As promised, I want to flag a few of the aphoristic tales Carol Berkin shared with us in the first episode of the Women of the American Revolution series, explain why you may have heard a few different versions of them and give you the best available version we currently believe, which is the unsatisfying best I can do. But first, we have to talk about the intersection of folklore and history and why, in women's history in particular, we have to get comfortable with a certain level of uncertainty. (Or you can skip ahead to just the facts, but you'd miss out.)

• Molly Pitcher
• Lydia Darragh
• Deborah Sampson
• Sybil Ludington

Women weren't always disappeared from the story of the American Revolution. Immediately after it, pamphlets, poems and political speeches honoured the contributions they had made to independence, Carol Berkin tells us in the introduction to her book Revolutionary Mothers. Even a couple generations after the war, Americans could read Elizabeth Ellet's The Women of the American Revolution, a three-volume compendium of some 160 profiles of heroines of the early republic, published in 1848-1850. "It is almost impossible now to appreciate the vast influence of woman's patriotism upon the destinies of the infant republic", Ellet was already writing then. (And already, her book was more concerned with the patriotic birth myth of America than a strictly factual history.)

What Ellet was perhaps starting to recognise is a pattern longtime Broad History listeners will be familiar with – women who had in their day been celebrated and recognised on par with their male peers were fading away from memory. Female fame just doesn't have the same staying power.

The reason – or at least one reason – is well known to women's historians, and again Carol Berkin reminds us in her introduction. The professionalisation of history as an intellectual discipline over the course of the 19th century, as of so many other fields during the Industrial revolution, pushed women out. It replaced antiquarians – amateur upper-class nerds with time on their hands, mostly men but a not insignificant number of women – with university-trained historians. Universities, crucially, did not accept women. Just as "the professions" were expanding to serve an increasingly complex economy, women were shut out of them by the tyranny of a qualification bar no amount of effort would allow them to clear.

Male historians, concerned with their new discipline's legitimacy and understandably less preoccupied with female representation, focused on power. Who had it, who lost it, how it was exercised. Eras were named after kings' reigns, marked by conquests and the movement of borders, bookended by wars. In this “great men” version of history, few women featured. Their stories retreated into folk tales and family lore, preserved in bedtime stories and letters packed up in attics for nearly two centuries until, in the 1970s, the feminisation of higher education led to a great boom in women’s history scholarship. Suddenly professional historians cared about women because they were women. (It's not always the case and it shouldn't be, but you'll noticed from the Broad History guest list that women's historians are very often women historians.) It wasn't just women either; historians started paying attention to the working class, to immigrants, to the indigenous and the colonised, to gender and sexual minorities...

When came time to resurface these stories, this new generation of historians faced a problem. In history, documents are king. People are biased. They misremember. They embellish. Familial tales get transformed with every retelling until, just one or two generations down the line, they bear little resemblance to anything that truly occurred. If we must rely on a oral history, we like it written down, thank you very much, as contemporaneously as possible. Nothing will excite a historian like a diary or a court transcript. And here lies the rub: The furthest you sit from power, the less written record there is of your existence.

How do you tell the stories of women who held no political office, who did not own anything in their own name, who could not write legal documents (remember coverture) and who hardly had a second in the day to start a diary? How do you find that story again after centuries when no one thought it particularly worth preserving? There is a record. It's just much harder to find and we've only been seriously at it for a few decades. It forces us to rethink what consideration we give to oral cultures, what gaps in the story we can live with and how we present those unknowns to the audience. That's what makes women's history so exciting – there's still plenty to find out – and so very incomplete and contentious too. Sometimes all we have is a folk tale and a historian somewhere hoping they'll get to it before retirement.

With that in mind, let's look at some of womanly legends of the American Revolution we mentioned in the first episode.

Molly Pitcher

Molly Pitcher isn't anyone's government name. She's often been named as Mary Ludwig Hays, the wife of soldier William Hays and a camp follower who washed clothes and provided assistance to the army at Valley Forge. She is said to have taken up her husband's place at the cannon after he collapsed at the battle of Monmouth. Another option is Margaret Cochran Corbin, who was exceptionally skilled at aiming and firing and also took up her husband's post when he was killed at Fort Washington, until she was very seriously injured herself. She was the first woman in US history to receive a pension as a disabled combat veteran.

But more than likely, "Molly! Pitcher!" isn't a nickname for any one person, but an archetype, an amalgam of many women who did exist. A revolutionary "Rosie the Riveter", as Carol Berkin puts it. Soldiers called out to women on the battlefield to bring them water, not for hydration (they were more likely to drink alcohol) but because water was needed to clean the barrel and cool the cannon between firings.

Lydia Darragh

Lydia Darragh is often portrayed as a daring patriotic Mata Hari, but she was really an opportunistic spy and her career in espionage only lasted a few months. When British troops occupied Philadelphia, the Darraghs' front room was requisitioned for officers' meetings. One night, she eavesdropped and learned of General William Howe's plan to attack Washington's army. Lydia was an Irish Quaker nurse and midwife, torn between the pacifism of her faith and her patriotic leanings, as well as fear for her son, who had enlisted in the Continental army. (The Society of Friends later disciplined both mother and son for getting involved.) She asked for a pass out of the city to buy flour from a mill a few miles away, such a banal request that the Red Coats were none the wiser. That's how she met Washington's scouts and gave them warning of the Battle of White Marsh.

Lydia Darragh's story has passed into revolutionary legend after she shared it with friends and family. She left no written record and the tale was first printed decades after her death. Flowery details, such as her sewing notes into the lining of her skirt, her son's jacket or a corpse's pocket (the family were, in some tellings, also undertakers), are uncertain. Philadelphia historian Robert Fanelli tried to parse fact from fiction in a biography of Lydia Darragh. Worth listening to his interview here.

Deborah Sampson

Deborah Sampson participated in her own myth-making. For years after independence, she toured as a sort of revolutionary Buffalo Bill, recounting her adventures as a gender-bending patriot who disguised as a man – enlisted soldier Robert Shirtliff – to fight in the Continental army. She was a tall and muscular person who passed as a man in an elite unit for nearly a year until, ill and unconscious, she was undressed by a doctor. With her friend Paul Revere's support, Sampson petitioned for and eventually obtained a veteran's pension.

We have records of several women who dressed as men to be able to enlist, both out of patriotism and because the pay was more attractive than most options open to women then. It's impossible to know how many did this as only those who were caught left a trace. Only Sampson and Corbin are on the record as having received combat pensions in their own right, though we know dozens tried.

Sybil Ludington

How Paul Revere became the iconic midnight rider really owes more to a particularly good poem than to Revere's unique skills. There had been many other riders. Whether Sybil Ludington was one has been matter of historical debate for decades.

Sybil was the 16-year-old daughter of American Colonel Henry Ludington when on the night of 26 April 1777, British troops started to march on Danbury, Connecticut. Sybil rode many miles through the night, the story goes, to warn militiamen up and down the Hudson Valley to resist. The problem is Sybil's story does not appear in print until more than a century later, recounted by a historian (note: a woman again) who swears that she has compiled many documents but does not cite precisely which (following the historiographical practice of the 19th century), and relies on accounts by the Ludington family, who have done a lot to memorialize their ancestor. We're here at the crux of the issue: Is it fair to discount a story without contemporary records at a time when no one cared to record women's lives? What credit should we give to oral histories? How much is the word of descendants' worth? Does women's history not deserve the same stringent evidentiary standard as others', or does refusing to adapt the practice perpetuate our erasure? I'll leave you to parse that one; I don't have an answer.

If you don't hang on Instagram and are wondering what the heck is happening to Broad History, scroll down for explanations. But let's get to the history first! Note this newsletter is much more comfortably read in your browser. Lots to get through today...

What was the most radical thing about the American Revolution? Not the undoing of the colonial yoke. Not the solemn declaration that all men are created equal. No, it was the sudden politicisation of women, says historian Carol Berkin.

Of course she's got her darlings. Carol Berkin is one of the preeminent historians of women in the American Revolution. Her book "Revolutionary Mothers", published in 2005, was a ground-breaking, movement-building effort in recasting America's independence story. I couldn't think of anyone better to open this new Broad History series on the women of the American Revolution. All summer, we'll be talking with renowned historians of the early American republic, meeting with women such as Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Mercy Otis Warren or the Schuyler sisters, and complicating the very virile story coming out of Washington D.C. (You may notice listening to the episode that "virile" is a particularly difficult word for me to pronounce in English. I recorded several takes and then I gave up.)

Revolutionary women were not just helpmates to the Founding Fathers, Carol Berkin argues. They were participants with their own agency, their own motives, their own political beliefs. Women were not at the Declaration of Independence or at the Constitutional Convention, of course; they were actively barred from high politics. But they were everywhere else that mattered.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Isabelle Roughol (@isabelleroughol)

Their radicalisation started with the boycott of British goods. Men wrote against British taxes on their consumption, but it was women who made purchases for the household. They understood and enforced what became a staple of American protest – using the power of the wallet to make a point. They refused to buy British tea, a drink as ubiquitous as your Starbucks today, even thought it was a central part of their social life. They returned to wearing homespun rather than buy British cloth, even though making the stuff cost them dearly. Young women even vowed not to marry men who would buy a marriage licence stamped and taxed by the British government. And they pressured their neighbours to comply.

Later in the war, women organised to raise funds and make shirts for soldiers who were woefully ill-equiped. They were washer women, who saved Washington's army from being decimated by lice and disease. They were Molly Pitchers, who cooled canons with water between firings and picked up the linstock when men fell. They were spies and messengers, who used the enemy's underestimating them to travel through British lines. Revolutionary women's political activism was largely not the stuff of stump speeches and noble declarations; those avenues were closed to them. It was concrete, direct action that made a difference.

Enough chatting, have a listen.

PS: I want to acknowledge that some of the stories Carol tells, such as those of Sybil Ludington, Molly Pitcher or Lydia Darragh, have multiple versions out there and you may have heard them differently. That gets to the heart of why women's history can be so difficult to research. We'll get into that on next week's newsletter.

