"Scribbling Women"
True Tales From Astonishing Lives
Marthe Jocelyn
Tundra Press
Published 2011
198 pages
ISBN: 978-00-88776-952-8
Everyone has trials and sorrors, and moments of boredom or immense delight. But these scribbling women wrote it down, passed it along, told us they were here, and took the time to illuminate their worlds.
In high school I was a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story junkie. Get me started on writing, famous authors, or "real lit" and I would immediately launch into a boring soliloquy on his symbols, allegories and other obscure stuff that would make fellow high school students stop me in mid-sentence and ask: "SO....what else is going on?"
So, when one day I read a quote by Hawthorne, deriding women writers, I was crestfallen. I would later learn that many famous writers I had previously idealised, held similar contemptuous views about women and their writing abilities, or lack thereof. What's a 17 year old girl, who considered herself a book snob, to do?
(Quote: America is now wholly given over to a d****d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."
I ignored women's writing. For a LONG time. It wasn't until about 5 years later, when I read Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" that I was yanked out of that little bout of insanity.
That's why when I saw Tundra Press's Scribbling Women Tour, I had to hop on that wagon. Because, too often, we women tend to minimize our mark in the world. Maybe we are living in a post-feminism world, but aside from the very few that make it to the top, many things still haven't changed for the rest of us. If you're a stay at home mom, (me included) you push writing to the back burner. More important things need to be done. What's the point of writing, anyway? You're never going to be famous, or change the world, or get read by more than your immediate circle of family and friends (for some of us, not even that). And before we know it, years have flown by and we're left with the regrets of all the sentences left unwritten.
And this isn't only applicable to stay at home moms: many working moms come straight home from a long day's work only to start their second job of cooking dinner and cleaning. When do they have a moment to themselves, much less a moment for writing?
Pick up the pen. Stop looking over your shoulder. Don't listen to men's voices, reaching over from centuries past, to scoff at you. Do it for yourself. Make time, even if it means that a couple of loads of clothes pile up, or someone has to eat cereal instead of an omelet. Or you get the occasional dirty glance for going up to your office right after dinner.
And now, enough of my rant. More about the book :)
In researching for A Home for Foundlings (a book about an institution that rescued abandoned children), Jocelyn came across letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a wife of the ambassador to Turkey three hundred years before. Mrs.Montagu's letters chronicled the "first recorded instance of what we now know as clinical trials."
Jocelyn became interested in "women whose observations...had chronicled or changed the world around them, even in very small ways."
Sei Shonagon: Sei, who was born 965 CE, wrote The Pillow Book, a collection of lists, anecdotes,, poems, gossip, reminiscences, and observations of the people she encountered each day. The book consists of 320 pages, half of them lists.
Things that can't be compared:
Night and day.
Laughter and anger.
Old age and youth.
The man you love and the same man once you've lost all
feeling for him seem like two completely different people.
Things that make me happy:
I know I shouldn't think this way, and I know I'll be punished for it, but I just love it when bad things happen to people I can't stand.
Harriet Ann Jacobs: 1813-1897
Born a slave, Jacobs didn't realize it until she was six years old. After her mother and her kindly owner, Margaret Horniblow, passed away. She had been taught to read and write, a rare occurrence. When Horniblow was given to a 5 year old relative of her deceased owner, suffice it to say her life changed dramatically. She was subject to racial slurs, being verbally and physically abused, and generally dehumanized. Jacobs' account of her life, and her determination to rise up out of her circumstances survives in her book, Incidents of a Slave Girl.
Nellie Bly: 1864-1922
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, Bly was an undercover journalist. She wrote exposes about women's working conditions and the prison system. She went to Mexico with her mother, and wrote reports from there about fashion, working conditions, ruins, customs for courtship and marriage, and began to delve into the topic of politics when she was asked to leave the country. Nellie also wrote an excoriating piece of the operating of an asylum on Blackwell Island, after being committed.
Subjected to inedible food and abuse from the nurses and doctors, Bly was horrified at the state of things. All 45 women in Hall 6 were being made to share two towels. Yuck! Nellie was convinced that most women were sane when they were confined to the asylum, but later lost their sanity. Women were forced to sit from 6 am to 8 pm on benches, not allowed to speak or move during those hours, served disgusting food, and abused by the staff.
Eventually, Bly would go on to write about other things, and in the vein of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 days, traveled the span of the globe in November 1889. What a life was that?!
Jocelyn highlights the lives of other women, every life as interesting as the one before.
Give to this to your mother, your sister, your daughter. Take it out when you don't feel like bothering to write. When you wonder why you should go through the trouble. When you yourself roll your eyes at the trivial things you cover in a day (so you consider them).
Write for your life. Write for your sanity. Write for yourself.
Toronto-born MARTHE JOCELYN is the award-winning author and illustrator of over twenty books. Her picture book Hannah’s Collections was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Illustration. Her novel Mable Riley won the inaugural TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. Marthe Jocelyn is the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Vicky Metcalf Award for her body
of work.
Tundra Books is holding a HUGE Giveaway. 28 books by Marthe Jocelyn.
Details can be found HERE.
HERE is the next stop on The Scribbling Women Blog Tour.
