Women Classical Scholars

On an unusually beautiful Sunday afternoon in Cambridge, I walk to a traditional English pub called Fort St George near Jesus Green to have a conversation with Edith Hall. She’s known as a preeminent classicist to many, a mother to a few (“It’s my daughter’s eighteenth birthday and we’re going to go see Deepwater Horizon”), and is even a champion of Classics in secondary education. But on this particular occasion I’m meeting her primarily in her role as co-editor (along with her former Ph.D. student and current University of Kent lecturer, Dr. Rosie Wyles) of the imminent Oxford University Press book Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly.

She still teaches at King’s College London but has recently moved to Cambridgeshire, and with my relocation there our converging paths make this encounter possible and convenient. The weather is lovely enough for us to sit with coffee right beside the River Cam, where students are rowing — a cheerful view during a conversation about a history that has not always been cheerful. Have a listen as she (EH) and I (YC) discuss her book.

YC: How did the idea for Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly come about?

EH: We decided to hold a conference because Rosie Wyles and I had collected, just as a hobby, and would send each other references to brilliant foremothers because we were very upset that there had never been this book. When I was a temporary Junior College Lecturer at the University of Oxford, there was a transdisciplinary foremothers seminar. This was in 1990. I actually gave the first paper — the seedling of this book — as long ago as that, on some incredibly important English women translators in the Early Modern period, especially Lucy Hutchinson, who was the first person to translate all of Lucretius into English. Marvelous Puritan lady.

So I’d actually been reading about it for all those years, but then Rosie decided to do postdoctoral research on Anne Dacier and said, “Come on, we’ve got to do a conference.” This was in 2012. I just looked around for a hook — why now? We discovered that it was the centenary of the birth of Jacqueline de Romilly, no less, who has to be one of the most important Hellenists of all time — not just among women Hellenists. She was born in 1913, so in 2013 we organized a conference, had people from many different countries, and quite quickly decided to turn it into a book, then commissioned supplementary papers.

It was really a desperate desire to have some pictures of women — we found portraits of almost all of them — to hang up in our mental library wing alongside all of those crusty men. There were loads of them! And they’d been concealed by diverse and comical means. Often it’s just by initial — people know the initial, they’ve got no idea that it’s a woman, so they assume it’s a man. Many wrote their husbands’ books, but their husbands got their names on them.

The book wrote itself, in a way, once we decided to do it. I’m just very sad about the many figures we’ve discovered since then. We managed to create an appendix for further research, all the ones that we need, like Marie Delcourt, whom lots of people have heard of if they do Euripides. So we put leads in and hope that this will start a new fashion in reception studies.

YC: Why do you think that nobody has been interested in women classical scholars before?

EH: It’s baffling! Is it just that women classical scholars now, despite having the great generation of feminists who were writing all the canonical works of feminist interpretation of classical literature — Helene Foley, Sarah Pomeroy, Froma Zeitlin — aren’t interested? I was actually told that at Oxford though, from 1978 to 1982, they were on a blacklist. Do not read these books. Which of course meant that we all went immediately — at least all the girls did — to read them.

I’ve talked to Froma, who’s a good friend, about it, and she said she simply doesn’t know. She’s aware of almost all the names — it’s not that she hadn’t heard of them — but none of us can quite explain it. Perhaps it’s just that we’ve had it so drummed into us — actually, for progressive reasons — how patriarchal the Classics academy has been. I think it’s also definition, because women classical scholars weren’t allowed into the institutions, which have always been the repositories of their own histories. That’s why Jane Ellen Harrison got noticed, because she’s such a huge specter hanging over Newnham College, Cambridge.

I find it rather dreary to have to do it — it’s like, somebody else should have been onto this. Anne Dacier was an extraordinary figure, working in the early eighteenth century on authors from whom women have generally been excluded. She worked on Roman comedy, she translated Homer. And epic has traditionally been very unfemale. You were allowed to play around with Sappho or the tragedians a bit, but she was very, very different.

That’s again why de Romilly is so important. She wrote one of the greatest books ever written on Thucydides. Historically, I’ve found that women studied Plutarch, Xenophon, they’ve been allowed to translate Herodotus — nice stories — but not something rigorous about Thucydides. This word “rigor,” male rigor, is one of the big ideological obstacles that we found. Women constantly being scrutinized, their work is scrutinized far harder for possible errors.

