coram deo

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

Idk why people assume that a woman not working a job for an employer means she's not working or laboring or contributing to the household economy. The propaganda runs deep, i guess.

Womanhood is the process of understanding your mother.

I love the term "domestic arts" idk why I just think it's such a cute way to describe the work that's been traditionally done by women since the beginning of time and I love having a way to encompass all the work that goes into caring for a home and a family physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I just absolutely adore domesticity and caring for others and slow living and I think the term describes that very well.

Amen and amen.

“The woman who derives her principles from the Bible, and her amusements from intellectual sources, from the beauties of nature, and from active employment and exercise, will not pant for beholders. She is no clamorous beggar for the extorted alms of admiration. She lives on her own stock. She possesses the truest independence. She does not wait for the opinion of the world, to know if she is right; nor for the applause of the world, to know if she is happy.”

–Hannah More, poet, abolitionist, and friend of William Wilberforce, as quoted in Fierce Convictions

uterus, i dont need you. go forth and find a beautiful trans woman who wants you.

For the millionth time, your uterus has many functions other than pregnancy. You DO need it to have a healthy body with regulated hormones. Unless you want to be dependent on pharmaceuticals for the rest of your life, and even then you risk loss of bone density, pelvic floor collapse, and a host of other problems. The uterus is not a merely a baby house. It's a vital part of your endocrine system that keeps you alive.

I hope every woman and every girl knows that you're not more akin to men than you are to other women/girls just because of what your interests and/or hobbies are. Just because you like clothes traditionally worn by men doesn't mean you're more like them than other woman. Just because you like video games or anime or sports or other women or getting dirty or roughhousing or working with your hands or beer or gaining muscle or what the fuck ever doesn't mean that you're anything like a man. It does nothing to ally yourself with men and convince yourself that other women are nothing like you. You are alienating yourself. There are women who will accept and love you and be attracted to you (if that's what you want). I know it can be difficult to hold that belief, but I promise that finding women who are like you is far too rewarding to give up on. There are other women like you. The proof is you yourself. You are not so unique that you're the only woman on the planet to have your exact traits. That belief robs you of so many rich friendships with other women who you can relate to in ways you never could with a man. Those women are waiting to meet you, too. Friendships with other women is so so so important. Being like other girls is the eight wonder of the world and I wish more women understood that.

What do girls have left? Every piece of girlhood is being overtaken by trans narrative. Girls can’t be girls without being told they may not be a girl at all. Suddenly a tom boy might be trans? A girl cannot enjoy more masculine activities or clothing without being told she’s trans, non-binary?? Gender expression..you mean personality? There is no right way to do girlhood or be a girl because a girl is a FEMALE child. Her clothes, her hobbies, her sexuality, her beliefs, her dislikes and likes, none of those things make her a “girl” and to define it as so is damaging! There are shared experiences of girlhood, womanhood, of being female, of course but it’s only shared experiences because of the biological reality of being female.

They’re baiting insecure people. Hobbies, interests have no gender. There is no gender police, if you do a hobby that most of your peers don’t.

As a teen, I did both hobbies associated with girls (horse riding) and associated with boys (motocross). Hobbies are perceived such way, because of who pursue them. There were no boys at my barn, so it doesn’t surprise me that current society tends to think more girls ride horses, even though male riders exist and are successful in horse sports. When I did MX, there were almost only boys at the track. Did any of them think I wasn’t “allowed”? No, they were thrilled about a girl interested in dirtbikes!  The fact remains, that I knew a lot more girls interested in horses than dirtbikes, and even fewer who were interested in both.

I think social movements, especially social movements built upon bad faith in people, tend to think society’s perceptions are rigid, when it fact, it’s not. Normalcy isn’t carved into stone, look how many things are “normal” now, plenty of bad stuff is “normal”, plenty of neutral stuff is “normal”, plenty of good stuff is “normal”, and you don’t have to let any of that influence your interests, personality etc. If you only care about what other people think, you’ll always be their prisoner.

I think nowadays it’s more important than ever to raise confident kids, who are not easily swayed by public opinion and predators, and thus cannot fall under the influence of gender ideology, who view everything rigidly in gender stereotypes, even though interests and personalities are never neatly divided into xx and xy.

You don't get to experience "girlhood" if you're a man. Stop fetishizing femininity.

we knew what a woman was for thousands of years before we knew what chromosomes were, the fact that people feel the need to actually formulate a scientific argument against such a ridiculous question is an absurdity in and of itself

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