Read Revolutionary Mothers

Carol Berkin's book is super accessible, full of fun stories and eye-opening. Strong recommend. You can get it from the US Broad History bookstore and support her and the show that way.

Unfortunately, most of the books I'll be discussing in this series are not available in the UK bookshop. Brits and others, try your local libraries, ask your favourite indie bookshop to order it in or, yikes, try Amazon. I still did my best to curate a list of books on women in the American Revolution that are available in the UK.

Can't get enough of Carol Berkin?

She'll be back for a second episode closing out the series later this summer. We talked about the long impact of the revolution for American women; the fates of Black and indigenous women at independence; and the concepts of republican motherhood and separate spheres and the way the new far right is seizing upon those ideas today. I like that episode even more than this one and I can't wait to share it with you.

But you don't actually have to wait. I published that episode early exclusively for supporting members on their podcast feed. To have a listen, go ahead and sign up to support the show at broadhistory.com/membership. You'll get my eternal gratitude and a link to listen immediately.

What's so bad about spinning?

Carol's and my comments about the utter dullness of spinning linen yarn seems to have displeased the spinning community. No offense was intended, I'm sure some people enjoy it. But seriously... there is a significant difference between spinning as it exists today – a heritage craft people undertake as a means of learning about history and reconsidering their relationship to hyperconsumerism – and spinning as it existed for women in colonial America and elsewhere for centuries.

Women had to spin every single thread they and their family wore, unless they were rich enough to pay someone else to or senior enough to hand it down to other family members, mostly children and unmarried women (hence "spinsters"). Why do girls get pricked by spindles in fairy tales? Because that was the ubiquitous accessory of girlhood, even in the upper classes. It was the thing you still occupied your hands with if you could finally sit down at the end of the day. It was the thing that broke your back, tired your eyes and blistered your fingers. It's why clothes were for centuries the most expensive things people owned. It's why they were designed to evolve with the body and be kept for a lifetime, even for multiple generations.

There's plenty in the historical record about how tired women were of spinning, and the invention of mechanical spinning and manufactured cloth was as revolutionary to them as later the washing machine. To understand the effort involved, I recommend the sublime work of public history by Eve Ogden Schaub on Instagram, who is GROWING a dress from scratch. That's right, every step from planting flax seeds to retting, spinning, weaving and sewing. She's 63 weeks in and she's got a few skeins of yarn, not nearly enough for a single dress. From this to Temu...

What is coverture?

Coverture is a fundamental reality of the lives of early American women. It comes up in every episode of this series so it's worth an explanation.

It's a legal doctrine the colonies inherited from British common law, under which a married couple formed "one person in law" – and that person was really the husband. On her wedding day, a woman went from feme sole (a legal status equivalent to a man's) to feme covert or covered. She suddenly had no independent legal existence. Any property she brought into the marriage or any she acquired thereafter became her husband's property. Her earnings were not her own. She could not bring suits, enter contracts or write a legally binding will. She had no right to the custody of her children. Rape was usually not a crime against her, but against her husband's rights, so marital rape could not exist. It's the laws of coverture that brought John Stuart Mill to write in 1869, "There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house."

In exchange, a husband was expected to protect and provide for his wife. Coverture had minor benefits: married women could not be sued in their own name or charged with minor infractions, though they retained liability for serious crimes. A widow also had dower rights. Property did not revert to her, but she had use of and a lifetime income from typically a third of her late husband's estate. Grief notwithstanding, widowhood was the most enviable state for a woman – the respectability of having been married and the autonomy of a feme sole. There were few incentives to get remarried as long as you could provide for yourself and any remaining children.

Because of coverture, American and British women had far fewer freedoms than indigenous or Spanish women in North America. Coverture was only undone in the United States in the late 19th century. Of course, lived realities differed. Partners navigated this legal landscape together, and many women asserted more autonomy than the law strictly allowed. We'll see this notably in the lives of Abigail and John Adams. Not every husband was a tyrant – but they all had the legal right to be.

What on Earth is going on with Broad History?

Tl;dr: We went a little bit viral.

Last week, I was researching semiquincentennial celebrations in D.C. for an article I hoped to pitch to a newspaper here in London (I failed, this will not be written) when I came across the Freedom250 website put together by the White House. (America250 is the official, bipartisan and Congress-approved non-profit organisation celebrating the semiquincentennial. Freedom250 is an alternative public-private partnership set up by the Trump administration and its website is the furthest thing from serious scholarship I've ever seen put together on public funds.) The website uses ridiculous AI portraits of revolutionary figures. I'd been meaning to tell you all about my AI policy (did you know I wrote a whole AI pledge on the website?) and I thought that would make a perfect case study. So I made this video. Let's just say the American resistance showed up... en masse.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Isabelle Roughol (@isabelleroughol)

Consequences for this little community: not so little anymore.

• There were a bit over 1,000 of you reading this newsletter; we're about to break 3,000.
• My Instagram following 10xed! I'll never make a Big Tech platform my primary channel, and I encourage you to comment here, in this forum we own, but the conversation and vibes there are lovely too. Do give it a follow.
• More than 12,000 downloads on the podcast in a single week. If you know podcasting, you'll know getting to here on a handful of episodes, without a network, without paid ads, as just one part-time solo creator... That's pretty cool. Broad History is about to beat in one week what my old show Borderline achieved in 50 episodes and many years. It opens the door, not yet but eventually, to finding distribution partners and sponsors.
• Brits, you're outnumbered. The audience used to be about one-third British, one-quarter American and then everywhere else. It's now 80% US 😅 This was always a British + French + American history programme (I don't feel resourced or legitimate to take on countries I'm unfamiliar with at the moment) and that won't change. The next season – I've decided but I'm not telling you yet – will straddle the Atlantic.
• Still, a shout out to new Portuguese readers too, who were referred here by a columnist Henrique Raposo. Obrigada!

So a massive thank you and welcome to all new readers, listeners and followers. Let's go!

When in 1921 American newspaper heiress Countess Eleanor Gizycka, on a tour of the West, docked her boat on a private beach on the banks of the Salmon River, she was stunned to be welcomed by a petite Chinese woman, 67 years old, "neat as a pin, wrinkled as a walnut". She was known to all her neighbours in this patch of Idaho, where she'd lived for nearly half a century, as Polly Bemis.

There was something of the uncanny in the sight of an elderly Chinese woman on the American frontier. It did not match the story of the West that Eleanor and the rest of the country had been told. After she wrote up the encounter for popular outdoors magazine Field and Stream, Polly became famous.

By then America had completely forgotten that during the conquest of the West, there had been whole frontier towns that were almost entirely Chinese.

In 1850, word of the California gold rush had reached Southern China, where times had been difficult, and soon tens of thousands of Chinese men had crossed the Pacific. Almost immediately, California imposed a tax on foreign miners that made it impossible for Chinese men to profit as their white peers did. When the California veins that could easily be mined by single men without much capital investment dried out, men fanned out across the West. In 1864, a few were hired on a trial basis to build the transcontinental railroad – jobs that white Americans shunned because they could make more money in mining. Within five years, Chinese men were the majority workforce on the railroads, their transport and employment organised by a professionalised network of recruiters, contractors and logistics firm on both sides of the Pacific. Nearly 20,000 Southern Chinese men worked for the Central Pacific Railroad Company alone in 1869, laying the tracks between Sacramento and Utah – the largest single workforce employed by a private enterprise in American history.

Chinese women followed, though never in as significant a number. San Francisco in 1872 had 1,000 Chinese women for 11,000 Chinese men, out of a total population of 150,000. Polly Bemis landed in the city that year from Guangdong. A sailboat down the Pearl River, a steamship from Hong Kong to San Francisco, another north to Portland and the Oregon Territory. Her parents had sold her at 18 to feed the rest of the family. She was spared San Francisco's brothels but may have been sold as a wife to a Chinese man. The record is unclear. Women were still traded and transported on American soil years after Abolition. What was human trafficking, what was sex work (whether consensual or not) and what was a monetised arranged marriage is hard to distinguish from a distance of 150 years.

Polly settled in Warren, Idaho, a remote mining town up in the mountains. In the 1880 census, the town had 470 residents, 80% of them Chinese men. It was already declining from its peak. (Today, it's got a dozen year-round residents, a Chinese cemetery and a crumbling frontier town aesthetic.) Polly, one of just five women and the only Chinese one, was listed as a widow – perhaps of the man who purchased her. She was with another man now, Charles Bemis, and together they ran a boarding house for workers. The town called her Mrs Bemis, but they weren't technically married for a while yet. The law wouldn't allow that because he was white and she was not.

After the financial panic and recession of 1873, white Americans had grown increasingly resentful of Chinese immigrants. The transcontinental railroad had been completed, the economy was bad, why were they still here? There had been lynchings, even in Warren.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, the first federal statute specifically designed to curtail immigration – but under the guise of fighting human trafficking. It banned the immigration of anyone from Asia (and Asia alone) who was involved in forced labour, as well as people from any country with a criminal conviction. The Page Act introduced the policing of immigrant women's sexuality. Enforcement was near exclusively targeted at East Asian women, and especially Chinese women, "few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honourable or useful occupations", according to President Ulysses S. Grant. They were all assumed prostitutes.

In truth, many Chinese women who were entering the US were intended as companions for Chinese men – as concubines, second wives, future wives... – but not necessarily to work as prostitutes. Candidates for emigration were subjected to repeated interrogations, bodily examinations and the whims of bureaucrats. Chinese women, not men, were the first immigrant group subjected to photographic identification. It was only they and criminals. This resulted in the near-total exclusion of Chinese women from the American dream. In 1882, 39,443 Chinese men entered the United States. Only 136 Chinese women did.

The Page Act had the exact opposite effect of its stated intent. By excluding Chinese women, it made it impossible for Chinese men, who could not realistically marry in any other ethnic group, to find partners and start families. It pushed them to brothels. It incentivised young men to go home and prevented the establishment of a US-born, ethnically Chinese population. With more white babies born, the population of Warren began to shift. I wonder what whispers Polly may have heard from her own community for choosing a white man. But by all accounts, she and Charles were beloved by their neighbours, Chinese and white. They married with a few friends as witnesses in the living room of their house in 1894.

