Feminist miscellany

First and most importantly, defending abortion. Below is posted, as advised by Rad Geek, a small contribution to a "Google bomb" to get an appropriate Google response to the search "Roe v Wade".

Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:
Roe v. Wade
abortion

You can too. Join me in Bombing for Choice.

America is the obvious example of why women have to be vigilant in defending abortion rights, even when they have seemingly been secure for decades, but Australia provides a further warning.

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More cheerfully, some women who really made the news, often against all of the odds:

"... Despite the fact that women were restricted from applying for some jobs ( the ban on female General Trainees was only lifted in 1960) they were responsible for some of the BBC's most famous news programmes.

In 1950, Grace Wyndham Goldie pushed the BBC into covering the General Election, she championed the first party political broadcasts and Budget programmes before re-launching Panorama in 1955 and developing Tonight in 1957.

In radio, two women (Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie) saw through the development of the Today programme which was launched in 1957. Isa Benzie was the first producer and inventor of the programme's title.

It was in 1957 that the first woman read the news in the BBC Television Service: Armine Sandford, one of a team of four who presented the West Region's daily television news bulletins from the Bristol studios.

But it was a long while before women were allowed to read the national news. Nan Winton was tried as a newsreader in June 1960 but soon axed. ..."

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How did the "Victorian" change into the "modern"? This essay about Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening suggests one woman writer of the period might have some of the answers ...

For feminist scholars, the text is especially rich because its female author explores and negotiates a fluid border of literary tradition -- examining and playing with, alternately embracing and backing away from, the Victorian literary foremothers' version of "domestic fiction" and the up-and-coming, largely male-dominated, Modernist movement. Chopin as an author, like Edna as a character, is a woman caught in the borderlands between the literary traditions assigned to her as a nineteenth century female writer and the mores of a new era.

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I'm not really a fan of the Impressionists, but if you are, as well as knowing about Monet, Renoir, et al, you should also know about Berthe Morisot. There's a new exhibition about her at the (American) National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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If you are planning to read Simon Goldhill's Love, Sex, and Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, which I am one of these days, an essential accompaniment and corrective, it seems, is this excellent review. Also a useful response to the claim we "don't need women's history now, because it is included everywhere".

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For anyone alarmed by the Telegraph story about women in Germany being "forced" to work as prostitutes or face a benefit cut, here's a pretty reasonable debunking. The old story, if you think an account is unbelievable, it probably is.

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Whew, now I'm on top of my inbox again ...

[women] (a tag)