Archive for the ‘feminism’ Category
Iran, football, refugees, war…
in the spotlight, but not as they hoped…
There’s an argument going round that we (in Australia) are now at war with Iran because we’re allied to the US. Not that the people pointing this out are happy about it – it’s more like ‘an inconvenient truth’. And AI (never lies) agrees, sort of:
As of March 2026, Australia is peripherally involved in the US-Iran conflict through intelligence sharing, AUKUS personnel, and regional base support, though it has not engaged in direct offensive action. Australian personnel were aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, and a base in the UAE hosting Australians was targeted.
So how did bonobos become female dominant? Can anybody tell me…?
girls girls girls
One of the things that pissed me off about the ‘evolutionary psychologist’ who mocked a female writer who found inspiration in bonobos, was that he himself expressed not the slightest curiosity about how this species, the closest one to humans along with chimps, actually became female dominant. He was too busy trying to argue that we had nothing to learn from these apes, and that our ‘psychology’ was patriarchal from the get-go, and presumably always will be.
Anyway, enough of him. Many women have been inspired by bonobos and this will continue into the future. And we know that the principal feature of their dominance is sisterhood. Here’s how the NY Times put it in an article posted last April:
… researchers who tracked six bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo over nearly 30 years provided the first evidence-based explanation for how female bonobos gain and sustain dominance over the males within their communities. Females, they found, form coalitions against males to tip the balance of power in their favor.
When a male bonobo steps out of line, nearby females will band together to attack or intimidate him. Males who cower in the face of such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adversaries gain it, affording them better access to food, and mates for their sons.
Much is made in the article, and in other material I’ve read, that bonobos are not exactly the peaceful ape they’re claimed to be. But who claims this? My own focus has always been on matriarchy, not at all on peace. In human society, women have been murderers and child abusers – but of course not on anything like the level of men. Bonobo females sometimes have to deal aggressively with uppity males – often targeting the private parts (not so private for non-human primates). Chimp males on the other hand, and even females, have sometimes engaged in infanticide, and whole chimp troupes have been known to wipe out other troupes in all-out warfare.
Bonobos deal with tension between troupes through food-sharing and of course mutual masturbation (producing that sticky stuff that brings folk together). There has as yet been no solid evidence of bonobos killing bonobos, but it may well happen from time to time. So how did they come to be so different after, at most, 2 million years of separation from chimps? The time frame is important, considering the differences between the two species, and some studies argue for less than a million years.
As the article above points out, it’s about coalitions, a Bonobo Sisterhood, as Diane Rosenfeld has argued, most cogently, as a template for human females. So how and why did this sisterhood evolve? My thought on this is that, in the forests of the region south of the Congo, there was an abundant enough food supply, mostly frugivorous, so that hunting and physically overcoming animal resources became surplus to requirements. Physical size and strength was less important – as is the case in post-industrial human societies. That’s why we now allow women into the military and other ‘tough’ forms of employment, at least in more enlightened societies. And along with those changes we have women being ‘trusted’ to run businesses, to head scientific and legal teams, and even to be elected into parliaments and occasionally become Prime Ministers or Presidents. But of course the balance of power, even in the ‘enlightened’ WEIRD world, is still massively in favour of men. But, l’avenir est féminin, my t-shirt proclaims, and l’avenir est long….
And again, for those who are apt to mock the idea that we can learn anything from our ‘dumb’ ape cousins, I’ve been reminded, through an essay just sent to me by a friend, and referenced below, of Kanzi the bonobo, who ‘stunned the world’ with his cognitive abilities. It’s extremely doubtful that he’s a ‘freak’, a Stephen Hawking of the bonobo world, though the fact that he was brought up in captivity, with human carers, must be taken into account.
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/bonobos-matriarchies-females.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/bonobos-apes-matriarchy.html
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2023
A bonobo named Kanzi could play pretend, challenging ideas about animal imaginations
tracing the history of patriarchy…
before pants were invented…
I’ve been wondering what to write next, whether I should limit myself to gender and feminist issues or to go wherever my very flighty mind takes me – to neutrinos, say, or dark matter and dark energy, all of which fascinates me but which I feel I should leave to experts, but what am I expert in? – this blog used to be called ‘An autodidact meets a dilettante’, and I wrote it in dialogue form, to satisfy my masculine and feminine personae, but then I decided, sort of, to focus more on feminism and the possibility of female supremacy, but I’ve never been able to keep to the script. And so…
Yesterday I was all set to have a go at particle physics, but I was at a friend’s house and she got me watching a video from a regular vodcaster (I think that’s the term), whose videos go under the title ‘Breaking Down Patriarchy’. Of course she knew that I’d be interested, and while watching I thought to myself, yes, I should stick to this topic – because it’s kind of endless and inexhaustible.
The presenter is a United Stater (not her fault) named Amy McPhie Allebest, and although it seems she is a Mormon, or was at least brought up as such and still retains her Christianity if not that particular take on Christianity, she presents the case against patriarchy in a highly intelligent, reasoned and humane way. In fact her calm approach sets a fine example for a ‘bonafide’ humanist like me (I was a member of the South Australian Humanists for years, and gave a number of talks to the group, including one on the rapid decline of Christianity in Australia), as I sometimes get a bit nasty – for example in recent pieces criticising an ‘evolutionary psychologist’ and his take on the evolution of human patriarchy and its supposed naturalness.
