Author Kate Mosse is bringing her new theatre tour to the Cotswolds: a celebratory one-woman show based on her book, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries. Katie Jarvis spoke with her about forgotten women who (also) built the world
So. How to describe Kate Mosse’s fabulous (word chosen knowingly; we’ll come back to that) new book?
I’m trying to think of a metaphor.
How about: you’re trudging through a barren, hostile landscape, near-faint with hunger. You try to jingle your pockets – they’re pretty much empty. And you’ve a despairingly long way to go.
And then – just like that. You round a corner and (heavens!) stumble upon a cornucopia: a vibrant, colourful stall piled high with so much unexpected, mouth-wateringly fresh food – sweet, savoury, salty, toffee-scented-caramelised sugars, rainbow colours – that you don’t know where to begin.
And the person running the stall says, ‘Take whatever you want.’
‘But where have you come from?’ you ask, overwhelmed.
‘Actually,’ they reply, ‘I’ve been here all along.’
KATE MOSSE’s non-fiction book – Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries – is like the full-to-bursting suitcase you have to sit on before you can do up the latches. (Why am I obsessed with metaphors? I think it’s sheer excitement.)
How Women (Also) Built the World, it’s subtitled. And it’s not kidding.
Here are stories of women such as (and I’m opening it at random) abolitionist Mary Ann McCracken (1770-1866), who handed out leaflets campaigning to keep slave ships away from Belfast Harbour.
*Flicks pages*
Russian Alyona Arzamasskaia (1640s-1670), a peasant, who disguised herself in male clothing to lead hundreds of men from around her home town during the Peasants’ Revolt. Captured by the Tsar’s troops, she was burnt at the stake: ‘Witnesses reported that she did not make a single sound as she died in agony…’
The Edinburgh Seven – the first group of women enrolled at a British university – who began studying medicine in 1869. When they arrived for an anatomy exam, they were confronted by 200-or-more male students jeering and pelting them with mud, driving the college’s pet sheep into the exam hall. They refused to capitulate: among them, Sophia Jex-Blake became the first practising female doctor in Scotland, co-founding the London School of Medicine for Women.
There’s Whina Cooper (1895-1994), Māori activist and elder, who led a protest march against her people’s loss of land – a 640km trek from the topmost tip of North Island to Parliament in Wellington. (She was 79 at the time.)
Adong Judith (born 1977), co-founder of the all-female theatre company, ‘Silent Voices Uganda’.
Lily Parr from Merseyside who, on Boxing Day 1920, played football at Goodison Park in a women’s match watched by a cheering crowd of 46,000. The affronted football association declared the sport unladylike – a ban not lifted until 1971. (1971!)
Women who – with unthinkable courage – have stood up against prejudice, educational inequality, injustice and deliberate cruelty; often without personal benefit.
Women who – for the most part – have sunk almost without trace.
Until now.
I could spend the whole of this article – and then some – listing just my favourite pioneering women from this book of… I don’t know how many. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds for sure.
‘Well, you can’t fit everybody in,’ Kate Mosse says to me, ‘but it’s better to make a start than be overwhelmed and not begin at all.’
KATE MOSSE and I are chatting. (She’s wonderfully easy to chat with.)
Sort of about feminism.
Though it’s much more basic than that.
I tell her how, at my all-girls grammar in the 70s, every teacher had the highest aspirations for us. Yet we were grouped into houses named Scott, Gandhi, Kennedy and Churchill. (I’m pretty sure we weren’t talking Jackie or Clementine.)
And how I never even questioned this.
Once, I interviewed the amazing Stella Rimington – Stella Rimington who went on to become first female DG of MI5. When she started work in the 60s, women got two-thirds of men’s pay; yet: ‘You didn’t really feel agitated because that was how it was’.
How incredible, I say to Kate Mosse, that even she should say that.
Umm. Not so surprising.
‘The status quo is very powerful; women are often made to feel grateful they’ve been allowed in there at all. So there was little chance you would rock the boat by saying: Wouldn’t it be good if we were paid the same as the man next to us doing exactly the same job! And, of course, it’s always about money.
‘Always follow the money.’
Ah, exactly.
The idea, she points out, that misogynistic reporting of ‘women’s lib’ in the 60s and 70s was wholly ideological is to misunderstand the crux of the issue.
‘The newspaper proprietors didn’t want to spend more money on their wages bill; it’s as simple as that.’
Such good points. Especially about the low-expectation/gratitude factor. I was particularly struck by the pinpoint-sharp analysis of Audre Lorde, a Black, lesbian, feminist invited to speak at a New York University Humanities conference in the late 70s.
What an honour!
Except that… In her influential essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she points out something that might never have struck me.
As Kate Mosse paraphrases, ‘In it, she notes how her contribution was being curtailed to her own lived experience, whereas others were invited to speak, to talk, to lecture on anything.’
So if – and I assume she does – Kate counts women such as Lorde as one of the Warrior Queens, then what’s this with the ‘Quiet Revolutionaries’?
‘So that’s the thing. The ones who are not famous, not flamboyant, but who just keep going are as important. And they are the ones who often have disappeared from history – because it’s not just about somebody being celebrated in their day; it’s about their legacy.’
Such as Mary Seacole, a nursing pioneer, born in Jamaica to a white Scottish father and a Black mother. She nursed victims of cholera in Kingston and in Panama, as well as funding her own passage to Crimea to care for wounded soldiers. Unlike Florence Nightingale, Seacole – who was vastly famous in her day – has almost completely disappeared from the record.
‘So, there’s the narrative of how women get not written into the history books. But there’s also the myth of ‘one extraordinary woman’ who was like no other woman. And I always give an example of that – the extraordinary Rosa Parks.’
In 1955 Alabama, Parks (as if we need reminding) refused to give up her seat in the ‘coloured’ section of a bus for a white passenger.
‘Immediately, the story started to be told that she was too tired to stand up. Which made her a passive person, not an active one.
‘Yet Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat nine months before – but she was 15, pregnant and unmarried, and wasn’t seen as suitable [as a cause representative]. ‘Pauli Murray had refused to give up her seat in 1944. There were many women freedom-riders before Rosa Parks, in the same way that there were thousands of suffragettes. But we know only a handful of names. So of course Rosa Parks is extraordinary. But it’s important to salute all the other extraordinary women who were also part of this same story.
‘So, that was the other part of why women are omitted from history. Looking at not only putting women back into the history books, but putting back all the women, not just the one-offs. Because it’s always been everybody.’
Everybody? Hmm. As Kate Mosse points out, despite her having an embarrassment of women to choose from for her book, the world hasn’t quite felt the same way. Take statues, for example.
‘It is a cliché and it’s a joke but it’s also shocking that there are more statues to men named John than to women. Just men called John! And, in Edinburgh, there are more statues to animals than there are to women.’
Back to that initial word, ‘fabulous’. Strange, isn’t it, I ask, that the world seems more comfortable with stories of made-up women (from Greek gods to mermaids) than real ones…
‘When you take mythological women away from statues, you’re pretty much left with Queen Victoria and Boudica. And it shouldn’t be… but the fuss when it’s suggested there might be a few more statues of women! It’s a very odd thing. When Caroline Criado-Perez suggested it would be good to have a woman on a banknote – and Jane Austen is hardly at the vanguard of the feminist revolution – she lived with death threats for several years.
‘People are very strange about these things.’
So far, Kate has been talking about ‘Warrior Queens’ in a round of bookshops. What reactions has she had?
‘Interestingly enough, I’ve had a bigger proportion of men in the audience for this than I’d normally have – and men of all ages. Almost every question has come from a man.’
What sort of things do they ask?
‘What can I do? How can I give my daughters, my friends, my sisters a better world?’
BUT, THEN, perhaps that’s understandable; for this book is a happy book; a non-threatening, non-aggressive book; the opposite of a polemic. It’s a celebration; a fiesta for women who, for too long, have been denied the popping champagne corks they deserve. And – what’s more – Kate Mosse is taking to the road in a rollicking theatre tour (February to April; including Chipping Norton, Bristol, Leamington, Worcester, Swindon), complete with bells and whistles.
‘It will be fun! Lots of music and images and intriguing facts. Nobody will leave feeling they’ve been attacked. This isn’t about men versus women. This is about a system that erases women from history, or forgets them, or overlooks them – and most people don’t want that to happen.’
It’s impressive. I don’t just mean it’s impressive that such a fantastic night is on the cards. But that this woman – a multi-million-selling author, OBE; famed for novels such as the Languedoc Trilogy – should be launching her first ever one-woman show.
She laughs.
‘What I’d really love you to put in this interview is that I’m a woman in her 60s and I feel it’s really important to try new things. There are a lot of us who think, OK, what am I going to do next? I don’t want to carry on doing the same thing. My children have grown up; I’m a grandmother now, which is joyous. I am a full-time carer [to her much-loved mother-in-law, with teamwork from her husband and brother-in-law]. But it’s that sense of: Let’s challenge yourself and do something new. I really enjoy doing events at book festivals and obviously the women’s prize. [She’s the founder-director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the world’s largest annual celebration of women’s writing.]
‘And I do a lot of speaking. And then a theatre producer said: Have you ever thought of doing a one-woman show? So I thought, why not give it a go?’
SO, WHAT haven’t I mentioned?
Loads.
Personal stories – such as one that made me laugh; but one that was suitably telling, too. About how, launching the Women’s prize back in 96, Kate – 5ft 2 – was forced to stand on a cardboard box to have any chance of visibility behind a lectern made for tall men. Eight words into her inaugural speech, she went through the box and disappeared.
And, then, there’s something I should have mentioned earlier. (But, honestly, in my defence, there’s so much interesting stuff to say.)
That part of the inspiration for this book came from her own ancestry. From Lily Watson, her great-grandmother: author, reviewer, journalist, born in 1849. Lily’s most famous novel, The Vicar of Langthwaite, boasted a foreword by former Prime Minister William Gladstone, for goodness sake.
Yet who remembers Lily now?
‘Her absence from the official record, from history, tells the story of so many women.’
Lily is an ancestor to be proud of; to relate to; perhaps, even, to compare the DNA – handed down through generations – of one writer to another.
But, like so many of these stories, nothing is straightforward.
For Lily – whose voice was clearly heard in an era when so many other women’s voices were silenced – was against women having the vote.
Gertrude Bell, the hugely influential travel writer, was another: a founding member of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.
How interesting the way this wrong-foots us in the 21st century.
‘Yes – and I’d love to be able to meet Lily and ask her why she was against women voting. But, also, I think I know what she’d say. The truth is that there was a very significant view – and Lily, I imagine, was absolutely of this view: that being the power-behind-the-throne, if you like, was a privileged position. Not having to go to work, or being shackled to a job they didn’t want for all their lives. Being able to be looked after and supported – that was a fair bargain. And they felt that being treated like men in one way – having the vote – meant they would be treated like men in all the other ways.’
Many women today would say they weren’t wrong.
‘But I also think, in all of these conversations, it’s really important to say this. That women don’t have to agree with each other just because they’re women. Nobody expects men to agree with each other just because they are men. We assume that everybody has an individual point of view.
‘You can agree to disagree – and this is something that’s in short supply, at the moment.’
Agreed.
For tickets to Kate Mosse’s one-woman theatre show, visit katemosse.co.uk/events
Kate Mosse’s fantasy dinner party – whom from her book would she invite?
‘Lily Parr [early 20th-century footballer]: The whole issue of women’s sport is fascinating; what is ladylike and what is not.
The notorious 17th-century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who are part-inspiration for my next novel, the Ghost Ship.
Ethel Smyth, the great suffragette campaigner and composer, and the only composer to have been awarded a Damehood.
Joan of Arc because, like many of the courageous women in the book, she was so young when she died. If she had lived, who would she have been?
Caroline Norton, campaigner for married women’s rights – one of the women who has made the most significant difference to women’s lives.
Enheduanna, the first named author in history, from Ur in Sumeria – a high priestess who lived in the 23rd century BCE.
The extraordinary Indian lawyer Dorothy Noel ‘Dorf’ Bonarjee, who studied at UCL and won the Bardic Chair at the 1928 Eisteddford, the first foreign student and first woman to have done so.
And I love the fact that Josephine Cochrane, in Chicago in 1886, had clearly had enough of nobody clearing up after themselves. So she went to a shed at the end of the garden and invented the dishwasher. Josephine, dinner parties salute you!’
