Women tell other women that they are not crazy, dumb or inferior: a 600 year history. Part 1.

"Its not you, it's the system." - every generation of women. (voice over: "but their words were not recorded or shared. Leaving the next generation to wake up to the same realization on their own")

A few years ago I was in a spiritual director training program so I could learn to help people transitioning out of Mormonism.

Whenever I mentioned my Mormon past an older woman in my cohort would always mention Sonja Johnson saying things like, “Did I tell you I heard Sonja Johnson speak in the 80s?” “The only thing I know about Mormonism is from reading Sonja Johnson.”

After a year of these comments, I finally fessed up, “I’m so sorry, but I’ve actually never heard of Sonja Johnson before.”

She looked at me like she must have misheard. “You’re a feminist leaving Mormonism and you’ve never heard of Sonja Johnson?!”

“Um, no.”

I felt so sheepish about my ignorance that I went out in search of Sonja Johnson’s book “From Housewife to Heretic” that day.

As I read, my mouth kept hitting the floor Sebastian style.

I could not believe that a woman I had never even heard of was thinking my exact thoughts 40 years before I thought them.

She was having the exact same whispered conversations with her friends that I was with mine about secretly praying to Heavenly Mother (which was forbidden), about how women are treated like children, about how change for women must be just around the corner- all of it.

Instagram convinced me my generation of Mormon women was the first to be having these revolutionary thoughts and conversations.

I then learned of a group of Mormon feminists in the 70s who stumbled upon the writings of Mormon feminists in the 1800s that they had never heard of until they found a stack of their old writings in the Harvard library.

These Mormon feminists in the 70s could not believe that women from 100 years ago were having the exact same thoughts and conversations that they were. They thought they were the first generation of women to be having these revolutionary thoughts and conversations.

I was gobsmacked. Waking up to my own history and reading From Housewife to Heretic is actually the reason I started this Substack.

Here’s a snippet from my very first article from over two years ago:

“It seems LDS women wake up to patriarchal inequality in cohorts. Each cohort believing they are the first to wake up… This puts women in the distinct disadvantage to reinvent the wheel with each new cohort of women awakening to patriarchal rule without learning the lessons and wisdom from the cohort before…

Meanwhile men in charge have the distinct advantage of decades of trial and error experience on how to combat women’s movements, silence women’s voices and snuff out requests for increased representation and equality.” - me

In response, my friend Amy shared this quote in the comments:

“Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they struggle for insights others had already had before them, resulting in the constant inventing of the wheel.” - Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness

Ummmmm…….

Who is this “Gerda Lerner” and how did she steal my idea?????

Rude.

Feminist consciousness? Never heard of it.

Me, ignorant of my own history, did not know what esteemed historian Gerda Lerner before me had thought and taught.

I, a woman, struggled to invent the wheel of women reinventing the wheel only to learn that this wheel had in fact already been invented by women.

At the time I was so engrossed in my little Mormon world that I couldn’t quite fathom this being true of the world at large. I knew I had been denied Mormon women’s history, but I hadn’t been denied women’s history as a whole, have I?

I mean we have a whole month dedicated to it. What more could we want?

I’ve heard of Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Queen Elizabeth and Rosa Parks. That pretty well covers it, right?

We wouldn’t want to be greedy.

Reinventing the wheel: 600 years of women realizing they are not innately inferior to men

Christine de Pizan vs Ovid, Mary Wollestonecraft vs Rousseau, Nancy Hopkins vs Larry Summers, and me vs Ezra Taft Benson

One sunny day in the 1300s in Venice a young woman by the name of Christine de Pizan was reading the famous poet Ovid.

While Ovid admittedly loved seducing women, he was not shy with his belief that they were vain, frail, inferior creatures.

Being one of the very few women who could read at the time, this was not the first time Christine had encountered the “fact” that women were inferior to men.

And she had always believed it. Until she looked around, took stock and thought, “hold up a sec, I don’t think we are inferior actually!”

She wrote,

“[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth.

Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.” - Christine de Pizan

On this instance of Christine prioritizing her lived experience over what she had always been taught, Gerda Lerner says, “Here for the first time in the written record, we have a woman defining the tension every thinking woman has experienced --between male authority denying her equality as a person and her own experience."

Way ahead of her time, Christine de Pizan wrote a book called The Book of the City of Girls, the premise of which is “Ladies, it’s not you, it’s the system. You are not crazy. Or dumb. Or inferior.”

350 years later, one sunny day in London, Mary Wollestonecraft was reading the famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said,

“Woman was specifically made to please man. If man ought to please her in turn, the necessity is less direct. His merit lies in his power; he pleases simply because he is strong. I grant you this is not the law of love; but it is the law of nature, which is older than love itself… She remains inferior to us.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Being one of the few women who could read at the time, this was not the first time Mary had encountered the “fact” that women were inferior to men.

She looked around, took stock and thought, “hold up a sec, I don’t think we are inferior actually!”

She responded to Rousseau directly by saying that if women are not as knowledgeable it is only because women are not afforded an education. If women are not as good at leading, it is only because they have never been given the opportunity to lead.