The argument goes, as one Breaking Down Patriarchy video points out, that the ancestral development of bipedalism altered the configuration of the lower limbs and pelvis, including the birth canal, so that offspring tended to be born at an earlier and more vulnerable stage of life, requiring more maternal care. And more paternal care? Of course, mothers did the breast-feeding, but child-minding and protecting could have been shared – as happens with bonobos. In fact bonobos aren’t monogamous at all, so it tends to be all in for the child-rearing. So again I raise the question – when, if ever, did we become ‘naturally’ monogamous?
Meanwhile, there was hunting, and gathering. It had long been thought that there was a fairly strict division of labour, on gender lines, but this is now being questioned, as well as the issue of which activity brought more nutrients to the group. On this question, a documentary, referenced below, provides striking data. Men and women in neolithic China, and in Malta at a similar period, were ‘of equal status’ – they ate the same foods, and, whether or not hunting was all-male and gathering was all-female (it’s unlikely), the usual claim that the hunting was more ‘important’, both in terms of the nutrients and of the status it provided, is now being debunked. It’s worth noting that my bonobo mates ate a mostly frugivorous diet, with absolutely no ill effects as far as I’m aware. Their ‘hunting’ was opportunistic – if some small animal or rodent happened by, it would be chased and seized, by either gender, and shared. Claims that hunting conferred greater status for men, as in the hunter-gatherers of Namibia, have been more or less debunked, unsurprisingly, considering that most of the food consumed wasn’t obtained through hunting.
This documentary, ‘Gender Revolution: The real role of ancient women’, also raises questions about ancient cave art, which often depicts tasty mammals. Early discoverers of these works ‘naturally’ assumed the artists were male, a typically 19th century view (for good measure the doco-makers cited Chaz Darwin’s typically Victorian view that men have evolved to be smarter than women). We can probably never be sure who created this art (examination of accompanying handprints doesn’t really answer the question, though I was fascinated by the fact that the female hand narrows toward the wrist more than the male hand – in my case, it’s true!), but it certainly isn’t safe to assume they were all men. Again, assumptions that neolithic and earlier hunters were men is based on a much later patriarchal society that kept women in domesticity and valued their ‘softness’ and physical weakness. It may be that we’ll never be certain about the status of women in the varied, scattered neolithic and bronze age societies. Bones from a bronze age site in China have revealed that the women’s diet was deficient in particular nutrients, suggesting separation and status imbalance, as well as an increase in sexual dimorphism. Bronze age sites in Europe have revealed a similar diet imbalance based on gender. The bronze age, dating from around 4,000 years ago was a period of much more elaborate burials, especially for males. Male corpses are always found at the centre of family burials, indicating their centrality and status in life.
Different climatic conditions seem to have affected different gender-based behaviour, tasks and diet. A period of climatic stabilisation marked the beginning of the Holocene, some 11,700 years ago, and the beginning of stable agriculture and animal husbandry. But this leads to struggles for the best agricultural land, the best herds, and so on. So, the story goes, the age of warfare begins, and to a large extent it still continues.
Another feature of this period of stabilisation as opposed to mobility was that women began to give birth more frequently, becoming, to a greater degree, ‘perpetual mothers’, increasingly domesticised. Reducing breast-feeding periods, thanks to the development of specialised meals such as porridges for children, led to increased post-natal fertility and more children – and more suffering and death for mothers. Common-marriage systems came into being, as fathers sought to maintain control of their children – essentially their property – into the next generation.
Patrilocality has also become a proven feature of bronze age societies. This prevented inbreeding, and is also a feature of bonobo and chimp societies. It’s been argued that this is another blow to female independence and status, as they have to establish themselves in a new group, presumably with more or less zero status to start with, and yet this still doesn’t prevent bonobo females from being dominant. I’ve watched a video which followed one of these young females as she nervously sought to be accepted by these bonobo strangers, but it didn’t really address the issue – presumably, once accepted by the females, she was able to contribute to their group domination of the males. The simple answer seems to be that sisterhood is powerful… and the males are just too egotistical to form similar brotherly bonds…?
It’s intriguing, and worth pursuing….
References
women and the future
8,000 years ago….
My previous post reminded me of some pieces I wrote (about a year ago), which I’ll reference below. I’m quite proud of these pieces – it seems indignation can bring out the best…
By the way, what happened to evolutionary psychology? To judge from Ryan Ellsworth’s efforts, it was a questionable enterprise, especially in trying to cement patriarchy into our biology. I would guess that it was never a ‘field’ that attracted female intellectuals. Here’s a passage from Ellsworth in his critique of a book by Susan Block called The Bonobo Way, which I criticised (his critique, not the book) in my earlier piece. Obviously I’m still fuming!
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
One has to read this passage a couple of times to let it sink in. Or at least I did – smarter people might’ve recognised the bullshit straight away. It’s there in the first two sentences (okay, the second sentence takes up most of the passage). The first sentence states as fact that there are ‘human sex differences in sexual desire’. So that must be why it’s okay to call men ‘studs’ and women ‘sluts’, or as Ellsworth puts it, we must recognise the fact that ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men’. And it would seem to follow that if they have such desires they should be ostracised and shamed. Ellsworth even tries to argue that to suggest that women might have such pluralist desires is sexist because it (sort of) turns them into men, stripping them of their identity as caring mothers or potentially caring mothers, which is their evolutionary role.