Polly got in under the wire. But in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all Chinese immigration for 10 years and barred any Chinese person from becoming naturalised as a US citizen. Though Polly saw the passage of women's suffrage, she never could vote. As a pre-1880 arrival, she was allowed to stay in the country but could not travel freely without identification. Her status was precarious, her safety always in question. In 1892, the Geary Act extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another 10 years and went further. It required all Chinese people to carry photographic registration certificates, or risk prison and deportation. The Geary Act is the only reason we have the above photograph of Polly Bemis. A photographer traveled to Warren to register all Chinese-born residents.

With immigrants deported or discouraged, mining in decline and the impossibility of Chinese births, the Chinese population on the frontier shrunk. There were still about 100,000 in 1890, but white Americans had taken control of both the land and the narrative. It's no wonder that a whole generation later, in a land of aeroplanes, cinemas and radio sets, where the frontier was already a national myth, coming across an elderly Chinese woman living in a remote mountain camp that had dwindled to just 131 inhabitants would have struck Eleanor as odd and worthy of a write-up. Though Polly was one of those who had built the American West, she hadn't been allowed into its story. She lived long enough to see women's suffrage – to her 80th birthday in 1933 – but she couldn't cast a vote. She was never considered an American.

Learn more

Most of the information in this article is drawn from The Westerners, by Megan Kate Nelson, my guest on the podcast this week. I very warmly recommend her book; it reads like a novel.

UK readers will have to import it, which unfortunately is only feasible on Amazon right now. Or walk into your favourite bookshop and ask.

What next

The podcast is taking a short break while I prepare the summer series on the American revolution... and the future of Broad History beyond it. A series on witch trials for the autumn, a history of mysogyny (because honestly, it baffles me too, where does that even come from?) Ideas abound, I just need a minute of quiet to make them happen. I'll still be in your inboxes occasionally – especially if you're a supporting member... and I've got a couple guests in the wings who may not wait. So I'll talk to you... soon.

The myth of the American frontier took shape just as the frontier itself was ending. It was in 1893 in Chicago that historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his influential thesis that the frontier – the "raw edge of civilisation" that American settlers had pushed further and further west, all the way to Hawaii where they had toppled the indigenous monarchy just a few months earlier – was the keystone of American nation-building. The United States was not born of Europe; it had been made in the West.

Turner's thesis – on which my guest this week, Megan Kate Nelson, opens her book The Westerners – was building on an idea already very familiar and held as near-religious canon by 19th-century Americans – manifest destiny. It posited that westward expansion was the natural and moral obligation of the United States, a gift from and duty to God to expand civilisation and populate the continent all the way to the Pacific. The original man spread. In this story, women only have a supporting role as the helpful wife or dutiful daughter. Or they're the foil, the sassy antagonist with dubious morals, nearly always a prostitute or a madam. The conquering white man and his technology pushes relentlessly west as wild people and wild beasts flee his advance. Nowhere is it more obvious than in 19th-century art of the American West, which inevitably moves right to left.

Like all empires, US expansionism required the belief that the land to be settled was virgin territory, dark and unexplored, that there was little to displace and that whatever there was, was inferior and would benefit from conquest. No one is the bad guy of their own story. Megan Kate Nelson is here to complicate that tale.

Westward expansion is an undeniable fact of US history. But before and during the settlement of White Americans, the land west of the Mississippi was already crisscrossed by trade and travel routes and inhabited by many varied cultures: hundreds of indigenous bands, French fur traders, Spanish settlers, newly independent Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, enslaved or formerly enslaved Black men and women, and many people whose story bridged several of those cultures. Movement happened west to east, north to south and south to north, and yes, sometimes from the right to the left of the picture.

In The Westerners, Megan Kate Nelson presents seven unexpected life stories in the American West. We explore two today in the first half of our conversation. (Sign up for membership to binge both episodes right away.)

The first is probably the more famous one – Sacajawea, the Shoshone and/or Hidatsa woman who guided the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri river and all the way to the Pacific Ocean, not discovering but opening up the West to East Coast settlers. History doesn't say whether she came to regret the help she gave; she died too young, in 1812, to see its effects. Sacajawea is a well-known figure, at least to Americans, but Nelson's telling is the first time I see her depicted as a full individual, including her life before and after the fated expedition (which, this will never cease to amaze me, she guided as a postpartum teenage mum breastfeeding an infant the entire time).

The second is more obscure but wasn't in her day. Maria Gertrudis Barceló was the richest woman and a power broker in the New Mexico territory. Her travel was south to north but also through the many national identities of the Southwest. She was Spanish first, then Mexican, and died an American. All without moving all that much. She made her future as a skilled Spanish monte dealer. A gambler, as much the Internet still identifies her, but really she was a casino owner and a wise investor, who wasn't afraid to take anyone to court who tried to swindle her. She was the consummate American pioneer – plucky, self-reliant, entrepreneurial, no nonsense... but she was a woman and Hispanic so she didn't fit the story America wanted told. She was a tourist attraction in her lifetime then largely faded into obscurity.

Those two women tell us the story of the pre-Civil War era, a multi-civilisational space that isn't yet the world of homesteaders you might picture when you think of the West and looks much more diverse than an episode of Little House on the Prairie. To explore that homestead universe and how different it actually was from the story trad wives are trying to tell us, check in in two weeks or sign up for membership and listen right now.

But for now, listen to the episode and let me know what you think or ask follow-up questions in the comments. I'll get to all of them.

In other news

• Welcome to new Broad History member, Louise! Join her in supporting this project at broadhistory.com/membership.
• You can now also give a gift membership! If you'd like to share BH with a friend, just click below. This will send you a gift card for a non-renewable one-month or one-year membership which you can share with anyone you love.
• Jason Koebler writes about his brain becoming "the AI police" and the exhaustion of constantly trying to parse what's AI and what's real. Hard relate. You wouldn't have noticed, but the Broad History website has an AI pledge, which I updated this week – precisely because I don't want you to have to play AI police when you engage with me. Yes, with me. Broad History is a super personal project and while I use AI loads in my processes (coding things on the website, analysing traffic data, keeping a project tracker of so! many! books!), I never use it for the words that travel between me and you. Promise.

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.

404 MediaJason Koebler

It's a mental model you need to flip to understand much of history until the modern era. Far from the prudish and uninformed ingénue of Jane Austen novels, farther still from the disinterested and desexed ideal Victorian housewife, in many of our ancestors' imagination, it was women who were the more sex-crazed gender.

From the ancient Greeks and for centuries thereafter, women were thought to be ruled by a compulsive libido, too weak to control their primal urge to make babies. Forget locker rooms; kitchens and washhouses were where moral danger lay. Girls will be girls, you know?

Far from an excuse for women to let their freak flag fly, the belief was one more reason to control their movements, behaviours, or dress. Men, superior creatures that they were, experienced desire too but could tame their animal instincts to be moral and productive citizen. It was their great burden too to keep our hunger in check – through restrictive marriages and endless pregnancies.

History is full of let's call them interesting ideas about women's sexuality. The ancient Greeks believed in the "wandering womb" – the idea that a woman's womb traveled through her body and made her ill. (I can't shake the mental image of a cartoon uterus on foot, à la Schoolhouse Rock. "I'm just a womb, yes I'm only a womb..." 🎶) Medieval Europeans, more generously, believed that a woman's orgasm was necessary for conception. The Victorians, who never disappoint when it comes to sex and gender, believed masturbation would drive one to madness. The illustrations are fun.

This week's episode is a bit of candy. I had a blast talking to history podcasting royalty, Dr Kate Lister, host of Betwixt the Sheets, about the history of women's pleasure, which is the topic of her new book, Flick.

Don't listen with kids – or your parents – in the room.

What else?

• This should be a community space! If you have work you'd like me to highlight to other Broad History readers, send it on.
• Welcome to new members Judith and Ana! Do join the very cool people who make Broad History possible.

• Unbreaking is a collective of volunteer journalists, scientists, and other knowledge workers – overwhelmingly women – keeping a record of institutional collapse in the United States. Here they're keeping track for future generations of how the administration is altering the historical record.
• Friend and BH reader George Anders wrote for The Wall Street Journal about what the 1920s tech boom can teach us about surviving the AI revolution.
• Happy Mothers' Day to listeners who are both American and moms. There's got to be a few. The Atlantic has a wonderful article about Mary Cassat, the American painter whose works on maternity will illustrate many a greeting card tomorrow and whose radicality – as always when an artist's work is commoditised – has been completely washed away.

We're all digging into the archives today, as I share more research from my MA in Public history. The good news is I graduated this week so I'm now somewhat qualified to be here. The bad news (for our purposes at least) is my folks were in town for it and I decided to prioritise them over writing something new for you. Instead, I recorded a long read I originally published in December 2024 (and more recently reshared on Substack). I had never made audio of this but after several of you mentioned you loved you had the chance to listen to my Dissolution research rather than read it, I thought I should.

I'll be back next week with plenty of fresh content. I'll be talking with Kate Lister, the incredible host of the podcast Betwixt the Sheets about her hot new book Flick, a history of female pleasure. We'll then take on myths of the American frontier with Megan Kate Nelson and also in the wings is a bit of historical true crime with very award-winning, very best-selling author Hallie Rubenhold. But for now...

The fire that started a Victorian gender war

The Bazar de la Charité fire was one of history's deadliest single-day tragedy for women, on par with the later and probably more famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

An estimated 125 people – we could never get an absolutely certain number – died in the 1897 Parisian blaze, which started when an early cinema projector was mishandled at an uppercrust charity event. It instantly captured the imagination and tabloid headlines around the world for one reason – nearly all the victims were women and girls, and aristocratic ones at that. Was it because the event was so exclusively attended by the fairer sex, or was it because men muscled their way out faster and failed to do their gentlemanly duty to women and children?

