Behind the Scenes Minis: Learned Women and Sharkey

Tracy shares a funny confusion about Unitarians and the University of Utrecht she kept having during research. Holly talks about how often escape stories to claim the escaper was never heard from again, even if that's not true.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy d Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This week we talked about Anna
Maria van Sherman, probably the most educated woman in Europe

(00:24):
of her time. A weird thing that kept throwing me
for a loop. Not really a weird thing, A random
thing that kept throwing me for a loop is the
Utrecht University website. Yeah, is at you? You dot NL
so you dot the extension for the Netherlands. And I
kept seeing this in my research and my bookmarks and

(00:47):
all of that. Having a dear friend who is a
she is a reverend with the Unitarian Universalist Church, I
kept having a moment where I was like, Oh, how
are the Unitarians involved with this story? Because anytime like well,

(01:08):
like let's just say we're like planning to go to
a protest together, I'll say, hey, where are where are
you going to be? I will be out with the UUs, okay,
And so it's just in my head the US are
the Unitarians. And so I kept having a moment where
I would kind of double take every time the University
came up in the research. We talked at the beginning
of the episode about how I've had a whole lot

(01:31):
of episodes clustered in the nineteenth and twentieth century, which
means I was kind of out of practice with subjects
like the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War
and how they overlapped and were connected, but they're not
quite the same thing. I am pretty sure one of
my sources had a moment of deep confusion where they
called something the Seven Years War that was a totally

(01:53):
different It's not doneying. It's funny. It's almost like learning
a language, Like it's funny how quickly that's stuff can
leave you when you go to work on studying something
else for a while and I come back and I'm like,
I don't remember how any of this stuff worked. I
don't remember who was the monarch of what when and
what they did. Like I have to do cliffs notes

(02:14):
for everything to get up to speed. Yeah, I think
this the like the year so far, has been sort
of the longest stretch for me in so recent a
time period on the show, which was not really on
purpose exactly, but it did make this episode kind of challenging.
One of the things that we talked about was these
catalogs of learned women. Obviously they did not only exist

(02:39):
just in this one part of history. We did an
episode on Christine de Pisan and the Book of the
City of Ladies that had some similarities to this, like
that chronicled learned women through history and in mythology. There
were other chronicles, lists, catalogs of learned women, and we
talked about how this was sort of it sort of

(03:01):
served as an example like, hey, here are all of
these women that were all really learned women have the
ability to learn. Another thing that some of the people
who compiled these seemed to think that they would be
good for that also applied specifically to Anne Marie van Sherman.
There was this kind of idea of like, hey, what
if we made learning really trendy for women, that more

(03:26):
women would go out and learn, And there just wasn't
sometimes a connection to the fact that, like one of
the reasons that there were not a lot of educated
women is that women were barred from access to education.
So yeah, you could make it seem really fun and

(03:48):
cool to be an educated woman, but that wasn't going
to do anything about the fact that most women had
no access to school of any sort. R, it's so
cool to be this thing you can never be, like yeah,
likeol set up and if you know, if your family
was in what we might think of as like the

(04:08):
middle class, you probably did not have a lot of
time to be teaching yourself to read at the start
of thing, right, So, like that was just I kept
kind of going, yeah, I mean, sure it would be
great if more women and the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth century

(04:31):
area era had been educated, but like it wasn't just
to pull yourself up by your bootstrap situation. Hey, everybody,
it never is. It never is. So it also feels
to me every instance of that and like all the
times that you included in this outline when dudes were like,

(04:52):
you should publish your work, it's so important. No I
don't want it, Well I'm gonna do it. It seemed so
much like sort of the performative lip service thing of
like I support women's education. Look at me, publishing this
thing against the women involves wishes, but still I'm really
I support women, you guys totally. I'm totally one of

(05:12):
the good ones. It's like uh yeah, yeah, yeah, there
are structural barriers at work here. It applies to so
many things in our world today, structural barriers going on
keeping people from being able to access whatever the thing is. Also,

(05:35):
it is tough to understand, like the sexual mores of
four hundred years ago, but her dad's fixation on her
virginity freaky feel feels weird to a modern freakyky. I