I had a rigorous, old-fashioned grammar school education, with Latin and Greek A Level, and even I was not allowed to do Greek verse composition. That was a bridge too far for girls. Prose yes, verse no. The meter was going to be too much for my little brain.

YC: Digging into the title a bit, I’ve been thinking about the distinction between women classical scholars, female classical scholars, and feminist classical scholars. I was wondering whether you thought about this when titling your book at all.

EH: I had originally entitled it Unsealing the Fountain, a reference to Alfred Tennyson’s The Princess, which is a comic narrative poem about the first college for women. Tennyson himself was not at all feminist, he’s laughing at the idea, but he does give Princess Ida this wonderful speech where she says, “Knowledge is no more a fountain sealed.” That was taken as the motto of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust. I went to one of their schools, where I got a state scholarship. I vividly remember in the Great Hall a huge terracotta bust of Minerva with Tennyson’s refrain, Knowledge is no more a fountain sealed, underneath. So we thought unsealing the fountain would be a good image for the thirst of women for intellectual stimulation.

But Oxford University Press said that we had to inverse it because of word searches or something. They wanted Female Classical Scholars. I don’t like the word “female” because it’s terribly biological, it makes you an animal and we’re trying to get away from the lactating creature of the γυνή. They’re not all feminist by any manner of means — in fact some of them are paid-up antifeminists who wrote polemics about how women would be mistreated by men if they had to work equally in the marketplace. That left “women,” which is between nature and culture, I feel. But we did have to have it.

YC: Do you think the fact that you’ve published this book, and that there was so much international interest in writing it, means that people are starting to take women’s history more seriously?

EH: Yes. Once we started looking, we found many individuals, all feeling very lonely. For example, there’s a wonderful chapter on Kathleen Freeman, a brilliant Englishwoman who really ran Welsh Classics out of Cardiff for many years and translated all of the Presocratic philosophers, by Professor Eleanor Irwin in Canada. It really was just a matter of somebody pulling them all together.

Now there’s a conference in Pisa on 19th-century women classical scholars. So it’s already starting, and I’m hoping it’ll snowball. Rosie’s going to get a free online dictionary up, so that there will be somewhere for people to go and submit little profiles as they find submerged scholars.

YC: I like the parallel to the feminist movement as a whole, because it’s about taking what are very common experiences that feel quite individual and bringing people together to work toward these political goals.

EH: Yes, and I hope it can help to change the nature of the academy. One of the most striking things about a lot of these women is that precisely because they couldn’t get paid by institutions — not in spite, but partly because of that — they have been brilliant at public communication. Kathleen Freeman — completely snubbed by the male academy, she never got prizes, she never got invited to give lectures at Oxbridge, never in a million years would she have been made a Fellow of the British Academy, when she was just as good — wrote all these brilliant popular books on the Greeks, about Solon and ideas of happiness. She was a very big name in the popular media.

Or they translate and earn money. Elizabeth Carter made a fortune from her translation of Epictetus. Betty Radice ran Penguin Classics for many years and was a huge force for bringing Greek and Roman authors to the general public. That sets an example, and it shows how narrow the activities of most of their male peers were. Jane Ellen Harrison did that as well. I think we have far more responsibility, as university employees, to communicate and disseminate ideas to a wider public. And I think that by digging them up we can actually revise our definition of “classicist.”

YC: Despite all of the great things that these women did, virtually all of their stories have been lost. Whose lost story do you mourn the most?

EH: That’s a difficult one. Probably Clotilde Tambroni, who was a professor of Greek at Bologna. We’ve hardly got any information about her, though we do have her inaugural lecture in Italian. She was already creating her own foremother, it was about Hypatia of Alexandria, so we found this tradition — women have always been interested in their ancient forebears, the semi-fictional ones like Diotima, or historical ones like Hypatia.

YC: How do you think the field of Classics would look different today if the contributions of these women had been valued?

EH: Well that raises lots of questions though, doesn’t it? There would have been tertiary institutions for women to study at. I would have certainly liked, as an undergraduate — when I was looking around at the walls of grim-faced clerics — to have known about these women, some of whom are quite glamorous apart from everything else. Jacqueline de Romilly was a fashion plate. She completely threw people, because not only were academics not supposed to be female, if they are female they’re supposed to be as dowdy as possible to display their intellectual credentials.

