[The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine De Pizan. 1410. cover, detail French manuscript]
I said we are all beguines. And I’m right. Those independent women in the low countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands from about 1200 did not occupy normal societal roles. When fathers, brothers, husbands went off to the Crusades and didn’t come back, they were left alone. Women alone. Femmes Seules.
They had to learn to support themselves. If they were left with the family’s male-hereditary land, that was a windfall if they could keep it. Or, if rich enough, they might be able to afford that “Bride of Christ” dowry to some convent. But if women were left poor and alone without accepted alternatives, then they had to learn how to live by their own work. What were the roles beyond wife, mother, sister, nun, beggar, prostitute? Some women learned the crafts of livelihood. They became soap makers, saddlers, metalsmiths, caretakers to the infirm, or the dyers of cloth, or were clever silk merchants in Paris. And for security and community they lived in collectives together—beguines.
The beguines remained mostly unmolested without occupying usual familial roles, for a while. But by a hundred years or so later they could be caught in the craze to label women who were alone as hag, witch, or heretic. Too many women who didn’t fit into societal/familial molds—under the control of men and the Church—were ostracized or murdered.
Today, eight hundred years later, there are still femmes seules, women who are alone who do not, or cannot, or don’t want to fit in. We don’t wedge ourselves into roles that are easily labeled and palatable, but into lives that are deemed “unusual” for women. How dare you? Just like controlling what women should do with their bodies, eight hundred years after the first beguines today women who have to or who choose to be alone still fall outside of “normal behavior.”
It’s about expectations. Roles. Perception: seeing and interpreting.
How do we twist reality? What reality? —No, whose reality? Whose eyes see me?
Scene:
A New York City Sunday at noon. Mother’s Day.
Midtown Sidewalk: Jostling women and their aura of sons, husbands, daughters, nieces, grandsons.... All specifically labeled roles for these actors.
Enter: Me, moving through this hackneyed cast of characters. A 30-ish woman accosts me.
She beams, “Happy Mothers Day!”
What? Why should it be that? Why should I be that?
I snarl this only in my mind because her wish is prejudice. With possible violence? Worse, with sympathy. Hers is an expectation that I don’t fit, don’t want to, nor ever even think of without such an intrusive, blurted claim.
How dare you foist your curse on a stranger?
It is nothing but an assumption based on appearance and age. A visual caricature. How dare you assume to speak it to me? It’s like saying to a woman who’s broken some standard of accepted “normal” girth: “when is the baby due?” How dare you suppose any woman’s status in life?
Break free. If we want, we are all beguines.