#englishwomen

[omg-hellgirl]

As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbor at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in 'When Harry Met Sally' where Meg Ryan simulates orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

“Mick Jagger? Oh... yes! Yes, YES, YES!”

Philip Norman, Mick Jagger.

[jezabelofthenorth]

anna whitelock implying that mary didn't name mqos as a succesor because of habsburg's conflict with valois france? i think that does a big disservice to mary's intelligence, mary based her right to be queen on the idea that order of succession of her father's will must be followed and shouldn't be changed on the basis of religion, if she tried to walk back on that she had to know it would not be accepted

[drsallyrothering]

Coins, Ale and Englishwomen -for @tabbyrp

"Thank you lovely, I-"

For what must have been the sixth time in as many minutes, the phone Sally had set down on the bar buzzed and lit up for attention. This time it caught her mid-acceptance of the drink she'd ordered - a bottle of the House's recommended beer - her hand extended with bills for payment towards the kindly bar-lady she'd seen each time she'd popped in this last week. It was work again who'd messaged, hoping for cover on a shift this evening.

EXTRA HOURS ON OFFER the message blared up at the ceiling.

Sally scowled at it after handing off her handful of notes and coins. Then, something cheeky overtook her. Fishing her coin purse out of her pocket, she produced a single English pound and held it out to the lady across the bar.

"Do the honours for me?" she asked amiably. The smile she spoke through had a wry cast to it; the sort that implied she knew the look of her workplace better than the innards of the small apartment she'd washed up in following a career move State-side. "Heads I'm a good Samaritan and put in for some extra hours. Tails I politely decline and get to know your selection of ales better than I probably should."

[marzipanandminutiae]

Dear marzi, for reasons of trying not to give period characters too modern fetishes in my smut, may I have some recs as to where I may find some of that olde fetish content you've previously seen?

On the Wikipedia page for the "corset controversy," unfortunately!

Historians have been taking obvious tightlacing fetish letters seriously for...way too long. And sometimes still are. Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing. Of course, there's no way to 100% tell which letters are fetish fuel and which are real, but generally any that use particularly heightened language or common erotic tropes- or that seem to fly in the face of evidence from extant garments, unedited videos, stock and advertisements from real corset companies, etc. -are to be viewed with suspicion.

(The same is true for letters used now to claim that nipple piercing was a real Victorian trend- for, indeed, the only source is anonymous magazine letters and many of them fall into the same obvious patterns as the tightlacing letters. One DOES describe the alleged process in detail...but it's basically the same as the process for ear-piercing, a service jewelers did commonly offer back then. Just applied to nipples. So whether it's real or not is still uncertain, but it's highly doubtful that large numbers of Victorian women were running around with nipple piercings given that no extant nipple rings have been found, such piercings are never mentioned in letters or diaries or other more concrete sources, etc.)

Besides that, I've seen glimpses of most modern fetishes in various sources:

the Psychopathia Sexualis, a medical manual of "sexual mental illness" (in heavy quotes because things like homosexuality and gender variance are mentioned under that heading), talks about everything from a fetish for tight boots and gloves on women, to bloodplay (initiated by a woman, actually, who wanted to drink her husband's blood), to force-femming, to some very elaborate femdom scenarios that I hope the sex workers in question were paid well for. Of course, since the cases are anonymous, these are also difficult to confirm- but clearly someone had THOUGHT of them, since they're written into the book.

And I've seen at least some of them in other sources, too, including some of the magazines that published the nipple piercing and tightlacing letters. The Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine was notorious for its letters on tightlacing, tight gloves, spanking, etc.

Photographic porn was definitely a thing almost as soon as photography came into being. A lot of it is pretty vanilla, but I could swear I'd seen piss kink photos (with urine painted in after development) before the blog where they were hosted went defunct

James Joyce's letters to his wife get into farting and scat fetish territory. Yes, really.

Speaking of letters, there was one man living here in Boston who, in the late 19th century, wrote letters to his wife describing erotic dreams of her as a giantess who pissed on him and then ate him. I cannot remember his name and it's going to drive me insane all day, but he was the head of Boston's censorship organization, the Watch and Ward society and these letters were first released by his own children for an unauthorized biography written five years after his death. Guess there was little love lost there.

