Women from History

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Women from History 📖 Let's explore women’s history !
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30/09/2026

Religions are so funny, like the world is just too beautiful, there must be a higher entity behind all this!
Anyway, let's oppress women.

30/09/2026

During China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), women were frequently represented in funerary figurines known as mingqi. Buried in aristocratic tombs, these small sculptures depicted dancers, musicians, court ladies, horsewomen and polo players, offering a rare glimpse into elite women’s lives and activities.
Their significance lies partly in their movement. Tang women appear riding horses, playing polo, dancing and performing music, activities that challenge the static image of women often associated with later periods of Chinese history. The cosmopolitan Tang court, shaped by extensive cultural exchanges across Central Asia, encouraged fashions, sports and artistic practices that crossed cultural boundaries.
Most of the women represented remain anonymous, their names and personal histories lost. Yet their bodies, clothing, hairstyles and gestures were considered important enough to reproduce and place within the tomb, where mingqi were intended to accompany the deceased into the afterlife.
Today, some of these Tang funerary figures are displayed at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Their presence in a French museum also raises questions that go beyond their artistic value: how were these objects excavated, acquired and brought to France and what was lost when they were removed from their original funerary contexts? Like many Asian antiquities preserved in European collections, they have a history of circulation that is inseparable from the history of collecting, archaeology and the unequal relations through which cultural heritage entered Western museums.

30/09/2026

Christopher Columbus was glorified in history books for centuries. He was presented as a daring explorer who “discovered” America. But behind that familiar story lies the violence of the colonial system he helped establish.

Columbus was not simply an explorer passing through the Caribbean. As governor of Hispaniola, he presided over a colonial regime built on the exploitation and enslavement of Indigenous people. Indigenous people were forced into labour, captured and transported, while Columbus and the colonists under his authority treated human beings as commodities.

And women were not spared. They were enslaved, sexually exploited and sold within the colonial economy. One particularly disturbing piece of evidence comes from a letter Columbus wrote in 1500 to Doña Juana de la Torre, a woman close to Queen Isabella of Castile. At the time, Columbus had just been removed as governor and arrested by Francisco de Bobadilla, who had been sent by the Crown to investigate his administration. Columbus was eventually sent back to Spain in chains. Contemporary accusations against his government included severe abuses and brutal punishments.

In his letter, Columbus described the situation in Hispaniola. He wrote that a woman could be worth 100 castellanos and that there were “plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls.” He then added that girls aged nine or ten were “now in demand,” while women of all ages could fetch a good price.

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~ The life of Amastris, part I ~Amastris (340/39–285 BCE) was a niece of the Persian king Darius III (r. 336–330 BCE), t...
30/09/2026

~ The life of Amastris, part I ~

Amastris (340/39–285 BCE) was a niece of the Persian king Darius III (r. 336–330 BCE), through her father Oxyathres. Over the course of her life, she was married successively to Alexander the Great’s general Craterus, the tyrant Dionysius of Heraclea Pontica and Lysimachus of Thrace. She founded a city in Paphlagonia that bore her name and became the first queen to issue coinage in her own name.

Despite the remarkable trajectory of her life, Amastris has received comparatively little attention from historians. She deserves particular consideration as one of the earliest Hellenistic queens. Her career illustrates the complex entanglement of Persian and Greco-Macedonian political traditions, while also revealing the extent to which royal women could exercise power in the early Hellenistic world.

As the daughter of Oxyathres, brother of the last Achaemenid king, Darius III Codomannus, Amastris was effectively the last surviving Achaemenid princess. Nothing is known about her mother, although the only woman associated with Oxyathres in the surviving evidence is an Egyptian concubine named Timosa.

After the Battle of Issus in 333 BCE, Alexander the Great encountered Amastris among the Persian royal and noble women who had been captured. Almost a decade later, in 324 BCE, she was married to Alexander’s general Craterus during the great wedding ceremony at Susa, in which Alexander arranged marriages between his Macedonian commanders and Persian and Median women. Craterus was, alongside Hephaestion, the only one of Alexander’s companions to marry a Persian princess.