Evolutionary psychology doesn’t seem to have lasted long, which I think is a good thing. It seemed to be wanting to find an evolutionary explanation for what many might find to be shifting social-psychological phenomena, and I don’t think that works. For example, in the WEIRD world we’ve shifted from larger families to smaller, often single-parent families, and family roles have changed. Marriage isn’t so essential to the reproductive process as it was, and of course it only came into being relatively recently, and as for monogamy, we have no idea whether that was practiced by humans, say 200,000 years ago. None of this has to do with evolution in a Darwinian sense – we often describe society as having ‘evolved’ in the last couple of centuries, but this nothing to do with the Darwinian concept.
So, back to monogamy. It’s seen as the norm for we humans, especially when it comes to bringing up children. And yet, neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, and clearly they manage to reproduce, and their offspring are just as well-adjusted as their parents. So when and why did we or our ancestors become so, and will we ever cease to be so? Ellsworth claimed in his essay that there have never been any successful or lasting matriarchal societies, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and of course it would not be of interest to him to mention the controversial but undeniably thought-provoking finds at Çatalhöyük suggesting plenty of goddess-worship. As I’ve often pointed out, the double male god-worship that constitutes Christianity was both born of and a template for thousands of years of patriarchy, still championed by the Catholic Church, so it’s intriguing to wonder about the society around Çatalhöyük, a mere 9,000 years ago. Believing in females with godly powers just doesn’t fit with a male-dominated society, and even those who argue against evidence that the undoubtedly remarkable society that created Çatalhöyük was matriarchal tend to argue for gender egalitarianism, which is remarkable in itself (though I’ve read anthropological studies on some Australian Aboriginal societies that have come to similar conclusions).
All of this makes me wonder again about early humans and their ancestors, Australopithecus and the like, especially considering that bonobos are clearly matriarchal and chimps are clearly patriarchal. Of course, size matters, pace bonobos, and it has recently been found in a study published last year that both A. afarensis and A. africanus, and especially the former, were more sexually dimorphic than present-day humans. But size matters less in the modern WEIRD world, where brute strength is of decreasing importance. I suppose these days we should be looking more at brain size, or rather brain complexity, and I very much doubt if we found any real difference there, which is doubtless why nobody much studies gender-based brain complexity, whether in dogs, cats or humans (I did once have a university friend who seriously asserted that men were naturally more intelligent – and she spoke of neurological complexity – than women; but she was young, and I let it pass, probably due to shock).
Generally, though, I feel optimistic about the greater empowerment of women in the future (the future is long, and I’m getting old, so I’m not worried about being proved wrong). This in spite of Trump and Putin and the Ayatollahs and the Sudanese and so many other African and Middle Eastern nations/regions. We describe them as living in the past for a reason. And Australia, far from the madding crowd of backward-facing nations, with more and more women in government, both nationally and in my home state, can and hopefully will set a small example that exhausted and disillusioned humanists elsewhere might take notice of…
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
this is important: bonobos and humans
Wolf Alice – the right stuff
I’ve been listening to the music and watching the videos of Wolf Alice recently – I’ve just discovered them, mea culpa. Just a fantastic band. They often sing about emotional stuff, emotional confusion, as in the song Blush, which is accompanied by a video that adds gender to the confusion, and an extra dose of sadness to the word ‘happy’, which is the song’s refrain.
I won’t pretend to analyse the song, but it’s one of a number of influences lately that have made me think of humanity’s gender issues – issues that don’t seem to be shared by our closest rellies. Tormenting issues.
My novel In Elizabeth dealt with adolescent and later teen issues in a working-class town, mostly in a light-hearted way. But the fact is, it was a period of torment – though sometimes I felt a sort of enlightenment, or superiority, in thinking of things, indulging in feelings, that I sensed were ‘beyond the pale’.
I described my first sex (but what exactly is ‘sex’, is it feelings or acts? The first erection, the first masturbation, the first awareness of the exciting/disturbing physicality of your own body, the first physical attraction to another?) – so here I’m talking about my first act of putting my penis into the vagina of a girl, an act which, I’m not sure, was probably illegal according to the laws of the time, and even of today. It was my 16th birthday, and the girl was a year below me at school, so either 14 or 15, but not a virgin, as she told me. I was beyond words overwhelmed by the occasion, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Only a few weeks before I’d spotted her in a school corridor, chatting to girlfriends. Her movements, her smile, her grace mesmerised me, and I recall thinking of a young horse, a filly, free and unself-conscious, untamed, perfect. For days I could barely think of anything else and I kept seeking her out in the school grounds….
So I described my obsession to a school friend, and when I pointed her out, he told me he knew her, her name was Edwina, her family were friends with his, and he suggested ‘putting in a good word to her’ about me. That sounded ridiculous, and I agreed. A couple of days later he came back to me. Edwina said yes, she would be my girlfriend.
The joyful impulses of youth. I described this in my novel, and I described the massive impact of Bowie on me as a 16 year-old, and my youthful questioning of sexuality and gender. I didn’t happen to mention that the boy who got me together with Edwina (very briefly) was very pretty, and I had delicious fantasies about him. Not that I avoided homosexuality – I wrote of some boy-boy cuddles and fantasies, which at least one reader told me she found ‘a bit shocking’.
To be honest, I’m shocked, dismayed, and above all disappointed, that people are shocked. Which seems code for disapproval.
The whole male-female gender stuff is still very much a minefield, and a battlefield. As someone in his 70th year on the planet, I’m hoping I can think about it ‘objectively’, if that word means anything.