BDSM is old. Like, really old. Old, to quote the sacred texts, as balls. I'm pretty sure there are sexual flagellation texts going back to the Renaissance, but don't quote me on that.

Basically, Rule 34 can be back-applied, too. If it existed, there was a fetish for it, probably. Of course, things that specifically involve modern technology or properties are out, but beyond that...the sky is the limit

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[mlarayoukai]

Surprised the Englishwomen wasn't automatically fluent in Japanese

[hazelcephalopod]

Well today feels like as good a day as any for me to mention some real history I learned after I watched The Terror. This has basically nothing to do with the show I’ll tell you rn -I’ll also mention some facts about the Franklins at the end. Let’s talk about Dr. John Rae and one of the first investigations into “Wtf happened to the Franklin expedition.”

Background

John Rae was born on September 30, 1813 in Orkney were he was also raised -The Orkneys are a group of islands off Scotlands northern coast. He became a doctor and then got a job to what is not Ontario with the Hudson Bay Company. During that time he worked with First Nations people of the area and became adept with snowshoes and survival skills.

He was later chosen for an expedition which required further training that he had to travel to receive. He then joined expedition and took advice from Inuit he met along the way. During this period he learned to build igloos which he preferred to tents. While he did not reach his destination he made progress on its goals. He later explored the Arctic coast exploring areas that Franklin had before -or near them.

Journeys to find Franklins Expedition

Dr Rae became the second in command on a expedition to find Franklins taking an overland Arctic route, in 1848. Many other took place Using different routes and at different times, most with limited or no success. One of the rivers they encountered is named after him. Ultimately this expedition failed to find Franklins nor much evidence or information about it. Rae returned to England in 1852, roughly 4 years since it started.

Back in England he was granted an attempt to to return in 1853 and had by March of that year. This attempt would prove far more fruitful.

In 1954, after over a year of travel he met some Inuit who had a gold cap-band. When asked they explained they had found it 10-12 days away at a place where roughly 35 non-Inuit had starved to death. He bought it and offered to buy any similar items.

Several weeks later and only two of his men able to travel he began to turn back, on the way he met several Inuit families who wanted to trade with him. With them they had a small silver platter engraved on the back read “Sir John Franklin, K.C.H.”.

They informed him that 4 winters prior some Inuit met no less than 40 non-Inuit who where dragging a boat south, describing a man who fit the description of Francis Crozier. This party of probably Englishwomen communicated by gestures to the Inuit that their ships had been crushed and they were looking to hunt further south. When the same Inuit returned the next spring they found roughly 30 deceaseds, also found were signs of cannibalism.

Rae found this information sufficient to end his search and return to England and report his findings. Ultimately leaving Repulse Bay several months later in August 1854. His journey he taken a roughly a year and a half. He may have been the first European person to discovery the Northern Passage and was certainly one of the first.

Report and Disgrace

Once returned to Britain Dr. Rae made two reports. The the British Admirality he made a full report including the cannibalism, to the public his report excluded the mention of cannibalism. The Admirality, apparently by mistake, released the full report to the public, causing backlash. Lady Jane Franklin was especially affronted and had Charles Dickens write a tirade against Rae published in a magazine. The tirade ignited racist claims that the Inuit were liars, with some accusing they themselves of the cannibalism, claiming Englishmen would not have stooped to such acts. Additionally implying Dr. Rae the fool for believing the Inuit themselves.

Dr. Rae’s reputation was somewhat tarnished, he received a portion of the prize money for the information gathered, but it likely prevented him from being knighted and receiving further recognition in life and for the century after his death.

Post Expeditions, Death, and Legacy

Despite this he planned a polar expedition, building the “Iceberg”. Before he could take this journey the ship was used as a cargo ship and sadly sunk with its crew of 7. The wreck remains lost. Following this he became a founder of the “Hamilton Scientific Association” which would become the “Hamilton Association for the Advancement Literature Science and Art”. He later worked to establish telegraph lines in America and Canada. He visited Iceland and Greenland. He also married in 1860.