Behind the controversy lay extremely potent questions then – that still feel very relevant now – of masculinity, femininity and class. "Women and children first" was the moral duty of the powerful, the obligation that made hierarchy palatable. What was the use of an aristocratic man in the rising 20th century if he did not embody the chivalric ideals of his knightly ancestors? The tragedy exposed the seams of an archaic world coming undone.

Listen to the audio in your browser or wherever you get your podcasts. (Note: The audio does not include sidebars, images or captions, which contain lots more information, so I do recommend checking out the original piece.)

The fire that started a Victorian gender war

Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?

Broad HistoryIsabelle Roughol

Ends and odds

• Well, this is rank behaviour. A company has copied the names and designs of 75 history podcasts to confuse listeners looking for them, divert audiences and make money off ads. The content itself is just AI drivel. Do I wish Broad History were famous enough to be ripped off? Yeah, let's be real. But honestly, some people really don't mind what they do if it makes them a buck. Don't get played.

The company cloning famous podcasts

Copying the names and the designs of more than 75 shows

Podnews

• If it's a historically-set film, odds are I've seen it. If you're looking for a new one, I can recommend Colours of Time, by Cédric Klapisch. Not quite a masterpiece but it's a fresh and pleasant take on the period film. I loved it for transporting me rather faithfully to one of my favourite eras, 1890s Paris. Not the Paris of the Bazar fire though, but a Paris of bohemian artists and working-class women this time.

Two things you should do before digging into the piece. First, sign up for Jonn's excellent newsletter for more of his signature assorted nerdery. Second, buy his book. You have options because he's gone and written four, including two Sunday Times best-sellers, while I'm still debating what should be my first. If you must pick just one, pre-order his new book because that's what really helps an author and signals to bookstores they should stock it.

Brief housekeeping notes:

• I've been having quite a bit of fun doing video explainers on social media and getting feedback. Sacha on TikTok loved the Minories' girls story so much she imagined their entire post-Dissolution life. And I got to do my first reply-as-a-reel on Insta. I'm thinking through how to create an elegant video collection on the website, but in the meantime make sure to follow on Instagram or Tiktok.
• Achievement unlocked: My episode 2 guest, Fiona Sampson, was spotted on Broad History by none other than France24 cable news anchor Annette Young, also a BH listener. Before long, Fiona was on Annette's show, The 51%.
• Community interactions like this are why I love indie media. I was quiet last week because I was at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, a place I go to every year for inspiration and gelato. It was quite an encouragement the number of industry peers who came up to me to say they loved the show. Several of them lusted over my tote and demanded their own. What do you think? Should I make merch?

Now over to Jonn...

What is that primogeniture thing, anyway?

The rules of succession; or, how to pick your king (and avoid a queen)

This piece was originally published on Jonn Elledge's The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything on February 4, 2024.

The recent Channel 4 documentary about the new adventures of Ricardian car park botherer Philippa Langley has got me thinking about the Wars of the Roses. It’s a bit of English history so complicated that it kept Shakespeare busy for eight entire plays: the conflict’s causes include, but are not limited to, noble ambitions, royal incompetence, and the exciting discovery, in 1399, that if you deposed and replaced a king then god would not, in fact, stop you. 

But what struck me when I found myself reading about it recently was the difficulty of assessing, from this distance, which of the two rival factions actually had the better claim. Both were what are known as “cadet branches” of the Plantagenet dynasty, descended from younger sons of Edward III: the third (John of Gaunt) in the case of the House of Lancaster, the fourth (Edmund of Langley) in that of the House of York. One reason that two lineages so far down the apparent pecking order were in contention at all was that Edward’s second surviving son, Lionel of Clarence, was foolish enough to only produce a daughter. Another was that the son of the first, Edward the Black Prince, who predeceased his father, was Richard II: the king whose deposition by Henry Bolingbroke – Henry IV – started this madness in the first place.

At any rate, one cause of the instability was that, although the Lancastrian and Yorkist lines had stronger claims than anybody else, neither was particularly strong. Another, I suspect, is summed up by this sentence on the House of York’s Wikipedia page:

Compared with its rival, the House of Lancaster, [the House of York] had a superior claim to the throne of England according to cognatic primogeniture, but an inferior claim according to agnatic primogeniture.

I didn’t know what that meant. I decided to find out.

First things first. Primogeniture – the system of leaving a realm to its ruler’s eldest child – is neither natural nor inevitable. The early Frankish kingdoms used partible inheritance, which means dividing things up between claimants: this is why, half a century after Charlemagne put so much effort into rebuilding the Western Roman Empire, it had already been split into half a dozen fragments once again. There have also been many monarchies – Anglo-Saxon England; the Papacy; the Holy Roman Empire – which used an elective system, in which a group of senior nobles get together and pick their next boss. (The Holy Roman Empire technically remained elective right up until Napoleon abolished the place because he found it annoying even though, for century upon century, those electors mysteriously ended up electing the next Habsburg in line every bloody time.)

Then there’s ultimogeniture, a system in which it’s the youngest child who scoops the pot. This sometimes makes sense with, say, family estates, since it’s the youngest who’s most likely to end up stuck at home looking after their ageing parents; but it doesn’t seem to be a thing with royalty very often, presumably because a child on the throne is exactly the sort of thing you’re generally trying to avoid.

So: a lot of monarchies end up with primogeniture, where the crown goes to the monarch’s eldest surviving child, then the next sibling in line, and so on; if you run out of kids, the inheritance instead passes to the monarch’s next sibling, then their kids and so on. In mathematical terms, this is what’s known as a “depth-first search”: you finish following one line of descent before moving back and looking at the next. This is why the line of succession for the British crown will run through Prince William and his kids, then Prince Harry and his kids, before looking to the current king’s siblings. All of which keeps the prospect of King Andrew I comfortingly far away. (Editor's note: Andrew Windsor is now, in 2026, even more comfortably out of the running.)

This might seem straightforward enough, but there are a number of possible variants. Some systems – notably the famously lovely Saudi one – adopt a “breadth-first search”, exhausting one generation before moving onto the next (how, I’m not quite sure). The purpose seems to be to ensure age, wisdom and absolutely minimal change. 

The bigger question is that of gender. Absolute primogeniture – of the sort a number of European monarchies adopted in the 20th century, and Britain in 2013 – gives women the same right of inheritance as men. Historically, though, the idea that women were as capable of ruling as men was seen as insane wokery or political correctness gone mad, partly because ruling tended to involve fighting, partly because of complicated issues surrounding marriage and property. (Would a kingdom ruled by a queen regnant end up to some extent controlled by her weird foreign husband?)

Separate to that was the question of whether the right to rule could pass via the female line. The king’s daughter may be too delicate and curvaceous to rule; but what of her sons? Cognatic primogeniture means they could, indeed, inherit; agnatic primogeniture means they can’t. Under the latter system, it doesn’t matter that maternal granddad was king: if you wanted the crown, you should have been more careful in your choice of parents.

There are other terms for these two different sets of rules. Strict agnatic primogeniture is also said to follow the Salic Law, rules dating from 6th century Francia which say, basically, that only those who descended from the male line could either inherit or pass on the right to inherit. But other, semi-Salic systems mean that women don’t tend to inherit but their sons can.

It’s the clash between those two systems which has triggered so many of the excitingly war-y interludes that make up so much of European history. One of the contributors to the Schleswig-Holstein question was that Denmark and Holstein had different attitudes to the Salic Law. Result: a bloody big succession crisis in 1863.

It was also (see, we got there in the end) one of the things that contributed to the Wars of the Roses. Under the strict agnatic interpretation implied by the Salic Law, Lancaster had the better claim, because the family was descended from Edward III’s third son, York merely from his fourth. Under a semi-salic interpretation, though, York had the better claim: that’s because Richard of York was not only the grandson of Edward III’s fourth son, but the great great grandson of his second, the aforementioned Lionel of Clarence.

By my count, that made Richard his own cousin twice removed, which is very healthy. But it also meant it was not actually obvious even then who had the better claim: it all depended on what you thought the rules were. Throw in ambition, power-hunger and the fact everyone had realised a few decades earlier that you could depose a king, and nature took its course.

Until recently incidentally, the British royals followed male preference primogeniture: that means your sons inherit before your daughters, but your daughters inherit before your brothers (who inherit before your sisters, etc.). The Cameron government amended this in 2013 to give Princess Charlotte the same inheritance rights as her brothers.

There are other possible complications too, especially when talking about estates rather than kingdoms: complicated rules involving things like entailes and moieties, aimed at ensuring the estate didn’t get broken up. But on the assumption that you people are more interested in political units than why Cousin Matthew got to inherit Downton Abbey, I’m not going to go into that stuff.

Some last points, to wrap up. An heir presumptive can be displaced in the line of succession by plausible future births; an heir apparent cannot. (Prince William is heir apparent; the late queen was, prior to the death of George VI, merely heir presumptive, because her parents could plausibly have given her a brother.)

The Roman Empire relied, in part, on a system of adoption, in which the emperor could nominate a successor by adopting him as a son. The benefit of this system was that it replicated the certainty you get from a familial system (no arguments over who gets to take over!), without the annoying issue that such systems sometimes inevitably produce heirs who are utterly unsuited to rule and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It feels telling that Rome’s golden age came to an end when Marcus Aurelius, last of the “five good emperors”, became the first of them to die with a son and natural heir, Commodus. Who was so great at the job that he would go on to be the baddie in Gladiator. 

Lastly, there are matrilineal systems, in which it’s the female line which inherits: in certain periods of Ancient Egypt, the next pharaoh would be the guy who married the last one’s eldest daughter. That, though, is quite another story. 

Where did the nuns go when Henry VIII closed all religious houses circa 1539? This may feel like a niche question, but think about it: Here you have in a few short years the complete destruction of an entire industry, tens of thousands of people having to reinvent their way of life, and an unprecedented transfer of wealth to powerful plutocrats. Plus, because Henry loved his paperwork, we have reams of data about it and a unique opportunity to compare the fate of men and women under the exact same circumstances.