The issue is important because for centuries upon centuries we’ve lived in a patriarchal world. I’ve read a lot of history, and much of it has been about men behaving badly. And I mean really really badly. And there are still large regions of the world in which females are automatically considered to be inferior, meaning their lives are heavily circumscribed vis-à-vis men. So gender matters muchly.
So what is it? What do we mean by it? And what does it mean to a bird, a cat or a bonobo?
Bonobos are female-dominant. In order to be so, they must clearly be aware of their gender, though they have no knowledge of the word ‘gender’ – they’re never confused by language like we can be. So they’re driven, or affected, by instinct, to be supportive of their own gender. They know who’s male and who’s female, though there may be degrees of maleness and femaleness, as Frans de Waal pointed out in the case of Donna, the female chimp who hung out with the males and never became pregnant (she finally became the dominant chimp in her troupe – or rather in the Lincoln Park zoo enclosure where she lived – but would this have happened in the wild?)
It’s difficult enough to understand how and why bonobos became female-dominant in a period of one or two million years (a pretty wide margin of error) since their separation from chimps, without trying to understand our broadly patriarchal system, which is clearly undergoing change, not only in the WEIRD world. Still, it’s a fascinating topic, which I feel the need to focus on more exclusively, without being distracted by Trumpism or the possibly coming European holocaust, should Putin be pushed to the brink, or the possible slaughter of Taiwanese people under Xi – and other horrorshow issues.
So, in the non-human primate world, size generally matters, and males are mostly bigger than females. Gorillas and orangutans are at the extreme end of this dimorphism. Interesting in the case of orangutans, as they’re solitary, so there’s no obvious need for gender-based dominance – but then, if you’re going to rape a female, it pays to be as big and strong as possible. But of course, the term ‘rape’ is never used when referring to non-human primates. Forced copulation is the preferred term.
But ‘forced copulation’ isn’t just a euphemism. It’s done to produce offspring, and humans don’t have sex, be it via rape or love or anything in between, just to produce children. And why do orangutans have sex? Do they know they’re doing it to produce children? Does a dog – male or female – rub its genital area intensely on your leg to produce offspring? Silly question. These activities are ‘evolutionary by-products’ – we are stimulated to have sex in order to reproduce, but that stimulation being in itself pleasurable, we just do it regardless, often without a partner. And often, as with bonobos, to promote fellow-feeling – you rub my front and I’ll rub yours. Humans often do it for similar reasons, but not enough, I think. After all, we can mutually masturbate and reflect on the nature of dark matter/energy. We contain multitudes.
I’m generally intrigued, and often disturbed, by the difference between human sexual practices and those of other species. Again we are probably the only species that knows that sex leads to pregnancy. We’re also the only clothed species, and these two facts seem connected. Is there anywhere on this planet where public nudity (above a certain tender age) is not a crime? Clothing and civilisation go hand in hand, and most people are relieved that this so. After all, we’re not animals…
But seriously, civilisation demands clothing. Indeed, we might argue that the greater our level of civilisation, the more vast and varied our vestments should be. Charles Darwin, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, used the word ‘savage’ rather a lot in The descent of man, and it seems clear to me that he could see one coming by her lack of anything resembling a petticoat.
So, enough of the cheap shots. I’m intrigued, and inspired by the fact, and surely this is a fact, that bonobos have used sex to become female dominant, while humans have used violence to become male dominant.
There, I’ve come out with it. I’ve avoided being direct about it till now, in fact I’m not even sure that I was clearly aware of this before writing it. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, but that’s how it happened. So, if we deliberately create, or try to create, a female dominant society, will it have a bonoboesque result? Are we currently trying to create such a society, or is it just happening, like evolution? The WEIRD world is certainly more ‘permissive’ than it used to be – with the inevitable frustrating conservative backlash, which means we need to recognise that the future is long, frustratingly long for us mortals, especially the oldies. And of course there are plenty of ultra-conservative females in powerful positions throughout our world, as well as women who are skeptical of any difference that greater female empowerment would make. Usually they point to one or two female politicians, or bosses, or mothers, who weren’t much chop. That’s a ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ argument, IMHO.
Obviously I’m not going to be around to experience a female-dominant WEIRD world, and neither is anyone now living. It may never happen, but I think it should, for the sake of humanity and life on this planet. The trouble-makers today are the leaders of Russia, the USA, China, Iran, Israel, Sudan and North Korea, to name a prominent few. Of course they’re all male, and they’d all expect their successors to be male for all eternity, but that won’t happen, at least we know that much.
So, Wolf Alice isn’t an all-female band, but at least they’re not an all-male one, and there’s no doubt that their sole female member, Ellie Rowsell, is also their most prominent member, for a number of reasons. Their song The Sofa, in contrast to Blush, the song I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, seems to me to be happy and life-affirming, and the accompanying video of males, females and kids engaging in fun, skillful, weird and wonderful activities as a backdrop to a floating or rolling sofa occupied by the band members in turn, but mostly by Rowsell, the singer (and intellectual beauty queen), is – well, it’s just nice, in a bonobo sort of way. Here are some of the lyrics:
Hope I can accept the wild thing in me, hope nobody comes to tame her, And she can be free.Sick of second-guessing my behaviour, And what I want to be. Just let me lie here on the sofa…
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I feel kind of lucky right now and I’m not ashamed to sayI can be happy, I can be sadI can be a bitch when I get madI wanna settle down, or to fall in loveBut sometimes, I just want to fuckI love my life, I love my lifeSometimes, I just want to…
Bonobos don’t have sofas, but I like to think to think they have a similar mind-set, if in a more simplified form. Emotionally labile at times, excitable, sexual, and, given their precarious position in the Congo, hoping to maintain their freedom, the threats to which they’re perhaps dimly aware of. .
