But did either of these women, or a handful of other formidable females whose exploits were recorded by history, ever actually rule the world? That topic took center-stage before an overflow audience at a Zócalo/Getty panel discussion that roamed from pharaonic Egypt to the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the White House.

Moderated by Bettany Hughes, a historian and documentary filmmaker, the conversation drew on the expertise of UCLA archaeologist Kara Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, and University of Manchester Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.

After confessing to her “enormous girl crush” on Cooney and Tyldesley for their exemplary scholarship, Hughes drove right into what she ironically called the “completely uncomplicated and uncontroversial question” of whether women, in fact, ever have ruled the world.

For feminists, the answer wasn’t encouraging.

“I don’t know,” Tyldesley replied. “It was always, I think, unusual for a woman to take a position of power.”

Cooney concurred definitively, “the answer is no.”

But even if there is “no mythical matriarchy to which we can return,” as one panelist put it, history offers some instructive examples of women who were able to take and hold power through a combination of brilliance, bravery, guile, beauty, gender-bending self-reinvention, and—perhaps most importantly—the ability to control and manipulate their own image.

In ancient times, as now, women seeking to rule had to contend with the constraints imposed by existing cultural traditions, political structures, patriarchal hierarchies, and male-driven religions. While earth-mother goddesses and fertility deities abounded in the ancient world, aspiring women rulers had to push back against spiritual systems dominated by male gods and male priestly castes. That may have been even truer under the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than it was in pagan cultures. “Monotheism usually doesn’t do anybody any favors, particularly women,” Cooney observed.

Tyldesley cautioned that historians of the ancient world, like herself, must be very careful about making assumptions that often have to be based on fragmentary evidence and scraps of records.

But one powerful woman who history definitely shows to have been in charge was Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. This remarkable ruler helped establish trade networks and was a prolific builder of temples and other public works. An inscription on her tomb described her as “Mistress of Two Lands,” the type of homage that Egypt’s mightiest male potentates typically showered on themselves.

“In a way, it speaks to how the Egyptian culture allowed a female to take all those claims as her own and feminize them,” Cooney said.

Indeed, Tyldesley chimed in, the concept of “king” in ancient Egypt wasn’t necessarily gender-linked; it was quite possible for a woman to take on that role, although usually the title was bestowed on males. Over the course of her career and reign (circa 1478–1458 B.C.), Hatshepsut controlled her image in strategic ways that underscored the changing nature of her power.

To wit, early on, she was represented in a nubile, eroticized, traditionally feminine style. But as her reign progressed, she adopted a more masculine public persona and custom of dress. In one of her best-known images, a statue in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she registers as an almost androgynous being; in other representations, she’s buff and muscled like a man.

Hatshepsut’s fluid style of self-representation was matched by her flexible style of power-wielding, Tyldesley suggested. Instead of subjugating conquered peoples to try to make them part of the Egyptian empire, she preferred to engage them through trade.

“I think if you’re a woman in the ancient world, Egypt is the place to be,” Tyldesley concluded.

Cooney agreed that it may have been easier for a woman to take power in Egypt, “an authoritarian, tightly controlled society” ruled by dynasty, as opposed to democratic Greece or republican Rome. Cooney drew a parallel to Hillary Clinton, speculating about whether we associate the former Secretary of State and one-time First Lady with dynastic power, rather than judging her on the basis of her own merits.

Taking up the point, Tyldesley noted that there are examples of ancient queens who temporarily filled in as rulers for husbands who had died or were away in battle. These women often ruled on behalf of their infant sons until their offspring were old enough to assume the throne, at which point their mothers stepped back from power.

Do women rule differently from men? It’s a question that haunts Cooney, who said that, although she wavers on an answer, “the older I get, the more I read, the more I live in Trump’s America, [I believe] that women do rule differently.”

Both today and throughout the centuries, powerful women often have aroused a deep ambivalence. Hughes noted that while a goddess like Venus is generally depicted as a creature of pure, unadulterated beauty and sensuality—fairly harmless, apart from her role in starting the Trojan War—some of Venus’s counterparts, like Isis, are represented in more complex ways. They’re fighters as well as lovers, “bringers of death as well as bringers of life.”

