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snow
So, it snew! That happened. I live, and am back at work trying to catch up with half the staff still stuck on cul-de-sacs. We only got about 20 inches but apparently people just up the road got 36. It was a fun five days of snowed-in-ness, during which I shut the laptop in case of power outage and then just... didn't get around to opening it again even after the rist of power outage was over.
This sounds super virtuous, but tbh my laptop is so cranky these days that it is not a pleasure to use it. Also I spent most of that time listening to podcasts on my phone while playing solitaire, so it actually wasn't virtuous at all.
The podcast I was listening to is Rex Factor, recommended by sister, which is reviewing and rating all the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland. So far I have made it from Alfred the Great to Mary Tudor. And earned 85 stars in the solitaire app.
So far, the podcast is mostly making me think - other than 'wow, I don't remember nearly as much British political history as I thought' and 'this is actually a really good way to do history' - is just how much power women always had. Like, you read 'feminist history' things that talk about shifts in womens' rights over time, or that pick out individual powerful women, but what you get going through right in order like this is that there was almost always a woman running things. Like, there's occasional gaps, like some of the Saxon kings who outlived their mothers and grandmothers and then deliberately didn't marry, or the last decade of Henry the 8th's reign after Queen Katherine was too old to lead his armies for him anymore. But what the versions that pick out the powerful women make it easy to miss is that they weren't actually... exceptional? Like, I'm pretty sure up to the point where I am, there were about as many Queens of England who led armies to battle as there were Kings of England. (Well, maybe fewer numerically because they've tended to live longer, but as much time in power, anyway.)
Anyway, also it's got me thinking that I need to study up some dynastic history that isn't British because that's really the only ones I've ever studied. And the podcast listening has woken up the princesses who live in my head, who need at least some history influence other than British, since they live in what is basically Doggerland. (Every little girl had princesses they made up and have whole dynastic histories for, right? Mine are eight sisters: one of them becomes an architect, two become ruling queens, one becomes a sorceress-saint, one becomes a knight, one becomes a scholar, one becomes a banker, and one never amounts to anything much. Only one of 'em marries a prince; he marries her because she promises to win his war for him if she gets to run the country afterward and he's like, eh, better her than me.)
...anyway, of course that means I've gotten NOTHING ELSE done except some snow shoveling and some fingerloop, so that's fun.
I want to do a whole long rant about how they're pushing really hard to clear the roads at the expense of pedestrian access, and if previous patterns hold, there will still be five-foot piles of snow on all the wheelchair access ramps come Easter, but you can probably take that as read.
This sounds super virtuous, but tbh my laptop is so cranky these days that it is not a pleasure to use it. Also I spent most of that time listening to podcasts on my phone while playing solitaire, so it actually wasn't virtuous at all.
The podcast I was listening to is Rex Factor, recommended by sister, which is reviewing and rating all the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland. So far I have made it from Alfred the Great to Mary Tudor. And earned 85 stars in the solitaire app.
So far, the podcast is mostly making me think - other than 'wow, I don't remember nearly as much British political history as I thought' and 'this is actually a really good way to do history' - is just how much power women always had. Like, you read 'feminist history' things that talk about shifts in womens' rights over time, or that pick out individual powerful women, but what you get going through right in order like this is that there was almost always a woman running things. Like, there's occasional gaps, like some of the Saxon kings who outlived their mothers and grandmothers and then deliberately didn't marry, or the last decade of Henry the 8th's reign after Queen Katherine was too old to lead his armies for him anymore. But what the versions that pick out the powerful women make it easy to miss is that they weren't actually... exceptional? Like, I'm pretty sure up to the point where I am, there were about as many Queens of England who led armies to battle as there were Kings of England. (Well, maybe fewer numerically because they've tended to live longer, but as much time in power, anyway.)
Anyway, also it's got me thinking that I need to study up some dynastic history that isn't British because that's really the only ones I've ever studied. And the podcast listening has woken up the princesses who live in my head, who need at least some history influence other than British, since they live in what is basically Doggerland. (Every little girl had princesses they made up and have whole dynastic histories for, right? Mine are eight sisters: one of them becomes an architect, two become ruling queens, one becomes a sorceress-saint, one becomes a knight, one becomes a scholar, one becomes a banker, and one never amounts to anything much. Only one of 'em marries a prince; he marries her because she promises to win his war for him if she gets to run the country afterward and he's like, eh, better her than me.)
...anyway, of course that means I've gotten NOTHING ELSE done except some snow shoveling and some fingerloop, so that's fun.
I want to do a whole long rant about how they're pushing really hard to clear the roads at the expense of pedestrian access, and if previous patterns hold, there will still be five-foot piles of snow on all the wheelchair access ramps come Easter, but you can probably take that as read.