So, vive les bonobos, and thank you Wolf Alice, you’re good.
Okay, so this is a chimp, but you get the idea…
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
Eartha Kitt – the sexiest matriarch?
When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin to lose
Bob Dylan, Like a rolling stone
Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008
So before I go onto the second lecture on immunology, a break to write about a theme I’ve neglected for too long – interesting women as models for a future matriarchy. So the other night, in a slightly boozy session with friends, one of them happened to mention his interest in Eartha Kitt, whom I knew only as something of a sex icon who had the obvious bon goût, and the most unAmerican ability, to sometimes sing in la belle langue. So we spent the next pleasant hour or so sampling her most playful work on Youtube.
Before that session I knew vaguely of Eartha Kitt (the earthy kitten?) as perhaps a comedienne of sex, who sang purrrfectly absurd songs sending up and celebrating the world’s most delicious vice. But…. well, let’s find out more.
She was born in the tiny town of North (or on a nearby plantation), in South Carolina, and having checked out what information is available online about the town, I find no mention of surely one of its most famous daughters. But then, her beginnings weren’t auspicious. Her father is basically unknown – some say a plantation owner’s son, others say a local white doctor. Could it be that her success had to be attributed to ‘white genes’? Others, or maybe the same conjecturers, say that she was the product of rape. In any case, her mother (who was of mixed Cherokee and African descent) began a relationship with a black man, who rejected Eartha as being ‘too white’. So, not exactly your standard middle class or even working class beginnings.
So, just a few lines on that earthy name of hers. Eartha really was her birth name, and her family name was Keith, (or Keit) or at least that was the surname of her mother, Annie Mae Keith, who died when Eartha was still quite young. The inspired switch from Keit/h to Kitt seems to have been Eartha’s own.
But more on her unpromising beginnings. She was sent away to be raised by a relative, one Aunt Rosa, ‘in whose household she was abused’, according to Wikipedia. The nature of the abuse isn’t mentioned, but it’s clear that life wasn’t easy for her in this period. She recounted in a later interview that ‘we’ were near starvation at this time, though who exactly she was referring to is unclear. I may have to read one or all of the three autobiographies she has written…
The difficulties of her early years are, to me, made clear by the fact that she wasn’t even sure who her mother was, let alone her father. According to Wikipedia,
After the death of Annie Mae, Eartha was sent to live with another close relative named Mamie Kitt [okay, so that’s where the name came from], who Eartha later came to believe was her biological mother, in Harlem, New York City, where Eartha attended the Metropolitan Vocational High School (later renamed the High School of Performing Arts).
No date is mentioned for this big city move, clearly a decisive event, but it was likely in the early 1940s. According to her daughter, this was undoubtedly the essential move of her life, getting her away from the bigotry of the South, where she was discriminated against by both Blacks and Whites. Interestingly, she wasn’t aware of her own birth day, until a group of students from her home state of South Carolina unEarthaed her birth certificate in 1998. She was born on January 17, 1927. Wikipedia next states, without evidence, that ‘she began her career in 1942’, whatever that means. After all, she was only 15 at the time. In any case, she’d clearly shown enough talent to appear ‘in the 1945 original Broadway theatre production of the musical Carib Song’, though not in a major role. In the 1950s she recorded a number of songs and gained her enduring reputation as a tongue-in-cheek ‘sex kitten’, with a very distinctive and, to me at least, very unAmerican, voice. Speaking of which…
She toured Europe as a dancer and vocalist from 1943, an extraordinary opportunity for a young teen, where she also proved to be skilled at picking up languages – la langue d’amour especially, but according to Wikipedia she was able to sing in eleven of them and to speak more or less fluently in four. C’est ridicule ça! When as a youngster I first heard her singing in French, I thought she was a native, or from the French Carribbean (if I’d heard of such a place) – at least, not a United Stater. In any case, such polyglotism seems freakish to me, in the best possible way. But French was the foreign language that had the most influence on her early career. Apparently she’d been touring with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe and was offered work in a Paris nightclub, which she accepted, becoming fluent in the language much quicker than I ever could. Bitch!
So when she eventually returned to the USA, reputation enhanced, she came to the attention of one Orson Welles, and made her acting debut in a Welles adaptation of Faust, as Helen of Troy (of course). This was in 1950, and she want on to record songs such as C’est si bon, Santa Baby and I want to be evil in the early fifties, establishing her reputation as an earthy sex kitten. Or should I say tiger, panther, bonobo…?
So this is a real rags to riches story, of a talented and enterprising young girl from the most unpromising of backgrounds, which, frankly, moves me more than I can say. And she has all the best bonobo qualities, though much better looking, at least from a human perspective.