What’s more, Cooney said, there’s “a great disconnect” between the way that some societies worshipped man-eating, ferocious goddesses while remaining deeply sexist and segregated. “That fierceness, that PMS-ing b!$©h” quality is something that certain societies had to harness and tame, and put to use in more socially acceptable ways, like protecting the king.

Perhaps few rulers embody the contradictory demands placed on women more than Nefertiti, who appears to have followed a singular trajectory from queen to co-ruler to solo ruler. In the world’s imagination, she’s the glamorous woman immortalized in a famous bust that sits in a Berlin museum. But according to Tyldesley, “We don’t even know if she was beautiful. We have this one bust and from that, this whole mythology has developed.”

Similarly, much of what we think we know about Cleopatra—from her putative powers of seduction to the manner of her suicide—comes from the writings of Roman authors, filtered through the plays of Shakespeare. Another powerful woman whose name gets short shrift and whose remarkable deeds have been obscured by time is the 6th-century empress Theodora, a humble exotic dancer who became a powerful and revered ruler-reformer—a sort of Byzantine Eva Perón.

Although the evening was devoted to examining female rulers of the pre-Christian world, one audience member during the question period raised the example of Queen Elizabeth I. The panelists agreed that she should be on the list of the world’s 10 most powerful female rulers of all time. Another audience member proposed Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving British prime minister known as the “Iron Lady” for her take-no-prisoners economic policies and steely response to Argentina’s attempted takeover of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.

Hughes replied that although Thatcher still divides Britain as deeply as Marmite, “she definitely taught me that women can be in power.”

“Whether you like her policies or not,” Tyldesley said that Mrs. T ensured that, “girls don’t grow up in England thinking, ‘I can’t be the prime minister.’”

But, in the end, it may not be possible to assess how much women like Thatcher, Clinton, and Angela Merkel owe to their ancient female political forebears.

“I think we’re missing a whole host of powerful women,” Tyldesley said, “simply because there wasn’t someone to write down what they do.”

The post Women Rocked the Ancient World—But Ruling It Was Harder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Her decision to do so, at such a late stage of her life, was paradoxical. Rose had long admired the United States, working ardently to make it a better place whenever it fell short of its promise. Legally, she had been a citizen since the 1840s, when her husband, the English silversmith William Rose, became an American: Throughout Western countries at the time, wives assumed their husbands’ nationalities. The Roses were just 17 days from leaving the U.S. for Great Britain, perhaps just for a voyage, perhaps to resettle there. They hadn’t yet determined if they would return.

So why file for citizenship then? As I see it, Rose’s decision mirrors a broader ambivalence that she had about her American identity. Both an internationalist and a passionate citizen, she coupled a deep commitment to fighting for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and free thought in the United States with lingering skepticism about the country’s devotion to its ideals.

Rose had embarked on an immense journey to become an American activist. Born in 1810 as the only child of a Polish rabbi, she grew up in an Orthodox household but soon began to question her Judaism. When she was 15, her mother died, leaving her an inheritance. To “bind me closer to the bosom of the synagogue,” Rose later recalled, her father betrothed her to a man she did not want to marry, stipulating in a contract that if she did not go through with the ceremony, her fiancé would receive her mother’s money. She hired a sleigh, travelled 60 miles to the nearest circuit court, and successfully pleaded her case. When she returned home, she found that her father had remarried to a girl her own age. She gave him some of her inheritance, and then left Poland, her family, and Judaism forever.

She lived for two years in Berlin, then in Paris, and in 1831, when she was 21, moved to London. There she found a surrogate father, the industrialist-turned-socialist reformer Robert Owen. Owen believed that evil and crime were caused by social conditions, and that if education were improved, poverty reduced, and criminal punishments more carefully applied, the world could be transformed. Owen also rejected all religious beliefs. His new follower delighted in his creed. In the Owenite movement, she encountered the notion of female equality, made her first speeches, and met her adored and adoring husband. In 1836, the couple immigrated to New York City, where they lived for the next 33 years.