Dr. John Rae died in Kensington, London on July 22, 1893 at the age of 79. He was buried in Kirkwall, Orkney. His death went by mostly unacknowledged due to the backlash at his discovery of the fate of the Franklin Expedition. Later findings would confirm the reports he had been given by Inuit traders and delivered tactfully to Britain. (Author here: Authorities completely bungled his attempts to deliver the news with tact)

He has been noted as perhaps the foremost European Arctic survivalist. Likely in part due to his willingness to learn form local Arctic Peoples and other First Nation Peoples, setting him apart form many of contemporaries.

Since his death his accomplishment have received greater recognition, his former home in Kensington received a Blue Plaque in 2011. On the 200th Anniversary of his birth a statue to him was erected in Stromness, Orkney. Later that year the charity “The John Rae Society” was created to promote his achievements. Additionally, in 2014 at his birthplace of Hall of Celstrain, Orphic, Stromness, Orkney a plaque was placed by Historic Enviroment Scotland.

Also fun facts: His discover of the Northwest Passage is contested with the generally more accepted discovery by the McClure Expedition also created to find Franklins Expedition. McClure’s went significantly worse than Rae’s.

Places named -in English- after Dr. Rae include-

- Rae River

- Rae Strait

- Rae Isthmus

- Mnt. Rae

- Point Rae

- Rae-Edzo was the legal name for several settlements and communities near what is now called Behchokǫ̀, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Well thank you for reading. I really enjoyed writing this. I might do a better researched essay on this in the future. I’m just happy I got to tell you about Dr. John Rae bc tbh his story has become a minor special interest of mine. I just think he was a neat guy.

Now for those who want some absolutely not respectful words about the dead:

Facts about the Franklins (I’d not call them fun)

my opinion based off the following info: fuck’em. They sucked. (Plz ready Sir/Lady with the maximum amount of contempt you can manage)

As shown in the show this was not Sir first expedition. On his first he lost 11 of 20 men over roughly 3 years. Learning from the first the second went much better, they mapped the area and didn’t seem to suffer any major losses -though tbh some of it seems to have been luck.

Lady Jane Franklin -his second wife- while her husband was a Lt. Gov. of Tasmania (1837-1843) took in two aboriginal children one after the other, to “teach them to be civilized”. A young boy named Timemendic who she soon gave to her step-daughter (who was 18) who trained him as a servant, until he was deemed bad at that and they tried to send him to an orphanage and then ultimately to work as a deckhand.

Several years she decided to try again and “adopt” a very young girl called Mary whom she renamed Mathinna, once again she put her step daughter in charge of her. Lady Franklin liked her much more, but ultimately when Lord Franklin was called back to England they abandoned her in an orphanage, the rest of her life was suffice to say filled with abuse and suffering and by 18 she was dead. Her remains were eventually returned to Tasmania.

[archivist-crow]

Dieppe Raid Case - 1951

Reports of the hearing of ghostly sounds of a bloody World War Il air and sea battle fought near Dieppe, France. The case, documented and examined by psychical researchers, attained fame in the 1950s. It is considered to be an example of paranormal collective auditory hallucinations.

The case was reported by two Englishwomen on holiday at Puys, near Dieppe, in late July and early August 1951. The women, identified pseudonymously in reports as Dorothy Norton and her sister-in-law Agnes Norton, stayed in a house that during World War II had been occupied by German soldiers. Dorothy Norton was accompanied by her two children and a nurse.

On the morning of August 4, at about 4:20, the women were awakened by loud noises that started suddenly and at first sounded like a storm arising at sea. The sounds ebbed and flowed, and then they could distinctly hear sounds of gunfire, shellfire, divebombers, and men shouting and crying out. The women got up and went out on their balcony, where they could not actually see the sea, but they detected nothing that could account for the noises. Meanwhile, the noises came in from the direction of the sea, loud and intense, and still seemed like gunfire, divebombing and voices shouting. The roaring abruptly stopped at 4:50 A.M. and resumed at about 5:07 A.M. The noise became so intense that the Norton women were amazed that other occupants of the house were not awakened. As the sky grew light, they heard a rifle shot on the beach below. The noise became more distinct as the sound of divebombing planes that came in waves. It stopped abruply at 5:40 A.M. The noise resumed at 5:50 A.M., not as loud, but stil sounding distinctly like planes. The noise died away at 6 A.M. and resumed at 6.20 A.M., much fainter. The women heard nothing at all after 6:55 A.M.

