A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN 101 OBJECTS

A walk through female history

by ANNABEL HIRSCH

A review by Julia Spry-Leverton

Just how many ways are there to cut the feminist literary cake? Perhaps, like me, you’ve been thinking this topic’s been exhaustively explored and completely covered in its every angle, thanks to the publishing industry’s years of prolific output? Well, I’ve had to think again and you – after taking a look at Annabel Hirsch’s new book, published in October 2023 – may also find yourself changing your mind.

As you might expect from a history book, A History of Women in 101 Objects presents as a classically handsome red volume. Inside though, it takes on a rosy character: Hirsch’s 101 objects in all their extraordinary variety are each illustrated in black and white, full page and fully declarative – but against a pale pink background. The light touch of this unusual, almost frivolous presentation is something of a preparation for Hirsch’s manifesto in the Introduction. She does not set herself up as an expert, the selection of her chosen objects she says ‘is absolutely subjective, [not] curated by a historian but by a woman who grew up .. at the end of the twentieth century, a woman who loves women, their objects and their stories.’ It is in ‘details and anecdotes’ that she revels, she tells us; her aim is to convey, through them, ‘how rich and diverse, how complex and non-linear the history of all women is.’ 

 Hirsch’s span is chronological: from 30,000 BC to modern day. Some objects are everyday: the hatpin, the sewing machine, some are unexpected, and others veer to the bizarre.  I find her book delights because, opened at whichever image appeals, you’ll find an accompanying three-page mini-essay presenting you with the author’s take on it: what it represents and how she relates to it. Although expository, and very evidently the product of admirably scholarly research, these descriptions are in no way dry. Hirsch sparks your imagination with her ingenuity, each approach a fresh one to intrigue you – you, her reader but also a guest, invited to enter into her ‘cabinet of curiosities.’

Hirsch draws freely on her feminist pantheon in these essays. Her bibliography is an impressive run-through of voices past and present from literature, the arts and politics which, if not openly celebrating women in their work, have sympathetically examined their status. References to George Eliot and George Sand recur, Simone de Beauvoir is a favourite, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin. Due to Hirsch’s French and German roots, there are also names less familiar to British readers.  The book in its directness and thoroughness is not, I would say, a read-through-from-start-to-finish – rather it’s a volume on your shelf that will reward you with amusement and/or surprise and enlightenment every time you dip into it. 

I’m fully in agreement with the words of praise for 101 Objects from actor Olivia Colman singling out ‘Hirsch’s intimate observational gifts.’ These are used to display her eclectic and somewhat left-field knowledge base – and it’s these gifts’ combination with the intimacy achieved by her conversational tone of voice that makes the book such a distinctive read. How Hirsch perceives the Isis Statuette from the Egypt of 332-330 BC is an example, introducing the goddess with the words: ‘proud mother, divine child naked in her lap … the peace that envelops them both – might you be able to see here .. a version of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child? If so, you aren’t alone…’

For her modern-day entries Hirsch is unafraid to interrogate objects for one reason or another mostly kept covert, such as the menstrual cup from the 2010s. Concluding her description of this accessory she alerts us that, in an era when current debate centres on normalizing menstruation, these cups ‘don’t spare you the sight of blood’ while rallying her readers with the statement ‘the colour red doesn’t stand for shame, but for strength, joy, love – quite simply for life.’

In the book’s closing pages we are brought right up to the present, via objects associated with Kim Kardashian, Pussy Riot and #Me Too, to the opposition to the morality police sparked in Tehran 2022 by the arrest of a young female activist who was discovered dead in hospital three days later. In the book’s earlier sections Hirsch doesn’t flinch from looking rape and the brutality of women’s oppression full in the face. The ‘Thumbscrew’ entry from the seventeenth century, for example, is not an easy read. But despite her graphic detailing, don’t you find that these contemporary episodes she describes come over as darker and more distressing? Is it perhaps that looking at the past with an ethnographically-attuned eye we may be able to retain some detachment, but in the present, with an eye distended with alarm at what our social media feed is showing us, we cannot?

Don’t though, be deterred by Hirsch obliging you as a reader to confront reality. The cleverness that defines her writing is that while assembling and assessing her facts, the dire ones as well as the dizzy, she’s essentially outward- and forward-looking, aligning herself always on the side of optimism. This book, made so interesting by its idiosyncracy, should be seen as an important arrival in the canon of feminist dialogue (which yes – I’ve come to accept it’s so –) is ongoing in all its multi-dimensionality. The last words are Hirsch’s. Characteristically life-affirmingly, she signs off her book, ‘And so, in this spirit: Women. Life. Freedom.’  

A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabel Hirsch
(Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2023)