Ernestine Rose had long had an idealized view of her new home. “I remember I was but a little child, hardly able to understand the import of words,” she recalled, “that I had already listened to them who pronounced it the Republic of the United States of America … and I thought, if I live to grow up a woman, O how I should like to see a Republic!”—that is, a government without a monarch. Rose loved her first Fourth of July here: “The sun shone brighter; the trees looked more beautiful; the grass looked greener; the birds sang sweeter; all the beauties of nature became enhanced in my estimation, for I viewed them all through the beautiful rainbow colors of human freedom,” she said. If she had left the U.S. on the 5th of July, she added, she would have retained that positive view, but by staying longer she began to see the gap between American ideals and reality.

Ernestine Rose rapidly became involved in three radical causes which aimed to emancipate Americans: the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and free thought, which espoused the rejection of traditional religious beliefs. In the deeply Christian United States, she was an outspoken atheist, a position offensive to many. At a time when the abolition of slavery was controversial, she lectured in support of it. And in a society where women could not vote, hold office, or, if married, own any property, she ardently worked for women’s rights.

Completely supported by her husband, Rose used his income, plus the money they saved by not employing a servant, to finance numerous lecture tours, travelling to 23 of the 31 existing states before the Civil War. By the 1850s, she was a well-known public figure, far more famous than her allies Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Yet Rose was almost always identified as a “foreigner,” both by herself and by others. “Poland is my poor, unhappy country,” she declared in 1849, 13 years after arriving in America. Her allies often commented on her accent and called her “the eloquent Pole.” She was the sole non-native-born person in the early women’s rights movement. She was also one of the few Jews in America then—only 150,000 lived among a general population of 31,500,000.

Once her disappointment with America set in, it never fully abated. In 1854 she explained that, “I chose to make this country my home in preference to any other because if you carried out the theories you profess, it would be the best country on earth.” But as time went by, the only one of Rose’s causes which found success in her lifetime was the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, the women’s movement divided over the 15th Amendment, which granted black men, but not women, the right to vote. “We have proclaimed to the world universal suffrage, but it is universal suffrage with a vengeance attached to it,” Rose often asserted. “White men are the minority in this nation. White women, black men, and black women compose the large majority.” By 1869, when she and William decided to return to England, free thought was in deep decline and women’s rights had stalled.

Disillusionment underlay her ambivalence about the United States and was also reflected in how she identified. Always calling herself a Pole when in America, she repeated that claim in London, where she stated that although she had lived in America, “I am not an American.” From her teens, when she had questioned Judaism, she had seen herself as an outlier. I believe she became most comfortable with that oppositional stance: a Pole among Americans, an atheist among Christians. She often described herself, approvingly, as “a minority of one.”

Old age shifted her perspective. In 1878, comfortably settled in London, she criticized both England and the United States for presenting “obstacles to free thought and free speech” and not having achieved true “liberalism.” But she also praised the United States for having neither a monarch nor a state church. Near the end of Rose’s life, in 1889 when she was 79, a reporter who visited her observed that “her fine face is lighted up when she speaks of America, of which she is proud to own herself a citizen, and recalls the memories of the days when her voice was a trumpet-call to the soldiers of freedom.”

Ernestine Rose was an internationalist and ambivalent American whose life contributed greatly to this nation’s history. Her conflict over being an American mirrors that of many idealistic immigrants to this nation. Like them, she believed in self-determination and the ability to reform the United States. She deserves to be better remembered.

The post The Immigrant Activist Who Loved America’s Ideals, If Not Its Actions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before 1900, biographies of American women were customarily grouped under a collective title—famous, eminent, celebrated, or noble. The standards of selection were overtly moral and covertly gendered. In Our Famous Women: Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (1883), 20 women were profiled by well-known women writers, to show their “courage, patience, … cheerfulness, and lofty aspiration.”

