Letters

In her review of the Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy, edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro, Sophie Smith takes exception to the idea that ‘the thinkers on whom the volume focuses are described in one essay as “largely forgotten” … “their work overlooked”’ (LRB, 25 April). Smith uses this unacknowledged quotation of my own words to develop a theme: that women historians of philosophy are complicit in silencing their predecessors since use of the amnesia metaphor risks exonerating those responsible for marginalising women thinkers – the historians and philosophers and patriarchy in general. What I actually said was that women’s ‘contribution to philosophy was largely forgotten’, not that the philosophers in question were forgotten. Smith also ignores that I go on to criticise the standard accounts of the history of philosophy written by those she calls the ‘agents of our ignorance’.

It was not the purpose of my essay in the volume to review histories of philosophy. I am well aware that the fortunes of women thinkers have varied over time and that interest in them has historical precedents. The example that Smith cites (Caroline Dall’s Historical Pictures Retouched) had a few worthy predecessors, not least in Mary Hays’s Female Biography. But while such biographers of women helped to remind their readers that women had distinguished themselves intellectually, they didn’t actually have much to say about their contribution to philosophy.

Detlefsen and Shapiro rightly acknowledge that their volume is part of the recovery project dedicated to restoring knowledge of philosophy by women. It is disheartening that Smith, who is so clearly a beneficiary of that project, should characterise it as the ‘women’s recovery industry’, as if the contributors to the Routledge volume were jumping on a bandwagon of some kind. It is certainly the case that publishers are now eager to publish works by and on women philosophers – a far cry from the situation when Shapiro was trying to find a publisher for her translation of Elisabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence with Descartes. But it is a misrepresentation of the endeavours of those who work on the recovery of women philosophers to suggest that we are out to sell a lie, never mind ‘sell the lie that the only thing standing in the way of “equality” is a lack of historical awareness’.

Well and good that it is now possible to teach students about women thinkers even in elite universities, as Smith does, and that students are now able not only to study women philosophers, but to do so with the aid of secondary literature like the essays in the Routledge volume. Resources of this kind were not readily available to students sixteen years ago when, as Smith reports, she was a Cambridge undergraduate. They simply didn’t exist forty years previously when I studied there (at a time when women were excluded from 85 per cent of Cambridge colleges), something worth mentioning lest we forget what the recovery project has been up against.

Terry Eagleton says the origin of culture is labour; labour provides the material base for the products of the mind (LRB, 25 April). ‘Labour’ is also the word for childbirth. To go from Eagleton’s stimulating reflections to Sophie Smith on the way women’s thinking has historically been excluded from histories of thinking was instructive. Smith puzzles over the ‘forgotten woman’ trope – commercially still so appealing after almost half a century of ‘recovery’ work in literature, history and philosophy. Me too. What is it about women that the culture doesn’t want to keep in mind? Is it at least in part reproductive labour? Conceiving, bearing and raising children didn’t stop women pursuing the life of the mind: the ‘forgotten’ prolific poet Felicia Hemans had five children and a husband who deserted her, yet she became the poster girl for Victorian domesticity and empire. But there’s obviously an important difference. The life of the mind goes on in time alongside multiple relationships and bodily changes. The anecdotes Smith recounts are grisly reminders of the way men – and I know it’s not all men, but historically it might as well have been – have preferred not to think about things actual women make them think of.

Religious faith is ‘the most enduring, deep-rooted, universal form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed,’ Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘yet you won’t find it on a single cultural studies course from Sydney to San Diego’. That’s hardly surprising: it’s all ocean.

In a Diary piece for the LRB I mentioned Lady Astor’s denunciation of the Eighth Army troops in Italy and the vernacular army song ‘The D-Day Dodgers’ which resulted (11 November 1999). I recently wrote again about the song in a letter, to which Gerard Hastings responded, urging that the lyric should be credited to Hamish Henderson, the author of the great song ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’ (Letters, 7 March and 25 April).

A reader wrote to me in 1999 making the same suggestion. Since I had learned the song indirectly from Hamish (who had fought with the Highland Division in Sicily, and who lived until 2002), I suggested that the reader ask him. He did, and Hamish assured him that he was not the author. It’s true that this wouldn’t have been the first instance of an author falsely claiming not to have composed a ballad (stand up, Walter Scott) in order to confer the authenticity of folksong on it. It’s also true so far as I know that Hamish Henderson was the sole known carrier of the song.

So Gerard Hastings may be right, but if he is, it’s by guesswork.

Michael Hofmann, writing about Hallðór Laxness, makes the tongue-in-cheek remark that Iceland’s culture in the 20th century was ‘contracted out to expats living in Saskatchewan or Denmark’ (LRB, 4 April). I can only assume he means Saskatchewan’s neighbouring province Manitoba, home to more than thirty thousand people of Icelandic descent. Many of them reside in the communities of New Iceland, running from Hecla Island in the north through Arborg and Riverton down to Gimli. I am reliably informed that Gimli is home to the largest Icelandic community outside the motherland. It hosts the annual summer festival of Islendingadagurinn and is where you’ll find H.P. Tergesen & Sons, which still reliably stocks literature in the Icelandic language and may even have been visited by Laxness himself when, as Hofmann informs us, he made his way to the Icelandic community less than 100 km away in Winnipeg.

Shrovetide football, as described by Bunny Hambleton-Relf, sounds like a great game, more anarchic and high-spirited than the official ball sports (Letters, 21 March). Seemingly, it resembles lacrosse as played in past centuries by Indigenous Americans. There might be hundreds of players involved on each side, in teams from neighbouring villages. The object was to carry the ball from one’s own village to the opponents’ village, sometimes several miles away, across whatever terrain there may be. Players used sticks with little nets or baskets on the end, with which they carried the ball or passed it between themselves. The game wasn’t as brutal as, say, rugby or American football, but it was banned in some areas around 1900 because the Choctaw tied lead weights to their sticks to bash skulls.

John Kerrigan regrets the loss of Seamus Heaney’s childhood letters (LRB, 25 April). So far, little has been written about his family’s traumas, including the deaths of his four-year-old brother Christopher and of his father’s baby sister, referred to in Station Island: ‘her name which they hardly ever spoke but was a white bird trapped inside me beating scared wings’. Heaney was thirteen when Christopher died, and the loss haunted him ‘like an absence stationed in the swamp-fed air’. Also in Station Island, Heaney has James Joyce, whose own parents lost their first child, tell him: ‘Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes./Let go, let fly, forget.’