The event has come to be known as “the Dissolution of Monasteries,” but the moniker helps us ignore half the story – it was a dissolution of monasteries and nunneries. Actually, 20% of the story: female institutions were a minority and there were only an estimated 1,900 nuns in England at the time. That makes them much easier to follow in the archives. What I found is that the dissolution dealt a much heavier blow on religious women than on their male peers, but most interesting of all is that it wasn’t because of blatant gender discrimination. Even five centuries ago, it was subtle, structural inequities in a nominally fair system that guaranteed women worse outcomes. Sounds familiar?

Dissolution 101

Refresher: Henry wanted to marry Anne Boleyn but was already married to Catherine of Aragon. When the pope wouldn't grant him a divorce, he decided to break with Rome, create his own church and grant himself the divorce. One key element of the creation of the Church of England was the suppression of all monastic life; religious institutions were seen as corrupt and too loyal to Rome. 

Dissolution didn't happen all at once. From 1535, men and women under 24 were excused from their vows, given secular clothes and told to go home. Henry – in practice, his favourite bureaucrat Thomas Cromwell – then disbanded the “lesser” houses with income under £200 a year, which took care of most countryside nunneries. Before long, in 1538, it was the turn of “greater” houses such as those in the capital, which drew a healthy income from vast urban property holdings. By 1540, there wasn't a monastery, convent, friary or priory left in England.

Henry redistributed their lands, buildings and goods to the Crown and his favourite aristocrats. It was the biggest transfer of wealth in British history, on par with the portioning of former communist countries among oligarchs in the early 1990s. What happened to the monks and nuns? They were mostly shown the door and told to get on with their lives. That's where paths diverged for men and women.

The (near) impossibility of marriage or work

The Reformation was a domestic conservative revolution. Breaking with the medieval glorification of chastity, the new mindset praised marriage as an ideal natural state and defended the political, economic and social interests of the married craftsman as the patriarchal head of his household. The Reformation plucked women out of the cloister and put them back at the centre of the family.

That was all well and good for the next generation, but not for those women pushed out of the nunneries. Henry VIII kept fairly Catholic views, among them the primacy of chastity vows, made to God, not to Rome. (Funny how that didn’t apply to his own marriage vows…) Any early confusion about the right to marry was dispelled with the passage of the Act of Six Articles in June 1539, which prohibited the marriage of former religious men and women on pain of death. Those who had married in the preceding, ambivalent months were quick to undo their unions, or at least publicly denounce them. The prohibition was only fully lifted with Elizabeth’s accession in 1559. By then, even those women who had been in their 20s at Dissolution 20 years earlier were long past marriageable age.

If not marriage, work then? Easy enough for former monks, who found positions as clergy in the Church of England or were welcomed in universities. But the new religion had no use for women whatsoever, however learned in the faith, until the first ordination of women priests in 1994. The few economic activities religious houses had supported – breweries, apothecaries, book copying and inluminating... – required tools and startup capital. Lay sisters may have continued their task in secularised hospitals or entered service elsewhere, but the middling sort and gentry women who were leaving the convent had no trade and little chance of employment outside kinship networks.

Pay on your way in, get paid on your way out

What was left was the prospect of surviving on a meagre pension. Former monks and nuns were entitled to lifelong payments to compensate for the total destruction of their livelihood. But the way they were calculated exacerbated structural inequities and kept many women in the most abject poverty.

By practice if not by canon law, women entered the convent with a dowry, just like they would a marriage. The religious life was not a refuge for empty-handed girls; it replicated the social hierarchies of wider society. In wills, you see fathers set aside sums for their daughters, to be used either for marriage or for a “profession fee.” The grander the family, the grander the house, and the grander the fee. It could be around £40 for a decent London position, completely outside the reach of most people, with further donations expected in order to go up in the ranks. Even less prestigious institutions expected novices to have some education, to at a minimum arrive with a trousseau and to provide for their own needs. Most convents therefore recruited from the parish gentry or among city merchants and craftsmen. Women who could not afford such a career became lay sisters. They took simple vows of humility and obedience and laboured in exchange for room and board. This ended up mattering greatly because the way you entered the convent determined how you left it.

Pensions were based on the individual’s age, years of profession or potential office, as well as their house's wealth. Their attribution seems to have been more concerned with maintaining the pre-existing social order than ensuring a dignified living for all. Hierarchy was paramount so that it wasn’t rare for the head of the house to receive considerably more than even the most senior nun. Elizabeth Salvage, prioress of the Minories in east London, was granted £40 a year, while her immediate deputies received 12 times less. Her lay sisters were simply dismissed – they hadn't bought their way in, they wouldn't be bought out. In the lesser houses, rank and file nuns weren't provisioned for at all; only heads of houses received an annuity. Sybil Kirke, the rather reviled prioress at Stratford-at-Bow, was granted £15 while her nuns complained of hunger.

The making of a pension gap

The historian Kathleen Cooke calculated that the median pension granted women was 4 marks or £2 13s 4d. The median male pension was nearly twice that at £5 10s. Were Dissolution-era nuns victims of what we’d today call gender pay discrimination?

Syon Abbey is an interesting case study to consider the discrepancy. The large Bridgettine house on the banks of the Thames in West London, was mixed, home to 52 nuns and 12 monks. It wasn't unheard of for larger institutions to house both sexes, but they were always under female leadership, and those women were handsomely rewarded – 300 marks to the abbess Agnes Jordan, the highest pension given to any woman in the country and higher than all but a few men. (A mark is two-thirds of a pound, or 13 shillings and 4 pence, a common accounting device in the early modern era that makes maths far easier in the non-decimal currency system.) The highest pensions at Syon went to women in leadership, and monks and nuns down the ladder were then treated equally according to their seniority. The four lay sisters and five lay brothers each received the exact same sum of 4 marks. In the medieval and early modern era, class is a much bigger differentiator than gender, and that's what we see across all mixed institutions.

I also crunched the numbers to compare pensions at male and female houses of similar size and income. I'll spare you the maths and give you the conclusion: There is no evidence of wilful gender discrimination, only of subtle and relentless systemic inequities. Pensions were drawn not from some national, common pot, but from the estate of each organisation.

Two issues: First, nunneries were generally poorer. Nearly half of England's convents had income below £50, versus just about 1 in 7 monasteries. Wealth was built on centuries of donations and land grants from monarchs and wealthy patrons, and you can see how that would favour male institutions. In fact, nunneries were so poor that Cromwell reprieved nearly 50 of them in the first round of dissolution. If he had truly closed all 116 houses worth less than £200, as the law intended, he would have found himself with thousands of respectable women suddenly out on the street. That stayed the king's hand for at least a couple years.

When nuns of the dissolved houses were given the option to either leave religious life or transfer to another house, nearly 9 out of 10 opted to stay – many more than men. With little to no pension, without a trade, without the right to marry, or even to inherit, there just wasn’t much of a life awaiting them outside the convent and they knew it. Which leads us to the second issue: nunneries were crowded. Once they had absorbed the refugees pushed out of lesser houses, nunneries had to provide for them. A female house may have had as big a pension pot as the monastery down the road, but it was divided up among many more souls.

And that's how you end up with equal treatment on the surface, but inequity in the outcomes.

“Many a young nun proved an old beggar”

The life of a former nun was that of a dependent spinster. Those with the option moved in with a parent, a married sister or a friend. Once again, aristocratic women fared better – deprived of work and independence, but at least handsomely housed, ironically sometimes on the very land they had just left. It is not uncommon to see the same family names among the better-pensioned former heads of houses and the aristocrats who shared the spoils.

Parliament, apparently intent on making their lives difficult, barred former religious women and men from inheriting any part of an estate in order to protect existing heirs – who sat in Parliament. That’s why the wills of even loving parents only grant former nuns annuities, not property, and beseech siblings to take care of them. Women passed from the care of a father, to that of a stepmother or a brother-in-law, and eventually her parish when all who loved her had gone. Another coping strategy was for them to maintain a form of communal, and even quasi-monastic, living. Two or three former nuns sharing accommodation not far from their old convent helped reduce expenses and face a less jarring transition to secular life. There are hints of several such arrangements in the pension books, where individuals of the same communities can be seen collecting their due together, or on behalf of one another. Ties of friendship must have remained. Former nuns provided for their sisters in religion in their own wills and testaments decades after the Dissolution.

It is hard to know how the women of 1539 felt about these sudden, monumental changes. If any chronicled their experience of the events, it has been lost to the centuries. The economic impact, we’ve seen, was devastating. The psychological impact, we can only guess at. It's tempting with contemporary eyes to consider the Catholic convent a retrograde institution, especially under enclosure, which severely restricted nuns' contact with the rest of the community. But there was an opportunity for women to live in sorority, to build large organisations, to lead intellectual lives, and to contribute to the economy and the culture. Even women and girls outside the convents couldn’t have been indifferent to their only choice of a socially acceptable life outside marriage and motherhood suddenly disappearing.

Those with wealth, family and connections, had one fewer option. Others were left with none. As once wrote the 17^th-century historian Thomas Fuller, who might have seen them as a child on the streets of London, “many a young nun proved an old beggar.”

Trust me, there is a lot more I could tell you that I cut out. Have questions? Put them in the comments.

You can listen to the episode here, or watch my unedited interview with Julia Cooke on Youtube.  

When I was a kid, growing up and dreaming of becoming a journalist – a constant since about the fall of the Soviet Union – my heroes were men.

I wanted to travel the plains of Africa with Joseph Kessel. I wanted to cross the Yukon with Jack London. I pictured myself as both the hero and the writer of Jules Verne novels.

I don't think I ever consciously thought, "oh, I won't be able to do that because I'll be a woman." I don't think that's how representation works. I just didn't have a mental image for it because the culture didn't have an image for it. Women roaming the world for stories just weren't in my books. They weren't on my tv. They weren't romanticised. And so logically I concluded, again probably not consciously, that they just hadn't existed yet. The best that well-intentioned people could tell me was, "yes, Isabelle, you can do that. You can do anything. And you'll be the first, how cool is that?"