They were often wives and mothers — and I find that very inspiring as well, because I wanted to have a family myself in addition to being an academic. So if their contributions had been valued, parenthood would have been valued far more.

I hope the difference will take place now, that people in universities all over the world will be able to give their female students, and male students, inspiration of knowing that these texts have been pored over just as much by women. They’re ours.

YC: Obviously these women faced many, many professional difficulties. I was wondering if you yourself received any pushback while writing this book.

EH: Yes! Oh absolutely. There’s a woman at the University of Pennsylvania Press who thoroughly supports our project — actually, the only publisher who came to the conference. And she really wanted to publish it, although I’ve published most of my work with OUP, just historically. Do you know what? A nearly all-male commissioning committee turned it down. There were two women, but they were very junior — I went and looked at who the delegates were. They said it wouldn’t sell. OUP had already asked why we hadn’t brought it to them, so we just did that as the quickest transfer.

Even before that, we were turned down by all of the institutions, including the British Academy, who fund such conferences. So we scraped around. Another one of my former Ph.D. students, Lottie Parkyn, is an administrator at Notre Dame University at London, and she got us the premises for free.

So you get this collectivist female endeavor. Almost all of the people who came had to fund their own flights. We desperately wanted Michele Ronnick, who is in Detroit and has written some excellent books on African-American men classicists, to come, but she couldn’t afford the flight. In the end, my lovely colleague Roland Mayer, who’s the only man in the book, paid for her flight out of his own pocket. It was very hand-to-mouth, but we did it anyway. Isn’t that dismal though?

Funnily enough, you know what the only other conference I never got the money for was about? Ancient slavery and abolition. To me, the two most crucial conferences I’ve ever done were not funded.

YC: In writing this book, do you think that you learned anything about the importance of having a woman’s perspective?

EH: Definitely. Their humor shines through over and over again, because these women always knew how daft the ideological prejudices against them were. I’ve better learned how to fight with wit.

I’ve also learned the importance of putting your family first at all times. When you get Anne Dacier writing about her beloved daughter who died — she had three children, actually — you see that they always had their values completely right, in a way that not all the men always did.

It’s very affirming: humor, family, the importance of financial independence. With only two exceptions, none of the women were working-class. They had the leisure and the books to study because they had some money.

YC: So you found that class complicated your study.

EH: It did. This is a book about middle-class and upper-class women.

YC: I want to pick up on something that you said earlier. Could you talk a bit more about how these women both furthered and hindered feminism? Especially the latter.

EH: There are many wonderful stories of women who tied their campaigning for women’s education to political goals. I don’t want to underestimate them.

However, we found two or three recurring strands of what I would call “self-oppression.” One is deeply unsisterly attitudes toward other women in the profession. I call this “totem poleism” — once you’ve gotten to the top, kick other women down harder than men.

The second is women who publicized, used, or stressed their attractiveness to men in order to excuse their prodigious nature. They’re less threatening as a prodigy if they are thoroughly conformist to heterosexist ideas of prettiness. Anne Dacier, for example, cast herself as Penelope. She was widowed young and publicly utilized the “tragic lonely wife” thing.

Then you do get those women who were thoroughly signed up against suffrage and prepared to argue publicly about that. That again is wanting to define their own prodigiousness, you can underline your own incredible intelligence by distancing yourself from other women. Upsettingly, Lucy Hutchinson — and this has to do with being Puritan — said that women were inferior before God. She used her biblical sources while being terribly proud of herself. She had herself painted with the laurel wreath of the poets and her little boy: “I’m the one who can be the good mother.”

Also, falling madly in love with figures such as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who had one or two female doctoral students. They enslaved themselves by worshiping him.

YC: And he was very open about how he felt about their inferiority.

EH: He was unbelievably rude about it. These are really tragic stories, and you want to ask, “Why you would fall in love with someone who has such a low opinion of you?” But again, that has to do with the way things were for women. It’s very easy for someone born post-War to feel superior to previous women because they weren’t feminist enough.

YC: Those themes sound disturbingly familiar. Both the idea of, “I went through a lot so you shouldn’t complain,” and also that you need to work within a system rather than trying to transcend it.

