— I do not remember having opened a single book in my life in which there is no allusion, in one way or another, to the inconstancy of women.
All the songs and all the proverbs revolve around female foibles, says Captain Harville.
— Do not take your example from the books.
Men have always enjoyed an advantage, and that is to be narrators of their own history.
They have had all the privileges of education, and, in addition, they have had the pen in their hands.
No, I do not allow you to present the books as evidence, Anne Elliot replies.
This conversation occurred in 1816, in the middle of the pages of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
.
More than two centuries later, these excerpts appear in the middle of
The Missing Ones.
A history of the different world
(Taurus, 2022), by Cristina Oñoro, a book that Austen could use as proof of her own argument.
It is a work that brings together 13 women through whose intrahistories it is perceived how that continued to happen, how it still happens today, to different degrees and according to latitude: history, configured from and for men.
And she is reading the complete story, the one that includes the women that the men did not tell, of course, clearly, the present.
Wombs for rent?
Aeschylus already pointed out manners in
The Eumenides
: “The mother is the begetter of the one whom she calls her son, but only the nurse of the newly sown germ.
She begets the one that fertilizes, while she only keeps the shoot”.
Assume the construction of gender (the masculine) to rebel against it or be free through it?
Joan of Arc, Agnodice, and Victoria Kent already did.
That the criteria, work and capacity of women are beaten or made invisible just because they are women?
He happened to Malinche and Rosa Parks.
Conciliation and help from the environment for professional development?
A look at the history of Marie Curie can be a master's degree in co-responsibility and family support.
Many of the openings that feminism still has to close or debate were already there before, some of them always.
And Oñoro —42 years old, philosopher, doctor in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid— decided on March 8, 2018 that she was going to ask 13 women about all these open questions.
None alive, so she began to “study her absences”, and she recounts it one Monday morning in April.
Ask.
What was she looking for?
Response.
My intention was not to repeat the stories we already know, but to ask these characters about questions that are open right now in feminism: if the story had been well told, complete, the world today would be different.
And this is a look at moments in history loaded with meaning to raise questions.
Q.
An example.
R.
Cleopatra.
She had had a daughter, who had outlived her and who had reigned.
There the question is who was left in charge of our memories, the memories of our mothers, our grandmothers.
Who stays now?
Or the life of Marie Curie, whom we know more as a scientist, but her family structure is more unknown to those who have not immersed themselves in her own writings.
P.
Marie Curie is conciliation.
R.
They [Pierre and Marie Curie] were so interested in symmetries... On an almost metaphorical level, it served a bit of gender symmetry that exists.
P.
But always surrounded by men, yes, men who shared work and care with her.
R.
In it we have for the first time the face of a woman in a photograph with the great scientists, but it is the only one, however, it does not appear as an exception, which is precisely what I tried to avoid in my book, I did not want to present to the 13 women as exceptions, but to look for the way in which the story of Marie Curie could repeat itself again.
And I found the figure of her father-in-law, which is fascinating.
He was the one who stayed with the girls so she could go to the lab.
And also Pierre, who was very insistent that she carry out her work and set aside her own research interests to embrace hers.
Participants in the first Solvay Conference, in Brussels, in 1911. From left to right, seated, Walther Nernst, Marcel Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Henri Poincaré .
Standing, Robert Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Arnold Sommerfeld, Frederick Lindemann, Maurice de Broglie, Martin Knudsen, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, Georges Hostelet, Edouard Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein and Paul Langevin .Benjamin Couprie
P.
There is another issue that underlies the entire book: the little or much trace that remains of women has often been written by other women.
A.
Selene, Cleopatra's daughter, reflects that very well in the book.
With those little coins that she makes [Selene minted some coins in which, surrounding her face, the inscription Queen Cleopatra, daughter of Cleopatra is read], and where there may be, perhaps, a story of commemoration of her maternal memory .
It is in that part of the book where I point out that we are much more culturally educated for the great epics, not for cultural forms that have to do with the feminine.
P.
And the small, in quotes, is left out of history.
R.
Yes. Sometimes it seems that, in contrast, the small stories, those that have to do with the realities that women have sometimes lived, do not enter, because we have that look.
Valuing a culture that is not at the center of the canon or that we have undervalued with our system of high and low culture, and that has often been associated with the masculine and the feminine.
And it is the women who on many occasions have recovered those legacies.
In the book I try to be attentive to those small tributes that women have made to recover themselves.
Activist Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus.
Q.
In
Rosa Parks' chapter, recalls Charles Payne writing, "They led the [civil rights] movement, but they organized it."
A.
Totally.
And it's not like I had to search a lot to find those wonderful phrases, the pearls that Parks tells in her own memoirs, when she remembers that Edgar Daniel Nixon told her that the place of women is the kitchen and then she replied: " What do you want me to be here for?"
And he answered: “Because you are a very good secretary, can you bring me the sandwich?”
It is logical that we are fascinated with the character and with the speech and with the magnetism of figures like Martin Luther King, but it seems that history is frozen there and the boycott [sitting on the buses in the seats reserved for whites and also stopping use them] is less well known.
And it was a movement in which many women participated at a logistical, organizational level.
P.
In Rosa Parks or in Malinche the myth of the eternal intern is very well reflected.
Women displaced to the background, when not totally invisible, despite their knowledge and criteria.
R.
In the figure of Malinche it is very evident.
I was interested in approaching her figure from there, from her role as translator, interpreter, which she is making possible, holding a historical scene.
Although she, like many others, are relegated to areas of darkness.
The importance that she had in the communication between two visions of the world, Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, is not sufficiently recognized.
P.
Malinche is better known, although her story has often been reviewed from an androcentric perspective, but how much do you think is known, in general, about the life of the thinker Simone Weil?
A.
Not much probably.
I chose her because it seemed to me that her philosophy connected wonderfully with feminism from relational ethics, from care, from a more dialogical vision of the world.
And I was fascinated by her project that there would be nurses who would go to the front line unarmed in World War II to care for the wounded or accompany the dying, as a symbol.
A moral antagonism to the image of the SS, which is the image of death, of violence.
It seemed to me that there was a very interesting philosophical line there, that of care.
P.
Care, how and who cares, is also something that appears in one way or another in all the chapters.
In Mary Wollstonecraft's, for example, that care spans from the girls she educates when she was a governess to her daughters later.
In her case, special care for the time because the axis was education.
It's her favorite, right?
R.
[Oñoro laughs] Yes, is it very noticeable?
It is that she was able to think against those who had taught her to think to side with all women, even those with whom she had no common interests, such as aristocrats.
That gesture of thinking against the teacher of her establishing a relationship of gender identification with other women, including those who were not like her, is the reason why she is one of the mothers of modern feminism.
Q.
From that metaphorical awakening to rebel against her teachers in Wollstonecraft to “Elsa, wake up” that Anna says to her sister in
Frozen
and that is the last chapter, the postscript of the book.
What does she think she has to be awake now, from feminism?
A.
Because everything that has been achieved is not definitively won, which is something that can be seen throughout the chapters.
The book begins there, in 2018, with that strength and that spirit of 2018 is what must be taken care of, return to it, not take it for granted.
We have to keep going.
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