In 1917, Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University, which presided over the Pulitzer Prizes, said that Julia Ward Howe was the “best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people, illustrated by an eminent example.” These virtues—requisite in famous women—were not expected of eminent men. No one cared about Benjamin Franklin’s unselfishness, Mark Twain’s patience, or President Lincoln’s cheerfulness. “Lofty aspiration,” too, was an acceptably feminine way of describing what in men was simply “ambition.”

The Howe daughters edited the story of their mother’s life to smooth over any selfish moments. They were especially careful to present their parents’ turbulent marriage as the idyllic union of two noble souls. But Julia Ward Howe was not a solemn or didactic book. Indeed, the Howe daughters drew on their mother’s letters and journals, in addition to their own memories, to present her as lively and lovable.

They told the story of her struggle to become a serious poet while raising six children, her sudden fame after writing the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and her second life as a widow, suffragist, pacifist, and social reformer. They also noted her love of fashion and her appetite for fruitcake, her comic verse, and her playful self-mockery. Writing to her sister about caring for her large and obstreperous family, she concluded, “If it were not for beer, I were little better than a dead woman.”

Reviewers paid tribute to Howe’s dedication and achievements, but the critic for the North American Review found that her mixture of “saintliness and friskiness” undermined “that unity and that almost epic quality which distinguish the greatest biographies.” For a high-minded woman writer, philanthropist, and social reformer to enjoy shopping, let alone beer, violated his standards of greatness. Yet the biography of a woman was likely to touch on details of domesticity and everyday experience that would not come up in the biography of a man. Did that disqualify women’s lives from “epic quality”?

During the 20th century, American attitudes towards biographies of eminent women slowly changed. In the 1950s, the great Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger saw the need for a biographical dictionary devoted to American women. The Dictionary of American Biography included only a tiny percentage of female subjects—706 out of 15,000 entries. A group of historians at Radcliffe College, led by Edward T. James, undertook the vast project of compiling a “biographical dictionary” of American women.

The three-volume Notable American Women, 1607-1950 began to come out in 1971. Containing 1,359 biographical entries by 738 contributors, it was a major event. It drew attention to the way women’s public and private lives often conflicted; it suggested how the career paths, motivations, social environments, and marital circumstances of gifted women differed from those of their brothers, and contributed to their chances of becoming—or failing to become—“notable.” Janet Wilson James, the associate editor, cautiously predicted that circumstances might change. The revival of feminism in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, the invention of the birth control pill, and the expansion of higher education might lead in the near future to women’s “larger, long-term commitment to the world outside the home.”

In the 21st century, women can become notable in a much wider field of actions. They need not be considered admirable or even respectable to attract and deserve biographical attention. Yet there is still a gender imbalance in biography. In 2015, a study found that more than 70 percent of the biographies published in the U.S. were about men, with the list dominated by books about presidents, world leaders, war heroes, and sports figures.

Paradoxically, a century ago, when women could not imagine seeking real political power, “lofty aspiration” was a virtue readers admired in Julia Ward Howe. But today a woman’s desires to aspire and compete, and her self-confidence, can be seen as unlikable traits. Howe was one of the most famous women of her era. At the memorial exercises at Symphony Hall after her death in 1910, she was hailed, with enormous local pride, as a figure who stands “for womanhood itself, for America, and for Boston.” Today that admiration is a bit trickier to secure.

As a researcher writing a biography in the 21st century, I knew many things about Julia Ward Howe’s life and difficult marriage that her daughters did not know or chose to ignore. Some of her social and literary female frenemies, who knew very little about her struggles or her marriage, regarded her as “Bostonish,” stuffy, discontented, competitive, or self-indulgent. I included these details, along with lots of stories of her interest in jewelry, hairstyles, fashion, and iced champagne. No one today objects to her frivolity or friskiness, and my readers also sympathize with her ambitions to lead. But I was surprised to see that a few reviewers thought that Julia was whiny, or had a high opinion of herself. Too high, I assume they meant—in any case, unlikable in a woman.