I think that gets to the crux of why we do women's history, why a project like Broad History even exists. We get to this in the second half of my interview with Julia Cooke today. Julia mentions this famous quote by Virginia Woolf: "Women have no history." And here's how I understand it.

Men are allowed progress, evolution, change. There is exploration and conquest, scientific discovery, political revolution and innovation. A young man who enters the world gets to iterate it. History is movement. For women, the centuries are static. Our past is portrayed to us as some eternal and natural domesticity, where only the hemlines and the appliances change. Women have one job: standing still.

When we step out of that sphere, since we're made to accept as our only sense of the past and our only foundation national histories that barely include us in the march of the centuries, we don't get to build on previous generations' work. Everything feels new, undone, a first. The lives of women don't iterate. We start from scratch every time.

Without history, there is no roadmap. You have to blaze a trail everywhere you go. That's harder than it needs to be and it's exhausting. And there's only so much you get to do in one lifetime, before your daughters and granddaughters start from scratch themselves. That's what keeps us down.

That's why I feel so strongly about giving women back their history and why there's such an urgency to it right now. So today I'm adding three incredible world-roaming journalists – Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey Hahn – to 10-year-old Isabelle's personal pantheon. They had existed.

Buy the book

All book sales support Broad History, independent bookstores and the authors who give us their time and knowledge. And they're cheaper for you, too.

🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK

🇺🇸 Buy the book in the US

Broad History has reviews!

We've got a dozen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ratings and our first two reviews! This makes me very happy. If you've got nice things to say, go ahead and say them on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. This really helps surface the show to new listeners. Thank you!

Bobs and bits

• How does questionable history become common knowledge? Dr Florence H R Scott, who has the best-titled newsletter on the women's history circuit, addresses an Easter myth.

Eostre: Pagan fertility goddess or complete fabrication?

Special Easter edition

Ælfgif-who?Dr Florence H R Scott

• Anne Helen Petersen is one of my favourite writers and an absolute inspiration for how to do community-centric independent journalism well. She just wrote about women doing their husband's job searching and my God, must we really carry the whole world all the time?
• Here's the 1972 article in The Atlantic about the New Journalists' self-mythologizing that Julia Cooke mentions in the episode.

Notes on the New Journalism

The New Journalist is in the end less a journalist than an impresario. Tom Wolfe presents ... Phil Spector! Norman Mailer presents ... the Moon Shot!  

The AtlanticMichael J. Arlen

• Hat tip to Ben Werdmuller (another stunning newsletter) for pointing me to this piece by Julien Genestoux on our complicity in the death of the open Web. I'm thinking about this a lot as I've been playing around with publishing on Substack again. Everything I've written about how they're playing to their own incentives, which will eventually turn against independent publishers and already has, remains true. But it also feels like being the only girl in high school not going to the party and telling her friends not to do drugs. Broad History needs growth or it will die. I've been publishing online for 20 years and I don't think I've seen a more difficult environment for audience growth yet. Resisting the siren's call of the last place that promises growth is not easy, even when you can see all the strings.

The open web isn’t dying. We’re killing it

The open web is under pressure from AI companies and large platforms, but its troubles did not start with AI. We also chose convenience over control, and we will have to change that if we want a better web.

Ouvre Boite

Here's where I think we're going, now I've kicked the tyres on this thing a bit:

• I've got a few more standalone episodes in production, but the podcast is returning to my original plan – deeply researched, carefully produced, multi-episode documentary series that look at a known moment in history but recenter women's experience. I'm aiming for one a quarter because it's about as much research as my dissertation, and we're starting with the American Revolution. Members will get to binge it all on day 1; everyone else gets the weekly drip.
• Every Saturday, and early this week because it's Easter, everyone gets the newsletter of assorted nerdery as my friend Jonn Elledge calls it (definitely subscribe to him too). Sometimes serious, sometimes sillier (like today) but hopefully always educational. Main topic at the top, scroll down for bits and bobs. Some bobs may end up behind a paywall.
• As the catalogue grows, all archives, occasional essays as well as the video explainers that are proving popular on social media will live here, for members only. As membership grows, I hope to also host online community events, just for us.

Sounds good? Let's go! And happy Easter too! 🐣

What D-Day stories were we missing? The weather's, apparently.

The World War II movie is the epitome of popular history media. And it never (fine, almost never) has women in lead roles. War is a man's affair, we're told. Blockbuster films require drama, conflict, things blowing up. Surely we can't make a big budget movie about sad wives on the home front and non-combatant troops handling logistics, you understand. Then they go and make a movie about... the D-Day weather forecast.

In Pressure (out in May in the US, in September in the UK), General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and Britain's chief weather guy James Stagg (Andrew Scott) battle it out over when to storm the Normandy beaches – fear not, the trailer really wrings all it can out of that particular metaphor – while avoiding the rain. Spoiler alert: The landings were originally scheduled for June 5, 1944 and were pushed 24 hours because of storms on the Channel.

The film is perfectly pitched for the Rest Is History dad crowd, a famously underserved audience, down to the Major Wint... er, Damian Lewis supporting role. Kerry Condon plays the one female character, the real-life Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's chauffeur, secretary and trusted thought partner. Wikipedia editors call her "his right-hand man" and they must think it's a compliment.

Will I watch this? Of course. You're talking to the woman who does a yearly rewatch of Band of Brothers. And I love this success for the playwright, David Haig. But that doesn't mean I won't complain about it. I mean no disrespect to Group Captain Stagg; weather is a fundamental element of war, Napoleon taught us that. But if you can make a hero out of a meteorologist sitting in Bedfordshire and a villain out of the British weather, surely you can make a film or two about the women of WWII for once. Here are my pitches.

1. D-Day Girls

The incredible story of the 39 women who in 1942 joined the SOE to infiltrate France on behalf of Britain's secret service. Many were French women who had fled when the Nazis marched in, answering De Gaulle's call to join him in London. There was Andrée Borrel, a tomboy, working-class girl from the suburbs of Paris who was the first to parachute back into her occupied homeland. She was murdered in a concentration camp before reaching her 25th birthday. Add Odette Sansom, a bored suburban mum in Somerset, French-born but married to an Englishman. With her husband on the front, she left her three daughters in a convent school and joined the Spindle network. Its leader would become her second husband – who doesn't love a romantic secondary storyline? She survived 14 Gestapo interrogations under torture without giving away a thing. Noor Inayat Khan was an Indo-American-British Muslim woman born in Moscow and raised in France. She fled Paris in 1940 but parachuted back as a radio operator for the Prosper network. She too resisted torture after her arrest, and was executed at Dachau. What about Lise de Baissac, a Mauritian aristocrat who'd emigrated to France as a teenager and a fiercely independent single woman in her mid-30s when the war broke out? She teamed up with her brother Claude de Baissac to ready Resistance troops on the ground for D-Day. And let's not forget Violette Szabo, who, when she was stopped by German troops, engaged them in a fierce gun battle, allowing her male comrades to escape and survive. She too was executed.
Genre: Espionage + sorority. Think Bridge of Spies meets Band of Brothers, with less testosterone.
Source material: There's already a best-selling nonfiction book, just buy the rights.
Cast: Céleste Brunnquell as Andrée Borrell, Adèle Exarchopoulos as Odette Sansom, Ambika Mod as Nour Inayat Khan, Eva Green as Lise de Baissac, Louis Garrel as her brother, Lyna Khoudri as Violette Szabo.

2. The Face of War

Martha Gellhorn was one of very few reporters to land in Normandy on D-Day. She had covered the war all over Europe and Asia, and the Spanish civil war before that, but the army refused to accredit even experienced women for the invasion, so she went as a stowaway on a hospital ship. For her daring, she was stripped of all accreditations and had to fight her way onto every story. Later she revealed the horrors of Dachau to the world. Gellhorn pioneered the way we write about wars today, focusing not on troop movements, but on the impact on civilians and the collision of quotidian domesticity with geopolitics. She's often introduced as Ernest Hemingway's third wife and the only big movie about her focuses on that relationship (she's portrayed by Nicole Kidman, he by Clive Owen). Hemingway was a jealous and domineering husband, who admired her talent before resenting it, stealing her commissions and blocking her career. Guess who didn't get out of the boat on D-Day?
Genre: Biopic + journalism movie (my favourite kind). Yes we already have Lee, but who says we only get one?
Source material: Plenty of Gellhorn's own writing, much of it autobiographical, like The Face of War, which is lending its title; her authoritative biography by Caroline Moorehead; Starry and Restless, by Julia Cooke (next on the podcast), which connects her with two other great reporters of the era, Rebecca West and Emily Hahn.
Cast: Since Kate Winslet has already played Lee Miller (she can cameo), I want to see Carrie Coon on this one. Rachel Weisz can play Rebecca West and Kristen Stewart as Emily Hahn.

3. Clipped Wings

There was some flying in WWI, but WWII is when airborne conflict really took off. Every nation was desperate for pilots, so women were soon called upon to do the less glamorous bits of flying, carrying freight and ferrying planes to where they needed to be, in order to free the men up for combat. Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary attracted pilots from all over the world as it alone accepted women at the time – 1 in 8 of their signups, who were paid 20% less than their male peers. They were under the command of Pauline Gower, a former débutante who gave joyrides in a flying circus for a living. The US later had a dedicated unit, the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots), led by Jacqueline Cochran, later the first woman to break the sound barrier, and Nancy Love, who started flying as a teenager. The job brought no glory, but it was nonetheless perilous. These women flew experimental aircraft for testing and damaged aircraft for repair, often without navigation instruments. They even trailed targets for live fire combat practice. The ATA's death toll was 1 in 7; 38 WASPs died as well, the final one Hazel Ying Lee, the first Chinese American female pilot. Not considered soldiers, the women were given no life insurance and their funeral expenses were not covered. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was the only country to allow women to fly combat missions. The Night Witches were a bomber regiment of very young volunteers, founded by Major Marina Raskova, the "Russian Amelia Earhart", who led precision raids over Germany, cutting off their engines and gliding in silence over their targets. Raskova died while attempting a forced landing near Stalingrad and received a state funeral.
Genre: Let's make this one an international TV production. This is clearly Masters of the Air, but female and global.
Source material: There is an absurd number of books about this. Just look at this Goodreads list. I stole the title Clipped Wings from one of them.
Cast: Florence Pugh as Pauline Gower, Rhea Seehorn as Jacqueline Cochran, Julia Garner as Nancy Love, Stephanie Hsu as Hazel Ying Lee. Tough casting Russians right now, so maybe Olga Kurylenko or Noomi Rapace for Marina Raskova.