It’s interesting – and very USA it seems – that a performer who, in a most unAmerican voice, performed I want to be evil and a deliciously slurpy (but strangely affecting) Lilac wine in her younger days, to grand acclaim, would be ‘outlawed’ for her sympathy for the young American troops being sent to an unnecessary war in Vietnam (not to mention the Vietnamese and Cambodian people caught up in the slaughter). It’s likely her early touring life gave her more of an internationalist, humanist perspective. And she spoke often about ‘falling in love with yourself’ as a prerequisite to a happy and fulfilling life, which is, I think, a more sophisticated view than it might sound. Only she would know how many intimate relations she had, but not too many, it seems. She married only once, relatively briefly, a union which produced her only child, Kitt McDonald, who is devoted to her memory.
I feel quite privileged now to have discovered the life of this fascinating and worthwhile person, who was more than just a unique polyglot entertainer. Hell, I may as well quote some of the Wikipedia material on her activism:
Kitt was active in numerous social causes in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, she established the Kittsville Youth Foundation, a chartered and non-profit organization for underprivileged youths in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Kitt was also involved with a group of youths in the area of Anacostia in Washington, D.C., who called themselves “Rebels with a Cause”. She supported the group’s efforts to clean up streets and establish recreation areas in an effort to keep them out of trouble by testifying with them before the House General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor. In her testimony, in May 1967, Kitt stated that the Rebels’ “achievements and accomplishments should certainly make the adult ‘do-gooders’ realize that these young men and women have performed in 1 short year – with limited finances – that which was not achieved by the same people who might object to turning over some of the duties of planning, rehabilitation, and prevention of juvenile delinquents and juvenile delinquency to those who understand it and are living it”.
I wish I’d been there to hear her! Articulate and precisely on point – this approach reminds me of what I’ve been reading in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Treat people like shit and you’ll get nowhere with them. Treat them as better than they have been and they will learn to love themselves and their environment more.
Kitt was also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed during World War 1 and still in existence. She was under CIA surveillance from 1956, further proof of her bonafides as an international humanist. And there’s more:
Kitt later became a vocal advocate for LGBT rights and publicly supported same-sex marriage, which she considered a civil right. She had been quoted as saying: “I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it?”
Indeed. With the current turn to conservatism, intolerance and patriarchal attitudes, Eartha Kitt’s attitude and example, including even her sexiness, reminds me of the purpose of this blog (she surely would’ve loved the bonobo example). Vive Eartha Kitt! I wish I could’ve met her.
References
on money and matriarchy
When I bring up the subject of a bonobo humanity in any public place I’m more often than not met with confusion or indifference. Bonobos are either unknown or seen as irrelevant to us super-smart, super-complex humans. So, though I don’t agree, I often skip to the issue of matriarchy. And that’s when I get the response, from women, that this female political leader/boss/family member/whatever, was useless/weak/disastrous etc.
THIS IS A CATEGORY ERROR – in my humble opinion. Nothing could be more irrelevant than this response. To explain, let me again quote the author Toni Morrison, who I’ve quoted before:
‘The problem is not men. The problem is patriarchy’.
To which I will add this correlated statement:
‘The solution is not women. The solution is matriarchy’.
And to be clear, we’re living in a patriarchy.
Of course I’m well aware that the human world is a hugely complex thing, and parts of it are more patriarchal than others, and maybe there’s even the odd tiny matriarchy buried somewhere in the hinterlands of our hinterlands, but it has occurred to me that there’s one powerful aspect of our world that attests to its patriarchal nature more than any other, and that’s finance. Money, I’ve been told, is power, and I’m inclined to believe it.
I’m not talking here about gender pay gaps, which sadly have remained much the same over the past three decades, I’m talking about the vast accumulations of wealth that bestow power. According to the Forbes list of the top 20 richest individuals, two are women, and of course they’re down at the bottom half, in 15th and 20th positions, and also of course the top, say, three, are exponentially richer than the bottom three on that list, though those comparative failures are richer than the wildest dreams you and I could ever concoct.
So – money, corruption, manipulation, genocide. It doesn’t always fall out that way of course, but there are some examples worth considering. First, let me replace the word ‘money’, which conjures up an image of coloured paper and round metallic stuff, with wealth, and its associated images of servants, palatial homes, international travel, manipulation of markets and such. And of something else which is hard to produce an image of – power.
The pursuit of wealth, almost exclusively by men, has led to some consequences worth contemplating. Take the soi-disant Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. I won’t go into the complex pre-colonial history of that region, later known as sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’, but from the 1860s onwards virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa became an intense battleground between various European states, with the USA often acting as a self-interested broker. And it was all about wealth, under a cloak of humanitarian-sounding verbiage. At the end of all the wrangling, Leo Victor, by family connections ‘Emperor Leopold II of Belgium’, had carved out a massive chunk of Central Africa for himself, which he named the Congo Free State. And let it be clear, this land didn’t belong to Belgium, it belonged entirely and exclusively to Leo. By the late 1880s, just about everything was in place…
But this isn’t a horror I want to revisit (suffice to say it was about as devastating to the Congolese as Genghis Khan was to Baghdad, all for wealth, booty, plunder and the power such things bring). It was around this time, towards the end of the 19th century, that the term ‘savage’ became just a bit out-dated, what with such newly fashionable studies as anthropology and sociology. Even so, the heart of Africa has remained too dark for the world to fully comprehend the sufferings visited upon its native inhabitants by white-skinned people and their proxies.
So, if we accept that wealth is power, and we accept that female empowerment, or female domination, is worth aiming for, what can we do about divesting in, or from, males and investing in females?
