean our first language – English in my case. Mother tongue is translated from the Latin, lingua materna, and centuries ago it was a reference to the ‘inferior’ language spoken by the women – mothers – in the household when with their children and servants. By and large women spoke only in English because they lacked the classical education of the males who were taught to use Latin plus,maybe, Old French (brought into the country by the Norman conquest) and Greek.

Latin was the ‘father’s’ language, so to speak; though ‘father’ referred as much to the monks and educators as to actual fathers. By the sixteenth century society was evolving, not least because of the arrival of printing and there was an impetus for all classes and both sexes to communicate in English. Soon use of the mother tongue i.e. English became the norm in England.

But back to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue in which she means, literally, the language used by and about women through the past millennium and beyond. Her book is described in The Publishers Weekly as ‘and eye-opening survey of the etymology of words used to identify women’s body parts, the kind of work they performed, and the violence they suffered from men … Required reading for logophiles, feminists, and history buffs.’

Mother Tongue promises to be an illuminating read and I may well come back to it in future posts, but here are a few gems to whet your appetite – be you a logophile, a feminist, a history buff, or just a bit curious.

Did you know, for example, that the word girl referred to both male and female children until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century? Or that during the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century girl was a derogatory term for young women who were deemed unruly?

In the fourteenth century, ovaries were sometimes referred to – no doubt with some feeling – as moder ballockes stones (mother-bollocks-stones), the vulva as the womb gate, and the clitoris as the hayward of corpse’s dale. There are sixteenth century records of the cervix being called the kernelly snout, and the vagina the privy passage.

Monthly periods – menstruation – were once called lunations (from the Latin Luna – moon and its 28-day cycle round the earth). More picturesquely periods were described as flourys (flowers) in some medieval texts. Hence – ‘I’m on my flowers,’ or ‘It’s flower time again!

Hystericus is the Latin/Greek word for womb. That women can be hysterical (on account of their wombs making them rather emotional) has been a constant stereotype in literature. Maybe, as Jenni suggests, we should balance things up a bit by describing ‘typical’ men as testerical – a word unaccountably missing from my dictionary.

I’m taking Mother Tongue on holiday with me next month. No doubt plenty more fascinating gems await me.

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Need the Loo?

Are you a sitzpinkler or a stander? If you are scratching your head at this question, maybe the title of this post will give you a clue: sitzpinkler is the descriptive German word for a man who sits down to pee. Apparently 62% of German men do this – at home anyway; if public loos in Germany are anything like the men’s toilets are reputed to be in this country, it would be most unwise to sitzpinkle when out. Many British men think sitting down is unmanly, and there is some sympathy for this attitude among the 38% of standers in Germany – a sitzpinkler is sometimes used as a term of abuse about someone, roughly translating as ‘a bit of a wuss’

Men sitting to pee is a good thing according to many doctors – it enables them to empty their bladder more completely than when standing up, thus mitigating the effects of any prostrate problem; and you are less likely to drop your phone down the pan if your bum is acting as a lid.

Cleaners approve too – less mess on the floor and the toilet seat. You can even buy a WC-Geist from German supermarkets. Translating as ‘toilet ghost,’ it is a device that orders you to SIT DOWN!!! if you dare to lift the seat. It comes in a choice of voices – I understand Angela Merkel’s voice is a best seller.

But what is going to happen if men sitting down to pee in public toilets takes off in this country? The advantage with a urinal is that you simply point and splash and it takes half the time that it does for women – and that’s without women often having to take one or two children in with them, or accompanying an older companion who seems to take forever. It is for good reason that employers and local authorities are supposed to allow more cubicles for women (and why a current trend to turn women’s toilets (but not men’s) into ‘gender neutral’ spaces can have such a negative effect on women’s convenience (pun intended). It is also probably illegal under the Equality Act 2010, and various regulations. Even so, women still seem to have to queue round the block, where as the men are just in and out in a flash.

Many towns and cities are closing public toilets because of the cost of their upkeep. But the fewer facilities there are the fewer people come into town centres to spend money, so it is a rather short-sighted policy. In my home city, Coventry UK, a group of women (and one man) have been researching the toilet provision and inviting comments, so as to petition for improved facilities for all potential visitors. If you are local, you may want to have your say on the survey too – or attend the public event in the city centre on 14^th June 10-12 noon (contact me for the exact location).

Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdICGccwM9ui09L36s1hW8_UqgTX7UEsUpPGa5X7HTSy13WrQ/viewform

NB: Loo is an informal yet polite way of referring to the toilet (unlike bog, which is both informal and impolite). It comes from the French phrase ‘guardez l’eau!’ (‘mind the water!’) a warning shouted by a maid as she emptied the chamber pots out of the bedroom window.

Many of the words describing where we urinate are water or washing based – polite euphemisms for other, much cruder terms.

Such euphemisms include toilet, from medieval French la toilette the word for the cloth used when shaving or dressing hair. Lavatory is from the Latin lavare, to wash, as is latrine. And Americans ask to go to the bathroom when they need a pee.