4. The Lost Manuscript

This one takes us straight from World War II into the Cold War, and we're going arthouse with two parallel timelines. The first, 12th-century Germany. We follow the rise of Hildegard von Bingen, mystic, intellectual, artist, Da Vinci-like superstar savant of the German Renaissance, and eventually saint (I'll tell you about her some other time). Second timeline, February 1945, Dresden. An open bank vault in a bombed out city. Hildegard's original works had been moved there for safekeeping during the war. Only the Riesencodex remained, a mammoth volume of her collected works preserved in a metal box. Soviet soldiers seized it for the communist state. To get it back, the nuns at Hildegard's abbey in Eibingen teamed up with Franz Götting, the state librarian; Margarete Kühn, a medieval scholar with access to the Soviet sector of Berlin and ambitions to take vows at the abbey herself; and Caroline Walsh, the wife of an American soldier stationed in Germany. Together they organised an incredible switcheroo: Margarete obtained a loan of the manuscript under cover of research and replaced it with another old volume procured by Franz. She handed it to Caroline who crossed occupied Germany with 35 pounds of old velum hidden on her person until she reached Eibingen and handed the Riesencodex to the mother superior. It took years for the Soviets to realise they'd been played.
Genre: The Name of the Rose meets Ocean's Eleven
Source material: Janina Ramirez tells the story in her book Femina.
Cast: Diane Kruger as Hildegard von Bingen, Sandra Hüller as Margarete Kühn, Christop Waltz as Franz Götting, Katherine LaNasa as Caroline Walsh, Olivia Colman as the mother superior.

And a fifth movie that's actually been made

The Six Triple Eight (available on Netflix) tells the story of the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed in WWII, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was tasked with sorting and delivering mail to soldiers on the Western front. "No mail, low morale" was their motto. Before you tell me the postal service isn't all that compelling, I don't entirely disagree, but let me remind you this all started with a movie about a weather forecast.

Bobs and bits

• Incidentally, a staff writer at The Atlantic is the granddaughter of a WASP and she just wrote about their (fruitless) battle to be recognised as veterans.
• Speaking of Band of Brothers, I was moved by this interview with Kirk Acevedo (he played Joe Toye with that wonderfully coarse voice) who talks about roles drying up, having to sell his house and the disappearance of the middle class actor. It's happening everywhere. I see it in journalism, my brother sees it video games, my friends see it in screenwriting, in the theatre or in music, my professors told me not to bother with a PhD because they see it in academia... the creative middle class is disappearing. It predated AI but AI makes it worse. Value is still being created but it's not captured by those who create it. It's intercepted by tech platforms, big monopolies and a few superstars. You're either Taylor Swift or you're starving. Let's be real, we don't want to be out here constantly begging you for 5 quid a month on Substack or Patreon (who also take their pound of flesh). It's just the only option left where creatives feel a modicum of control over their destiny. Pretty dire.
• On a recommendation from BH member Michaël Jarjour, I just listened to this brand new podcast, The Wrong Side of History by Jay Singleton. The concept is slippery but clever – understanding history's bad guys the way they understood themselves. The first series is about American women who opposed getting the vote, the majority view at the time. Jay's the sole narrator, no expert interviews, so you have to trust him, but the research on episode 1 is solid.
• Victoria Bateman and I told you in episode 1 how much more frequent it used to be before the Industrial Revolution for women to work in waged labor, and we shared a bunch of business cards of 18th century entrepreneurs. In that vein, the National Archives have a fun story about Mary Parker, an East London wine merchant, during the American Revolution.
• My MA classmate Amy Freeborn wrote a very necessary article about re-examining the witch as a symbolic feminist figure. The feminist study of Early Modern witch hunts played a huge part in the rise of women's history as a field and got a lot of us engaged, but the more we learn, the more we have to nuance the picture. Not everyone's willing to do the hard work of intellectual honesty. I'll write about this some more.
• Women's History Month is over. Thank God. Now we get to hear from people who actually care.

What if work was never our liberator? Even the suggestion is confronting to a generation of women – mine – raised in the Girl Power 1990s to be the Girl Bosses of the 2010s. But lately, we've been forced to contend with the possibility.

I know two kinds of Millennial women: those who've already checked out of their corporate careers (Hi, it me, and we're broke) and those who, exhausted and disillusioned but still financially constrained, only dream to.

Squeezed by inflation, terrified of returning to a putrid job market and paralysed by the threat of AI sending us there anyway, we spend our few free hours bedrotting and passing around articles with titles like "Do All Jobs Suck Right Now?" and "Stop Fixing the System" (both great reads by the way, strong recommend). We've long lost faith in employers who called us family and promised we'd change the world, only to turn around and lay off all our friends while signing contracts with ICE.

What's a Millennial woman to do? For a while, the default exit was to turn your burnout into a coaching career and get paid to manage other women's burnout. That's starting to feel a bit like a pyramid scheme. What else? Woodworking with a Youtube channel? A smallholder farm with a Youtube channel? I know! A cat rescue with a Youtube channel! But there's only so many of us the Creator Economy will absorb – someone's gotta make real money to buy those memberships that sustain us.

Our more lefty friends laugh because they knew all along. In the 1970s, radical feminism was not interested in leaning in. The Wages for Housework movement demanded pay for cooking, cleaning, and child care – not because they believed women belonged in the kitchen, but because they were under no illusion that that invisible labor would ever be evenly shared or that adding a 9-to-5 to it would ever be sustainable. We're stuck doing this, they said, we might as well get paid for it and have some financial independence. The rest of our time should be for us, not for a boss. You can see how they had a point.

I am struck by the similarity with a 2026 trend, unearthed by Bloomberg's Irina Anghel, of young women eschewing traditional careers and monetising their housework on social media. They don't have the Christian conservative baggage of "trad wives" but a very matter-of-fact, realism about them. They call themselves breadmakers.

Wages for Housework based its demands on three insights:

• "All work is sh*t", as we've seen. Intellectually fulfilling work that pays is a rare privilege. The jobs most of humanity does suck. Women don't need jobs; they need pay and time for themselves.
• A boss who pays one worker gets the labor of two – the waged employee, sure, but also the person at home, almost always a woman, who makes his labor possible by doing everything else that sustains human life – feeding him, keeping him and his home clean, even birthing and raising the next generation of workers. Both should receive wages.
• "Every mother is a working mother." Welfare payments aren't charity; they are a due for the work women do to sustain society. Cuts to public services, especially in care, are a tax on women who are expected to step in to pick up the slack.

As you can probably guess, Wages for Housework was a working-class, Marxist analysis of labor. I can't pretend to be either of those things, even if writing about women's history automatically marks me as a radical to some on the Internet. But I explored the ideas with an open mind interviewing Emily Callaci, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a history of Wages for Housework with unprecedented access to its archives and surviving organisers. I discovered a half-century-old political movement that is astonishingly current. Have a listen.

Are you following me on Instagram?

I've been really enjoying making video explainers of all the topics I explore here. If you'd like to see how I manage to boil down every episode for 3-minute attention spans by pretending I'm in an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk, definitely give it a follow.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Isabelle Roughol (@isabelleroughol)

Buy the book

All book sales support Broad History. And they're cheaper for you, too.

🇬🇧 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the UK

🇺🇸 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the US

All Work and No Pay: Watch the Wages for Housework documentary

In this episode

• "All work is sh*t" or what anti-Girl Boss feminism might have got right
• Why women need time and money, not another job
• "You can't make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time" or how employers get two workers for the price of one
• Wages for house work, not for housewives
• All mothers are working mothers
• The care work of the climate crisis
• More about Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescott

Transcript

Transcripts are AI-generated and only somewhat cleaned up. Spelling and transcription errors may remain. Punctuation is haphazard. Check against the audio before quoting.

Watch

Buy the book

All book sales support Broad History. And they're cheaper for you, too.

🇬🇧 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the UK

🇺🇸 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the US

Help me out: Share, review, donate

• Share on social media or reach out to a friend one-on-one and let them know what you like about Broad History

• Leave a 5-star rating and most importantly a review on the main podcasting apps. This really helps surface the podcast to others.

• Become a member to listen to the episodes early and without ads and unlock more benefits as we grow. Or make a one-time donation of any amount. There is no Broad History without your financial support. Thank you!

How many movie stars at the Academy Awards tonight will remember the woman to whom they owe much of their industry?

Alice Guy (pronounced Ghee) was 22 years old when she discovered the moving pictures. It was 1895 and the Lumière brothers had invited Léon Gaumont, a camera manufacturer, to a demonstration of their new technology. Alice, his secretary, was allowed to tag along. She was fascinated and quickly understood the potential of the new medium.

Films then were mostly non-fiction stock shots – a train entering the station, workers leaving a factory, waves crashing on a beach... Alice was the daughter of a Chilean immigrant with a large bookselling and publishing business. She knew storytelling and she knew she could do better. She pitched Gaumont the idea of making their own films but making them stories – surely, that would help sell more cameras and projectors. Fine, the boss said, but on your own time. Her first production, The Cabbage Fairy, was arguably the first narrative fiction film and a big success. (Arguably because some film historians point to the Lumière brothers' scene The Sprinkler Sprinkled instead, filmed some months earlier, or some of the early George Méliès pictures. It's a fair debate but where you land ultimately matters little. History likes to remember singular firsts, but progress more often arises from multiple people independently arriving at the same result at roughly the same time.)

