It is pointless to dismiss men from the seventeenth century as sexists – historical research should ensure understanding, says historian Els Kloek. This year, the theme of the Month of History is just right for her:'She/He'.
While she used to be scorned by male teachers who didn't understand why there was a need for separate historical research on women – 'soon they also want elephant history' – nowadays it just happens that she is placed in the wrong feminist camp. Els Kloek is a historian and twice compiled a lexicon with portraits of 1001 women:'1001 women from Dutch history' and '1001 women in the 20th century'. Last month she added the collection 'Women and children first', in which she collected previously published columns and essays on the theme She/He.
We are in the artist foyer of the History Festival, one of the big activities in the Month of History. Kloek has just returned from a debate with sociologist Abram de Swaan about the importance and dangers of feminism. This month she is almost daily on stage in all corners of the country. “During our first meeting in 1978 of the National Women's History Consultation, we never dreamed that a month of history would come with this theme.”
Kloek mainly remembers a kind of distrust of the battle-weary generation of feminists before her, who watched with a shake of their heads as the new generation tried to set up an academic branch called 'Women's History'. She remembers well that the famous feminist Willemijn Posthumus-Van der Goot let them know that she had simply been 'lucky' and had not suffered from oppression as a woman; she came from a well-to-do family. “We didn't want to hear that at all! We wanted to tear down those kinds of structures!” Today, Kloek is concerned about the new generation of feminists who want to liberate women by deconstructing our language. Have they not gone too far? More on that later.
Go to a different corner of the country every day to speak in front of an audience. Why do you think that is important?
“So my husband constantly asks:why on earth do you want that? I think it just has to be. The history we read in books is mostly about men. If it is about a woman, then it is either a Mary (an embodiment of good) or an Eve (an embodiment of evil). I call it the smurfette effect. In a smurf village you also have many different smurfs - papa smurf, spectacled smurf, lol smurf, grumpy smurf - and you only have one smurfette. But there are so many different women. This much! With my 'Women's Lexicon' I wanted to give women back that individuality. That is liberating for people. A world opens up for them.”
Do you get a different picture of Dutch history when you read about the lives of women?
"Absolute. Precisely because they often weren't in charge, you get the idea that you can peek in through the kitchen window. I don't call it the back of history for nothing.”
So it's not that women actually played a much bigger role in history, but that we forgot about them because they weren't written about?
“It is undoubtedly the case that women are forgotten more quickly. But to say that those women have actually determined the course of history… Then you quickly end up in a showdown, and that's not necessarily what I'm looking for. For example, I write about Judith Leyster, a seventeenth-century painter from Haarlem, but I'm not going to say she was better than Rembrandt. The point is that men could choose painting as a profession, and women only in exceptional circumstances. So of course a Rembrandt can surface there. But you can't measure how much talent of women has been lost. What is special about Judith Leyster is that as an unmarried woman she had her own workshop, with apprentices and servants. Such women deserve attention.”
Why did there need to be a separate encyclopedia about women's history?
“Actually, my Women's Lexicon is the result of failure. I wanted to write a handbook about 'normal' Dutch history, but I wanted to consistently put women in the foreground. That is also possible, but it turned out to be too ambitious for me. The project became too large because I wanted to seriously integrate women into the history. Moreover, I still had the constant idea that I had to justify myself theoretically.”
“We are still not used to actually writing about women. We also ran into this with '1001 women', on which more than three hundred experts participated. Initially, almost every portrait contained a passage about youth:why her brother was allowed to go to school, and she was not. That got annoying at some point, so we deleted those passages. Also, authors quickly tend to write about women as role models. I just didn't want that. I thought that all possible women should be featured, as historical characters. So not necessarily as a hero or victim.”
Distrust
Kloek suffers from 'innate feminism', as she calls it:an antenna for skewed relationships between men and women. “I just see it all the time. That men are more likely to explain things, for example. Before you know it, they're telling you what's in your book (mansplaining ). Or that they take up more space in public space (manspreading ). And then you can say that women should become more empowered or claim more space, but then I think:'Damn, those men should learn to keep their legs together! And modesty isn't such a bad quality at all!'”
You leave behind a whole life's work with '1001 women'...
“While I'm still alive!”
Featured by the editors
MedicineWhat are the microplastics doing in my sunscreen?!
AstronomySun, sea and science
BiologyExpedition to melting land
Are you confident that the new generation will continue with this?
