How have women supported each other through the centuries?
8th Mar 2024 Inspire
6 min read
To celebrate International Women's Day, historian and journalist Sarah Gristwood dives into a selection of incredible diary entries that reveal women supporting women throughout the years
March 8 is International Women’s Day—March is Women’s History Month—and what better moment to look at the way women have celebrated each other down the centuries? I’ve just spent many months delving into 400 years of women’s diaries to edit a new anthology, Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries. What I found there was a great wave of solidarity, all the stronger for the fact that our foremothers did not always have it easy.
"Our foremothers did not always have it easy"
Daughters celebrate the mothers struggling to give them a better life; women separated by all sorts of barriers recognise their similarities. Young women delight in their sexuality and fertility, even as they acknowledge the difficulties; older women describe the pleasures of a life that doesn’t always centre around men. And women of all times and backgrounds cheer on each others’ victories.
Because all these women were fighters in their way, whether the battlefield was their own hearth and home, or in the Houses of Parliament. One of the great pleasures of reading women’s diaries is hearing the women of past centuries voice our own dilemmas—how to juggle work and family, how to survive and thrive in a society still dominated by men…how to fly the flag for their own, individual identity. Because women didn’t just voice these dilemmas, they faced up to them and made a better world for women today to enjoy. Their strength and endurance, their cheerfulness and humour, are what make women’s history.
Here are a few passages that show just how women have supported each other throughout the past few centuries.
Virginia Woolf, January 11, 1918
Another sedentary day, which must however be entered for the sake of recording that the Lords have passed the Suffrage Bill [giving some British women the vote]. I don’t feel much more important—perhaps slightly so. It's like a knighthood; might be useful to impress people one despises.
Beautrice Webb, May 28, 1886
Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of man’s supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have displayed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power.
Louisa May Alcott, February 14, 1868
…Mr B lured me to write “one column of Advice to Young Women”…It was about old maids. “Happy Women” was the title, and I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.
Portrait of writer, abolitionist and Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott by George Kendall Warren. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Barbara Pymn, October 1, 1977
We took two sisters from the village to visit their other sister "terminally" ill in the Churchill. Driving in the car, the smell of poverty…Looking at one of them with her hairy chin and general air of greyness one couldn’t help thinking that this was as much a woman as a glamorous perfumed model.
Nella Last, August 1, 1943
I suddenly thought tonight, "I know why a lot of women have gone into pants—it’s a sign that they are asserting themselves in some way." I feel pants are more of a sign of the times than I realised. A growing contempt for man in general creeps over me…
Mary Boykin Chesnut, July 24, 1861
They brought me a Yankee soldier’s portfolio from the battlefield…One might shed a few tears over some of the letters. Women—wives and mothers—are the same everywhere.
Anne Lister, January 29, 1821
I love, and only love, the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.
Watercolour portrait of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall probably by a Mrs Taylor of Hallifax. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Katherine Mansfield, December 27, 1920
“Oh dear,” she said, “I do wish I hadn’t married. I wish I’d been an explorer.” And then she said dreamily, “The Rivers of China, for instance.”
“But what do you know about the rivers of China, darling,” I said. For Mother knew no geography whatever; she knew less than a child of ten.
“Nothing,” she agreed. “But I can feel the kind of hat I should wear.”
Helena Morley (aged 15), July 10, 1895
Papa is much beloved in my family. Everybody likes him and says he’s a very good man and a very good husband. I like hearing it but I’m always surprised at their just saying that papa’s a good husband and never saying that mama’s a good wife. Nevertheless, from the bottom of my heart I believe that only Our Lady could be better than mama.
Alice Walker, November 5, 1981
…women are much more interesting to me than men, just routinely.
Ma Yan (aged 13), September 22, 2000
It’s in order to feed and clothe us that Mother works so hard…She wears herself out so that we can have a different future from hers. She exhausts herself to provide food for us when there’s nothing left, and then she exhausts herself all over again, without getting anything out of life for herself. She doesn’t want us to live the way she does. That’s why we have to study. We’ll be happy. Unlike her.
Lady Monkswell, June 13, 1880
On June 7 Miss Fawcett came out above the Senior Wrangler in the Cambridge mathematical Tripos. This caused a great stir throughout the cultivated world…Every woman feels two inches taller for this success of Miss Fawcett, aged 22.
Beatrix Potter, August 1, 1894
I herewith record my conviction that we are at the edge of the reign of knickerbockers…I shall be much surprised if, within a very few years, a lady cannot appear in them without exciting hostile comment.
Mary Shelley, December 3, 1824
—Most women I believe wish that they had been me—so do not I—change my sex and I do not think my talents would be greater—
Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dawn Powell, August 3, 1951
The end of sex finds women resenting older men…This is just the time Mama finds the company of her own sex most rewarding. Don’t be sorry for elderly ladies on sprees—they’re usually having the time of their life.
Beatrice Webb, November 1, 1887
Every woman has a mission to other women—more especially to the women of her own class and circumstances. It is difficult to be much help to men…do what one will, sentiment creeps in, in return for sympathy.
Anne Frank, January 5, 1944
Each time I have a period—and that has only been three times—I have a feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way, I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again.
Anne Frank. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Naomi Mitchison, August 12, 1945
The girls and I and Joan discussing this business of babies. It really is doing in both Joan and to a lesser extent Ruth. And the same thing has happened to me…We deliberately took on this burden. Yet we didn’t know beforehand how crippling it would be.
Mary Boykin Chesnut, March 4, 1861
…I have seen a Negro woman sold upon the block at auction…My very soul sickened. It was too dreadful. I tried to reason, “You know how women sell themselves and are sold in marriage, from queens downwards, eh? You know what the Bible says about slavery, and marriage. Poor women, poor slaves.”
Ivy Jacquier, July 25, 1917
When will I learn not to look for in man what I demand of women!! And to be satisfied with what they are capable of giving. Then only shall I be able to marry.
Virginia Woolf, November 1, 1924
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? Truthfully?
Sarah Gristwood is the editor of Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries, published by Batsford
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