(05:55):
that that gave me the ick, a little bit super ick,
because I mean, for many reasons there are takeaway any
of the like why are you so fixated on this part?
My thing is that if at that point he recognizes

(06:16):
that she should be educated, that she's clearly very smart
and deserves to learn things, to cut off a whole
part of the human condition from her information is kind
of kneecapping the way in which she can understand a
lot of the other things she's studying, right, And I

(06:36):
don't like it, Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's
a weird issue where what people see as immoral in
many cases is really just human. And I understand the
desire not to expose people to things before they are ready,

(06:57):
but at some point humans have to understand the breadth
of human experience. If they're truly going to be an intellectual,
is my opinion, right, right. I am so inherently rebellious
and was as a kid that if somebody told me
you cannot have access to this, I'd be like, fine,
expurgate away, I will find another copy, like I Yeah.

(07:24):
One of the things that I found interesting about her is,
like we talked about the description of her as like
the Sappho of Utrecht, or like the Dutch Sapho. Yeah,
and how at the time that was really that was
about her poetry, and the connotation of sapho and lesbianism

(07:44):
like wasn't quite as established as it is now, not
something that we talked about in that recent Saturday classic,
and I did not. Everything that I read about her
suggests that she was celibate for her whole life. She
never married, that this was deeply religiously and spiritually important

(08:05):
to her. Simultaneously, it was not typical for a Protestant
woman to lead a celibate life in this way, right,
Like the social expectation was for women to get married
and have children. It was more established among Catholic women

(08:28):
to have you know, convents and nunneries and all of that,
and like that just it wasn't quite as like that
that role didn't exist in quite the same way for
Protestant women at this point, even though like the entire
idea of non Catholic Christian religions was very early like

(08:50):
this is this is during the Reformation and counter Reformation.
So if you look at like queer history as a
big umbrella in which we can think of queerness as
like anyone who's sexual or gender identity isn't aligning with
or is like expanding beyond what is expected of them

(09:12):
in their society, Like, she does still kind of fit
in that, in with that because of this chastity that
she stuck with her whole life. So even though the
term sappho as a connection to like lesbianism doesn't quite
line up with what we know of her, the fact
that she was so focused on her own chastity kind

(09:33):
of still sets her apart from the the expectations of
women at the time and also super weird in position
by her father. Yeah, I don't know, So I don't
know if we have a sense of like her feelings

(09:55):
about a lot of stuff, right, Like, she wrote these,
she wrote treatises, she wrote letters, she wrote works that
still survived. She wrote things that other people published on
her behalf that are still around, but like, that doesn't
really give us a sense of like her inner self. Yeah,
so yeah, yeah, I did find her father asking her

(10:16):
to promise that on his deathbed to be of yikes,
super weird. I also had the very, you know, personally
giggly aspect of when she got rid of all of
her poetry towards the end of her life and the
many theories about what that meant. There was part of
me that was like, what if this was just an
issue of practicality where one day she was like, there's

(10:37):
so many junkie notebooks around here. Yeah. I definitely destroyed
some stuff when I was moving the last time that
I moved. Yeah, that was about I really really wanted to.
We were in an apartment that had too much stuff

(10:59):
and it is bothering my consciousness, and I really wanted
us to get into a house and not feel like
we were drowning and stuffy. And so I went through
a bunch of file folders and notebooks and file cabinet
and stuff like that, and I purged a bunch of stuff,
and some of it was I don't want to be

(11:20):
buried on under all of these papers anymore. And some
of it was also these these things I wrote when
I was twenty are embarrassing and no one ever needs
to see them ever again in kidding me, have ditched
a lot of things in that mindset. Yeah, there is
almost nothing that I regret having disposed of in that

(11:44):
kind of mindset. Yeah. No, And I like, there was
one thing and I don't even remember what it was now.
There was one thing that I briefly was like, ah,
I wish I had not gotten rid of that thing
so long ago, But now I don't even remember what
that was. So, yeah, we talked about William Sharky this week.

