The New York Times: Historian Amanda Foreman upends the story of civilization to give women their due

BY LINDA KINSTLER

The Ascent of Woman

The Ascent of Woman

Enheduanna. Hatshepsut. Empress Wu. Murasaki Shikibu. These ancient women were the first feminist trailblazers, yet they’ve been largely expunged from the historical record.

Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great of Sumer, became the world’s first recorded author in the third millennium BCE. Hatshepsut ruled the Kingdom of Egypt for 20 years, adopting the full regalia of a male king — beard included — before her successor had all signs of her reign erased. Empress Wu, also known as Wu Zetian, united the Chinese empire and reigned as sole monarch for fifteen years before her successors also tried to obliterate her achievements. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, the Tale of Genji, between 1001-1010 AD. Her real name and personal details remain largely unknown.

These influential women are just a few of the female iconoclasts featured in The Ascent of Woman, Dr. Amanda Foreman’s four-part BBC documentary that premiered to U.S. viewers on Netflix earlier this month. The series aims to “retell the story of civilization with women and men side by side for the first time,” as Foreman declares in the introduction. Reinscribing women into their rightful places in the human story, the documentary corrects the erasures of history’s male heirs. Continue reading…

The Sunday Times: Chest-beating Putin aims his vilest weapon at the West — misogyny

Photo: Drew Hays

Photo: Drew Hays

I am not a professional Dr Angry. I don’t go round collecting grievances. Nor do I have a brain that categorises everything in terms of “isms”.

So when I say Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of the most loathsomely misogynistic countries in the world, I am speaking from the heart. I don’t just mean misogyny in a crass, vodka-swilling, male loser way; I mean in a big threat to world peace way.

I have visited a fair number of countries this year in the course of filming a documentary series on the history of women. Some could hardly be described as bastions of tolerance and equality. But only in Russia did I witness sexism bolstered by state-sanctioned menace and contempt. It’s a truly repellent culture that can’t see anything wrong in a poster for vodka showing an alluring woman with bruised knees.

But simply being brutish and boorish is not in itself a national catastrophe. The poison in the well comes from the skilful way in which Putin has encouraged a cultural war— one that equates patriotism and nationalism with hard-fisted chauvinism — in order to bolster his political war with Europe.

Continue reading…