This is a bit of a sensitive topic, so I’m going to try to tread carefully here, lest I be misunderstood.
Lately, I’ve been rereading the book version of The House Of The Dragon (HBO’s latest Game Of Thrones spinoff), and it occurs to me just how much of a tragedy it is to historiography that we lack many solid accounts of informal female power networks throughout history.
The story hook is that after the civil war which the show will cover over the next several seasons (hopefully), peace was restored in Westeros after an aggressive whisper campaign by the noblewomen of the realm — arranging marriages of conciliation, heading off further wars and recriminations, exposing bad actors so they can be punished, and generally just influencing the menfolk through sex. George R. R. Martin’s signature insensitive style is of course on full display in the prose, but whether intentionally or not, he also speaks to something that gets lost in modern feminism’s endless takedowns of “the patriarchy” and all its historical horror of misogynist oppression.
The real-world counterpart to the story hook is that we know for a general fact that women have indeed exercised this kind of soft power since before history began. There are only a handful of rather vivid examples of informal female power — the Late Han struggle between the dowager and eunuch factions comes to mind — but those are dwarfed by vast gobs of innuendo, insinuations, and palace intrigue about female involvement in practically every single major event in human history. Like trying to guess the plot of a Game Of Thrones episode, it’s difficult to reconstruct what actually happened amidst all the lies, biases, and secrets, let alone the usual deterioration of evidence that plagues all historical study. In short, some of it must be true, we just don’t know which of it is.
It’s sad because not only are we missing out on plenty of rich history, but also on countless, priceless examples of the exercise — and accordingly, success or failure — of soft power. Today, women coordinate on social media to take down sexual predators. As recently as a few years ago, women were regularly deployed to combat units in Afghanistan to tap into the informal networks there. And over a century ago, women organized massive street campaigns to win the vote despite not having the right to vote. How much further along might we be if we had more historical information to draw on and inform these efforts? How much progress are we missing out on because our society is still in the grips of a patriarchy that ignores women’s contributions?
To be clear, the patriarchy is real and its caricatures justifiably arise from historical truths, not mere stereotype; and yet like their cousin the stereotype, those caricatures still obscure many other truths1. Take the tale of arranged marriage. The standard narrative would have us believe that men uniformly forced women into marriages and treated them like property because business/alliances/blah-blah-blah. Perhaps a more updated version might include some women in this indictment, to be cast as gender traitors because Women Can Be Misogynist Too, but it’ll also probably make sure to bring up every little evil the patriarchy committed, because the patriarchy’s sins were covered up before, and we don’t want to perpetuate that, right? Either way, most references you’ll ever see basically condense to this broad narrative of arranged marriage — and to be fair, it mostly works as a shorthand, because that’s… how things mostly worked.
And yet, the complex truth is probably that at some number of points in history2, women have successfully used marriage negotiations to advance female power, not merely to serve the patriarchy. And that’s the thing: I’d like to know more about these stories! What separates them from the standard narrative? How were the women able to win out where other women were forced to submit to the patriarchy? What did they do with this power? How did the men respond?
This is what we lose when we take our standard narratives at face value. Like with arranged marriage, that doesn’t mean they have no value — just think of the countless millions of women and men who have been saved from the suffering of arranged marriage in the past couple centuries. But it does mean we have to question them, to mine them for whatever truth and progress we can. Who knows? Maybe the next great tale of female triumph is waiting to be discovered in some archive or ruin somewhere. We’ll never know until we start digging for them, though.
Now, because I’m pretty damned sure I’m not the first one to figure any of this out, humility dictates that it’s time to go back to the proverbial drawing board. So, if you’re aware of any good history books or feminist literature about this topic, please share them! Knowledge is a good thing to spread.
In fact, it’s precisely because of the patriarchy’s power that we lack the historical evidence to reconstruct the actual networks of informal female power — women were forced to obscure their efforts from men, and thus from the historical record.
To be clear, not all, not a majority, heck, maybe not even an appreciable minority, but it’s at least got to be a significant and possibly impactful subset of exceptions. I’m not trying to paper over all arranged marriage and make it look like it was hunky-dory — it wasn’t. But if there ever were instances where it was wielded to advance female power, then we’d expect those to be more impactful than most marriages, precisely because the ensuing events would have defied how the patriarchy would have done things absent female intervention.
Thinking about your article here made me think about how the more I learn about history the more I learn how non-linear it is. Growing up we were taught that everything before the last few centuries was backward and unenlightened, and only recently has progress brought us forward. The before times were bad especially for women who apparently had zero agency until the 20th century.
The more I read though I realized that for thousands of years all types of societies have existed where gender either didn’t matter for social hierarchy or women had a leading role. As Europeans began to expand influence in the 16th century the hardening and expansion of patriarchal societies began rapidly and seemingly in tandem with the early growth of capitalism. Only when democratic principles began to expand in this country and others in the 19th century so we see the beginning of modern feminism.
But to ignore previous incarnations of strong societies led by women over the millennia seems to do no one favors. Take lessons from our foremothers, they’ve been here before.