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29/09/2026

Women were working, creating, fighting, organizing, inventing, shaping societies too. Much of it simply wasn’t recorded, or the records that did exist were never preserved.

29/09/2026

What happened in a room like this when the men weren’t talking about politics?

This is the Demarteau Salon at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, a remarkable example of an eighteenth-century Parisian interior. The room was commissioned around 1765 by Gilles Demarteau, a successful engraver and publisher, and its elaborate decoration was designed in the artistic circles surrounding François Boucher.

At first glance, it might seem like nothing more than a beautiful aristocratic interior. But rooms like this can tell us something important about women’s history.

The eighteenth-century home was not simply a private space separated from the intellectual and political world. For women of the social elites in particular, domestic spaces could be important places of sociability. Receiving guests, organizing dinners and gatherings, maintaining family and social networks, discussing literature and art and facilitating encounters between intellectuals and artists could all be part of women’s social roles.

This is one of the reasons why the history of the famous eighteenth-century salons cannot simply be reduced to women “talking in pretty rooms.” Women who hosted and participated in these gatherings could exercise a form of social and cultural influence, even though they remained excluded from many of the institutions where political and intellectual authority was formally exercised.

And of course, this was never the experience of all women. Access to these spaces depended enormously on wealth, class, education, marital status and social position. The freedom enjoyed by an elite hostess tells us very little about the lives of working-class women, servants or women without access to these networks.

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29/09/2026

How did women in prehistoric societies or in poor, rural communities in medieval and early modern Europe experience and cope with postpartum psychosis? We cannot know exactly how common it was, because the historical record is profoundly biased toward literate, urban and socially privileged populations. But postpartum psychosis is not a modern phenomenon. Women could experience hallucinations, delusions, severe confusion, paranoia and profound disturbances in their perception of their newborn child. Some could even become convinced that their baby was not truly theirs.

This makes European changeling folklore particularly intriguing. Across different regions, stories circulated about infants being stolen by fairies or other supernatural beings and replaced with a changeling: a child who appeared strangely different, sickly, disturbed or somehow no longer recognizable to its parents. We cannot establish that these stories were specifically created to explain postpartum psychosis; changeling traditions had many different meanings and were also associated with illness and developmental differences. Nevertheless, they may preserve a cultural recognition of something that modern medicine would describe very differently.

Historical communities did not possess the psychiatric concept of postpartum psychosis, but they were capable of observing its consequences. A mother could behave in ways that seemed profoundly unfamiliar, including expressing the conviction that her own child had been replaced. Rather than interpreting this experience through psychiatry, communities could understand it through the religious and supernatural frameworks available to them.

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~ Fashion Designers, Madame Labille ~Madame Labille was a Parisian marchande de modes active during the eighteenth centu...
29/09/2026

~ Fashion Designers, Madame Labille ~

Madame Labille was a Parisian marchande de modes active during the eighteenth century. Her establishment was located on the rue de la Ferronnerie, in a district characterized by numerous shops devoted to fashionable goods.

One of the most notable individuals connected with her establishment was Jeanne Bécu, the Comtesse du Barry. As a young woman, Bécu reportedly worked in Labille’s shop before entering the social world that eventually brought her to the court of Louis XV.

Unlike Bertin, Labille left no comparable body of accounts or correspondence and her biography should consequently be treated with greater caution. Nevertheless, her existence is significant precisely because she represents the numerous female fashion entrepreneurs whose names rarely survived in conventional histories of fashion.

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28/09/2026

J. Marion Sims is celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology.” But much of his reputation was built through experiments performed on enslaved Black women, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, whose bodies he repeatedly operated on without their consent and anesthesia.

28/09/2026

The mutilation of women’s faces was sometimes used as a form of punishment, humiliation and social control. Cutting or mutilating a woman’s nose was particularly significant because it was central to identity and beauty. To disfigure it was to attack both the body and the woman’s position within her community.

Historical and legal sources record instances in which women accused of adultery or “sexual transgression” were subjected to facial mutilation. Such punishments were intended to make the alleged offence permanently visible. The stigma could not easily be concealed or forgotten. Such practices reveal an important dimension of patriarchal power: controlling women could also mean controlling their appearance, reputation and capacity to participate in social life.

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