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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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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