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I'd rec French dynastic history, especially the Valois and Bourbons. Very interesting and great women all around.
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...I kind of want to do Holy Roman Emperors but that is such a mess.
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I've heard the new Mary Beard book is good, but have not yet gotten to it.
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My princesses are technically the inflection point in a universe that starts with not-actually-ancient-sumer and ends with galactic civilization, but I only ever mapped out the family tree from about c. 900 to c. 1900, and that was mostly just the main regnal line, until they went full-democracy in the early 1800s and then I started following the part-African-part-North-American cadet line.)
(and none of them lived 900 years old. Also shockingly, given my current proclivities! but that universe is sort of light on magic: there's magic but it's not showy, usually. My millenia-old characters were mostly nonhuman and from a different universe, with very little in the way of family trees, because the fantasy novels with century-long lifespans but families that looked like modern US families never made any sense to me on a worldbuilding level.)
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I think you probably put more work into yours. Mine was mainly an excuse to have Jedi-Timelord-Librarians (just like me!) fuck with continuity and save/murder canon characters.
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There was one where the Enterprise got sent off to another dimension/time/whatever and the descendants somehow passed down roles in the crew via genetics, and so Picard and Vash's great-grandchild was in command when they re-established contact with the Federation (also they colonized a planet somewhere in there).
But the one that I spent by far the most time on--including writing out all the genealogies and such--was the one about Spock and Saavik's daughter and her descendants and how she became the Eldest Mother for the clan (yes, I was Heavily Influenced by the 80s and early 90s TOS books, especially Diane Duane's) and also a High Priestess, and such. I lost the genealogy, but I still play around with the character occasionally.
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Though I wanted to finish Eldest Mother of the clan with of the Cave Bear. Which might either explain a lot of things, or be a crossover too far.
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I love A.C. Crispin's Trek books, too. Zar was awesome!
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Off the Latest Things page
You're right that none of those queens were exceptional. But then none of the kings were either.
This is a general question being asked, here and now, because yours in one of several posts that have, in some way, sort of complained that certain women weren't especially exceptional. Here it is:
Why must women be exceptional to be important (or *more* important) than some guys who just happened to be born royal, or who got actual military instruction, or any kind of education, and then acted on it?
Why do men get to just be men, but we women have to be exceptional?
It seems to be a general expectation that various women who made some kind of difference, in whichever way, were also somehow superhuman. They really weren't. A little smarter, maybe, or maybe they had clearer insights into things once considered commonplace, or they paid more attention to their husband's studies than he'd ever have thought possible. But at heart they were ordinary women, not much different to me. That's why women like that are role models: we can relate to them.
Truly exceptional people are almost creatures set apart. One might admire them. But emulate them even slightly? Not possible, unless one is also exceptional in a way that sets one apart.
I'd rather look at someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and say to my step-granddaughter, "Oh yes, you can be every bit like her, because she was and is every bit like you." I couldn't do that if I regarded Justice Ginsburg as exceptional.
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Re: Off the Latest Things page
Re: Off the Latest Things page
But the word 'exceptional' is one that's been used by men for a long time to keep us women in our place: no, we couldn't possibly be the next Marie Curie ("No, you can't be like Amelia Earhart," said my father) because she was exceptional.
We're using that word in much the same way, still. Not good.
Re: Off the Latest Things page
I mean, before I listened to this podcast, I would have said, why can't I ever remember which Queen Eleanor it was who went on Crusade?
...I couldn't remember which one because it wasn't one. It was both of them. Queen Eleanors go on Crusade, it's what they do. And yet, everything I had read, most of which was trying to be feminist! gave the impression that the Queen Eleanor they're talking about was the exception, because of course there was only one Queen of England who went to war, it's such an odd thing for a Queen of England to do, especially at that time in history!
It's really, really not. Queens of England have always gone to war, in every period of history and every dynasty. It's not exceptional. It's great, but not exceptional. And teaching people it's exceptional is a way of teaching people they can't.
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We sometimes tell one or two stories about them--for example, when I was a pre-teen I absolutely LOVED a book called Emma Edmonds, Nurse and Spy. But those books often make it seem like whatever one the book focuses on was EXTREMELY UNUSUAL, rather than one of hundreds or thousands.
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And the thing is, I knew about most of these Queens of England and what they did - (ok, Emma of Normandy was mostly new to me) but every single one was presented to me as the only one, or as a product of very particular times and circumstances, so I never actually realized how common it was until I just went through them all in order with no particular agenda, and then it became obvious.
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It's a pretty hilarious podcast! Their main thesis is basically 'royalty should at least be entertaining' and Aly speaks a dialect that I honestly thought only existed in Wodehousian parodies but he is 100 percent real and super into castles and it's adorable.
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