I admire the fact that for 91 years, Howe refused to conform to social expectations. She would not be “Saint Julia,” she would not conceal her opinions, she would not hide her ambitions or her pleasures. “I do not desire ecstatic, disembodied sainthood,” she wrote, “Because I do not wish to abdicate any one of the attributes of my humanity. I cherish even the infirmities that bind me to my kind. I would be human, and American, and a woman.” Words for a modern biographer to live by, I think. And glory, glory, hallelujah for that.

The post What Do Readers Want From the Lives of American Women? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Arriving there, I felt a sense of déjà vu—because I had been born in Oakland and because, as I would later learn, many members of my family rode the bus on Mission Boulevard from Niles (now a district of Fremont) to Oakland to hear the famed woman evangelist Bebe Patten during her early revival services in 1944.

When it comes to Pentecostalism, there is a “there, there” in Oakland. The city has a particular and proud history as a global crossroads for Pentecostals and women ministers like Patten.

Pentecostalism was born in 1906 during a revival on Azusa St. in Los Angeles led by William Seymour, an African-American minister. During this revival Christians embraced the spirit baptism experience, which is evident through speaking in tongues, that is recorded in the Bible in Acts 2: 1-4. Today, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian movement in the world.

Many Pentecostal denominations have restricted women’s roles in the pulpit and denominational leadership. Nevertheless, many women have determinedly gone into various ministries anyway. They commit their hearts to God and believe that their sole responsibility is to that commitment—not to society, religion, or any church.

The history of women’s ministry is particularly long and rich in Oakland—an unbroken chain, one Pentecostal woman creating opportunity for the next. The tradition extends from Maria Woodworth-Etter—who began her ministry in a test at the corner of 26th and San Pablo in 1889—to Sylvia Vigil, who currently leads many of Victory Outreach’s street ministries.

In between, the story of Pentecostals in Oakland includes many other ministers. Carrie Judd Montgomery founded a faith healing home in Oakland in the 1890s and built her interdenominational and ecumenical ministry here. Lillian Yeomans was part of Montgomery’s ministry in the Laurel District of Oakland. Ernestine Rheems started preaching in a murderous neighborhood in 1968 and went on to build a transitional housing program for homeless single women and found a charter school. Vitely Kiteley, a leader of the Latter Rain movement, began her Oakland ministry in 1965, building a diverse church that became a force in the civil rights and Charismatic renewal movements (in which churchgoers in non-Pentecostal denominations began to experience spirit baptism).

Then there’s Betitia Coty. As a teenager in the 1960s, I was involved in the Chicano movement. The leaders of my church admonished me for my activism; they wanted to focus on saving souls. But “progressive Pentecostals,” like the Nicaraguan-born Coty, embraced activism. Coty ministered to the homeless, women, AIDS patients, and others in Oakland from the 1970s until her death at age 50 in 1996. She is perhaps best remembered for setting up a tent on the lawn of the headquarters of the Oakland Unified School District in 1996 to support teachers during an acrimonious strike—even as she was dying of cancer.

The Oakland story also includes Aimee Semple McPherson, one of the most famous figures of the first half of the 20th century. Though she is better known for her Los Angeles ministry, McPherson received her revelation of the “Foursquare Gospel” while developing a 1922 sermon in Oakland. The city was also the scene of the end of her ministry. In 1944, she flew to Oakland to dedicate a new church. She died there at the age of 53, in the Lemington Hotel, of a probable overdose of sedatives.

Patten is part of this chain. She was a 1933 graduate of LIFE Bible College, an institution McPherson founded. When McPhersen died, Patten was in the midst of a revival series in the Bay Area—soon to become home to her own ministerial and education endeavors.

The first graduating class of Oakland Bible Institute.

