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Do Old Ladies Make World History?: Student Perceptions of Elder Female Agency
Stephen M. Woodburn
Southwestern College, Winfield, KS
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THE QUESTION MAY SEEM ODD, but it arose legitimately enough
in discussions with my students in modern world history classes
near semester's end.
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Most were not history majors and so their opinions could be considered
a representative sample of general attitudes about history, and
about this question in particular. My undergrads completely overlooked
the practical difficulty of who qualifies under the term "old lady,"
most relying on a visual rule of thumb. Some may call forty year-olds
"elderly" based on graying hair or a few wrinkles, producing cringes
from those of us old enough to know better. The worship of youth
in American culture doesn't clarify anything for them, either. We
are encouraged to remain adolescents in behavior and self-image
until old enough for a midlife crisis, when we are allowed to act
like children again. We stubbornly refuse the "senior discount"
for years after we are eligible, and support whole industries that
promise to help us defy old age. Old means "irrelevant" or worse
to many Americans who don't want to be either. The question of the
role older citizens might play in public life will elude those who
don't examine their own assumptions about age.
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Professional historians may view a question like the title in terms of a broader underlying debate: whether individuals "make history" at all, or are in fact subsumed by larger collective forces and institutions. The debate posits individual agency against social structures, in a David-and-Goliath match up. It touches some of the core issues of historical causation: does the colossus topple because of the individual striking the blow, or because it was already collapsing from within? Proponents of individual agency in history emphasize the slingshooter's accuracy or lucky strike; structuralists examine the fallen monolith for internal failures or feet of clay. The debate itself will not be neatly resolved, but both sides can be incorporated within a multicausal view of historical change, something we have in mind when we say loosely that the "time was right" for some historical event. Historical investigation into any given outcome usually uncovers some confluence between structural readiness for change and individuals permitting or actively pursuing that (or another) change. Not that any of my world history students would necessarily grasp what I've just described. To them, history is usually made by individuals whose names appear in their textbook, and for periods when there are no names, history simply "happened." |
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Because my undergraduate students mostly view the past in terms of the Great Man theory of history, which holds that those who make history are necessarily great, and usually men, their answers to the question, "Do old ladies make world history," predictably, vary from an unconditional, "No," to a noncommittal, "In the background, somewhere, maybe." Some can muster a few high-profile examples of older women on the world stage, like Mother Theresa, Queen Victoria, Clara Barton, or Sojourner Truth. They're just as likely, by the way, to confuse "old" with "having lived long ago," which leads them to include Harriet Tubman or Florence Nightingale. In point of fact, both did live to a ripe old age, but we know them for things they accomplished during their twenties and thirties. (Cleopatra, on the other hand, proves that ancient is not necessarily the same as old.) Even though these examples are all women, they still fit the Great Man theory of history as the kind of exceptions that prove the rule. |
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The Great Man theory of history is an old school notion that aligns easily with the celebrity-saturated present. The consensus is that important people must be famous, and famous people must be important. To speak of the image of the hero in history is to invoke a pantheon of figures in white marble or bronze, the "A-list" celebrities of the past. However, contemplating the heroes of history should also involve consideration of the unsung heroes, whose accomplishments go unrecognized. For instance, in St. Petersburg's Hermitage the 1812 War Gallery displays the portraits of 332 Russian generals from the victorious campaign against Napoleon. No image survives for a dozen or so, commemorated by names on empty frames. Of course for every general, there were thousands of soldiers who actually won the celebrated victory. The empty frames remind us there may be more heroes in history than we have portraits to put on display. Many average persons, old ladies included, take part in making historical events happen, even on the world stage. |
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When I posed the question of older women making history my students had already read an eyewitness account of Beijing during the demonstrations and massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. They had also read a collection of newspaper articles describing the defense of the Russian White House during the attempted coup by Soviet hardliners in 1991. In both events, masses of "average people" took part in heroic acts of resistance against authoritarian regimes. When I asked my students what types of ordinary people took part in those demonstrations, their recollections centered on young people, usually students like themselves. When I asked who else took part, they were mostly at a loss. I urged them to take another look at their sources, to see what they might have missed.2 |