So I’ve looked it up, and, unsurprisingly, most initiatives start from the bottom, which is after all, where a huge percentage of women are found. World Vision highlights seven ways to empower women – ensuring clean water (women in Africa and elsewhere spend many hours in the day trying to find and collect the stuff), supporting women and girls in crisis (child labour, enforced prostitution…), mentoring (supporting women and girls into meaningful employment), empowering entrepreneurs (microloans), education advocacy (keeping girls in school for longer, awarding scholarships), supporting mothers (with essential items and a nurturing culture), and the seventh, perhaps most vague but also most vital, respect, support and advocacy for female-hood from the cradle to the grave.
This may not have to do with wealth, except in the broadest sense, but it’s really the only way to start. And it’s very likely that if the world continues to shift towards greater female empowerment over the next few centuries (and let’s face it, it’s going to be an excruciatingly slow process), the distribution of wealth will reflect this, with far fewer of the disgustingly rich and the distressingly poor.
Will this trend, if it continues over the next thousand years or so, end up in matriarchy? Well of course it will! I can predict this with the great confidence of someone who won’t be around to be proven right or wrong. But looking around at the world today, I can predict with depressing confidence that there will be plenty of setbacks along the way.
References
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
7 ways to empower women and girls
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
Parisian salon society
Thanks, Lucinda!
I don’t know if I’m a Francophile, but my first experience of any foreign language was when my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me, started teaching me French from his high school textbook before lights out, when I was about ten. I went on to do French at high school for three years, topping the class each year, which wasn’t hard. I left school at fifteen, but eventually went to university in my thirtieth year, and completed a 3-year arts degree majoring in French, I’ve no idea why. I did about half of an honours year, then dropped out due to poverty, and a realisation that my French writing was pretty shite. And that, the way things were going, I’d never get to France.
Since then I’ve managed to spend some eight days wandering cluelessly around Paris, which was great fun. And of course I’ve read a lot of French literature, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and such serious stuff as Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir and Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, although my favourite French writer has long been Stendhal, who basically turned his back on France and all things French, preferring the more demonstrative Italians – interestingly, as he seems to have been the most sexually repressed of characters, though the most obviously feminist.
A shame, for Stendhal might have been brought out of his shell by the salon society that was coming to an end by his time – the post-Napoleonic era. I’m reading a lovely little book, True Pleasures: a memoir of women in Paris, by an Australian, Lucinda Holdforth, who brings to life the salonistes and salon-creators of that city, and their admirers, from Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th century, to Nancy Mitford and Gertrude Stein in the 20th. It rather painfully reminds me of my solitary wanderings on the Rive Gauche and through the Marais during that week in 2016, hoping to find something associated with my very dissociated French readings. Will I ever get back there? Not likely.
So now, towards the end of Holdforth’s book, I’m reading about Germaine de Staël and her contretemps with Napoleon. I knew of her, of course, mainly through my reading of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and my researches around that work, but I wasn’t quite aware of just how viciously Bonaparte had treated her. She wrote at least two novels, Delphine and Corrine, and various political and literary tracts, none of which I’ve paid the slightest attention to. In fact many of these female salon-holders were quite voluminous writers, and I’ve read none of them. I’ll try to make up for it, maybe after I’ve found out what’s going on with that possibly non-existent dark energy.
All of this makes me wonder about my take, as a man (of some kind), on female intellectualism and aesthetics through the ages, especially the last few centuries. When I was a teenager, still living in Elizabeth, I read some modern (at the time) feminist literature, including Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch, Eva Figues’ Patriarchal Attitudes and Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique (all of these were just books around the house, thanks to my mother and elder sister), but I can’t remember much about those readings, or whether I even finished any of them, except that I’m sure I patted myself heavily on the back for being so enlightened. Since those days I’ve come to realise just how difficult it is to get out from under the worldwide control of patriarchy, in spite of having encountered many powerful women in my life, for better and worse. And I’ve tried to imagine what a ‘world turned upside down’ would look like, hence my interest in bonobos, so vastly different from us, and yet so strangely inspiring. And my interest in women of intellect, trapped in a world which has deprived them of political power. At least in a direct sense, but they have exerted insidious influences. So here’s a potted account of some of those influential women – and I’m limiting myself to the French influencers, though not all were French by birth.
Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665): Born in Rome, daughter of a couple of nobles (the male being a marquis, whatever that is) and married at 12 to the future marquis de Rambouillet, with whom she had seven children. They lived in Paris but she was unimpressed with court life and by 1620 she had gathered a circle of intellectual/influential friends at Hôtel Pisani, later renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, the first recognised salon, in which ‘the fine art of conversation’ was overtly cultivated. The list of visitors and habitués is long, but some of those recognised by me are the tragedian Pierre Corneille, Madame de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Cleves, the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, letter-writer extraordinaire. So Madame de Rambouillet might be called, very simplistically, the inventor of the salon.