By then Patten was an experienced minister, having begun as a “girl evangelist” in Tennessee and having served as a pastor in Cleveland. Her 19-week revival in Oakland was groundbreaking—it gave birth to the Oakland Bible Institute, the Academy of Christian Education, the Oakland Bible Church, and a revival center, all housed in the Alice Theater (currently in the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts on Alice St. near downtown Oakland).

The decades after that brought challenge; her husband was charged and convicted of five counts of grand theft related to mishandling of the ministry’s funds. At that time, his trial was the longest criminal prosecution ever held in Alameda County. Three years into his five-to-50-year sentence, he was released from Soledad prison and he passed away in 1958. The following year, Patten married John Roberto, her co-pastor, but the marriage was short-lived. Like her early mentor, McPherson, Patten would be widowed once and divorced twice.

But Patten’s ministries continued through these difficulties. After the trial, the ministry center moved from the Alice Theater to a converted car garage on Telegraph Ave. In the early 1960s, the church, academy, and college moved again, this time to the Coolidge Ave. campus, where they still reside. In the 1980s, the Oakland Bible Institute became Patten University.

I’m now in my 46th year as a member of the Patten community. Patten was my pastor and my boss. Her gift, especially in working with young people, was making them feel like they—with God’s guidance—could accomplish anything. This went a long way in giving me my own sense of capability in various roles on campus—publication director, high school coach, and finally university professor and administrator.

One of her favorite sayings was, “Bloom where you are planted,” and she definitely gave you the sense that you would indeed flourish in whatever endeavor you undertook.

Women evangelists like Patten were often more innovative and entpreneurial precisely because they were not endorsed by denominations because of their gender. They had to create their own ministry enterprises. Patten’s media efforts included the Trumpet Call, a quarterly publication, the “Shepherd Hour” radio broadcast, and a cable television program.

Patten died on Jan. 25, 2004 at the age of 90. When she passed, she asked that someone from the Church of God succeed her as pastor. Rev. Tobey Montgomery now leads the congregation. In 2012, Patten University experienced extreme financial difficulties and was acquired by UniversityNow Inc. It is now a secular, online university.

The history of Pentecostalism is replete with women who have founded churches, denominations, schools, universities, and social help ministries. Women have also pioneered the presence of denominations in countries, but, because men are sent to formalize that presence, women often do not get the credit for those endeavors.

Pentecostal women like Patten and her predecessors succeeded in eras in which women weren’t thought to have the capabilities to found and lead Christian institutions. Their spirit is visible today around the globe—and across Oakland, where Pentecostal women serve in the classroom and the pulpit, fight human trafficking, and feed the poor.

The post The Oakland Pentecostal Women Who Defied Convention to Change Their Churches and Their Communities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The pay gap, one barometer of progress, hasn’t budged in a decade, according to a new study from the American Association of University Women. For every dollar earned by a man, a woman earns 79 cents. That chasm is considerably wider for black and Latino women, and for women with children.

Women who forge ahead face other challenges. In academia, in the male-dominated STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, instances of sexual harassment are being documented with increasing frequency. And if women pursue projects that primarily benefit other women, the obstacles can be particularly daunting. Recent news accounts highlight these struggles, from one entrepreneur’s Silicon Valley quest to find investors for a hiring website that would make corporate America friendlier to women, to the years of frustration an engineer and her female business partner endured while seeking funding for tampon technology that could give early warning of cancer and reproductive diseases.

Naming the problem can, in itself, mark a kind of progress: on the elite conference circuit, the ubiquity of all-male panels is being called out on social media. At this year’s World Economic Forum, more than three-quarters of the speakers and moderators were men. Despite that fact (or perhaps because of it), “women” was one of the five-day Davos gathering of global elites’ most-Tweeted topics.

One path to change is leadership—when women lead, their skills and contributions are more likely to be recognized, and they in turn are more likely to acknowledge the accomplishments of other women. In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Time political correspondent and New America Fellow Jay Newton-Small asking “Are Women Changing the Way Institutions Are Run?”, we posed a related question to several women leaders: What is the single biggest change we’ve seen as a result of women in leadership roles?

The post What Happens When Women Run the World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.