Marguerite Marie Jeanne (Vourc’h) Garden

After the end of the Second World War a young Frenchwoman called Marguerite Vourc’h went to study architecture in Paris, at the Beaux Arts. It was while here that she met a Scottish army surgeon, James Garden, who was on holiday in the city. Against the wishes of her father, at the age of 20, she cut short her studies and followed James to Scotland where they were married in 1949. James became a prominent orthopaedic surgeon and they eventually settled in Lanark.

Marguerite was a keen amateur naturalist and she was an important influence in the founding of the Corehouse Nature Reserve – now run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust – as well as supporting many other conservation projects in South Lanarkshire. She worked tirelessly collecting funds every year for the Poppy Appeal on behalf of the Royal British Legion as well as serving many years in the Red Cross.

It is the fact that after the war she had received a letter handwritten by the Air Chief Marshall thanking her for her help during the war years that makes Marguerite more than just a young Frenchwoman going against the wishes of her father. She had remained true to her orders and had remained silent for decades as to the part she played that had caused this personal communication, but the truth makes her one of those women in history who deserve the title of heroine, even perhaps more so when you consider that she was only 14 years-of-age when it all began.

Marguerite was born on 25th January 1926 – the sixth of nine children – at Plomodiern in the Finistère department, a coastal area of western Brittany. Her father, Antoine, was the village doctor and also a local councillor. He had been a veteran of the First World War and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur. She went to school locally and then to the Maison d’education de la Légion d’Honneur at St. Denis, just outside Paris due to her father’s past war record and standing in the community. However, when the city was occupied, she had to flee and return to be with her family where she found that her home village had been occupied by German troops.

Her father had arranged for the local evacuation of French male youth from the region after denouncing the establishment of the Vichy government and two of Marguerite’s brothers – Jean and Guy – were amongst those who stole away in a small boat. After some 12 days at sea, they were picked up by a British submarine.

(Marguerite (left) with family and friends)

During this time, the Resistance was basically non-existent, but her father sought out sympathisers during his rounds as doctor, while his daughter, under the guise of childish innocence, found out from her friends where their families’ sympathies lay.

She said: ‘I think my Involvement began when my father took me with him when a lobster boat was going away so I got to know the people who were preparing It. Later on, when my father wasn’t around, they trusted me enough to come to me and ask me to help.’

Her village was around three miles from the coast and it was an ideal spot from which to track the movements of German boats in the Bay of Dournenez. For days she would cycle around the local coastline gathering intelligence on soldiers, boats and the location of mines which was then relayed back to MI6. Under the cover of being a 14-year-old schoolgirl on holiday no-one suspected her as a spy and she soon found herself in contact with the Resistance as she helped deliver false identity cards to the networks. She even managed to continue her undercover work whilst Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers were billeted at her family home in January 1941.

Marguerite continued to study just outside Paris, but during holidays and half-terms she was able to resume her spying. The fact that she was a schoolgirl provided perfect cover for carrying messages and parcels between her local Resistance group network and another in Paris. She would return to her school with bulging folders containing military information amongst her school books. She recalled : “There was no reason to suspect me. I was a young girl, travelling to my school. I was never arrested.”

While harbouring airmen waiting to leave France, she helped conceal them upstairs in the family home while a German slept in one of the bedrooms, completely unaware, which was rather nerve-racking. ‘What better cover than to have the Wehrmacht in the house,’ said Marguerite.

It was also at her family home that the head of MI6 — the intelligence-gathering network for which she worked - began making radio transmissions that were picked up at Bletchley Park, the Enigma code-breaking station in England.

As war progressed Marguerite’s activities increased and she became involved in aiding Allied airmen escape to Britain by hiding them in lobster boats and also passed on information about German ship positions which had been extracted from an unsuspecting harbourmaster by family friend Madam Le Roux.

Unfortunately, Madam Le Roux was arrested whilst at the Vourc’h family home but the Germans failed, at first, to make any connection. However, Marguerite’s father made his escape in fear of what Madam Le Roux may say under interrogation and made his way to North Africa. When the Gestapo arrived on the family doorstep Marguerite’s mother told them that her husband had abandoned his family, which they believed and hence Marguerite did not come under suspicion.

‘I opened the door to them,’ said Marguerite. ‘They smelled of the Gestapo, of Turkish cigarettes. My father had learned what was happening and didn’t come home, so my mother told them that he had left us and they accepted that. If it hadn’t been for that story, they would have taken us away. I was aware of risking everything but tried not to think about it. I wasn’t scared even though one of my brothers was shot by the Germans in Paris. She added: ‘We wanted to be of use to Britain. That was our aim, to help win the war. I would do it all again if I had to.’