Rousseau said that women are frivolous and shallow-only caring about their looks. Mary clapped back by saying that women are taught from the time they are babies that their worth IS their beauty. Then they are mocked for caring. (still true)

“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” - Mary Wollestonecraft

Way ahead of her time, Mary wrote a book called The Vindication of the Rights of Women¹ in 1792, the premise of which is “Ladies- it’s not you. It’s the system. You are not crazy. Or dumb. Or inferior.”

200 years later, one sunny day in January 2005, Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT was sitting in the audience of the Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.

She was listening to Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, give a speech about the under-representation of women in tenured science and engineering positions.

He began by saying that he chose this topic, “not because that’s necessarily the most important problem or the most interesting problem, but because it’s the only one of these problems that I’ve made an effort to think in a very serious way about.”²

And what conclusion did his very serious thinking efforts lead him to?

That women are not well represented in science and engineering not so much because of discrimination, but because of innate differences in aptitude.

His closing remarks were,

“…in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”³

This was not the first time Nancy had heard that women of science were inferior to men of science.

Like Christine de Pizan exactly 600 years earlier,⁴ at first when she encountered difficulties and setbacks as she climbed the academic ladder, she assumed it was… just a her problem.

Then, when she was denied a 200 foot expansion of her lab at MIT, she went around with a tape measure and measured how much bigger her male colleagues’ labs and offices were compared to hers and those of her female colleagues.

Turns out it wasn’t just in her head. She looked around, took stock and knew that she and her female colleagues were not inferior actually. But they were not afforded the same labs, grants, speaking opportunities, and leadership promotions.

After walking out of Summers’s talk in protest, Nancy wrote an article for MIT proving his talk false point by point:

“Over recent decades, psychologists have demonstrated that identical intellectual work performed by men and women is frequently not valued equally. For example, if one xeroxes a manuscript and puts a man's name on one copy and a woman's on the other and sends the two articles out for review, the identical work receives a higher score or more positive comments if reviewers think it was authored by a man. Strikingly, it does not matter whether the reviewers are men or women! Most of us - women and men alike – tend to under-value work if we think it was performed by a woman. It does not take research or imagination to understand the devastating impact on professional women, of having their work judged inferior when in truth it is at least equal in merit. The inability of most people to believe they are capable of such unconscious bias and unfair judgment is perhaps the greatest obstacle to equality in the workplace.” - Nancy Hopkins, Academic Responsibility and Gender Bias⁵

A book was written about Nancy’s research and experience called The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Its premise is “Ladies, it’s not you. It’s the system. You are not crazy. Or dumb. Or inferior.”

One sunny day Celeste was repeating the memorized words of Mormon prophet Ezra Benson who said, “By divine design… fathers are to preside over their families… mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”

This was far from the first time she had heard that men were to lead over women by divine design. She had always believed this was true—that she was born a woman, so she was born to obey a male husband, a male prophet, and a male God.

Until she looked around. Took stock. Thought, “Hold up a sec! I don’t think women are innately meant to follow the men actually.”

I think I am just as worthy, born with just as much access to divinity and innate ability to lead as the men.

I now write this Substack, the premise of which is, “Ladies, it’s not you. It’s the system. You are not crazy. Or dumb. Or inferior.”

The fact that each generation of women have been reinventing the wheel, waking up to this same realization without knowing the words of previous generations of women is frustrating.

And to add insult to injury, the words of these men have been taken as authority- not just about women, but about poetry, philosophy, politics, spirituality and history.

Ovid is one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. He has been read widely for hundreds of years in the study of classic literature.

Rousseau is even more widely known and heralded. His ideas are the ones behind the Declaration of Independence. He has been read for hundreds of years in the study of political science, psychology and sociology.

And even if you’ve never heard of Larry Summers, I’m sure you’ve heard of his job titles. He served as the US Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton. He was the Chief Economist of the World Bank, and director of the National Economic Council.

Yet how many of us have read the words of Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollestonecraft or Nancy Hopkins? How many of us have even heard of them?

But how many of us have had their same experience of looking around and thinking, “hold up a sec, I don’t think this is right. Am I crazy?”

You’re not crazy, it’s not you. It’s the system.

"Women's history is the primary tool of women's emancipation." - Gerda Lerner

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Join us next week for part II as we discuss important questions such as: have women contributed anything to human progress? Why/why not? Why is only 0.5% of 3,500 years of recorded history dedicated to women? What mistakes does the women’s movement keep making over and over since we don’t know or learn from our past mistakes? (spoiler alert: it’s racism)

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1. Every word of this book written over 300 years ago holds up today. You should def read it.

2. The President of Harvard admitting to not thinking very hard about diversity at a diversity conference is WILD!

3. I read his talk in its entirety. Here’s another notable quote:

“…my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.” Translation: my daughters played house with trucks, therefore they are meant to stay home with babies, not be scientists.

The. President. Of. Harvard!

4. This happened in 2005 and The Book of the City of Girls was written in 1405, so it was exactly 600 years earlier.

5. Don’t like that example? That’s fine. I could talk about James Damore, a Google employee who wrote and distributed a memo arguing that biological differences between men and women explains why fewer women hold leadership roles in tech, and Susan Wojcicki’s op-ed response in Fortune highlighting her experiences with gender bias and the systemic pattern behind them. I could talk about Jordan Peterson’s continuous Rousseau-ian tirades that men are innately better at leading as evidence by the fact that they always have. The modern day examples of this centuries-old conversation are endless.