Once my father, overcome with an unusual fit of politeness at a distant relative’s rather frugal cottage, asked if he could ‘wash his hands.’ The old lady took him at his word and led him to the one cold tap in the house, standing over him whilst he solemnly washed and dried his hands. It made his need to pee even more pressing, but he didn’t dare ask to use the loo/toilet/ lavatory/ bog (and there was no bathroom), For a man who found fart jokes funny until the day he died, I found this attack of bashfulness about needing the loo highly amusing, and showed a lamentable lack of sympathy for his discomfort.

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Words Matter – Just Check Out the 2021 Census

Every adult in England and Wales knows about the 2021 Census, and the findings have been steadily reported in recent months. Each census, which is co-ordinated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and takes place every ten years, seeks to gather data that monitors changes in the population – numbers, relationships, occupations etc. Such data can then be used by local and national government and others to refine policy, for example, and allocate funding accordingly.

Many questions remain the same over the decades, so real comparisons can be made. But new questions can also be introduced, and some questions can be re-worded, to capture perceived changes in society.

However, tinkering with questions can have unforeseen consequences. Which is why many women, and some men, were dismayed when the question asking for the sex of the respondent was revised to include the sex the respondent currently identified as, not just sex at birth. (So trans identifying males and females would be included as, respectively, females or males rather than their natal sex). Fair Play for Women took the ONS to court and argued, successfully, that this would hinder meaningful data collection.

The question was changed back to the customary binary choice, and a new question about gender identity remained. This, in theory, could have given some really useful data and, when combined with other data, provided statistics to improve policy making and services targeted at people identifying outside the sex binary.

Unfortunately the question was couched in a way that was intended to be sensitive to people’s feelings, but proved to be too confusing for many who lacked tertiary education or for whom English is a second language. Hence the number in some areas who seem to have answered it wrongly – leading to some distinctly bizarre findings.

The London borough of Newham, for example, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, with low educational attainments and a high immigrant population, has come out of the census as the region with the highest proportion of trans identifying residents: 1 in 67 Newham Muslims declared themselves to be transgender, as did a similar ratio of West Ham supporters.

Trans Pride, Brighton

Extrapolating from this, it would seem, ludicrously, that the strongest predictor of trans identifying residents within a local authority is the proportion for whom English is not their first language. This despite other research studies showing that transgender people are more likely to be found around universities and especially in Brighton, the ‘LGBTQ+ capital’ of England. But Brighton, according to the census, was a lowly 20^th for the number of trans identifying residents.

The wording of the Census question was: Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth? Straightforward, you might think. But only if you understand the subtleties of language used by trans allies and lobby groups such as Stonewall. The ONS made the mistake of using language that is familiar to certain sections of society (including their own staff), but not to the population at large.

The word gender means different things to different people: An alternative word for sex? A grammatical category? A social identity? A psychological identity? Likewise, what does identify with mean to someone not up to speed with identity politics? And if, as an immigrant, you do not have a birth certificate, what does registered at birth mean? If in doubt, people tend to hedge their bets and answer No to ambiguous questions – hence the larger than expected number identifying as trans in some unlikely areas.

In response to the ridicule that has accompanied these ‘findings’, the ONS has accepted that many respondents may have misinterpreted the question, and the matter is being investigated by the Office for Statistics Regulation. Maybe the ONS should have heeded the advice of an old college lecturer of mine who used to say that effective communication is knowing that it’s not what you think you meant, but what someone understood you to mean.

So, if you want to get a straight answer to a question, you need the reach beyond your own intellectual and cultural bubble and ensure you use words people will understand. Otherwise, as the ONS has found to its cost, you can end up with nonsense.

Words matter!

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Meet author Isidora Sanger

An interview with an author is long overdue on this blog, so I am delighted to introduce you to the author who writes under the name of Isidora Sanger, and is known to her many followers online as laScapigliata*

Isidora is a medical doctor who retired early due to some chronic health issues. She always wanted to be a writer and started writing fiction as soon as she went on her first long-term sick leave.

Around 2012 she became aware of a growing discourse around transgender issues, and became concerned about ethics and the evidence-base for gender self-identification and gender reassignment interventions. She decided to look into it further and has since written about various issues connected to that topic.

Welcome to the blog Isidora. I have just finished reading your book, and found your essays so well researched and well argued that I am happy to recommend them to others who want to look more deeply into this issue.

What is the title of your book? Born in the Right Body: Gender identity ideology from a medical and feminist perspective. The book explores the impact of the transgender phenomenon, gender self-identification, and gender identity ideology on patient welfare and women’s sex-based rights. It examines the evidence-base for gender reassignment interventions using a first principles approach. It tracks the cognitive and policy capture of Western institutions by gender identity ideology, and it applies the feminist lens to consequences and outcomes of individuals identifying as the opposite sex.

Why did you write it? In 2012 I first noticed men who identified as women starting to abuse feminists online. A woman could not say that women have unique biology and healthcare needs, and that female biology makes women vulnerable to abuse, without being called a “TERF” – which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” – “bigot” and even “Nazi”.

