Crazy. Feisty. Bolshy. Bossy. Hysterical. Sassy. Shrill. Spinster. Cat woman. Hag. Cougar. Frigid. Slut. Bitch. The English language has no end of words to describe women who don’t behave the way they are supposed to. They are all derogatory and almost none of them have a male equivalent. The most complimentary thing you can hope to be called if you are a woman who doesn’t conform to societal expectations is the E-word: eccentric.
While the idea of eccentricity is nebulous, it is an important barometer of society and women’s place within it. “The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained,” wrote John Stuart Mill in 1859. If that is the case, then I think we should be incredibly excited by the loud and proud display of feminist vigour running through popular culture. From Janelle Monáe rocking very unsubtle vagina trousers in the music video for her song Pynk to Marina Abramović’s provocative performance art, and TV shows such as Killing Eve and Sally4Ever that revel in weird women, female eccentricity is having a moment.
Dr David Weeks, a neuropsychologist at the Royal Edinburgh hospital and the author of Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, agrees. “We are seeing more female nonconformists, and most eccentric women come from that group. There are more eccentric women nowadays, although they were not as well documented over the period from about 1580 to 1800 in the UK.”
The emergence of more female eccentrics is a sign of how much feminists have achieved. Women, Weeks says, now have more opportunities to “exercise their creativity, independent-mindedness and their feminist, anti-sexist rights.”
To be labelled as eccentric rather than crazy used to be a privilege only a great deal of money could buy. In the past, eccentric women tended to be aristocrats. Being upper class gave one more licence to stray from social norms. As Edith Sitwell, one of history’s most famous female eccentrics, noted: “The genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.” If you were posh enough, you could get away with anything.
Sitwell came from an incredibly wealthy and famously odd family. Her father, Sir George Sitwell, invented a tiny pistol for shooting wasps and a musical toothbrush. When not shooting wasps, he wrote a number of unusual – and unpublished – books, including A Short History of the Fork and Acorns as an Article of Medieval Diet. Then there was her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Londesborough, who died after contracting a disease from a parrot. Some of her relations were reportedly fond of hiding live lobsters between the sheets as a prank. Her mother, Ida Sitwell, was an alcoholic who spent a few months in Holloway prison for fraud. It would have been remarkable, with all that going on, if Sitwell had ended up in any way conventional.
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