EH: There are also quite a large number of what we’re pretty sure are women who loved other women, though how much they knew they did or not is up for debate. Elizabeth Carter would not marry, made herself financially independent, and wrote very intense letters to other women. Edith Hamilton lived with a woman all her life. Again, she was patronized completely by the male establishment, but her book The Greek Way was the one that every regular person in America who wanted to know about the Greeks read. It’s the one that Bobby Kennedy quoted the night that Martin Luther King was shot. She made enough money off her books to live an independent life, and she did so with girlfriends. So did Kathleen Freeman.

But this is the twentieth century, where it’s certain in terms of self-knowledge, and therefore a more recognizable phenomenon.

YC: I’d like to move into the twenty-first century for the last part of this interview and talk about women classical scholars today.

The importance of a piece of scholarship is often determined by how often it’s cited by Google Scholar. Because many of these women classical scholars were underappreciated, they weren’t cited extensively, so it’s easy to say that they’ve had less of an impact. Do you think that there are better metrics?

EH: For contemporary scholars? I haven’t given it enough thought, actually. I know that it’s a huge problem. I think one of the big problems has always been modesty — “modesty is a virtue in a woman.”

I often get young men sending me articles that they wrote. I never get it from women. Never!

YC: And men are much more likely to cite themselves.

EH: Exactly. It’s partly that women just have got to develop Teflon hides.

YC: It’s been shown that many institutions in higher education as a whole put female professors at a disadvantage — student evaluations, for example. What can we do about that? With all these small pieces, just us getting tougher doesn’t seem to be enough.

EH: No, it isn’t. Well, you can have implicit bias training. There is a whole philosophy now called epistemic injustice. One of the things I find interesting is the language and vocabulary in reviews of women’s books. I found that the complete myth that Kathleen Freeman’s translations of the Presocratics were unreliable — which is ridiculous, they’re fantastic — was started in a review by Friedrich Solmsen. And he did it very subtly, with adjectives that he’d never use for men’s writing.

YC: You want to subtly call attention to the fact that she’s a woman.

EH: He didn’t even need to do that. You can look at the critical vocabulary used — not just by men, women absolutely will use those stereotypes at certain periods of history to take down another woman.

YC: Speaking of which, do you think that there’s a generational divide between so-called second-wave and third and fourth-wave feminist scholars?

EH: Definitely. I’ve had a couple of research students who openly challenged feminist issues in Classics as boring old hat. I think what is difficult is that few of the scholars who are younger than I am have memories of bad sexual harassment, being marked down or given lists of books not to read because they were feminist “claptrap.” Some young women do, especially of sexual harassment. But if you haven’t, you begin to think it’s far away and long ago and for me it’s still very immediate.

Also, I’m very keen on systems analysis and although there are far more women in posts now, it’s in junior posts without executive power. I mean power in terms of appointing people, dishing out research grants, executive κράτος. I’ve got loads of ideological power, because people read my books, and I talk on radio, but I’m on no important committees.

It’s easy for men to say, “At our university forty percent of the teaching staff is women.” Show me where in the system, and how much access to money and appointing power they’ve got. Those are the two crucial things — and you’ll find that it’s pathetic.

YC: So it’s all the more important for feminists across generations to work together. I wonder if there’s a way for younger feminist scholars to become more attuned to history and older feminist scholars to become more attuned to concerns that they may be out of touch with.

EH: Absolutely. And it’s very easy for someone with a tenured job and salary like me to sit and pontificate, while all young academics — not just women — are facing, certainly in Britain, such incredible proletarianization of their contracts in every sense.

YC: To wrap things up, in your opinion, what living women classical scholars will end up in a future version of your book?

EH: Oh, many, many, many. But my three great inspirations personally would be Pat Easterling, Froma Zeitlin, and Helene Foley. They’re all mothers, which is very important to me. They’re all hilarious company — charming, lovely, wonderful people who have given me totally motherly support and advice throughout my career without a whisper of envy. All of them in different ways have supported the next generation of women, and they were up against far more than even I was.

YC: Here’s hoping that book gets written.

After teaching at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Durham and Royal Holloway, Edith Hall was appointed to a Chair in Classics at King’s College London in 2012. She has published more than twenty books on the ancient world and its reception, most recently Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2015). In 2015 she was awarded a Goodwin Award from the Society of Classical Studies and the Erasmus Prize of the European Academy. The University of Athens will give her an honorary doctorate on February 15th, 2017.

Yung In Chae is the Associate Editor of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2015, and after a year of studying History and Civilizations at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales is now pursuing an MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.