A few months before Paris was liberated, Marguerite and her mother joined up with Jean-Claude Camors (code-named Raoll) who was a Resistance friend of one of her brothers. Together they had planned an operation to help 40 Allied airmen back to Britain who were hiding in Brittany. All was put into place, but before actioned Raoll was recognised by a German double agent and shot. This meant that Marguerite and her mother we left trying to find a place where they could hide and feed the airmen. After approaching the local priest he agreed to hide them in his church where they remained for days whilst the Resistance waited for a chance to repatriate them.

After successfully returning back home, however, the BBC broadcast a coded message that the “fourth son of a doctor in Brittany” had arrived. This was blatantly a reference to Marguerite’s family and soon the Gestapo were calling again. Fortunately, however, Marguerite was at school at the time and her mother was visiting the Breton town of Quimper. They were warned by friends not to return home and they hid in a run-down apartment in Paris. However, the two younger sisters of the Vourc’h family were still at home and the Gestapo would interrogate them mercilessly. “They’d wake the girls up in the middle of the night, holding their rifles to the girls’ faces,” Marguerite recalled. “They would do anything they could to terrify them into saying where mother was. But it didn’t work.”

Her husband died in 1992 and in 2003 Marguerite’s efforts and bravery were finally rewarded by the French government when she was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. She was also nominated for Woman of the Year award in the same year. A few years later she moved from the Lanark family home (the home they bought from Dr. Joe Bryant – the brother of Admiral Ben Bryant who had been the submarine commander who had rescued her brothers from the Atlantic in 1940) to Edinburgh when she was struggling to maintain her independence owing to the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease which rapidly progressed, leading to her death aged 84, on 5th May 2010. She is survived by seven children, thirteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Marguerite rarely talked about her remarkable role in the war - she modestly dismissed it as no more than ‘doing her bit’

Eleanor of Aquitaine

I am not sure whether you can call Eleanor of Aquitane a heroine or just a woman who was used to her personal wealth and power getting her what she wanted, but you cannot deny that she made a mark for the fairer sex back in the 12th Century. In a time of family pit against family in the political intrigues to gain the throne of England, it would have been a dangerous time for anyone – man or woman – to make a stand against a King. And to travel around the country and Europe would have been a brave and dangerous thing to embark upon.


Born in 1122, Eleanor of Aquitaine was the eldest of three children. She was named Alienor (from the Latin alia Aenor meaning the other Aenor) after her mother Aenor of Chatellerault. When her 4-year-old brother and mother died when she was 8 years old she became heir presumptive to the lands of her father – William X of Aquitaine - and inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine and Poiters in 1137 at the age of 15 from her father upon his death. Thus she became the most eligible bride in Europe. From what is known, Eleanor, who has been recorded as being very beautiful, was taught to read and speak Latin and was well schooled in music and literature, together with riding, hawking and hunting. She was supposedly extroverted, lively, intelligent and strong willed – all attributes that will have served her well for the life that lay ahead of her.

In July that year Eleanor married the heir to the throne of France – Louis VII– who became the king upon his father’s death a month later. This union bore two daughters, Marie and Alix. During the time of this marriage Eleanor accompanied her husband and his army, along with an entourage of 300 of her ladies, on the Second Crusade. However, in March 1152 the marriage was annulled on the grounds of consanguinity. A couple of months later in May, she married Henry Fitz-Empress, the Duke of Normandy and heir to the throne of England. When King Stephen died in 1154 her husband became Henry II. They had three daughters and five sons (William, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, John, Mathilda, Eleanor, and Joan). Two of their sons became Kings of England after their father. They were Richard I – the Lionheart - and John Lackland.

Eleanor of Aquitane was a powerful and wealthy woman in her own right and she was not afraid to support her three sons in their revolt against Henry in1173. Henry must have been surprised at this action on her part – it would have been unusual for a woman, but in her eyes it was perfectly justified. She had, over the last two decades, bore children, put up with her husband’s infidelities and disagreed vehemently with some of Henry’s decisions. But to top all of this, she would have had to share her independence and power and perhaps in deposing Henry she would have been able to rule Aquitaine with her favourite third son, Richard.

However Henry put down this rebellion and for her part – at the age of 50 - she was confined in various fortified buildings for between 10 and 15 years.

She became more involved in the ruling of Aquitaine from 1185 and upon Henry II’s death in 1189, Richard inherited the throne. Eleanor was also active as a ruler in Poitou and Glascony between 1189 and her death in 1204. She travelled often and on more than occasion risked her life in her efforts to maintain the loyalty of the English subjects and manage her army and estates. She also travelled to cement marriage alliances – she travelled to Spain to choose and collect her 13-year-old grand-daughter Blanche of Castille to become the bride of Louis VIII of France – the grandson of her first husband. And even when she was almost 70 she travelled over the Pyrenees to escort her prospective daughter-in-law, Beregaria of Navarre, via the Alps down to the Italian peninsula to Sicily. Beregaria then went on to Cyprus to marry Richard in Limossol on 21st Mary 1191.

Richard was reputed to be her favourite son and when his brother, John, joined forces with the King of France in rising against his brother she backed Richard and helped in bolstering his rule when he was on crusade. She played a heavy role in raising the ransom to release Richard from imprisonment on his return from the Holy Land, and thus she became known as an able politician.

Then, in 1199 – on the death of Richard - she supported John’s claim to the throne against her grandson Arthur of Brittany and helped hold out against Arthur’s forces until John could arrive to defeat him and his supporters – this at the age of 80. In 1191 Arthur – son of Richard’s brother Geoffrey – had been designated as heir to the throne of England by Richard I over his other brother John, but upon his deathbead in 1199 Richard had proclaimed his younger brother John as his heir due to Arthur only being 12 at the time and him fearing that he was too young to look after the throne.

During her life, Eleanor had periodically gone to the abbey at Fontevrault to find peace and it was here that she died on 1st April 1204 and was subsequently buried there, next to both Henry II and her son Richard I.

Feminism in the 15th Century

Christine de Pizan has been recorded as being perhaps the first woman to write about the position of women in society. These days she could well be known as a feminist, but as during the days in which she was writing, such a term was a long way off some have suggested that to suggest such a thing is an anachronism. Some prefer to call her a protofeminist –a term used to define women in a philosophical tradition that anticipated modern feminist concepts, yet lived in a time when the term "feminist" was unknown, that is, prior to the twentieth century.

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364; the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano (Thomas de Pizan after the family’s origins in the town of Pizzano). Her father accepted an appointment at the court of Charles V as astrologer, alchemist and physician and Christine joined him there at the age of 4. It was at court that Christine was able to indulge her intellectual interests, where she educated herself in languages made good use of the vast amount of manuscripts in Charles V’s royal archives. When the king died in 1380 her father was out of a job, and he died soon after.

At the tender age of 15 she married Etienne du Castel, who was a royal secretary to the court. She bore him three children: a son, Jean; a daughter who went as a companion of the King’s daughter Marie, to the Dominican Abbey in Poissy in 1397, and another child who died in childhood. It was not until she was widowed at the age of 25 in 1389 and found herself without a protector, that she made her intellectual abilities and skill in writing known. This was mainly due to the fact that she had three children to look after, plus a niece and her mother to support. Upon her husband’s death she found herself facing complicated law suits with regard to claiming her husband’s salary and by 1393 she was writing love ballads that caught the attention of wealthy patrons within the court due to them being intrigued by the novelty of such prose being written by a woman. They asked her to compose poetry based on their own romantic escapades. In 1399 she began to study latin poets and between then and 1405 she composed 15 important literary works (as she herself declared) and between 1393 and 1412 she wrote over 300 ballads and many short poems.


It was in 1401-1402, however, that her literary fight for women began. She became involved in a literary quarrel known as the “Querelle du Roman de la Rose” concerning the Romance of the Rose written in the 13th Century by Jean de Meun in which he satirises the conventions of courtly love while depicting women as nothing more than seducers. Christine specifically objected to the use of vulgar terms used within the poem and argued that they denigrated the proper and natural function of sexuality and that such language was inappropriate for female characters in the poem , such Madam Raison. She saw him as slandering women deliberately through this debated text. Whilst the argument began with this poem, it finished with a general observation from Christine that women were unjustly slandered in literary texts. Hence she was seen that she could defend her claims in the male-dominated literary world in which she lived and she continued to do so.


Christine’s most notable works were finished by 1405 – The Book of a City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies (or The Book of the Three Virtues). Her final work was a poem about Joan of Arc and is a poem important to historians as it is the only record of Joan outside the documents relating to her trial.


Christine finally decided to retire from writing at the age of 65 but the exact date of her death is unknown. Simon de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 that her part in the literary quarrel regarding the Romance of the Rose was "the first time we see a woman take up her pen in defense of her sex”.

The virginity industry

You can't change people's belief in their own religion and it would be wrong to impose our own moral standards on that of other races, but upon reading the article below it made me both angry and sad to think that there are women out there in the world who have to abide by rules laid down centuries before. They live in a world that is still dominated by their opposite sex and face dire consequences if they try to move into the 21st Century. 

Young Arab women wait in an upmarket medical clinic for an operation that will not only change their lives, but quite possibly save it. Yet the operation is a matter of choice and not necessity. It costs about 2,000 euros (£1,700) and carries very little risk.


The clinic is not in Dubai or Cairo, but in Paris. And the surgery they are waiting for is to restore their virginity.


Whether in Asia or the Arab world, an unknown number of women face an agonising problem having broken a deep taboo. They've had sex outside marriage and if found out, risk being ostracised by their communities, or even murdered.


Now more and more of them are undergoing surgery to re-connect their hymens and hide any sign of past sexual activity. They want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.


The social pressure is so great that some women have even taken their own lives.


Sonia wants to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. She is a slender young brunette studying at art college in Paris.


Although born in France, Arab culture and traditions are central to Sonia's life. Life was strict growing up under the watchful eyes of a large traditional Arab family.


Virginity certificates
"I thought of suicide after my first sexual relationship," she says, "because I couldn't see any other solution." But Sonia did find a solution.


She eventually went to the Paris clinic of Dr Marc Abecassis to have surgery to restore her hymen. She says she will never reveal her secret to anyone, especially her husband to be
"I consider this is my sex life and I don't have to tell anyone about it," she says. It's men that are obliging her to lie about it, she says.


Dr Abecassis performs a "hymenoplasty" as it's called, at least two to three times a week. Re-connecting the tissue of the hymen takes about 30 minutes under local anaesthetic.


He says the average age of the patient is about 25, and they come from all social backgrounds. Although the surgery is performed in clinics around the world, Dr Abecassis is one of the few Arab surgeons who talks openly about it. Some of the women come to him because they need virginity certificates in order to marry.


"She can be in danger because sometimes it's a matter of traditions and family," says Dr Abecassis. "I believe we as doctors have no right to decide for her or judge her."


With Chinese manufacturers leading the way, there are now non-surgical options on the market as well. One website sells artificial hymens for just £20 (23 euros). The Chinese hymen is made of elastic and filled with fake blood. Once inserted in the vagina, the woman can simulate virginity, the company claims.


'Caught out'
But this was not an option for Nada. As a young girl growing up in the Lebanese countryside she fell in love and lost her virginity. "I was scared my family would find out especially since they didn't approve of my relationship," she says. "I was terrified they might kill me."


After seven years in the relationship, her lover's family wanted him to marry someone else. Nada attempted suicide. "I got a bottle of Panadol and a bottle of household chemicals," she says. "I drank them and said, 'That's it'."


Nada is now 40, and found out about surgical hymen restoration just six years ago. She married and had two children. Her wedding night was a stressful ordeal. "I didn't sleep that night. I was crying," she says. "I was very scared but he didn't suspect anything."


It's a secret that Nada - which is not her real name - will carry to her grave. "I am ready to hide it until death," she says. "Only God will know about it."


But it's not only the older generation that subscribes to traditional views about sex before marriage, when it comes to choosing a wife.


Noor is a trendy professional who works in Damascus. He's fairly representative of young Syrian men in a secular society. But although Noor says he believes in equality for women, underneath the liberal facade lies a deep-rooted conservatism.


"I know girls who went through this restoration and they were caught out on their wedding night by their husbands," he says. "They realised they weren't virgins. Even if society accepts such a thing, I would still refuse to marry her."


Muslim clerics are quick to point out that the virginity issue is not about religion. "We should remember that when people wait for the virgin's blood to be spilled on the sheet, these are all cultural traditions," says Syrian cleric, Sheikh Mohamad Habash. "This is not related to Shariah law."


Christian communities in the Middle East are often just as firm in their belief that women should be virgins when they marry.


Arab writer and social commentator, Sana Al Khayat believes the whole issue has much to with the notion of "control".


"If she's a virgin, she doesn't have any way of comparing [her husband to other men]. If she's been with other men, then she has experience. Having experience makes women stronger."


It may be the 21st Century but the issue of virginity in Arab culture can still be a matter of life and death, especially for women like Sonia and Nada.


And while hymen repair may be a quick fix, it can't reconcile centuries of ingrained tradition with the attitudes of modern society.

Introduction

For a few years now I have posted blogs on Female of the Species. The blog started as I became part of the CFZ in that it was a sort of woman's eye view of what it is like living with three blokes - wife of one and - well I am not sure what I am to the other two.  It was originally intended to be a record of events seen from my point of view and has grown into something a bit more over the last couple of years.  It has always left a gap in that I have not been able to write about some of things most dear to my heart - and also not to be able to write about my family in a more personal way as it detracts from the general CFZ.  So I have decided to start a new blog totally separate from the other in which I can moan about life as a female without it having to fit into CFZ life.

I am not a 100% feminist, but I have a huge interest in how women have been treated over the centuries.  I am hoping to draw on information on how the treatment of women has changed or not as may be the case in some areas.  It is not intended to be a direct swipe at men but is purely a look at womanhood through the ages.