Rebellion, Gender Roles and Discourses, and Historical Memories of War and Peace

Abstract

Rebellion, Gender Roles and Discourses, and Historical Memories of War and Peace Sandie Holguín and Jennifer Davis One of the pleasures of editing historical writing is that one begins to see common themes emerge among articles that span vast temporal and geographical distances. What links women who appear in late medieval Flemish chronicles to those who emerge in interwar Italian and Turkish women's novels? What traits do nineteenth-century US women mountain climbers and twentieth-century "Monuments Men" share? Conversely, as two articles here reveal, historical actors who took part in similar events might bear little resemblance to one another. Did women who joined transnational peace organizations really share similar goals or the means of attaining them? This issue of the JWH explores these historical questions. The first two articles compel us to mine seemingly problematic sources for information about rebellious women. Lisa Demets', "Spies, Instigators, and Troublemakers: Gendered Perceptions of Rebellious Women in Late Medieval Flemish Chronicles" and Kara Peruccio's, "Bad Romance: Toxic Masculinity, Love, and Heartbreak in Interwar Italian and Turkish Women's Novels, 1923–1932" reveal how written works that historians have traditionally ignored as unreliable, like chronicles and novels, contain insights into both women's rebellious behavior and the forces that try to tame it. Demets employs a close reading of late medieval chronicles from Bruges to understand women's violent participation in medieval revolts. She dispenses with the idea that chronicles are less reliable than administrative sources or that they provide historians with only misogynistic literary tropes. Demets demonstrates that these tropes simultaneously reflected late medieval political ideology—Flemish urban men's anxieties about networks of rebels and women's place among them—and recounted women's real political activities and rebellious behavior in that period. Peruccio, in contrast, writes about four women novelists who used the romance novel genre to examine women's transgressive ideas and behaviors in the context of oppressive authoritarian regimes in the European interwar period. Comparing writers from two countries and regimes that the author admits are rarely likened to one another—Fascist Italy and Kemalist Turkey—Peruccio tries to uncover the strategies that two Italian and two Turkish women authors used to critique their respective regimes, especially concerning gender relations and toxic masculinity. In these non-traditional historical sources, Italian and Turkish women documented their compatriots' affective and material experiences during times of state-enforced misogyny. They probed men's [End Page 7] verbal abuse and sexual violence, society's expectations of female docility, and women's chastity as the measure of the family's always-precarious honor. Employing the term "hidden transcripts," the documentary material that reveals quiet revolts against the status quo, Peruccio exposes how these women authors experienced life under authoritarian rule and battled the toxic masculinity that sprung from it. Masculinity does not have to be toxic, but it determines normative behavior in many places, and it confers certain privileges. Barbara Cutter's "'A Feminine Utopia': Mountain Climbing, Gender, and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America" explores how women who engaged in behaviors that western societies ordinarily deemed masculine, like mountain climbing, opened up possibilities for women to partake in activities once denied them. Cutter focuses on late-nineteenth-century US mountain climbing clubs that admitted both men and women members. Those clubs that welcomed women mountain climbers were also predisposed to think that if women could handle the physical and mental difficulties of mountain climbing, then they were also likely to share the "manly" traits of autonomy and independence. These mountain climbing men and women created a "feminine utopia" of egalitarianism on the mountain tops and hope for an egalitarian world in the flatlands. As women proved themselves on the mountaintops, Cutter argues, they paved the path for Americans to accept women's suffrage as a natural extension of these women's capabilities. If these female mountaineers could exhibit independence in the outdoors, could it be that even more women were capable of exhibiting the mental toughness to participate as full citizens in the public sphere? These mountain climbers certainly thought so. Discourses of masculinity are highly malleable, of course, and they can serve to reveal as much as hide...