Having been a feminist for a long time, the insults and threats these men (who called themselves “transwomen”) hurled at women reminded me of Men’s Rights Activists and “incels”, who had been abusing feminists online for years beforehand. However, instead of being universally condemned in feminist circles, they were often being celebrated as “the most oppressed minority in history,” and allowed to take over women’s groups and conversations.

Soon, the word “transwoman” changed spelling to “trans woman” and transactivists started to claim that men who identified as women were in fact female, and that “trans” was just an adjective, like “Black”, “tall” and “disabled”. Simultaneously, the word “woman” started to disappear from healthcare and policy. Woman became “anyone who identifies as a woman”, and while women were being described using dehumanising terms such as “menstruators”, “vulva owners” and “birthing bodies”, the word “man” remained intact.

A massive surge in children and adolescents (and especially girls) identifying as the opposite sex followed, and gender clinics world-wide started to follow a so called “affirmation-only model”. This involved automatic affirmation of opposite sex identities – without exploring underlying causes – and interventions designed to masculinise girls and feminise boys. I found that children and young people were having their normal development arrested through the use of puberty blockers, their physiology was being thrown out of balance with cross-sex hormones, and they were undergoing radical yet unnecessary surgical procedures such as castration and double mastectomies, all in a pursuit of the unattainable goal of a “sex change”.

The more I looked, the more I realised how damaging this was. These medical and surgical interventions had very serious long-term side effects (such as impairment in bone, brain and sexual development) and the evidence that this was improving psychological distress associated with “gender dysphoria” was lacking. I realised we were witnessing a medical scandal and as a doctor I felt it was my duty to raise awareness and fight it.

What have you found to be the most challenging aspects of being a writer? I find, as a bilingual person, writing in my second language is quite tiring. Even though I’m fluent in English, there’s a delay between an idea and words on the page. It is hard to explain, but I find that I have to focus a lot more when I’m writing in English, than when I’m writing in Serbo-Croatian, which is my native tongue.

I also didn’t quite appreciate how physically strenuous writing a book can be; finding a good chair and desk was essential.

And the most rewarding? Being able to express myself has been not just incredibly rewarding, but also healing. Once upon a time, I was a refugee in a foreign country whose language and customs I didn’t best understand. Not being able to crack a joke or express my feelings to others felt like I was “locked in”. It was a very surreal, frustrating feeling. Finding my voice again feels like a blockage has been cleared and my energy can once again flow freely.

Writing non-fiction allows me to contribute to the conversation about issues that are important to me. However, my happy place is fiction-writing. Creating new worlds and characters, and seeing others enjoy and derive personal meaning from it, is a great privilege.

What is your top tip for an aspiring writer? Find a story you can see yourself working on for at least 2 years, if not longer, because writing a book takes time. Every story can be told in countless ways. As writers we have to make choices every time we sit down to write, and it can be daunting to be aware of the choices we didn’t make, to doubt ourselves and even, to start again. The story has to really grab you, it has to remain exciting and motivate you over a long period of time. So, write what you want to read, and what you can see yourself thinking about day after day for the foreseeable future.

What do you like to read? I read quite widely. I love literary novels but also genre fiction, especially mystery, supernatural and science fiction. Some of my all-time favourite novels are The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Dictionary of Khazars by Milorad Pavic, The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostoyevsky, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Dune by Frank Herbert and The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin.

What are you working on at the moment? I’m working on a story about a female vampire who lost her memory. The story is set in the future, with flashbacks to the past and a sci-fi subplot. But in essence it is a story about a mother and son, about survival and about being a woman.

I look forward to featuring this new work on the blog one day! Meanwhile, where can readers find you and your recent book?

You can find me on twitter as @lascapigliata8

My website is lascapigliata.com

My book is available in bookstores such as Waterstones, Barnes and Noble, and in all Amazon marketplaces.

The link to UK Amazon listing is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Born-Right-Body-identity-perspective-ebook/dp/B0BN2FJDTX/)

A Synopsis from Born in the Right Body

For over a century, feminists have campaigned for women’s sex-based rights, despite the violent backlash from men. They recognised that women’s health and well-being, participation in public life and their ability to escape abuse were the most urgent human rights issues affecting the female sex. The backlash from men was carried out in the physical – by using oppression and violence – but it was justified with metaphysical theories about women’s brains, a feminine psyche and the innate nature of gender stereotypes. Obscure scientific methods of dubious significance, like phrenology, kept being devised to try and substantiate this empirically.

Needless to say, such methods have been abandoned as quackery, and we now know that none of the assumptions about women on which male supremacy was based were correct. Despite this, the tendency toward justifying discrimination against women and girls has not disappeared with technological advancements in the 21st century. Now, instead of phrenology and fanciful ideas about “wandering wombs”, we have brain scans being used to allegedly prove that feminine males and masculine females were “born in the wrong body” and that their psychological distress can be cured by medical and surgical procedures designed to make them resemble the opposite sex.

This collection of essays is my testament to the feminists who have campaigned so painfully and courageously, and for so long, and those that continue to fight to this day – and beyond.

NB: *[Editor’s note] La Scapigliata is an unfinished painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Through it, Leonardo is suggesting there is much more to the female race than society understands and appreciates.