How to achieve immortality? How to resurrect the dead? This is a feminist exploration of these two questions in the year 2005, in the technology of that moment.

Silicon technology will, on some accounts, allow the achievement of immortality by disposing with the body – the ‘meat,’ as a school of science fiction and pseudo-science writing would scornfully have it. Hans Moravec in Mind Children proposes the transplantation of individual humans into a computer, removing "our biggest handicap, the limited and fixed intelligence of the human brain" (109). I am with N Katherine Hayles, among others, in a determination to resist this approach, which is rooted in what she describes as this "defining characteristic of the present cultural moment … the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates" (1).

What would such ‘meatless’ immortality mean to biography and to history? If, for a moment, we accept that the entire sum of your knowledge, your experiences, your neural pathways can be imprinted on a computer, does that mean anything without a human body – indeed a human society – being aware of its existence? I would argue that this is not immortality, but indefinite cold storage, cryogenics by another name. It possible, however, to imagine an alternative form of silicon immortality – a feminist form, but only within what Bynum calls "the stuffedness of the body” (267) (and the mind), or, to put it another way, a human consciousness. If a memory of, or knowledge of, a person exists within a single human body/mind, then the person remembered has an existence, albeit a tenuous, wraithlike one.

If as self is contained within the pages of a book on a library shelf, there is potential life, potential immortality, but it is unrealised – it is in another form of cold storage if the book is not open and read. The nature of the internet, its closeness to what Barthes described as the perfect text – "the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest … it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances" (Quoted in Landow, 3) – makes the potential of any life recorded on it much stronger. Furthermore, the internet is a community, consisting of vast numbers of “communal projects requiring ongoing community responsibility” (Wertheim, 302). If immortality is preserved within a massive, worldwide network of bodies it is as secure as it can possibly be at this moment in time. A monograph residing in half a dozen libraries around the world might have a better chance of cryogenic survival, but not of coming to the attention of living minds. The male proponents of silicon life are right about its importance, but entirely wrong about its nature.

This alternative, embodied view of immortality chimes with a longstanding ‘commonsense,’ pre-silicon-age view, which also holds that a person lives on whilesoever their memory is retained in that of another. Making this “life” possible is often, consciously or not, the aim of historians, as Lerner says in explaining “why history matters … the dead continue to live by way of the resurrection we give them in telling their stories” (211). That this can be achieved in a variety of forms, beyond the traditional scholarly mechanisms, has been demonstrated by fiction writers such as Marele Day, who brought to life Mrs Cook (wife of the famous captain) in her imagination, then in the minds of her many readers. Even more informal forums in which warm minds encounter cold text can equally well produce such rebirth.

This genuine form of silicon immortality is important for feminists for two reasons. First, and I doubt many readers here will need much convincing of it, this is because women have so often been denied the immortality of memory by societies that refused to regard them and their work as important. Before beginning my current research, on women’s history in London in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, I had absorbed the general ‘pop history’ view that women in the past were the ‘angels in the house’ of Victorian times, or the frustrated housewives of Betty Friedan. Every day now, however, I am astonished to find just how many women who were prominent in their own time, in any and every field of endeavour, have very nearly disappeared from history, and have only been rescued by historical research of the past couple of decades.

Any reader can be excused for not having heard of Isabella Whitney, who was (very likely) in her own time widely known as the “Sapho” (sic) of London (Lyne, 2004, para 2); her best surviving work is a wonderful poetical travelogue of the city, its shops, its jails, its streets. Isabella wrote two published books of poems, that we know of. Both survived – so frighteningly precariously – in a single copy. The first, The Copy of a Letter, now in the Bodleian, Oxford, comes from the library of the jurist John Selden. There is nothing in it to prove it, but it seems likely that it was saved by his wife Elizabeth, a scholar and scientist. Isabella’s second book, Sweet Nosegay, was saved by the Rev. Thomas Corser of Manchester, a lover of early English verse. When in 1868 much of his collection was put up for sale it was purchased by the British Library.[1] Until 1980, when the first article on her was published and one of her poems republished, however, these books, and Isabella herself, had only potential, cryogenic immortality in their guardian libraries. Today she still has only a scant silicon presence, and a wraithlike immortality in relatively few, predominantly academic, minds.

The second reason why silicon immortality is important to feminists is that it offers many women the opportunity to contribute to the resurrection of women of their own and other ages, when other avenues are closed to them. Norma Clarke in The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters asks why Jane Barker, Sarah Fielding, Eliza Heywood, Delavrier Manley, innovative, popular, admired writers, were almost forgotten, while the men who were their compatriots – Milton, Pope, Steele, Swift – have got as close to immortality as any person who spends their life laying pen to paper could reasonably expect (119-120). I’m angry, sometimes, that these, my foremothers, like so many of their compatriots, did not do enough to ensure their own survival into the future, and I have to ask: why?

Clarke explains the apartheid of historical fame in her period by looking at how men supported and encouraged each other’s fame, in life and posthumously, while even those men who helped and facilitated women’s work failed to do anything to ensure they lived on after death (122). There is, I would suggest, something in this – and it is a condition that continues today. Separations of public and private spheres, the institutions of mating, the grinding labour of so many women’s lives, have all tended to separate women from each other, while men are pushed together into mutually supportive groups: clubs, political parties, sporting teams, the list could go on and on. Yet the internet offers a chance to network that pushes aside barriers of private/public, of distance, even (with translation technology) of language, and (to a limited extent) of economic disadvantage. Every year, it seems, it becomes easier to publish yourself on the internet. And these are opportunities that are growing every day.

I look back over a professional life of some 15 years, most spent as a journalist, and realise that from my earliest working (pre-silicon) days, one of my obsessions was to record and preserve accounts of women’s experiences. On a small local paper in New South Wales, Australia, I wrote about Myrtle Jenkins, a farmer and housewife and for 50 years an unpaid correspondent to the small weekly Eastern Riverina Observer. I wrote about Amy Kleeman, an old-age pensioner who had grown up on the Alpha, a Murray River paddleboat on which her mother was the engineer. These stories are, however, generally accessible only to a scholar – most likely of local history – who might consult the fragile, yellowing pages in the local library or archive, at least until I made them available on my website (No pink-winged blue-spotted flies, 2005). Yet still it is only a chance correspondence on Google that is likely to take a reader to their stories.

Constructing such a website is today relatively cheap and easy, but there is an even simpler way to publish, the weblog (‘blog’). For those with internet access there is very low or zero cost, it makes few demands for technical knowledge, and, most importantly of all, through the means of ‘blogrolls’ (lists of sites the writer recommends), authors can find and develop communities of shared interest. The still nascent research on the blogosphere has tended to focus on explicitly ‘political’ blogs (See for example Ratliff). The limited research indicates, however, that women and girls are taking advantage of the publishing opportunities of weblogs at least as much as are males (Herring et al, para 8). Women who would not/could not class themselves as ‘scholars’ – family historians, local history researchers, interested ‘amateurs’ of all sorts, even journalists – could contribute and participate in this cyber community. They tell their own stories, the stories of their friends and acquaintances, and the stories of the historical women they encounter in reading and research. The accuracy of such accounts no doubt vary widely; some are referenced, many are not, yet they give the characters that inhabit them immortality, real and potential.

Many of the women I encounter in dusty manuscripts, in scarce Victorian tomes, or indeed in modern scholarly books not seen outside academic libraries, do not fit into the framework of formal pieces on which I am working. Yet they exist, for a brief moment, brought back to life in my consciousness when I read their name and something of their life, and I feel compelled to try to breathe more life into these flimsy wraiths. My blog allows me to quickly and easily transfer a snippet of a woman’s life into a form accessible to all. This is experimental, uncertain; how long it will survive I do not know, but it does extend that resuscitated life for just a little longer. Maybe, if what I write is of more than casual interest to a blog-browser, she will write more, in print or on the web, and that wraith will become just a little stronger.

An example of the possibilities: In October 2004 I wrote about Mary Lady Broughton, widow and "Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison" in London (Bennett, “A Victorian almost-feminist”). On 29 August 1670 she was accused of "wittingly and wilfully" suffering Thomas Ridley, who was in her custody on the charge of stealing a silver cup worth 25 shillings, to escape. She entered my consciousness while I was on the trail of Elizabeth Gaunt, the last woman to be executed for a political crime in England. The word “Gatehouse” caught my eye, however, since it was there that the Civil War prophet Lady Eleanor Davies, another of my research interests, was imprisoned. I was surprised, too, at the gender of the jailer. Had I not been a blogger, Lady Broughton would, however, have died from my consciousness in a day or two: she had no place in the framework of the subjects I was pursuing. Instead, I wrote a small blog post.

I can claim no credit for what came next; that belongs to Dr Sharon Howard, of the Early Modern Notes webblog (Howard, 2004). She knew a woman of the same name who appeared in court in Denbeighshire in 1683. When she asked in a comment on my blog of any possible connection I replied I had no idea, adding only that I was mainly concerned about the period around 1633, when the Gatehouse jailor was one “Aquila Weekes.” Dr Howard knew that Lady Broughton had a son of that name, and quickly established – primarily through internet sources – that she and her family had run the Gatehouse for much of the seventeenth century. Consequently there is now, on a blog, accessible to any scholar or random browser, the beginnings of the reconstruction of a woman’s life, indeed the professional ‘dynasty’ of which she was the centre. I’ve done my bit for Lady Broughton; Dr Howard has done much more.

Why, you might ask, was a weblog useful here, rather than another digital form? First, for me this was just a throwaway snippet, an interesting piece of information for which I had no alternative use. It had no place in any formal piece on which I am working, and using it neatly fulfilled my small ambition as a blogger to post every day. Secondly, it was read by Dr Howard because we belong to a community of bloggers, many of whom often (although not exclusively) post on early modern history, who regularly read each other’s work. Finally, those posts are now in cyberspace, preserved for at least as long as we keep our blogs going, and possibly longer due to the increased archiving of the web. Thanks to Google (or perhaps one of its successors), anyone else who comes across the name of Mary Lady Broughton will be able to follow in our footsteps, and perhaps build on what we have found.

The possibilities are there. Stein calls for us to think of ourselves as ethical ancestors for the wired world, saying "it is up to us to take the technological base of our society and to build on top of it the structures we want to build" (203). There is no way of knowing how long what you post today on the internet will survive – surely it is best to hedge all bets and use also whatever traditional forms might be available. But what it does offer is a chance to record and recount women’s lives in a form potentially accessible to anyone at this point and time, and possibly for far into the future. It is the best hope we have of providing warm life, not just cryogenic storage, for our foremothers and modern compatriots. The men who have claimed bodiless silicon immortality are right in believing there is great potential in medium, but wrong in thinking that it can exist without an intimate partnership with embodied humanity.

What have you done today to preserve a woman’s life – even your own – for future generations?