(12:11):
We did. We did murder, although it's not a no
murder is good obviously, but this isn't a particularly grisly one, right,
and becomes very mired in legalese. Yes. One of the
things that is very interesting about any of these types
of stories where it's like this person escaped is that
there very quickly becomes a lot of writing about how

(12:34):
they were never seen again, and I'm like, nope. There
were literally newspaper reports all the time of like, yeah,
he's still in Cuba. We know. Similarly, Maggie's story is
often written about as though she just vanishes into the ether,
and I'm like, nope. I found the report of her
husband's death and how she at leth that specifically mentions
his widow, Maggie Jordan, who helped William Sharky escape from prison,

(12:58):
Like it's not a secret where she right? Right? I
know it's more fun to have more mystery, but that
also isn't the truth all the time? Right? I love
what a ding dong Monty python move this was? Yeah, yeah,
I really did. When I read through this earlier this morning,

(13:20):
I got to the Parliament about them finding remnants of
his mustache, and there was a chortal, like an out
loud chortle at my desk, not expecting that to be
it's pretty good. It reminded me of William Maxwell, the
fifth Earl of Nidsdale, who similarly, but in seventeen fifteen,

(13:43):
was disguised as a woman to escape prison by his wife.
He was in the Tower of London, though, and I wanted,
I want to travel back in time and go, Maggie,
did you read history books? Is that what we gave you?
This idea? Because it's a real similar escape. Yeah, William
sharky sounds like not a cool dude, no to hang
out with. He clearly had a horrible temper, maybe a

(14:06):
chip on his shoulder, not a not a good dude,
and you know, using a gun to gesticulate with. Yeah,
and then mistreated the person who helped him escape from prison.
Not a good dude. Incidentally, though, we mentioned in the
episode that Maggie's story again gets written in a very
tropy way of like she was a good girl from

(14:26):
a good family, but then she just turned to a
life of crime. But she there's a little more nuanced
there to that, because she was not the only person
in her family who had criminal dealings. I found a
newspaper account of her brother getting arrested for theft. You know,
it's not as sort of black and white and storybook

(14:50):
as he would right normally right here in discussions of her.
But I love a good story of a person in
drag that whole I got so mired in all of
the coverage of the court case because the whole situation

(15:11):
with the judge basically going no, no, it was fine no,
and then a higher court going, ooh, wait a minute,
you actually do have some points in this filing. He
did do some stuff wrong. I mean, we know, no
human is you know, beyond fallibility. But it also points
out that the way then, and I would say is

(15:34):
probably going on in instances now that like one official
in the justice system can completely shift the outcome of
a trial or of a legal situation. Sure, like, as
I said, Sharkey not a good dude, but it does

(15:55):
actually kind of sound based on all the witnesses, like
he didn't actually mean to shoot, done right, but yet
he was convicted of first degree murder, which yeah includes intent,
largely because the judge really really whiffed it on his
jury instructions. Yeah, yeah, really deeply irresponsible to just be

(16:18):
kind of pounding on something while holding a gun. Yeah,
don't do that. Definitely reasons don't do that. Yeah, I
just you know, any combination of bad temper, alcohol, firearm
recipe for disaster. It was then, it is now. I

(16:39):
hope nobody in our audience gesticulates with a gun when
they are angry forever, because that's not a way to
have a discussion. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of all I
have on William J. Sharky. Just don't live his life,
don't know him don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah.

(17:04):
If you have some time off this weekend, which I
hope you do, I hope you eat the most delicious
thing you've ever tasted in your life. We need more
fun and delicious things. I hope you have like the
best sleep you've ever had in your life. I just
hope everybody has a best of moment this weekend, because
we need it. Frankly, if you don't have time off

(17:27):
and you actually have to do responsible things, I'm sorry,
I feel you, But I hope you still find maybe
the most delicious thing you've ever had in your life,
or maybe just a return to an old favorite that
gives you comfort. There are so many wonderful things in
this world, and I hope everybody reaches out and enjoys
them all as much as they are capable of. We
will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode,

(17:48):
and then on Monday we'll have something brand new. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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