Alice became a one-woman film studio. She was the director, the screenwriter, the producer, the director of photography... Eventually, Gaumont relieved Alice of her secretarial duties and named her the first executive of what was, then, the biggest film company in the world (or second-biggest, battling it out with Pathé) and is, today, the oldest continuously-running studio. She made more than 400 films in 11 years. She experimented with visual effects. She filmed herself behind the scenes and came up with the "making-of" film that has bulked up so many DVD releases. In 1906, she invented the "sword-and-sandal" genre with The Life of Christ, an epic running more than 30-minute-long with hundreds of extras. She filmed with the Chronophone, a Gaumont innovation that synchronised sound to film.

She was in her mid-30s already and a powerful professional when in 1907, she met another, much younger Gaumont employee, Herbert Blaché, who traveled with her to Germany to sell the Chronophone. They were married within months. Gaumont had already planned to send Herbert to America to sell the Chronophone there. Alice followed her new husband, but there was no job for her. Gaumont seems to have been sorry to see her leave but Alice had also made enemies on the Paris film scene. She had fired an assistant director when she learned he had raped a teenage extra on her set. Few understood her decision. There were many men in the wings coveting her job. She later wrote in her memoirs:

“I soon learned this self-evident fact: As long as a woman remains in what they call 'her place', she is left alone. But as soon as she takes up a position usually reserved to men, she is looked at sideways.”

In America, the now Alice Blaché was bored with the life of a suburban mom. In 1910, between the births of her two children, she launched her own film company, Solax, taking advantage of Gaumont's underused studio in Flushing, New York. It was quickly so successful that she could buy her family a big house and build her own $100,000 studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She was a workhorse. She oversaw all production and directed half the films that came out of Solax, as many as two a week. Alice's bold success and her French elegance made her a favourite of the US press, while she was soon forgotten back home. She was, according to the Motion Picture News in 1911, a “fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.”

Her films were progressive, ground-breaking and commercially successful. Her motto – "Be natural" – was plastered all over her studio; she invented a new, realistic language for film actors, away from the theatricality and heavy makeup of the stage. Her films centred the psychology of characters and often featured modern women who defied social conventions. They wore trousers and short hair, rode horses and pointed guns at villains. She imagined a world, In the Year 2000, where all gender roles were reversed (the film was a Solax remake of The Results of Feminism, which she had made for Gaumont in 1906). She filmed the first movie with an all-Black cast and the first on-screen kiss between two men. She wrote a film about family planning, sadly never realised, for the 1916 opening of Margaret Sanger's planned parenthood clinic.

In 1913, fateful mistake perhaps, she handed the presidency of Solax to her husband so she could focus on her artistic role. Historians here diverge. A lot of the sources explain Solax's decline and ultimate failure as the consequence of distribution difficulties as an independent studio, increased costs as the public demanded longer features, and the concentration and relocation of the film industry to the West Coast. All that is true but more recent scholarship by documentary film-makers Nathalie Masduraud and Valerie Urrua (2021) suggests Alice was more intentionally managed out by her own husband.

Within months of being named to the presidency, Herbert had formed a company in his own name, but using Solax inventory, actors and locations to produce his films. Alice was excluded from board meetings. Solax was slowly subsumed, Alice dispossessed. Herbert's company eventually failed too. The marriage fell apart and by 1918, Herbert had moved to Hollywood to live with one of his many mistresses. Alice briefly attempted to continue to work with him, but divorced and finally bankrupted when her Fort Lee studio burnt down, Alice returned to France with her two children in 1922 to seek refuge at her sister's.

An even worse betrayal awaited her at home. When she called Léon Gaumont desperate for a job, he refused to help. Was he bitter about the way she had left? Jealous of her American success? She had launched and run two of the world's largest studios. She had made more than 600 movies. She was, for a few years, the highest paid producer in America. But the days of pioneers were over; cinema had become big business. A man's business. She never again worked in film. Worse: When her old boss sent her a copy of the corporate history he had just published, she found she had been erased.

“My name was nowhere. When I protested, he said ‘I'm not the one who compiles the catalogues, Alice. And it matters so little.’ Let me tell you, my career as a woman has often left a bitter taste.”

Early films had no opening or end credits, just a card with the name of the studio. The names of the individuals involved were kept in company archives. Alice realised her male assistants had taken credit for all her films. She spent the last three decades of her life trying to restore her name in film history and find copies of her work. She wrote her memoirs, and though she was awarded the Légion d'honneur, France's highest civilian honour, with the support of Léon's son Louis Gaumont, doors remained largely closed to her. Male historians and journalists had little interest in hearing her. She died in 1968, aged 94, having found just two of her films and a fragment of a third. Her memoirs only found a publisher eight years after her death.

Recognition came too late but it came, through the documentary filmmakers Masduraud and Urrua, their US counterpart Pamela B. Green (see her film below) and Alice's biographer Alison McMahan. As often in women's history, it took female scholars getting interested in their own history for Alice to resurface. In 2024, Alice Guy was one of 10 historical French women honoured at the Olympic Games opening ceremony; that's when most of her country learned her name. HBO Max and French public television have commissioned a six-episode mini series on her life. Perhaps by the next Oscars ceremony, many more will know her.

Interested in early cinema history?

Read about the devastating 1897 that nearly destroyed the nascent industry and killed several of Léon Gaumont and Alice Guy's colleagues and clients.

The fire that started a Victorian gender war

Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?

Broad HistoryIsabelle Roughol

Read about the nine other French women – besides Alice – celebrated at the 2024 Paris Olympics

Who were the French women celebrated in the Olympics opening ceremony?

Whom we choose to put on a pedestal says a lot about our culture. The world over, public space is still dominated by male imagery.

Broad HistoryIsabelle Roughol

“It's tragic for us that we don't know our own canon”

Fiona Sampson, poet, professor of literature and biographer of George Sand, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, talked to me on the podcast about rediscovering Sand and why women fall out of the literary canon. In case you missed it, have a listen to episode 2 of the podcast and make sure to subscribe (on Apple, Spotify, Youtube, etc...) so you never miss it again.

Vocational schools for the marriage mart

“We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies.” George Sand wrote this terrible sentence in a letter to her brother Hippolyte as his own daughter was about to marry. Prepare her, George begged. Tell her what she's in for. Her writing was explicit: “Nothing is so awful as the terror, the suffering and the disgust of a poor child who knows nothing and sees itself raped by a brute.”

George had reason to know that terror. She married at 18 the first man who paid her any attention. Her wedding had been mere months after the death of her grandmother, with whom she lived behind tall walls in a tiny village smack down in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Her only formal education had been in a convent school. Her world was as wide as what a horse might see between two blinders.

In that George Sand was typical of early 19th-century girls of the upper class. Their education, if you can call it that, served two purposes.

The first was to keep them from the world during the wilful adolescent years when they might stray and be “ruined”. Girls were typically tutored at home by their mother or a governess, but could also be sent in their teens to a finishing school where they might socialise with other daughters of the right kind of people . Their eloping from school was every parent's worst nightmare, and the better off could afford establishments that were serious about security. The walls around the English Augustinian school where George lived from the ages of 13 to 15 were two-story tall. Every window onto the street was barred and covered with an immoveable linen screen. Visitors were only admitted as far as the parlour; private lessons were held there too, with pupil and professor separated by a grate. The only hints of the outside world were the sounds of traffic that may carry over the walls or a glimpse of the street in the seconds between the gates' opening and closing. “Two whole years behind bars,” George wrote in her autobiography. “It was really a prison, but a prison with a large garden and plenty of company.” That's the catch. George never felt her cage. In the best cases, cloistered life offered sorority among women of all ages and a chance at (some) intellectual, emotional and spiritual development away from the dangers and distractions of mixed society. George was so taken in she had ambitions to become a nun.

But the cloister wasn't real life. Well-to-do families sent girls there for a second aim – to prepare them for marriage. They weren't so much armed for the realities of adulthood, as moulded into agreeable brides who might succeed on the marriage mart. Lessons focused on manners, modern languages and needlework. The better schools offered the rudiments of geography “with use of a globe” or history, and occasionally lessons in accounts so the future bride could manage a large household responsibly. Families paid extra fees to bring in dance, music or art masters. The subjects that prepared young minds to engage in politics and commerce – Latin and Greek, philosophy, literature, law, mathematics and the sciences – were reserved for gentlemen. What better way to keep young women subjugated than to deny them intellectual development?

The number of both boys' and girls' boarding schools exploded in the early 19th century as the rising middle classes sought to emulate the aristocracy and ensure their children's upward social mobility. That only made the quality of these establishments more haphazard. The system fed itself: it trained the middling teachers and governesses it would then inflict on the next generation. Ultimately, a girl's education was down to chance – having a father with a well-stocked library and a more liberal attitude could make all the difference.

You've seen this in pop culture. Bridgerton – not one where I expected historical accuracy to be honest, but on this it's correct – shows this well: the brothers are off to Eton and their Grand Tour, while the sisters stay home and learn to set a table. The mother tolerates one daughter's love of books and politics, but worries it will make her a spinster. Young brides' ignorance of sexuality or their own bodies is fodder for endless comedy. Because it's a historical romance produced in the 2020s, the female characters are eventually matched with kindly leading men who promise a marriage of equals. But you can see how it wouldn't work that way in the real world.

Isolation and lackluster education produced naïve young brides thrown into marriage like sacrificial lambs. Or breeding fillies. George Sand's relationship started in love – still a rare privilege in the 1820s – but her charming young husband turned out to have a drunken temper and profligate ways. He came to hate her, and she came to understand it. By her early 30s, she had separated; eventually sued for divorce; battled for custody of her two children, even when her ex attempted to kidnap them; wrestled back ownership of her childhood home, which the law had bestowed on her husband; and established herself as a best-selling author and mistress of her own destiny. She fell in love often after that, but came to see marriage as a tragedy because even love was doomed as long as one partner legally owned the other. Her novels were an indictment of it.

How, with such an unhelpful start in life, did George Sand and so many other intellectual women manage to rise and dominate the publishing industry in particular in the 19th century? That's for the next newsletter.