From Eve to the Modern Woman: The Challenges We Face

Perhaps the only people today who can understand what it was like for women in the Middle Ages are those who live under Taliban rule though, actually, even medieval life wasn't quite as tough as it is for them.

We can't really know the suffocation of being discriminated against by the law of the land, by a God who'd made you inferior, and religious leaders who disapproved of, almost hated, your sex.

Nevertheless, there was just the faintest whiff of that still around when I was young, enough for me to try and imagine the situation of a woman - in this case, my 12th century trained fictional doctor Adelia -- with brains and skill who must hide them from nearly everybody, or be punished.

A nicely-brought up girl as unprepared for male hostility as a petunia for weedkiller, I became a news reporter in London's Fleet Street at the age of twenty. Male contemporaries, bless 'em, were fine. It was the older generation who were vicious. Hell, there'd been female war correspondents in their time, you'd have thought they'd be used to us. But no.

Submit to their sexual harassment and you were cheap; if you didn't - and we didn't -- you were a lesbian. (That still goes on, of course, but in those days it was considered a masculine right.) Men, no better writers than we women, were promoted over our heads.
Fleet Street's best drinking hole - a valuable place for finding a new job --wouldn't allow us at the bar. Some of us stormed the place, insisting on buying a drink on principle, only to be thrown out - and I mean, thrown.

When the Marines invited journalists on a tough two-day exercise and I, the only woman, turned up for my newspaper, it was a problem. No female could spend the night on a naval vessel unless a special guard was outside her cabin - for which there wasn't faculty. Sorry, they said, but go home. I kicked, I yelled. I told them I didn't know who they were insulting most -- me or the Royal Navy. Who did they think would rape whom? Eventually, they compromised and got me to the landing beach by jeep rather than ship where, camouflaged, face blackened and crawling inland on my belly under covering fire of live ammunition, I had a lovely time. Men's games are fun.

Petty frustrations, I know; hardly pinpricks compared with not having the vote, or a right to your children or property or education.

The thing was, protest though we did, we thought that was the way life worked. And there's the killer. Since Year Dot, since Eve bit into that bloody apple, male propaganda has portrayed women as servants, inferior, mere ovens in which to cook the next generation, - and we believed it.

How amazing then are those who didn't. And there they are, even in the 12th century. Unconforming Heloise writing with passion and beauty to Abelard, her lost lover. Matilda, really the first queen of England, who spoke three languages, fighting for her throne against the usurping Stephen and gaining it for her son...

I could go on. Given an education, women were able to raise their heads above the parapet so that we can still see them. A treatise called The Trotula shows that the liberated school of medicine at Salerno took women as students. Why not, therefore, my character Adelia? I make no apology for her. I'm proud of her, proud of all of them.

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Ariana Franklin wrote Mistress of the Art of Death and is the next featured author in the Sisterhood Group.

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