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Jan Wong describes the events at Tiananmen Square in her 1996 memoir Red China Blues. As a Canadian-born Chinese, Wong first traveled to China as an exchange student to Beijing University in the early 1970s, in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. She returned to China in 1988 as a journalist, the Beijing correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail. The demonstrations at Tiananmen Square began on April 21, 1989, ostensibly as an outpouring of grief over the death of former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang, considered a proponent of reform. Excessive mourning for Hu masked overt criticism of the reigning octogenarian, Deng Xiaoping. The government's unresponsiveness fortified the resolve of the protesters, who were mainly students at first. But, as Wong observed, the students were soon joined by ordinary Chinese from all walks of life. Three weeks into the protests, on May 15, China's summit with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev breathed new life into the demonstrations and the global media focused attention on Beijing.3 |
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Gorbachev's reputation as a reformer inspired hopes of a similar turn toward new thinking in China's own Communist Party. Wong notes one banner made the point simply by contrasting the two rulers' ages: "Gorbachev, 58; Deng Xiaoping, 85." Some protestors declared a hunger strike which, as she points out, "resonated deeply in China," where the subject of hunger is not treated lightly. Approximately one thousand hunger strikers were joined by several hundred thousand sympathetic demonstrators, including Beijing workers, civil servants, and new arrivals from the countryside. Wong reports that eventually a million demonstrators clogged Beijing's streets at any given time during Gorbachev's visit, derailing the itinerary and embarrassing the government. As Wong says, Gorbachev, "a man used to the limelight...had been completely upstaged."4 |
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With the departure of Gorbachev, the demonstrators ended their weeklong hunger strike. The protests might have dissipated thereafter, but Chinese Premier Li Peng, embarrassed and exasperated, declared martial law and sent a hundred thousand troops to Beijing. This reinvigorated the student protestors, and, on the first night of martial law, brought a million Chinese of all ages into the streets, to block intersections and defend the students. At first, as Wong reports, "the soldiers were no match for the people.
Elderly women lay down in front of tanks. Schoolchildren swarmed around convoys, stopping them in their tracks. After the first tense night, the soldiers began to retreat as the crowds cheered and applauded.... The next night,...I came across a dozen military trucks engulfed by five thousand emotional civilians. Three hundred rifle-toting soldiers sat in the immobilized trucks, their fuel lines cut, frozen like bugs in amber.... I approached a middle-aged Chinese woman and identified myself as a reporter.... "The government underestimated us," she said, with a sad, proud smile. She gestured at the crowd. "Look at all the people who have come out to protect the students. The government is wrong."
...Someone lifted a case of soft drinks onto the truck. An old woman in an apron came out to collect some empty bowls. "You see," a woman in the crowd said to no one in particular, "we give them food and drink. They've been sitting here all day. The government hasn't given them anything."
...The first twenty-four hours of martial law was a huge defeat for the authorities. For the next ten days hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens manned the barricades.... The people had called the government's bluff. Martial law was marshmallow law.5
But then, after two weeks of martial law and six weeks of demonstrations, on the night of June 3–4, 1989, soldiers commenced firing on crowds in outlying parts of the city with some reaching Tiananmen Square after midnight. There were regular intervals of heavy gunfire all night and all the next day. The infamous massacre had begun. Monday June 5, provided the most enduring image from the entire confrontation: the well-known footage of the unidentified lone male demonstrator in the middle of a Beijing street, staring down a column of four tanks. It is worth noting, however, that his action, the very image of heroism at Tiananmen Square, had been prefigured days earlier, on the first night of martial law, by the elderly women Jan Wong witnessed not just standing, but lying down in front of tanks.6 |
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I next directed my students' attention to a series of articles from the Washington Post recounting events during the attempted coup by Soviet hardliners in August 1991, and another set of articles from the Moscow Times in 2001, reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the events.7 The coup, led by eight of Gorbachev's aides calling themselves the "Committee for the State of Emergency," began on Monday, August 19, 1991. The Committee placed Gorbachev under house arrest in his Crimean dacha, shut down the independent media organs launched under the policy of glasnost'("openness"), and sent tanks into the center of Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, called for a general strike and urged Russians to rally around the Parliament building, or "Russian White House," to defend the forces of democracy. |
