The Worth of Women

"She was actually called Modesta Pozzo and she was a Venetian noblewoman. She was outraged by some of her reading. In my research about women’s reading I discovered that quite often it was a case of looking at what women had written as a reaction to their reading – when they felt frustrated and angry, particularly by representations of women that they thought were completely untrue to life. It was men who wrote about women as evil and fallen and so on, particularly intellectual women. Modesta was extremely astute about what the reading process is and how you can read passively or actively – passively in the sense that you just assume everything you are reading is true, or actively, when you say to yourself, “Well, hang on a moment. You may be arguing this, but I’m not entirely persuaded by it.” So you have her saying, “For goodness sake, don’t think that everything you read by way of history is true because it’s going to be written by a man and men are coming at this from a particular slant.” So there’s a wonderful kind of scepticism she’s displaying, which I think is quite remarkable so early on. Yes, quite."