Strong Women

 

By Marilyn Moore

The year was 1665.  The setting, a small mountainous village in England.  The plague was sweeping across Europe, killing millions of people.  And when it came to this small village, carried by the fabric of a roaming tailor, the people who lived there made an extraordinary decision.  They decided to isolate themselves from the surrounding villages, hoping that the disease would not continue to spread beyond their village boundaries.  They made an agreement with the next closest village, seven miles down the road, that it would provide all of life’s necessities, including food, fiber, and what was needed to sustain animals, for a year, at no cost, in exchange for the safety of isolation.  Provisions would be dropped off at a designated spot, on a schedule such that the person bringing supplies would not see nor have any contact with the person picking up the supplies.  And so the village lived this way, for a year.  

People became ill.  People died.  There was fear and distrust.  And a few heroes emerged, the helpers.  Chief among them was Anna, a young widow, with young sons who succumbed to the illness.  She herself became ill, but survived.  She became the caregiver for those who were ill.  She learned of remedies and medications derived from roots and plants from the woman in the village who had such knowledge, but who was viewed with suspicion as a devil, a witch, a being of Satan…who was drowned because people feared she was making them ill, rather than making them better.  Anna rescued her salves and ointments and dried leaves and berries, and she made use of them as she cared for those struck by the plague.  And she tried not to let people know that she had this knowledge, lest they kill her, too.

The story is told by Geraldine Brooks in her book Year of Wonders.  It is inspired by the true story of Eyam, an isolated village in the hill country of England.  

She tells another story in Caleb’s Crossing, this one set in Martha’s Vineyard and in colonial Massachusetts, in the 1660’s.  Caleb is the first indigenous person to be awarded a degree from Harvard, and “crossing” in the title refers to the immense difficulty in crossing between his native indigenous culture and the colonial academic culture.  Brooks chooses to tell the story through the eyes of Bethia, a young woman, daughter of the local minister, who befriends Caleb when both are children.  

Like Anna, in the English village at the same time, Bethia is not supposed to learn to read.  Nor is she supposed to know anything of traditional school subjects of the time.  But she manages to be near the room where her father is tutoring her brother, so she can listen in while she carries out her household chores.  She is not supposed to know anything of the language of the indigenous people who live on the island…but she learns it.  And in the course of the story, her knowledge of academia rescues her brother from an ignominious end at Harvard.  Her knowledge of the indigenous language rescues Caleb from danger, including the near loss of his soul in the moments before he dies.  She worked so hard at all the tasks that women were supposed to do, and she worked so hard to not let it be known that she could read, and think, and communicate in the indigenous language, because such was not permitted, and punishment was sure.

Another such story is told in The Frozen River, this one by Ariel Lawhon.  This is the story of Martha Ballard, a midwife in the town of Hollowell, Maine, in 1789.  The book is based on the journal kept by Martha Ballard, a real midwife, in Maine, at that time; her actual journal entries are the heart of the story.  Like most young women at the time, Martha had not gone to school, had not learned to read.  A hundred years after Anna and Bethia, but girls were still not taught to read.  In Martha’s case, she learned to read after marrying; her husband taught her.  (And such a delightful side note, he used the Song of Solomon in the Bible to do so…a very romantic, some would say sensuous, text.  But I digress….)  

As a midwife, Martha attends to the births in the community, and she is generally the health care provider for all.  People send for her when they are ill, when there are babies to be born, when death is near.  And yet, some are suspicious of her knowledge…wondering if perhaps those ointments and tinctures and mixtures of leaves and berries are really the work of the devil.  And while she’s required by law to provide testimony in court in some cases (particularly in the case of an unmarried woman who gives birth to a child and who does not name the father), she can’t testify unless her husband is in the courtroom.  Because her word…is valid only if said in the presence of her husband.  

Of the dozens of books I’ve read in the past year, these three stand out in my mind.  I believe Anna and Bethia and Martha have taken up permanent space in my brain, and my soul.  First, because I’m reminded all over again how very hard, and how very dangerous, it was to be a woman in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Everything was hard.  The basic, daily tasks of preparing meals, providing clothing, and keeping a house warm required hard physical work.  Add the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, the labor required to grow and preserve food, freezing winters and blistering summers, and life was just hard.  (And I would add that this had not changed much for my grandmothers, living in Nebraska in the early 1900’s, though both had been to school and were readers.) I hope they had strong women friends….

But what most strikes me about these three women is that they were not allowed to learn.  Women were simply not seen as having any role in life for which they would need to be able to read, or think, or write.  And despite not being allowed, they all did.  And they saved lives because they learned.  I can only imagine the difference in the quality of life in those villages had the number of people who could read been doubled. 

In all three of these cases, the women lived.  The tailor, who brought the plague to the village in England and for whom Anna cared, died.  But Anna lived.  Caleb died, but Bethia, who provided care for him, lived.  Martha cared for patients during a diptheria outbreak and through all the normal illnesses and tragic accidents of the time.  Many died; but she lived.

Starre Vartan, author of The Stronger Sex, to be published this month, cites research by multiple scientists who assert that women are biologically made to be stronger.  That holds true in extreme circumstances, such as famine, epidemics, and enslavement, across time and across continents.  In an interview published by CNN, she describes many contributing factors to this finding.  Three of them strike me as especially interesting.  One is the X chromosome.  Persons assigned female at birth have two X chromosomes, and that is an advantage over those assigned male at birth, who have the XY chromosome pattern.  The X chromosome is larger, containing 10 times more genes than the Y chromosome.  This means that female bodies have access to a much larger array of immune genes, increasing the likelihood of surviving infections and diseases.  

A second finding interesting to me is that the female small intestine is longer than that found in males, which means our bodies absorb more nutrients from the same quantity of food, nutrients needed to replenish the body during menstruation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding.  

A third finding…estrogen confers a variety of immune advantages, testosterone does just the opposite. Women also have higher counts of active neutrophils, the white blood cells that fight infections.  

Anna, Bethia, and Martha survived…because their bodies were built for survival.  Because they persisted to learn despite social and cultural prohibitions, which often caused them to disguise what they had learned, they saved the lives of many others.  While being thought of as “the weaker sex,” they were not.  Perhaps the men in the power structure, and it was all men in the power structure, knew in some way that women really were stronger, and if they were also allowed to learn and speak of what they knew, the power structure would no longer be only men.  Perhaps remnants of that thinking still persists today….

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