“I want to say something about that – and now I have to be very careful with my words. I think they make it so hard on themselves. They bring everything in. Everything. I find that LGBTQ confusing, because it shifts the discussion to sexual preference, and the m/f problem disappears from view. I think that's a shame.”
The idea that everyone fits into the 'man' or 'woman' box is being questioned.
“If you don't want to see that distinction anymore, you throw out the baby with the bathwater! I think that's terrible. Soon we will also have to put women in quotation marks.”
In quotes?
“There are more and more words that you are no longer allowed to use. I predict you:there will come a time when you won't be allowed to use the word 'woman' anymore."
Why would that be bad?
It falls silent for a moment. Dan:“That's really your generation that says that right away, isn't it. Because… Yes, then the women also get out of sight. If you make the entire language gender neutral, you won't see women anymore. While there is an essential difference between men and women. Women can give birth. I'm very afraid that won't happen again soon. That we will find it too animalistic and outsource it.” Whispering:“Yes, I'm really afraid of that.”
Kloek picks up:“But I don't want to talk about this at all!”
I'm curious why you're so afraid of that. You might also think:then women can do other things again.
Big eyes. A head-shaking laugh. “I've only been pregnant once, and that was a really special experience. We shouldn't be so negative about it. There's so much emphasis on career development right now, and it's surrounded by masculine norms. At the same time, we attach less and less value to qualities that have been considered feminine for centuries, such as caring, working together, crafting, asking questions. Now I really have to be careful. Before you know it, you're in the wrong camp. I don't want to make the differences between men and women absolute:men can be feminine, women can be masculine. But rooster behavior is currently very dominant as a norm.”
You mentioned earlier that as a young feminist you felt a certain mistrust of the older generation of feminists. How do you view the new generation of feminists yourself?
“I see two tendencies:one has a strong emphasis on career development and empowerment, the other is based on eternal victimhood. Sometimes the two come together. What I find difficult, also about #MeToo, is that women develop power from victimhood. There seems to be a competition to see who has been hurt the most. And because of that victimization, others no longer have the right to speak. The sociologist Abram de Swaan, with whom I just had a debate, can also very easily be dismissed as a white man over seventy who is going to meddle with feminism for a while. I really like that he does that. I can't help it that I'm white."
We were talking about gender. Now you start on whiteness. Why?
“For the new generation of feminists, those two things are closely intertwined. I think they make it so hard on themselves. They see sexual preference as part of the problem, and having children, climate change, racism. It's one big tangle. Then you have to deal with that. That seems very heavy to me and not at all constructive.”
But black women say white women benefit more from feminist progress.
“I think black feminists have made this point enough. My point is that I don't want to be framed as white, highly educated, and 50+ all the time. As if that automatically makes me a racist, or an elitist. Let's stop thinking in such boxes! That only creates division. Then you have to go head to head. I find it frightening when people sit in their own bubble and don't want to talk to each other, let alone stand up for each other.”
You could also say that 'standing up for each other' means giving more space to suppressed female voices.
“But I do! I went to great lengths to ensure that women of color were included in 1001 women. But I also experienced that I was waiting a long time for a biography of a Surinamese woman. The author left me at the very end, because she thought it was 'a white project'. Then you start repeating things to me that I don't recognize myself in at all, and I find that very annoying."
“Another example:in 1986 I gave a lecture on women in medieval guilds at a Women's History conference. Until suddenly the lecture was interrupted by a number of black activists who shouted that it was a shame that we did not pay attention to black women. I just finished my story, but a colleague who was supposed to talk about her research on women in the German cities of the fifteenth century quickly mumbled in something about Jewish women. I just find that scary.”
“Don't get me wrong:I am for diversity, but then we are talking about now. You cannot blindly project that pursuit of diversity onto the past.”
You want to do justice to the past.
"Precisely. I find it very annoying to denounce history.”
What do you mean by that?
“That you sit in God's chair and say:'You were wrong in the seventeenth century, because you were sexist!' I don't think that shows any historical awareness. In that respect I am more of a scientist than an activist.”
Yet historiography is never value neutral.
“But you have to strive for it. Of course, you're never going to make it, but that shouldn't be a license to express all opinions. That is my criticism of Gender Studies, the contemporary version of Women's Studies. They promote a way of thinking that is ideological. If you follow such a study for a year, you will only see confirmation that you are right. Science isn't about proving you right, it's about looking for truth, and you can only find it if you keep an eye on the possibility of being wrong. I think academics should always keep asking open questions.”