Both women knew that a battle had taken place in the vicinity during the war, but neither knew the details. They consulted a French guidebook and, during the experience, sat and read the account of the battle. They concluded they might have heard ghostly sounds of the real battle, and agreed to write independent versions of their experience. With a small discrepancy in time (probably due to a difference in watches), their reports matched. Later, they asked several persons if they, too, had been disturbed during the night, but received negative answers.

The sounds bore a remarkable correspondence to the fierce battle that took place in the Dieppe environs on August 19, 1942, at precisely the times experienced by the Nortons. The Royal Regiment of Canada launched a predawn assault on German forces from Puys, about 1.5 miles east of Dieppe, to Berneval, about 5 miles east, to Purville, about 2.5 miles west of Dieppe and to Varengeville about 3 miles further west. Flank landings were scheduled to make surprise arrivals at 4:50 A.M. to destroy coastal batteries. At about 3:47, the Canadians encountered a small German convoy off the coast, and the two forces exchanged fire until after 4 A.M. The Canadians arrived at Dieppe a few minutes late, at 5:07. At 5:12 A.M., destroyers started to bombard Dieppe with shells, and at 5:15 Hurricane planes attacked, at Puys as well as Dieppe. At 5:20 A.M., main landings at Dieppe were made, covered by a bombardment of shells from destroyers and by heavy air attack. A second wave went ashore at about 5:45 A.M. At about 5:50 A.M., new air fighters from England arrived, and German planes were in the sky as well.

The Germans, who were able to man their beach defenses, waited until the landing craft nearly touched shore before opening heavy fire with rifles, machine guns and howitzers. The Canadians were trapped by a high sea-wall. Within two or three hours, the Royal Regiment of Canada was nearly destroyed. Thirty-four officers and 727 men were killed. Two officers and 65 men, half of whom were wounded, were rescued and taken away, and another 16 officers and 264 men were captured by the Germans.

A comparison of the Nortons' experience with the phases of the Dieppe raid showed consistencies between times and the changes in the noises they heard, with a few exceptions. The information in the French guidebook was not specific enough for them to have subconsciously matched their description to the real event after reading about it.

The Nortons, interviewed by psychical researchers G.W. Lambert and Kathleen Gray, came across as well balanced individuals who displayed no tendency to embellish their accounts, and no desire to prove they had had a paranormal experience. Dorothy Norton said she had been avakened by similar, but fainter, noises on the morning of July 30, but had not mentioned the experience to Agnes (who had not heard the noises) because she had not wanted to spoil the holiday with something mysterious.

Skeptics proposed other explanations for the experience, such as surf sounds, noise from commercial airplanes flying a nearby route across the English Channel, or noise from a dredger. Agnes Norton had served in the women's Royal Naval Service during the war, however, and she probably would have been able to distinguish the sounds of the sea and of a single commercial aircraft, had those been the natural sources. The dredger was not in operation at the times corresponding to the Nortons' experience.

Both women were familiar with the Versailles Haunting, a similar case in which two Englishwomen on holiday in France felt they had paranormal experiences in encountering the ghostly past. Skeptics also suggested that this familiarity may have subconsciously primed the Nortons to have their own experience. The possibility is remote, since the Norton women were not previously acquainted with the details of the Dieppe case.

Text from The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, Third Edition by Rosemary Ellen Guiley (Checkmark Books - 2007)

[girleboy]

where are you guys getting headphones with beautiful englishwomen in them mine is gratingly american

[punkcaligula]

Historically speaking, Zionist feminism shares key characteristics of colonial feminisms of the nineteenth century. It arose as an instrument forging a new nationalist modernity – intertwined with bourgeois labour utopianism – carrying a palingenetic ambition for civilisational rebirth, yoked to a transgressive account of its own racial constituency’s destiny as gender-egalitarian. ‘It is not possible’, wrote the Polish feminist and Zionist activist Puah Rakovsky in her 1918 pamphlet The Jewish Woman, ‘that we Jews, who were the first bearers of democratic principles, should in this regard lag behind all civilised peoples and close the way for women to achievement of equal rights’. (The British-imperial version of this, which unfolded significantly earlier, had similarly been all about ‘reminding’ the British about a mythic past of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ harmony marked by true equality between the sexes. Recall how Jane Eyre discusses, near the end of the eponymous novel, the world’s spiritual need for independent-minded Englishwomen to emigrate and serve in the colonies as missionaries and teachers? Brontë’s heroine there is emulating the energetic, can-do figure of ‘the new model Englishwoman’, who sallies forth and cleans up various moral messes made by men in Australia, Canada, and India. ‘Miss Jane Bull’, a patriotic avatar, was an 1840s invention of feminists in Langham Place, London, largely meant to encourage and organise this emigration on behalf of the Crown.)

Some of my best enemies are feminists: on Zionist feminism; Sophie Lewis

[witchofthemidlands]

“so you went into the anomaly as an englishman, spent sometime in russia & named yourself ‘ethan dobrowski’, lived with a group in which you closest to two englishwomen & yet you came out of the anomaly ✨irish✨”

[haggishlyhagging]

From the first settlement of Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay, wives came with their husbands or followed close behind. The Mayflower brought twenty-nine women and seventy-five men in 1620, and almost every ship arriving in Massachusetts in the following decades carried some women and children. Some of these women came reluctantly; Madam Winthrop kept postponing the trip to join husband John in Massachusetts Bay until he grew quite out of patience. Others changed their minds after they arrived. Young Mistress Dorothy Bradford's fatal plunge from the Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the bleak Plymouth shore was almost certainly no accident. But the women who settled in Massachusetts (or died in the attempt) in the first half of the seventeenth century were unique: they were probably the only Englishwomen who came to America before 1650 of their own volition. Most women were tricked or coerced. They didn't emigrate. They were shipped.

The first consignment of ninety single women was sent to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1620 at the urging of Sir Edwin Sandys, erstwhile highwayman and treasurer of the Virginia Company. Unlike the Massachusetts plantations, Jamestown had been established by a band of rogues and bachelor adventurers. Sandys shared Captain John Smith's opinion that the lack of wives and family attachments in the plantation made it unstable and easy prey to "dissolucon." The women were supposed to "make the men more setled & lesse moveable who by defect thereof (as is credibly reported) stay there but to get something and then return to England." When the women married, as they all soon did, their new husbands were required to defray the cost of their crossing to the tune of 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco. These young women reportedly came "upon good recommendation," and by 1621 when "an extraordinary choice lot of thirty-eight maids for wives" was sent, the price had risen to 150 pounds of tobacco. The men paid the sales price willingly; by 1622 all the maidens shipped—some 147 in all—were married. (By 1625, due to disease and Indian attacks, three-quarters of them were dead.)

How were these "young and uncorrupt" women persuaded to hazard a dangerous voyage to an uncharted country? Historian Carl Bridenbaugh found that the "means used to assemble them approached kidnapping." He cites the case of William Robinson, a chancery clerk, who was convicted in 1618 of counterfeiting the Great Seal of England. His racket was to use this false commission "to take up rich yeomen's daughters (or drive them to compound) to serve his Majestie for breeders in Virginia." Robinson was hanged, drawn, and quartered. What became of the yeomen's daughters is not noted. Owen Evans, a messenger for the Privy Council, ran a similar business. Pretending to have a royal commission, he extorted money for himself, or maidens for Virginia and Bermuda. Many a father must have been willing to sell his daughter rather than pay extortion to keep her. Superfluous daughters were the price men paid for the supernumerary sons who ensured continuation of the male line, and since England had become a Protestant country, fathers could no longer dump them in nunneries, which had been for Catholics as Milton observed—"convenient stowage for their withered daughters." Customarily, superfluous daughters had to be bought husbands, through a substantial dowry, or supported in idle spinsterhood. In seventeenth-century England, where basic family ties were more practical than affectionate, rich yeomen must have welcomed the patriotic alternative of bartering a daughter for the good of the empire. Bridenbaugh concludes that the Virginia Company's methods of recruitment "were such as to give the Company a bad name." He writes: "Women were transported to America after 1629 in considerable numbers by ruses and devices which will forever remain obscure."

-Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

[saint-starflicker]

Addendum to Overview and Criteria for Gothic Fiction

When I wrote this thing about gothic novels I only mentioned Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's stageplay Sturm und Drang that premiered in 1777 and lent its name to a proto-Romantic artistic era in Germany.

I completely neglected to consider the influence of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen or "Household Tales" published on the 20th of December 1812, because I was focusing on English-language gothic literature, and Margaret Raine Hunt did not translate this collection into English until 1884. (I elected not to measure how many upperclass Englishwomen would be educated to fluency in German before a translation of the Grimm's text was published.)

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde published in April 1891. He published a collection of shorter fairy tales before, The Happy Prince and Other Tales in May 1888, but like Wilde's technically-perfect-yet-passionless aesthetic poetry I personally consider them rather twee or prankish. The Picture of Dorian Gray makes a more interesting showcase of gothic fairy tale.

Literary critic and gold-trophy Worst Human Being in History of the Year 1814 Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade keeps turning up in my gothic literature research like a bad penny. (I've read the Marquis's books, they're horrible, I hated them.) His literary criticism remains connected with the gothic, having first theorized in Idée sur les Romans (translated into Some Thoughts on the Novel) that the upheaval and slaughter of the French Revolution inspired authors to get some horror into their Romanticism, and also that the introduction of the Supernatural in the gothic novel posed a dilemma innate to the genre: Either it gets explained, and then the mystique is gone (I'll say this is me about Old Gods of Appalachia when the witches turned cosmic horror into calculated urban fantasy)...or it never gets explained, and then the reader remains at a loss (I'll say this is me about Picnic at Hanging Rock).

What I think the Marquis didn't consider, because The Picture of Dorian Gray was long after his time, was Wilde's creation of a marvelously original "Zaubermärchen" (magic fairytale)—the poetic justice, and the poetic logic that is exhibited in such a way that it only needs intuition rather than explanation. Dorian Gray is so sure he figured something out about his wish, so exactly, but the way the "magic" in this gothic 19th-century fairy tale truly operates makes a tidy and particular sort of sense that is magic of its own.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes, Princeton University Press, New Jersey: 2016.

@rwoh I'm trying to practice dual-mode citations what is this

Grimm, Jacob, Grimm, Wilhelm & Zipes, Jack (Trans.). (2016). 😥 ...wat whas that... The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Princeton University Press.

de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François. Some Thoughts on the Novel. Translated by R.J. Dent, Oneiros Books, 2021.

de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, and R.J. Dent (Trans.). (2021). Some Thoughts on the Novel. Oneiros Books.

I don't have to cite The Picture of Dorian Gray, right? You all are the dark academia subculture, you all know by now what The Picture of Dorian Gray is.

[jezabelofthenorth]

Again and again foreigners, commenting on the amazing freedom and independence of Englishwomen, refer to the common saying that England was the paradise of married women.

Tudor Women: Queens and Commonors, Alison Plowden

[fideidefenswhore]

Mary was raised in Bray, Berkshire, but not much is otherwise known of her early life. The Champernowne, Carew, and Norris families that Mary was a member of during her life were all Devonshire natives and staunch reformists. Several of the women in those families were ladies-in-waiting to Tudor queens and princesses, and Mary herself served in Princess Mary’s and Princess Elizabeth’s households during Henry VIII’s reign. Clearly, the sins of the father were not visited upon his daughter, as Henry also presented a necklace to Mary upon her first Christmas at court with her first husband, Sir George Carew, a rising courtier. Mary was Carew’s second wife; they married soon after he had escorted Anne of Cleves into England.

Levin, Carole, Anna Riehl Bertolet, and Jo Eldridge Carney, ed. 2016. A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen : Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500-1650.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

All Englishwomen lived in a society that accepted without question the judgement of the ancient Greeks and the wisdom of the church fathers: that women were 'naturally' inferior to men, physically, mentally and spiritually.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory