Tag: #16DaysActivism

DAY TWELVE: ‘It Takes a Global Village to End Gendered Violence’ – Looking back at the ‘International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship’

Moment in the making of a global feminist anti-VAW movement – Charlotte James Robertson reflects on The Brighton conference in 1996 and how far the movement has come.

Charlotte James Robertson 

[1]: ‘It Takes a Global Village to End Gendered Violence’

‘Never Give Up’ 

In November 1996, 2,500 people from 137 countries converged on Brighton, England, for the ‘International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship’.[1] Those who attended the conference recall it as the remarkable culmination of two decades of feminist activism against gender-based violence. The Chair of the conference’s Steering Group, Jalna Hanmer, described it as ‘emotionally demanding, physically exhausting and exhilarating all at once’.[2] Al Garthwaite, pioneer of the Reclaim the Night movement, described it as ‘one of the most significant weeks in my life.’[3] The Brighton conference covered a multitude of issues effecting women and girls, including rape, sexual assault, harassment, domestic violence, child abuse, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.

International conferences are slowly becoming a possibility again but what are the benefits of this? What did the participants of the Brighton conference value about the experience and how successful was the conference at including the voices of all women working on gender-based violence?  

The Final Programme, Book of Abstracts and Final Conference Report for the International Conference of Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship (1996). The slogan of the conference was ‘Never Give Up’ taken from the cartoon of a girl jumping into the air by Jacky Fleming.
‘A City Full of Women’

Angela Beausang, then chairwoman of ROKS, the National Organisation of Battered Women’s Shelters (refuges) in Sweden, recalled the conference thus: 

‘A city full of women and feminists as well, it was a dream come true. It took me a couple of days to get the hang of finding time for as much as possible… you had to plan your participation very carefully!’[5]

Beausang captured how overwhelming yet exciting it was to share a space with so many passionate women. Learning about what others had achieved gave women a renewed sense of possibility for what could be done in their home countries. As explained,

‘it is conferences like this, where networking on the global level gives women the impetus to persevere in their own communities’.[6] 

Helene Rosenbluth, Radio Documentarian

Another reason for planning participation carefully was the emotionally challenging content of papers and sessions. For example, the effect of armed conflict on women was a significant theme. Testimony from women living in the ‘Former Yugoslavia’ and Afghanistan highlighted war crimes against women, whilst many participants were moved when two women, one Palestinian and one Israeli, took to the stage to discuss their joint refuge provision project. 

An example page from the second day of the conference, demonstrating the range of countries that speakers travelled to Brighton from and the plethora of issues being discussed.
Inclusivity and Protests

The conference programme shows that this was a truly international event that included a diverse range of activist and academic voices. There were panels dedicated to discussing violence experienced by lesbian and disabled women as well as papers that considered the impact of race on experiences of gender-based violence. Patricia Connell, who was a PhD student at the time working on African-Caribbean women’s experiences of domestic violence, noted that the conference speakers and participants tried to widen the scope of the movement and to recognise the diversity of women’s positionality globally.[7] Connell recalled anti-violence advocate and criminologist Beth Richie’s paper, which called for a more contextualized and intersectional analysis of gender-based violence, as a highlight of the conference.

However, while the public memory of the conference is overall a positive one, there is also evidence that some women’s voices were marginalised. For example, there were two protests at the conference, one by a group of Black women and one by a group of disabled women, who felt their concerns were not being adequately addressed. Irish feminist activist Ailbhe Smyth also reported that there were no Black keynote speakers from Britain.[8]

Therefore, while there were discussions of issues affecting marginalised groups, it was disempowering that these were largely in the workshops rather than the keynote papers. It is also revealing that the recollections of the conference I have been able to find all come from European or North American women.

‘A Global Village’

These voices of appreciation and protestation are both important aspects of the way this conference should be remembered. Moreover, these were not binary experiences. Some women who voiced criticisms of the conference still appreciated the opportunity for debate and knowledge exchange. Challenging one another and grappling with uncomfortable issues are important aspects of creating transnational solidarity. The knowledge that there were other people campaigning around these issues could be incredibly reviving for activists who often had little recognition for their work.

Reflection on the more critical perspectives voiced is especially valuable in examining how much progress we have made on these issues since 1996. It is true that intersectionality is a key analytical approach adopted by many activists and academics working on gender-based violence in the present day.

However, LGBTQ+ people, women of colour and disabled women continue to be disproportionately affected by gender-based violence and there is still much work to be done. While the buzz of an in-person conference cannot be replicated, social media and video conferencing have made it easier for people to access and create transnational spaces of exchange. These are important tools for listening to and centring a more diverse range of voices in future projects on gender-based violence.[9]

Author’s Bio

Charlotte James Robertson is a doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History. Charlotte examines the feminist movement to establish women’s refuges and other services for victims/survivors of domestic abuse. Her thesis is entitled “‘Towards Sisterhood?’ Women’s Aid in Britain and the women’s refuge movement as a transnational endeavour, 1971-1996” and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Charlotte holds an MA in History from the University of Glasgow and an MSc in American History from the University of Edinburgh. She is the convener of the Hufton Postgraduate Reading Group. Her research interests include transnational and intersectional approaches to the history of feminism, the history of Women’s Aid and oral history. She also works part-time for the National Library of Scotland. You can tweet her @CharJamesR or get in touch: charlotte.jamesrobertson@glasgow.ac.uk 

[1] Title taken from radio documentary created by Helene Rosenbluth. ‘Active Resistance: Domestic Violence Globally’, Hungry Mind Recordings, radio documentary produced by Helene Rosenbluth. (1996). http://www.hungrymindrecordings.com/ProductListing.aspx?Id_Category=44

[2] Postcards from Brighton’, TroubleandStrife, (Summer 1997). 

[3]  Jalna Hanmer, ‘Message of Thanks’, Final Report: Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship, Brighton, UK, 10-15 November 1996, ed. Val Balding, Julie Bindel and Catherine Euler, p.3.  

[4] Al Garthwaite, Postcards.

[5] Angela Beausang, Postcards.

[6] Helene Rosenbluth, ‘Active Resistance: Domestic Violence Globally’, Hungry Mind Recordings, radio documentary produced by Helene Rosenbluth. (1996). http://www.hungrymindrecordings.com/ProductListing.aspx?Id_Category=44


[7] Patricia Connell, Postcards.

[8] Ailbhe Smyth, Postcards.

[9] The women-led volunteer organisation FiLiA have recently won funding to digitise and share audio recordings from the conference https://filia.org.uk/latest-news/2021/1/7/7th-january-2021?rq=brighton

DAY TWELVE: A ‘National Disgrace?’: Notes from a history of domestic violence in Australia

Three Australian researchers are working to understand the significant changes over time in public discourse, legal frameworks and activism to combat domestic violence

Ann Curthoys, Catherine Kevin and Zora Simic

Since at least 2015 in Australia, domestic violence has been a highly visible issue when bereaved survivor of domestic violence, Rosie Batty, was appointed Australian of the Year, and the Royal Commission into Family Violence in the state of Victoria was launched. The Commission’s March 2016 report recommended a multi-faceted approach which prioritises advocating for cultural change around violence. Historical understanding is an essential facet of this cultural change.

We are three historians researching the first national history of domestic violence against women. We begin our project in the mid-nineteenth century when marital cruelty began to feature in changes to separation and divorce laws across the Australian colonies (starting with South Australia in 1857) and we will end with the current ‘shadow pandemic’.

As the feminist historians who first opened up this topic to historical investigation in the 1980s recognised, the prevalence of domestic and family violence is impossible to quantify in both the past and the present given it’s a mostly behind closed doors phenomenon and associated with shame and secrecy.

Silences haunt histories of gendered violence. Yet what is striking is that across the 170-year-period, the most common form of domestic violence – men’s violence against their female partners – has always been visible in some form, including in public discussion about whether it was (and is) a peculiarly ‘national disgrace’.

In the nineteenth-century, the widely used terms ‘wife-beater’ and ‘wife-beating’ placed the stress on the ‘blow’ or the ‘wallop’, and the excessive drinking of the assumed working-class perpetrator or ‘husband’. Sometimes there was recognition that violence could occur in more ‘respectable’ families, and commentators pondered whether ‘wife abuse’ was more rampant in the colonies, or whether, as one 1870 editorial declared, that it was a ‘scandal to all English lands’.

Men wrote about other men under the auspices of condemning ‘wife-beating’ as an uncivilised practice, and a taint on any colonizing and civilising claims – but with scant recognition of the violence of colonialism itself, including against Indigenous women.

Image above: Mary Leunig (1992). [Domestic violence]. Source: https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/179890465?keyword=mary%20leunig. Reproduced with permission.

The terms ‘wife-beating’ and ‘wife-beater’ remained in common usage well into the twentieth-century, maintaining an emphasis on physical violence and the stereotypical ‘wife-beater’, a category which by the post-war period included the ‘migrant wife-beater’. But for some recently arrived migrants from Europe, ‘wife-beating’ appeared distinctively common in Australia – as one German woman told a reporter in 1953, ‘I am often surprised by what Australian women have to bear’.

In Australia, as in the UK and elsewhere, it was women who had experienced gendered violence who brought it to the attention of the Women’s Liberation movement in the early 1970s. Australian feminists were amongst the first to develop the term ‘domestic violence’, inaugurating an enormously generative cultural shift in comprehending its causes, prevalence and features, as well as an entire sector dedicated to addressing it. Yet from its inception, ‘domestic violence’ has been an evolving and contested term, including among feminists. At the first national conference on domestic violence in 1985, refuge worker Dawn Rowan referred to the ‘Criminal assault of women in their homes (euphemistically called domestic violence)’, while Vivien Johnson lamented that the ‘spurious neutrality of “domestic violence”’ distanced the issue and avoided the critique of marriage contained in ‘wife bashing.’

Another speaker at the 1985 Conference, Beverley Ridgeway, represented the ‘Aboriginal women’s viewpoint’. She argued that while on the surface, domestic violence within the Aboriginal community appeared to ‘resemble that within the non-Aboriginal community’, it could not be interpreted or responded to in the same way. As it was an issue, she argued, ‘which traditionally did not exist we can only assume it was another destructive element perpetrated on us by the non-Aboriginal community’. The support she sought was assistance to reduce domestic violence in a ‘manner which is appropriate to us.’ By the 1990s, a clear preference emerged within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for the term ‘family violence’, encompassing that it does extend family and kinship relations.

For decades now, various data has shown that First Nations women experience family violence at alarmingly higher rates than average.

For at least as long, Indigenous women have drawn attention to the extent of the problem and offered powerful intersectional analyses concerning the consequences of colonisation and the intergenerational trauma that has resulted.

As a recent open letter by Associate Professor Hannah McGlade, Professor Bronwyn Carlson, and Dr Marlene Longbottom made clear, the lack of outrage about the victimisation of Aboriginal women and children signals the ongoing normalisation of this violence. In current discussions surrounding the development of a new National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, First Nations women have called for their own separate National Plan, led by them, as opposed to being included as ‘afterthoughts’ in processes which have thus far failed to deliver.

Australia now faces a paradox that while there has been a significant increase in public awareness of and scholarly knowledge about domestic violence, there has been no reduction in the rates of domestic, family, and sexual violence, even while overall rates of violence have fallen. One of our central tasks as historians is to help account for this situation by taking a long view. We need to understand the significant changes over time in public discourse, legal frameworks, and activism to combat domestic violence as well as just how and why domestic violence has wreaked such enormous damage on women, children, and the society as a whole from the 19th century to the present.

Authors’ Bios

Professor Ann Curthoys (Sydney University) has researched, taught, and published on many aspects of Australian history, and also on questions of feminism, cultural studies, and historical writing and theory. Associate Professor Catherine Kevin (Flinders University) teaches and researches in the fields of Australian history and feminist history, particularly Indigenous-settler relations, the politics and experience of the reproductive body and gendered violence. Dr Zora Simic (UNSW) teaches and researches past and present feminisms, especially but not only Australian; twentieth century Australian history, especially gender history and migration history; and histories of sexuality. This research is part of 2021-2024: ARC Special Research Initiative (SRI) SR200200460, ‘A History of Domestic Violence in Australia, 1850-2020’

DAY ELEVEN: No it wasn’t different back then #2 -Tracing Rape Myths in Medieval Court Records

Challenging the notion of ‘it was different back then’, Mara Schmueckle draws attention to medieval Scottish notarial record on Janet Lausoun, who was abducted and forced into marriage. Lausoun’s story highlights the burden placed on women where their credibility is measured against expectations of the behaviour of “real victims.” 

Mara Schmueckle

Featured Image: “A lawyer speaking to an assembly” The British Library, Harley 947, f. 107.  

The prosecution of gendered violence remains a difficult topic. One particular challenge faced by victims remains the existence of “rape myths” – the idea that a victim of assault would behave in a certain way, and that victims who do not behave in this manner may have invented their allegation. 

The recent report by the Lord Justice Clerk’s Review Commission, which examined the management of sexual offence cases within the Scottish court system, explicitly recognised the existence of social expectations and their effect on the prosecution of sexual offence cases. Common myths include the suggestion that those subject to assault would resist or call for help (implying that assault without violence is consensual), that truthful allegations are reported immediately, and that false accusations are common. The Review Commission highlighted the ongoing, important line of judgments which forbids questioning designed to utilise these myths to undermine the credibility of the witness. Acknowledging the ongoing challenge in enforcing these rules, the review group nonetheless stressed the importance of restricting questioning to avoid re-traumatising witnesses. The Review Commission also warns that the outcome of cases can be affected by jury members who continue to apply these myths about rape. It recommends increased training and instruction for jury members to ensure that common (but usually inaccurate) understandings of sexual violence are not used to determine the truth of an allegation.

As a medieval historian, the parallel between the expectations placed on medieval women reporting sexual violence, and those still affecting the modern system, are striking. 

A few months ago, while searching Scottish notarial records for details of the legal process surrounding marriages, I came across a notarial record written in Scots. Many medieval historians experience moments when the experience of the people we study, who lived centuries ago, can feel enormously relevant to our own society, and this was one of those moments for me. The record, which details the abduction and forced marriage of Janet Lausoun highlights the burden placed on women where their credibility is measured against expectations of the behaviour of “real victims.” 

In February 1515 Janet Lausoun visited the home of a notary, accompanied by her (male) family members. The manuscript image featured in this post might help us to imagine this legal scene: a woman predominantly surrounded by men. She presented the notary with a pre-written statement, in which her abduction and forced marriage are described, and which details her formal renunciation of that marriage and any activities she undertook during this time. It is important to stress that while we do not know anything else about Janet Lausoun or whether there were any consequences for her abductor, her presence before the notary indicates that she must have been believed.

Janet met the burden of credibility. Her statement, however, also highlights the difficulty other women must have had in doing so. 

One of the challenges about medieval statements is that we have no insight into the process by which they were created. However, Janet Lausoun’s statement so closely mirrors the legal language of the time that it seems likely she had assistance in preparing it. This, combined with her status as an heiress and the presence of male family members to defend her honour, allowed her case to be recorded. The statement explains that, a few weeks before Christmas the year before, she was walking home from Edinburgh to Leith [a journey of about 2 miles] with her mother. En route, the statement goes on to say, she was violently abducted and forced into marriage. She states that she entered into this marriage in fear of her life. There are no details of the three months she spent with her abductor, but she is careful to stress the date and difficulty of her escape, the day before she gave her statement. 

In Janet’s case, reference to the violence of the abduction and to the speed with which she reported the case may have been necessary  to meet relevant legal tests, and thereby allow her to renounce the marriage which had been forced on her. 

But a comparison between the requirements placed on her and those placed on victims of sexual assault today suggests that long-standing legal ideas about how gendered violence looks and how a victim of gendered violence behaves did not simply disappear.  They have evolved and continue to affect public understanding of gendered violence in the present. 

Cases like Janet Lausoun’s remind us of the burden placed on women if we expect them to demonstrate that they are “a wholly blameless victim.”[1]

References

Final report from the Lord Justice Clerk’s Review Group, Improving the Management of Sexual Offence Cases, March 2021, available at https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/docs/default-source/default-document-library/reports-and-data/Improving-the-management-of-Sexual-Offence-Cases.pdf?sfvrsn=6

Gordon Donaldson ed, Protocol Book of James Young, Scottish Record Society OS Volume 74, entry 2081, in manuscript B22/22/15 f. 121r-v. 

Author’s Bio:

Mara Schmueckle is a PhD student in History at the University of Edinburgh.  She also obtained her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Edinburgh, before qualifying as a solicitor. Her research focuses on women and marriage in Pre-Reformation Scotland.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/30/details-of-sarah-everard-case-heighten-womens-sense-of-despair

DAY ELEVEN: No it wasn’t different back then #1 – Researching rape in 20th century US

‘It wasn’t different back then’ Mara Keire illuminates how this ahistorical rhetoric enables justification of men’s sexually predatory behaviour. Her research on rape in 20th century US shows clearly the falsity of that excuse.

Mara Keire

Featured image: ‘The Little Butterfly’, credit: Library of Congress, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Defenders of men like movie producer Harvey Weinstein, architect Stanford White, actor Clark Gable, and director Roman Polanski rely on the argument that it was “different back then.”[1]  They use this specious ahistorical reasoning to justify predation. 

Studying the history of sexual violence serves three important purposes for me.  First, it provides the crucial evidence that “no, it was not different back then.”  Second, it illuminates the politics of power and networks of complicity that enable the ongoing oppression of women and children through sexual violence.  And finally, it allows historians to advocate for the victims they study. 

Learning about what people thought about rape at the time, seeing how victims and their supporters responded to attacks, and reading the commentary about legal cases large and small, provides a stark contrast to the representation of a sexually laissez-faire world where anything men did met with social acceptance. 

My work on sexual violence in early 20th century New York provides concrete evidence refuting the assertion that it was “different back then.” I hope that it will help anti-violence activists change this narrative exonerating predators for assaults that were not acceptable then and are not justifiable now. Studying the history of sexual violence also serves to obliterate the idea that rapists are solitary “bad apples.” Instead, researchers can uncover the networks of complicity that reinforce male power. 

Most recently, we’ve heard Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols testify how they reported Larry Nasser to everyone who they hoped would listen from US Gymnastics to the FBI, but no one acted. Larry Nasser continued his predation because authorities thought a quack medical doctor was more important than elite young gymnasts.[2] 

While in the present day we need to unravel these networks of power in real time, as historians we can show them whole cloth.

For example, when Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson kidnapped and raped Madge Olberholtzer in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan had already known about his predatory behaviour toward women for years, but they had done nothing to stop him because he was a popular leader and useful to the organisation. After Olberholtzer died from her injuries, the Klan repudiated him. But Stephenson’s trial for murder and the subsequent revelations illustrated to a chilling degree how male sexual entitlement worked and the degree to which the people around him catered to and covered up his violence toward women. [3] Exposing the networks of complicity in the past shatters the myth of individual bad actors in present day cases.

Refuting the contradictory myths that rapists are either misguided men of their time or solitary monsters makes studying the history of sexual violence a necessary venture. However, I find that advocating for the once discredited victims is the most fulfilling part when writing this history. I chose to research rape because of my present-day activism fighting women’s oppression. I am not objective. I am emotionally involved. I care deeply about the girls and women about whom I write. I am one of them. As a survivor, I have the unparalleled opportunity to believe my ancestors in trauma. 

