1718
John Montagu (no "e" please), fourth Earl of Sandwich (no mayonnaise please), who gave his name to smoked salmon and cream cheese on granary, to pastrami on rye, and to those horrible things with processed cheese and curled-up edges that they used to serve on British Rail, born today in 1718; and another name to be added to the Hansom, Bloomer, Macintosh etc list of people on May 26 who gave their names to....
... except that Sandwich also gave his name to the Sandwich Islands (and see Jan 18), and though he gave his name to the sandwich, he didn't actually invent it. That distinction belongs to Hillel the Elder in the first century BCE, the founding Rabbi of Talmudic Judaism, who moved from Babylon to Jerusalem in order to teach his version of the faith to interested locals, and also brought his non-spiritual recipe book. A Hillel Sandwich, as it is now called, is eaten at Pesach (Passover), and it comprises - unless like me you have a nut allergy - a mixture made by chopping nuts, apples and spices and then moistening them mit a kleine droppele of kosher wine, all of which is then eaten between two wafers of matzah. This is not, however, what Hillel ate: he took meat from the Temple sacrifice, and some of the bitter herbs, and put them between the matzah wafers. Korech is the technical name.
1793
1793
Stephen Fuller Austin, the man who gave his name to the capital of Texas, born today in 1793. Some people get whole towns (Alexandria, Washington, Melbourne), and even countries (Bolivia, Rhodesia, Israel) named after them, and some like me get named after the tiny village of their ancestry, while huge numbers of towns, especially in America and Canada, are named nostalgically after the towns the people came from - very weird, being in London Ontario, or Paris Texas, or Palermo Buenos Aires, or finding yourself in Ithaca and it isn't Homer's Greece but up-state New York... the illustration at the top, by the way, though that particular example was built in New York, is technically and correctly a Texas Sandwich...
But enough of this whimsicality, and why have I placed the man first on this date, when surely, especially in this context, where "Woman is born free and
lives equal to man in her rights"...
So wrote Marie-Olympe de Gouges, or plain Marie Gouze when she was born, on May 7, 1748, in Montauban, just north of Toulouse, in that part of France where serious cultural and intellectual life had been rooted for the past seven hundred years. Somewhat more prophetically she also wrote, in “Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” that "Woman
has the right to mount the Scaffold; she must also have that of mounting the
Rostrum". There were
actually two versions of the "Rights of Woman", the first merely a pamphlet, the second an extension based on the
critiques she had received, and her own further thinking on the various subjects, including strong support
for people who are not self-evidently light-skinned.
The proposal for non-marital
partnership agreements as an alternative to marriage contracts belongs to the revised
version, part of an attempt to describe ways to make every aspect of life
meaningful for women; and though she did not include the abolition of slavery,
you can find that in her plays.
No one of her time went quite so far in advocating for the triplet of the Revolution, but it was she who turned it into a quartet, adding Sororité to what was otherwise the still male-dominated Liberté, Egalite and Fraternité.
“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” was published in 1791, and it insisted that women must stop allowing themselves to be victims, must stop serving merely as the “nocturnal administrators” of men, that women were responsible for their misfortunes because they collaborated in their own victimhood and passively complied with the patriarchy (my phrases, but the intent is clear in hers); whereas, if they formed sisterhoods to support each other, and dedicated themselves to creating a new woman with a new attitude to life, they could change the world.
Unfortunately, among the tiny number of people who had the literacy to read it, most counted among the leadership of the Revolution, who had already issued edicts prohibiting public protests by women, and banning “women's clubs” even in their purely social forms. De Gouges was arrested, accused of being counter-revolutionary, and sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793.
The full text of the “Rights of Woman” can be found here
No one of her time went quite so far in advocating for the triplet of the Revolution, but it was she who turned it into a quartet, adding Sororité to what was otherwise the still male-dominated Liberté, Egalite and Fraternité.
“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” was published in 1791, and it insisted that women must stop allowing themselves to be victims, must stop serving merely as the “nocturnal administrators” of men, that women were responsible for their misfortunes because they collaborated in their own victimhood and passively complied with the patriarchy (my phrases, but the intent is clear in hers); whereas, if they formed sisterhoods to support each other, and dedicated themselves to creating a new woman with a new attitude to life, they could change the world.
Unfortunately, among the tiny number of people who had the literacy to read it, most counted among the leadership of the Revolution, who had already issued edicts prohibiting public protests by women, and banning “women's clubs” even in their purely social forms. De Gouges was arrested, accused of being counter-revolutionary, and sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793.
The full text of the “Rights of Woman” can be found here
1901
André Malraux, French novelist, born today in 1901, in Paris France, which it might surprise you to know is not named after the anti-hero of Homer's novel, but is really Par-Ys - "like Ys" - the envious Franks looking west at the glorious Breton city of Ys, the most beautiful city ever built, until one day King Gradlon's daughter Dahut stole the keys that kept the dam secure that kept the waters of the Atlantic Ocean from pouring in, and when she unlocked it the legend of the sunken city of Atlant-Ys was born. Honestly. It's all in my book "The Land Beside The Sea".
I should have given advance warning of this too... Ethelred the Unready led the English in a massacre of the Danes, today in 1002. Not sure why I am including him, except that his sobriquet is irresistible. And perhaps a vague idea for another book, a book from which to learn some of the more painful lessons of history. The Book of Unreadiness. Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 will definitely get a chapter, Kara Mustafa for certain (see May 21), and Chamberlain the Unready too - see July 22...
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