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The articles describe how, on the first day of the coup attempt, "tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered all around the capital to argue and plead with the army troops and tank crews who had seized control of the city." Among those observed by one reporter was a "gray-haired woman" screaming at a column of armored vehicles, "Why tanks? ...Tanks against whom? Boys! Boys! You are our children! What are you doing? What do you want?"8 I pointed this out to my class, but I must frankly comment that in a country where babushkas are known for speaking their minds, it would be hard to imagine them not speaking out under such circumstances. |
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The fact is that women of all ages stood at the barricades outside the Russian White House as well. Members of a Soviet women's peace committee blocked the bridge over the Moscow River, one of the main approaches to the building. They held a large sign that read, "Don't shoot us. We are your mothers and sisters."9 Ten years later, one student demonstrator recalled a pair of older women standing behind the barrier casually talking about how to make tea and the best sausages. "It was surreal," he concluded.10 These particular women may not seem to strike a heroic pose, until we recall that the unarmed crowds at the White House expected an armed assault on their position at any time for most of the three-day duration of the coup. One sixty year-old woman, a retired schoolteacher, stood all day in the crowd outside the White House on Wednesday August 21, the third and last day of the coup. Late in the afternoon, she reacted to news of the coup's failure. "I am Russian, and I love order and discipline and hard work. But I love freedom, too. I love freedom because it opens the way to our creativity, to our best nature." She credited the "brave resistance of ordinary people" like herself for the hardliners' defeat.11 |
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These are only two examples, but they suffice to make my point. My students had read the sources, but they had not noticed, let alone been surprised, by the evidence that older women undoubtedly took part in these collective acts of resistance, even performing heroically on occasion. The conclusion I draw from this is that we underestimate the historical agency of older women, not because the evidence is lacking, but because we are not prepared to note what is there. This is probably less a function of historiography, or how history is told, than a function of what might be called the "sociology of history," meaning how history is absorbed, or set against prior assumptions. My students encountered these examples running contrary to their assumptions, but stuck with their assumptions about protest being an activity of the young. The evidence was suppressed, not in the sources, but at the intake because it contradicted the reader's prior assumptions. If we consider the reluctance of tank drivers in Peking to run over them, or of the average soldier to gun them down in Moscow, we may conclude that old ladies in fact possess great subversive potential and untapped historical agency. The question, "Do old ladies make world history," is not entirely as simple as it may seem. |
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Notes
1. I taught the course from which this paper is drawn at Wheaton College (IL), from fall 2001 to spring 2003. Specifically, this paper reflects interactions with my students in several seminar sections (105L) during fall 2002 and spring 2003 semesters. It was first presented at "The Image of the Hero" conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Colorado Springs, CO, March 2004. I am grateful for the feedback of respondents at that presentation.
2. The sources to be examined, comprising daily news stories as events unfold and a reporter's memoir about covering the events, are all based on journalism. One might ask, is this paper merely echoing journalistic sensationalism? Readers who examine the sources for themselves should be satisfied to find no special emphasis on the role of older women. In their original context, all the examples culled for this paper are from passing mentions or spontaneous observations, such as might escape attention on a first reading.
3. Jan Wong, Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now (1996; reprint, New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 225–30.
4. Wong, 231–34.
5. Wong, 236–40.
6. Wong, 248–62. Specific references to older women lying down in front of tanks are on 238 and 247.
7. In a collaborative effort to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the attempted coup, the Washington Post and Moscow Times assembled an archive of articles from 1991 and 2001. The articles assigned to my students were drawn from these collections, which may be accessed online: see "One Day That Shook the World: Ten Years After the Soviet Coup," Washington Post, August 2001, and linked articles from August 19–22, 1991, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/shoulders/coup.htm> (24 April 2004), and "Ten Years After the Coup, 1991–2001," Moscow Times, and linked articles from August 2001, <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/indexes/146.html> (24 April 2004). The articles in all subsequent references may be found at these two websites, identified as "One Day" and "Ten Years," respectively.
8. Michael Dobbs, "Crowds in Capital Protest Power Seizure," Washington Post, 19 August 1991, "One Day."
9. Michael Dobbs, "Protesters Confront Tanks in Moscow," Washington Post, 21 August 1991, "One Day."
10. Robin Munro, "Defenders Recount Their Moment of Glory," Moscow Times, 17 August 2001, "Ten Years."
11. Fred Hiatt, "Coup Resisters 'Not Heroes, But We Are Patriots,'" Washington Post, 21 August 1991, "One Day."
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