Author’s Bio:

Mara Keire is a Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.  She is currently writing a book called Under the Boardwalk: Rape in New York City, 1900-1930.  You can find her far too often on twitter at @MaraKeire

[1] Weinstein – Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” The New York Times (5 October 2017): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

Stanford White – Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1989), ix-xi.

Clark Gable – Lou Lumenick, “We’ll never really know if Clark Gable actually date-raped Loretta Young,” New York Post (13 July 2015): https://nypost.com/2015/07/13/well-never-really-know-if-clark-gable-actually-date-raped-loretta-young/

Polanski – Michael Cieply, “In Polanski Case, ‘70s Culture Collides With Today,” (10 October 2009): https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/movies/11polanski.html

All accessed 26 October 2021

[2] McKenzie Jean-Philippe, “Simone Biles, Aly Raisman Bravely Testify Against the FBI’s Handling of the Larry Nassar Case,” Oprah Daily, 15 September 2021: https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/a37610818/simone-biles-aly-raisman-testify-larry-nassar-hearing/ (accessed 25 October 2021).

[3] Mara Keire, “#MeToo, Networks of Complicity, and the 1920s Klan,” Process: a blog for American history (24 January 2019): http://www.processhistory.org/keire-networks/ (accessed 26 October 2021).

DAY TEN: Gender-based violence in the archives: Curating the past without perpetuating harm

Kirsty Stewart writes about the role of the archivist and the problems of taking a neutral voice in curation when many stories are underpinned by gendered violence and silencing womens’ voices.

Kirsty M Stewart

Featured image: “The old style archives” by ʎɔ. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

It has long been a part of archival training that archivists bear a neutral voice in describing records in catalogues for their users. Recently, that notion has been actively dispelled as the predominantly white, middle-class profession realises that it brings to bear a white, middle-class perspective on describing, arranging and even collecting archives.

Two examples of this are the following accounts relating to the Gaelic community in the Outer Hebrides in the 1800s in which gender-based violence has been perpetuated or altered, perhaps even sanitised, as they make their way through history. Women have had their names erased (sometimes thankfully) but also their voices – their dissent or distress ignored in favour of a good story or song.

The accounts come from the notebooks of the nineteenth-century Scottish folklorist and antiquarian Dr Alexander Archibald Carmichael (1832 – 1912), which are inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Held at the University of Edinburgh, this archive contains priceless pieces of Scottish folklore and oral tradition. Perhaps even more precious are the accompanying notes detailing the individuals who recounted or were recounted in charms, songs and stories.

“Màiri Bhòidheach” [Beautiful Mary]: ‘…she could never bear to hear the song’ One jarring example concerns the song “Màiri Bhoidheach”, a highly regarded example of a Gaelic song about unrequited love between a man and a woman. In a notebook from 1877, Carmichael reveals the real story behind the song, which heard in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. It was written by the local schoolmaster, Alexander Stewart (1764-1821), in the 1890s about Mary MacQueen (1783-1860), the minister’s daughter.

(Archives reference GB 237 Coll-97/CW108/47)

“Mairi Bhoidheach”
was the daught[er] of Rev. Alan MacCuinn
son of Rev. Donul MacCuinn, Taigh
earry. Song composed by Alexander
Stewart a schoolmaster. Kept the
school at Baileanloch – the only one
in N. Uist at the time. Stewart was
alleged to have used some familiarity
with some of his female pupils which
whether founded or unfounded caused
a feeling against him & he left. The
children of the best people in N. Uist at-
tended his school Miss Mary MacCuinn
(Nic Cuinn) was one in his school, and she
took sl such a dislike to the man that
she could never bear to hear the song. She
died some some [sic] 15 years ago or so – aged
She was a very tall handsome portly
woman of mild benevolent disposition.
   Stewart left Uist about the year 1800.