Ninon de L’Enclos (1620-1705): Paris born, and perhaps the most interesting of them all, as there’s no obvious sign of the aristocracy in her background, though her father was an established musician and composer who taught her to sing and play. The family was exiled from the city due her father’s duelling habits, and Ninon was forced into a convent when her mother died in 1642, but it didn’t last long, and ‘for the remainder of her life she was determined to remain unmarried and independent’. She returned to Paris, becoming a frequenter of salons, and a courtesan (lovely word), soon establishing her own ‘court’. She was a friend and patron of the young Molière. As you can see, she lived a long and fruitful life, and among her lovers was Louis II de Bourbon, aka Le Grand Condé (one of France’s greatest generals), and La Rochefoucauld of Maxims fame. Her associates included the young Saint-Simon, one of France’s most influential writers, and fascinatingly, ‘when she died she left money for the son of her notary, a nine-year-old named François-Marie Arouet, later to become known as Voltaire, so he could buy books’. But of course, being a known courtesan had its down sides, what with patriarchy and all. In 1656 she was imprisoned (in a convent) at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen consort (and mother of Louis XIV), but was soon rescued by another, rather more interesting queen, Christina of Sweden, who interceded on her behalf through the formidable Cardinal Mazarin. She was also a noted author, writing in particular about morality without religion, and was a friend to intellectuals such as Jean Racine, and powerful women such as Mme de Maintenon, second wife to Louis XIV. Immanuel Kant and Saint-Simon wrote approvingly of her (and Saint-Simon rarely wrote approvingly of anyone else), and – well, that’s enough.
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1696-1780): Convent-educated in Paris, and unhappily married for a time to another of those marquis blokes, generally known as Mme du Deffand, an intellectual and skeptic, close friend of Voltaire, she established an aristocratic salon in the 1730s which attracted Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Fontenelle and Mme de Staal-Delaunay as well as Voltaire. She had become completely blind by 1754, at which time she received help from Mlle de Lespinasse (see later entry) in organising the entertainment, but they fell out due to the latter’s wit and other attractions, apparently, so Mlle de Lespinasse established another salon which drew away many of the intellectuals. In her later years she established a close relationship with the British politician and indefatigable letter-writer Horace Walpole.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721 -64): Although not born into the aristocracy, and possibly ‘illegitimate’ (though she had many scandal-mongering enemies due to later becoming the mistress of Louis XV), Mme de Pompadour was renowned for her beauty, as well as her personal charm. From Wikipedia:
When she was married aged 20, she was already somewhat famous throughout the salons of Paris for her beauty, intelligence, and abundance of charm. Her husband, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, though initially displeased with their marriage arrangement, was said to have fallen in love with Mme Pompadour swiftly.
Let’s face it, it helps to be good-looking, even for a bloke. Her marriage produced two children, both of whom died young, sigh, but it also enabled her to attend salons, where she encountered Montesquieu, Duclos, Helvetius, Fontenelle and Voltaire, among others. Her reputation soon became known to the King, and so ended her marriage, and, presumably, her participation in salons. In latter years, her reputation as a generally civilising and humanising influence on the court has definitely increased. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-76): An ‘illegitimate’ child of wealthy types, it was, much later, discovered that Mme de Lespinasse was the daughter of Mme du Deffand’s brother. Unhappy and neglected in childhood, she received an indifferent convent education and was largely self-taught, comme moi. Her success in that endeavour has been attested to by the many intellectuals with whom she conversed. Mme du Deffand, acting as a patron of sorts, brought her to Paris, where she quickly gained such a reputation in her aunt’s salon that a dispute arose between the two, with Mme de Lespinasse emerging as the intellectuals’ favourite. She started her own salon, which became a meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie, particularly Diderot and D’Alembert. D’Alembert moved in with her, though the relationship was platonic, apparently (check that with Plato). As to her intellectual bonafides, they were later proven to the world by the publication of her letters in 1809, long after her early death, possibly from tuberculosis, but exacerbated by depression and opium dependence. These letters, largely about her relations with men, have been favourably compared, by Sainte-Beuve among others, with Heloise (the 12th century French philosopher and nun – and suggested reading for me), and later romantics such as Rousseau and L’Abbé Prevost. A sad ending, but at least she didn’t live to face the Reign of Terror…
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817): aka Germaine de Staël, who should be better known than her nemesis, wee nappy bonaparte. Mme de Staël was another saloniste who was an important writer in the romantic tradition, though today her critical and historical writings are more valued. Her mother, Suzanne Churchod, was also a saloniste and writer, and her father, Jacques Necker, was France’s controversial finance minister under Louis XVI. As aforementioned, I knew of her through Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but I wasn’t sufficiently aware of her prominence. Always a political moderate, she went into exile during the Reign of Terror (1792-4) and was later forced into exile by wee nappy. Her marriage, at 19, to a Baron Staël von Holstein, was apparently a matter of convenience, though they tolerated each other. No doubt due to the position of her father amid the political turbulence of 18th century France, Mme de Staël wrote reflections on political theory, while wisely avoiding direct political involvement. Nevertheless, as political division and violence mounted, she was forced to flee the city. She eventually reached England, where she was unimpressed by the general voicelessness of women. She returned to Switzerland in 1793, and published a defence of Marie Antoinette, who was on trial at the time. Like Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (and guillotined for her moderation), Mme de Staël was an advocate of constitutional monarchy. It was at this time that Benjamin Constant became her lover. She returned with him to Paris in 1795, where her salon gained fame and notoriety. The rise of wee nappy, however, with his more or less fake, self-boosting misogyny, spelt big trouble for both Constant and de Staël, and – well the rest is history, and I’ve gone on too long.
I’ve described only a few interesting women of the place and period – other salonistes worth exploring are Juliette Récamier, Mme de Choiseul, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet, to name a few. Vive les salons! Je veux en être un!
References
Lucinda Holdforth, True Pleasures: A memoir of women in Paris, 2004
Just about all the info on the above-mentioned women comes from their Wikipedia biographies.