Stewart had a reputation for ‘familiarity with some of his female pupils’. He had moved on because of ill-feeling against him, ‘whether founded or unfounded’, Carmichael’s informant had added. Mary’s physical appearance and character are noted as if to validate the song. It had entered local lore that Mary ‘took such a dislike to the man that she could never bear to hear the song’. Yet this did not stop the performance of Màiri Bhòidheach in her own community and many others for decades to come. How many other pupils might have squirmed or felt relieved that the song was not about them?

This example raises uncomfortable questions for those of us who curate records. Songs and stories about the abuse of vulnerable girls can be preserved as entertainment but to erase them might falsify history.

Alexander Stewart has been remembered as the composer of a beautiful love-song. Mary MacQueen’s story, her hatred of the song and what it truly meant, is little more than a quiet note in the archives.[1]

 “…with much quiet humour”

In another entry ‘Eòlas na Budha’ (charm for jaundice), this time from 1883, another young woman’s distress became the object of derision.

Carmichael noted down a long-standing story from South Uist. Angus MacEachen (c.1810-1890), a  herd, was called to treat the daughter of Roderick MacMillan ([fl. c.1850]), a neighbouring farmer. Aged 18 or 19, the girl in this story was, Carmichael noted, ‘a stout portly good looking girl’. Angus made a great show of heating a red hot poker, asked her mother to bare the girl’s back and then had everyone leave the girl’s room. He led her to believe that he was going to put the hot poker on her bare back. But at the moment she expected it, he placed a cold piece of iron on her back instead, to her great distress. ‘She roared and roared and screamed causing her mother and all the people in the house to rush into the room’.[2] (Archives reference GB 237 Coll-97/CW87/11)

In the published version[3], Carmichael writes that the young woman’s “mother and sisters burst open the door, calling on Mary Mother to rescue the maltreated girl, and on Calumcille[4] to redress her wrongs”. Yet the last word belonged to Angus MacEachen himself, who “told of this and similar cases with much humour, but without a smile on his lips, though his eyes sparked, and his countenance glowed with evident appreciation of the scenes.”

Once again, this young woman is identifiable, if not by name in either the notebook or publication by her relatives. That this is how she was ‘cured’ would be known in the community and with Angus’s reputation for curing may have been used as a dramatic example of his abilities. It also has the air of a cautionary tale for other girls/women. This young woman’s lack of choice or control, the indignity and cruel humour embedded in the tale (‘the cure’) would probably have been felt by her for many years.

Curation

So, what can the archivist do about these stories and the ways they have been preserved?

We cannot shy away from the wrongs perpetrated on Mary MacQueen or on Nic Ille Mhaoil [MacMillan’s daughter] but we can bear witness to them and change how they are represented.

In addressing concerns regarding bias or material which could be upsetting to others, we are starting to develop trigger warnings for catalogued material. We are trying to identify the unnamed if it seems possible –in the case of the young woman from South Uist, through her relations. We are trying to use language which is less biased and more empowering, whether it is through using the language the people represented would use themselves or whether it is considering what, as in this instance, the young women involved would think. The perpetuation of acts of violence on women and girls through their re-telling can be de-sanitised by less ‘neutral’ catalogue descriptions giving these women and girls a voice their history should have had all along.

Author’s Bio

Kirsty M Stewart is the New College Collections Curator and School of Scottish Studies Archivist, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degrees is in Gaelic Studies from the University of Aberdeen and her postgraduate qualification is in Archival Studies from University College Dublin. She has been an archivist for nearly 25 years.

[1] Read the original notebook entry: https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/fpxnm9 ; catalogue entry (ref. Coll-97/CW108/47, University of Edinburgh): https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/142484

[2]Read the original notebook entry: https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/t65tfp https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/1ose88 and https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/yca30v ; Catalogue entry reference: https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/141706

[3] Carmichael, Alexander Archibald, Carmina Gadelica Ortha nan Gàidheal, volume II, Edinburgh (1900), pp 12-13.

[4] Calumcille is also known as Colm Cille or St Columba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba