Philobiblon

Philobiblon has moved

2006-04-26T10:10:00.000+01:00

This is now the former site of Philobiblon; I won't be posting here any more, although I do plan to keep the site up for at least a while, possibly even in the long term, to keep links alive. The new site still needs a few tweaks, but is more or less functional.

Sorry, I know it is a pain, but could you please adjust your bookmarks and blogrolls? (The address is www.philobiblon.co.uk - so at least I've finally got rid of the annoying disparity between the name of the site and the address.)

I hope you'll like the new design - critical comments and suggestions will be most welcome.

Fine play based on obvious ideas

2006-04-25T14:19:00.000+01:00

There are some interesting characters in 15 Minutes, which has just opened at the Arcola Theatre. Maggie (Moira Brooker) is a veteran television documentary-maker battling to come to terms with the "reality TV" age. Her married (to someone else) boyfriend Robin (Tim Block), is a cynical old Fleet Street hack - a type I recognise all too well. Maggie's "subject" is Toni (Carly Hillman), a rebellious youngster who after a stretch in Holloway is trying, sort of, to get her life into line, not helped by her angry young man Mason (Ashley Rolfe).

These are familiar - perhaps too familiar - characters, but a combination of solid writing and excellent acting take them beyond the stereotypes. The problem with the play is clear, however, in its title. 15 Minutes refers - the programme explains - to the Andy Warhol quote about fame, something that has gone beyond cliche to the point of joke. The story here is of the exploitative and partial nature of "reality" TV. Yes? And it is about how subjects can sometimes turn the tables and become (for their "managers") all too active agents. Yes?

These ideas are simply too familiar, too obvious, to make an entirely satisfying evening. The writer, Christine Harmar-Brown, has a real ear for dialogue and an eye for dramatic movement, but she needs to find some bigger themes, bigger ideas, to explore.

That doesn't mean you won't have an entertaining evening at the Arcola. The acting is top class, and director Paul Jepson does interesting things with giant television screens that shift uncertainly around the stage. But don't expect to spend a delicious after-show dinner at the many excellent restaurants around the Arcola fervently arguing the issues it raises. You'll have said and heard it all before.

Links: The Arcola, with online booking. The production continues until May 13.

What to do with a swede...

2006-04-25T13:19:00.000+01:00

My organic delivery box has held them for weeks, and they've been sitting at the back of the fridge, looking reproachfully at me whenever I opened it. I've tried straight boiling them, but they really don't taste great.

But I did find this recipe and while it is a bit fiddly for my taste, it does produce seriously yummy soup, and the sort of thing that is ideal for using the scraps around the place. (I skipped the celery and added sweet potato, and am using yoghurt instead of cream, although really it could do without a creaming agent.)

No this isn't going to turn into a cookery blog, but this was a real discovery!

How not to travel (and not to write about it)

2006-04-25T12:07:00.000+01:00

After one brief, disastrous journey (to Bali as a green young Australian, with the sister of my boyfriend, who insisted I do the bargaining for her, then complained about the results), I've always travelled alone. Sure there are times when it is tough, but mostly it is wonderful - you talk to waiters, to people on buses, to passing strollers. You get enmeshed in the local world in the way that a couple - that self-contained unit - never do.

If I ever set out on a journey with the specific aim of writing a book, I'll certainly do the same thing. That intention was only confirmed by reading Frances Mayes' A Year in the World. The book is subtitled "Journeys of a Passionate Traveller", yet the only passion she seems to feel is for the husband with whom she travels. As a self-contained unit they sweep (not around the world, as the title misleadingly proclaims), but around the Mediterranean, like a couple cuddling in their living room watching a video.

The result is a book that reads like a school report of "what I did on my holidays". Well, that's a little unfair; there is a reasonably sophisticated account of the culture of the destinations - although the sophisticated habit of tossing in local words when English would do perfectly well does become irritating. And it seems every meal, even every instance of window-shopping, is recounted in agonising detail:

"We stop to gaze at a window arranged with trays of candied fruits, gleaming like jewels. The prince perhaps partook of cedro candito, those huge gnarly lemons, almost all peel, as well as the whole candied oranges and lemons, and the array of marzipan fruits, and piles of torrone bianco con fighi secchi, white candy with nuts, and dried figs."

The other irritating thing is the details of travels that we really don't want, don't need, to know. As the kids who gather at the youth club next to my house would say: "Duh. Too much information."

"Three hours later Ed becomes violently ill. I am alarmed at his fever and clammy skin. He spends the night in the bathroom throwing up. His stomach feels ripped and turned inside out ... he's so weak he cannot life his arm. I'm on the phone calling our doctor in Italy, who says this probably is simple food poisoning, not salmonella, since the heaving has stopped after only a few hours. I write names of medicines he recommends, hoping Hafid can help at the pharmacy... Hafid arrives and says Ed ate too much, it often happens when guests come to Fez because the food is so good.
By midmorning Hafid has found various pharmaceuticals, and Ed is sleeping as if in a coma. I try not to think of the man who dies in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, leaving his neurotic wife to become a harem prisoner."

To translate that, he got food poisoning. Everyone knows the symptoms. We can do without the description, and the hysteria. You feel absolutely lousy. Then you recover. With a bit of care you are about as likely to die as from a stubbed toe.

Mayes is well known for her memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, which is a decent-enough read about restoring an ancient abandoned house and living in a foreign country. But she's someone who should obviously stay at home; the road really doesn't suit her. If you'd like to really travel this part of the world, I'd recommend Tim Macintosh-Smith's Travels With a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah, with a writer who embraces the cultures and lives he encounters. And he travels alone.

Morning reading

2006-04-25T10:02:00.000+01:00

Common sense on trafficking: police are threatening to report brothel customers for rape if they use the services of women they know to be trafficked.

Men who visit a sauna, brothel or flat where foreign prostitutes are working will be being asked to ensure the women are there of their own free will before they pay. If they suspect a woman is working against her will, they will be urged to contact Crimestoppers and provide police with the establishment's location.

I won't celebrate too much, however; I'll wait for the first prosecution, and the first conviction.
***
Proving that internet culture can break down even the most ingrained aspects of national cultural, The Times's Japan correspondent reports on the behaviour of his very own "troll".

Mr Kita (or “kitaryunosuke”, as he signs himself) plays a unique part in my life — he is my conscience, my nemesis and the closest thing I have had to a stalker. Early every morning, he logs on to the websites of the British newspapers and the BBC. He is interested in China, the Middle East and in coverage of Japan by foreign correspondents — especially, it seems, in articles written by me. These he carefully translates into Japanese and posts on to his weblog accompanied by the most violent and inventive abuse I have encountered in Japan.
It truly restores your faith in the Japanese language reading the things that Mr Kita writes about me, and his blog is an education. He’s called me a baka, of course, but that’s only the start of it. I have been denounced as a “charlatan”, a “rotten devil foreign reporter”, a “low-class foreigner” and — perhaps my favourite — “the private parts of The Times”.

***
"Good" schools get that way by selecting "good" pupils. Talk to any parent looking for a school for their child and they know this, but a survey has, surprise, surprise, found that head teachers even admit that they ignore admissions rules supposed to stop the cherry-picking. I do like the Guardian's angle on this bad behaviour:

Just about the only thing teachers and the government can unequivocally agree on these days is pupil behaviour. It's getting worse and something needs to be done about it. Yet the third Headspace survey of headteachers, carried out by Education Guardian and EdComs, administered by ICM and published today, suggests some heads might care to reflect on their own behaviour before pointing the finger at their pupils.
Less than three-quarters of the 822 headteachers who responded to the questionnaire said their school's governing body followed its admissions code of practice to the letter - 13% of secondary and 20% of primary heads said they "mostly" followed admissions procedures, while 4% of secondary and 2% of primary heads admitted they followed them only "to a limited extent". Astonishingly, 5% of secondary and 2% of primary schools claimed not to follow any part of their admissions codes.

So the pupils they reject all get dumped together in neighbouring schools, which then have problems. Surprise, surprise.

Do not adjust your set...

2006-04-24T18:48:00.000+01:00

Yes, should you have happen to have had Sky News Live at 5 on at about 5.45pm British time, that was me on there talking about blogging. Almost as much of a shock to me as it was to you ...

The occasion was the six-month anniversary of their blog.

Reading and listening

2006-04-24T14:07:00.000+01:00

Radio 4's Women's Hour serial this week is I Leap Over The Wall, by Monica Baldwin, about which I've previously blogged (here and here) - a brilliant tale from a woman who entered a sequestered order of nuns just before WWI broke out, then emerged in the middle of WWII. (You can only listen through the website - no podcast.)

And the Telegraph has a story with the words "sex" and "archives" in the same headline - and it is even worth checking out.

The plastic brain

2006-04-24T10:45:00.000+01:00

A piece today in the Guardian about an address to the Lords by Baroness Susan Greenfield expressing far-reaching fears about the effect on the human brain of the digital world.

The brilliance of Baroness Greenfield's speech is that she wades straight into the dangers posed by this culture. A recent survey of eight-to 18-year-olds, she says, suggests they are spending 6.5 hours a day using electronic media, and multi-tasking (using different devices in parallel) is rocketing. Could this be having an impact on thinking and learning?
She begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

Now this is the comment writer's version of the speech, but on her account it does seem to be - as one commenter says - an astonishingly Luddite one.
That was the "basis of education" in the 20th-century, but a historically specific one. It was heavily text-based, but that was a function of relatively cheap print, a trend that began in early modern times, when the equivalent of the Susan Greenfields of the time were of course exclaiming about the dreadful effect on the human mind of all this flood of print.

The brain is an astonishingly plastic organ, and no doubt those of children and adolescents are developing different to they were a couple of decades ago. But it is developing in the world as it is now, FOR it is now. Damn good thing too!

But some aspects of the human psyche probably don't change much. An army major in Australia is commendably trying to save the memory of the men mentally crippled in the trenches of WWI, who suffered just in the ways that veterans of Vietnam and more recent conflicts do.

Madness and the Military: Australia's Experience of the Great War, by Michael Tyquin, is the first comprehensive study on mental illness in World War I. It shatters the stereotype of the tough Anzac, an icon that he argues Australians look up to today - but which never existed.
Major Tyquin says of the soldiers who were "mentally shattered" by the war - some of whom recovered, though many did not - "I think we've erased them from our public memory. We like to celebrate Anzac, and I use 'celebrate' now because I think we're getting away from the original intent.

Traditional 'wisdom' is anything but...

2006-04-23T12:54:00.000+01:00

As the victim of an overweight childhood encouraged by the "it is only healthy baby fat", I was taken by this:

"BREAST-FEEDING mothers have been given potentially harmful advice on infant nutrition for the past 40 years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has admitted.
Charts used in Britain for decades to advise mothers on a baby’s optimum size have been based on the growth rates of infants fed on formula milk.
... breast-feeding mothers were wrongly told that their babies were underweight and were advised, or felt pressured, to fatten them up by giving them formula milk or extra solids.
Health experts believe the growth charts may have contributed to childhood obesity and associated problems such as diabetes and heart disease in later life."

Then, wives who work are 50 per cent less likely to see their marriages fall apart.

"Wives' economic activity... contributes to the continuing resilience of marriage as a social institution," the study concludes.
...Separate new research on single dads has challenged the accepted wisdom that a woman is always the best partner to bring up the children, with growing numbers of new men becoming self-sufficient fathers."

The demonisation of the young

2006-04-23T12:07:00.000+01:00

I was at a party with a lot of lawyers last night, and there were some truly hideous ASBO stories floating around. (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders: these direct people - in about half of the cases - children, not to do certain things, on the pain of their contravention making that action criminal - and imprisonable - when it would not otherwise be.)

Classic was the case of the female alcoholic - harmless, cheerful, but the neighbours didn't like to see her sitting on a park bench with her White Lightning (super-cheap cider, the preferred drink on the street). She got an ASBO forbidding her to have an open alcoholic container in the street; so the next time she sees a police officer she smiles cheerfully, raises her bottle and politely says "cheers" to him. Six months in jail - bang. And next time it will be two years. And soon she'll be spending life in prison for drinking in the street. (And they wonder why the jails are full.)

It is even worse when the targets are children - children as young as TEN - as the government's own "youth crime tsar" has complained today:

Professor Rod Morgan, the Government's chief adviser on youth crime, today issues a warning that children as young as 10 are being labelled with "the mark of Cain on their foreheads" because of the furore over anti-social behaviour.
Calling for a radical rethink in how we deal with unruly teenagers, Professor Morgan says that discretion should be exercised in cases where children are being sent to court for offences that would once have been dealt with by a slap on the wrist. ...
Record numbers of children are being sent to court, although the actual level of youth offending has remained the same over the past decade. Ten years ago about a third of the 200,000 children in the criminal justice system every year went to court. Today the figure is closer to half.

I was watching a group of local 12-year-olds doing something mildly destructive recently (what they were being destructive with was some already broken frames for temporary fencing, so I didn't intervene) and realised that the messing around they were doing would once have been regarded as perfectly normal, whereas now sooner or later someone was certain to call the police.

Until even very recently in London there were derelict sites, building sites, places where a group of kids would build a den and muck around, smashing up waste materials, making lots of noise, sorting out their own battles independently of adults. That involved, no doubt, more than the occasional nasty injury, more than a bit of bullying, and a level of risk that would be considered wholly unacceptable today. There are, however, now virtually none of those spaces left; they are boarded up, fenced off, guarded by security men and dogs. The kids are doing exactly the same things they used to do, but now risk being criminalised for them.

And yet, as this Observer story makes clear, children still find spaces to vanish into as runaways. But they are, I suspect more hidden, private spaces than in the past, and hence far more dangerous ones, particularly for the girls.

A right to housing

2006-04-22T20:48:00.000+01:00

A neat little snippet from the latest issue of Green World, the Green Party magazine.
"In Wales, landless peasants would work round the clock to complete the shell of a "tai unnos", or one-night house, as a right of tenure would be gained if smoke was seen rising from the chimney before sunrise on the following day. The shell could then be finished off and added to as time and resources allowed."

Here's the BBC's version (which seems rather more doubtful about the legal position), and a bit on the archaeology of a settlement apparently so constituted.

Weekend reading

2006-04-22T16:26:00.000+01:00

I've written elsewhere about theories that humans have been, until very recent history, as often prey as predator, and there's an interesting piece on this here. It also highlights how other higher primates remain vulnerable - was surprised to read:

Our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are prey to humans and other species. Who would have thought that gorillas, weighing as much as 400 pounds, would end up as cat food? Yet Michael Fay, a researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the National Geographic Society, has found the remnants of a gorilla in leopard feces in the Central African Republic. Despite their obvious intelligence and strength, chimpanzees often fall victim to leopards and lions. In the Tai Forest in the Ivory Coast, Christophe Boesch, of the Max Planck Institute, found that over 5 percent of the chimp population in his study was consumed by leopards annually. Takahiro Tsukahara reported, in a 1993 article, that 6 percent of the chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains National Park of Tanzania may fall victim to lions.

***
Janice Turner offers some sanity on the Cherie Blair hairdresser story. It is simple really. If the media would stop writing stories about Cherie's appearance, she could stop having to go to such lengths...
***
Why has the status of the teaching profession gone down? Probably because its pay has gone down.

Research by the Guardian, using data from the Office for National Statistics, shows, for example, that teachers got 50% more than average pay in 1966 but now are barely above the average.

So perhaps what the government should do if it really wants to improve schools is do the same thing that it has done to GPs' pay:

GPs are back in the news as their average pay has reportedly climbed towards £100,000. Their last officially recorded mean average of nearly £70,000 was nearly two and a half times the average salary. Forty years ago, however, they were earning three and a half times the average. The latest rises in their pay have been part of a deliberate policy by the government to address a shortage of doctors.

Is a GP's job more difficult than a teacher's? I suspect not.

Friday Femmes Fatales No 53

2006-04-22T10:16:00.000+01:00

Ten brilliant posts, and ten new (to me) women bloggers worth waiting for.. that's why they are Femmes Fatales.

Starting out on politics this week, Stacy on Cafe Politico looks at the Bush regime's treatment of the media. Don't ask questions seems to be the best strategy; otherwise you might get thrown out. Crabbi, on A Curmudgeonly Crab (great name!), sees a small sign of hope in the attendance of gay and lesbian families at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Then a genuinely new blog, and an interesting cross-cultural international project, Jen on Speaking Up, Speaking Out is seeking personal accounts of domestic violence. "I decided that these silences must be broken, and that I wanted to be a part of helping that to happen."

Dr Socks on Reclusive Leftist reflects on the position of the British Queen (in the week of her 80th birthday), and the general fascination of the monarchy.

Then, going on the road, on Workers dojo a look at the place of trade unions in Russia today - and some pictures...

And an on-the-spot report on India Ink on the state of Katmandu; Basia Kruszewska reports on how curfews don't apply to tourists, but "the Nepali god is crying".

Marie Javins reports on (the just renamed) No Hurry in JC about her feelings on leaving Spain. She asks "what now?" the sort of question many travellers encounter when they get "home".

Turning personal, the Snow Crow, on A Crow in the Snow, has a cautionary tale about the fact that anything you post on the net will eventually come back to haunt you. And on My Wabi-Sabi life, Melissa J White reflects on the the effects of the passing years. Some things change, some stay the same.

Finally, a little history to remind us we're come a long way. Allison Meyer O'Connor on EHearth has an account of what life was like in early 20th-century America. "This was in the days when people used to heat with little tiny stoves, or they’d have one heater in the middle of the room, and everybody would huddle around it."

If you missed last week's edition, it is here.
***
Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think "that deserves a wider audience" (particularly someone who doesn't yet get many hits), drop a comment here. It really does make my life easier!

Apologies...

2006-04-22T00:52:00.000+01:00

... that the site has been down for a few hours. What the instructions I found for importing a Blogger blog to it don't say is that the process wipes out the Blogger template.

And of course there were other complications. (Aren't there always with such things!) The import process has only taken posts from 2004, not 2005 or 2006. Any helpful suggestions as to what to do now to get the rest of the posts over will be gratefully received.

Here is where it is all going - not the final look yet, but heading in that direction.

Two retrobloggers for your reading pleasure

2006-04-21T15:26:00.000+01:00

Spend a few minutes, or hours, with Katherine Mansfield (in her journal), or W. N. P. Barbellion (an amazing early 20th-century character oh whom I confess I was previously unaware).

Thanks to Paul, of the amazing Bibliodyssey, for the Mansfield link.

The good news and the bad news

2006-04-21T12:32:00.000+01:00

The Australian state of NSW has introduced a provision for previously given evidence to be used in rape trials should a retrial be required (which usually occurs for technical legal reasons). This followed a case in which a rape victim, understandably, declined to go through the ordeal of giving evidence a second time. That's the good news.

The bad news is that this is such a low priority for officials that nothing has been done to install cameras to tape evidence in case it should be required (which in these days of cheap electronics should surely be a pretty simple, and not very expensive, task.)

So courts are having to rely on transcript evidence, surely second-best for justice.
***
Then definitely the bad news, at a school in Britain pupils are to be subjected to THREE DAYS of religious nutter creationist propaganda.

As its supporters have become more vocal, creationism has become an increasingly contentious subject in the UK. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently warned that creationism should not be taught in schools, and the National Union of Teachers last week demanded new laws to prevent the teaching of creationism in science lessons.
Organisers of the trip declined to reveal the name and exact location of the Lancashire school on Mr Mackay's speaking tour, citing the need to protect staff and pupils from unwelcome attention.
...Mr Mackay, who has a geology degree, has conducted digs around the world where he has excavated fossils which he claims prove that the Bible was literal truth.
His website argues that the theory of evolution was introduced by Satan and that the idea has already undermined Western society and must not be allowed to spread to the Third World.

***
Then a well-done to Tim Worstall, the "Britblog roundup blogger", who has a comment piece in The Times today on the cuts to compensation for miscarriages of justice.

The proffered reason, to save £5 million a year, is simply beyond satire. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, annually disposes of about £500 billion of the nation’s production: denying those innocents unjustly banged up will save some 0.001 per cent of public expenditure. Just to provide some context, the £5 million saving is less than the £5.7 million spent in 2003 on subsidising the swill bins at the Houses of Parliament. No, it can’t be about the money.
The mark of a liberal society is that more care and attention is paid to those innocents wrongly found guilty, than to the guilty who escape justice. Any criminal justice system designed and run by fallible human beings will make mistakes. The important thing is how we react when a miscarriage of justice occurs. Shamefully, under the Home Secretary’s proposals those who find their guilty verdict overturned at their first appeal will have no right to compensation. For others compensation will be capped at £500,000.

Tim and I disagree on many things, but on this I entirely agree with him.

Time to stop sending catalogues?

2006-04-21T11:19:00.000+01:00

I read today about a neat protest against Victoria's Secret, which mails 395 million catalogs annually [in the US], most printed on virgin paper. The protesters want it to use recycled paper - a start, but not, I'd suggest enough. Why, in the multimedia age, do we still need to not only print on paper, but then ship that vast weight around countries (and even across the world) - consuming lots of fossil fuel in the process?

I recently rang up Land's End, a particularly egregarious offender in sending vast numbers of catalogues, sometimes it seems at weekly intervals, and asked them to stop. "Don't you like us any more?" was the line of questioning. "No," I said, "if I decided I need any more white T-shirts or similar, I will look on the website."

Surely it is time for companies to at least provide the option of not getting catalogues? By all means send me a regular email with special offers etc, or reminding me to visit your website - I think the environment can bear the electrons - but don't use 20th-century methods of promotion; you'll only annoy me.

A most amiable king

2006-04-20T16:34:00.000+01:00

My 19th-century blogger Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today indulging in a good old gossip about French royalty - particularly the Duke of Orleans, Louis Phillipe, later the the last French king.

I found that Sir Coutts, like myself, believed what they said to be true, that Louis Philippe had not sought the painful pre-eminence in which he finds himself.

Her informant is one Sir Coutts Trotter. As his name suggests he was involved with the famous bank (being principal partner and it seems from this reference very much a working one) - making his dinner with Miss Williams Wynn an interesting example of "trade" and aristocracy intermixing. (OK, I suppose it was a superior form of "trade".) I also found a detailed account of his burial place (in Hendon).

The other London

2006-04-20T10:37:00.000+01:00

One reason why I enjoy canvassing is the glimpses it provides into the many styles of London life. Some of the glimpses are, however, almost unbearably sad.

One group that arouses such emotion are the South Asian women who meet you at the door with a look very close to terror in their eyes. It is, I think, a varying mix of a fear of encountering a world that is strange and foreign, and that they've probably been warned against, fear that their behaviour will be judged inappropriate by husband or mother-in-law, fear that their lack of English skills and other "life skills" will be exposed.

I thought of them when I read the story of a Bangladeshi woman treated with great sense by a judge, who gave her a suspended jail term.

Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told.

The story reveals how, despite living in London for years, she was effectively still kept in a Bangladeshi village:

The judge said that Khanom’s strong cultural and religious beliefs, and the fact that she had been forced by her husband to live in isolation since coming to Britain from Bangladesh, meant that there were exceptional circumstances in her case.

So sad, so sad for the child, who suffered brain damage, and so sad for any children she might have, who will have a parent unable to be any sort of support in their world, and, of course, so sad for her, able to develop to only a tiny fraction of her human potential.

Small but revealing

2006-04-20T10:12:00.000+01:00

Sometimes it is the small(er) things that really reveal the fundamental nature and mindset of regimes. In America, the Bush government is reclassifying as "secret" material already placed in the National Archive:

Documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950's, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

An open, democratic society? That's the last thing that Bush and his controllers want. Might result in resistence to the latest foreign adventure or environmental destruction.

In Britain - and this is a "little thing" only in that a relatively small number of people are likely to be affected - the Blair government is planning to both drastically cut payments to people wrongfully convicted of crime, but to entirely abolish a millennia-old principle, "innocent until proven guilty".

Mr Clarke acknowledged that a move to a "not proven" verdict would be a major change. "It would be a radical change. We are going to have a look at it. The time has come to assess it," he said.

Behind this is an anti-liberty, very Daily Mail rightwing attitude that we are the respectable middle classes and they - anyone in the dock - must be the dangerous other. And if they happen to be found not guilty - by a jury of their peers - it must have been a mistake, for the instruments of state authority are always right.

But sometimes the little things also demonstrate individual creativity and initiative. Sussex ambulance service has created a series of first aid instructions for MP3 players.

The project was the idea of a paramedic, Stuart Rutland, who said that he hoped it might help in an emergency. "I like to go running and listen to music - but what if I turned the corner and somebody had collapsed? I have 11 years of paramedic training, but not everyone will. It's just about what to do in those moments before an ambulance arrives.

The power (and democracy) of the blog

2006-04-19T10:33:00.000+01:00

From the Guardian:

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

The article goes on to say that half of European web-users are "passive", not contributing to content at all, while a quarter only respond when prompted. But of course if you turn those figures around the other way, it means one-quarter of web-users are now actively contributing to the media, and thus, the article argues, exercising an influence on society - which compares to the old days or old media, when a tiny fraction of a percentage point were contributing. That's a pretty substantial democratic leap.

A nice companion piece to this: an interview with Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, with a short list of its "coups".

Bellow it from the rooftops...

2006-04-19T09:43:00.000+01:00

The Carnival of Feminists No 13 IS UP, and Terry has done a spectacularly good job. It ranges widely in space and time, from that increasingly backward state where it is apparently becoming increasingly difficult to buy even condoms, let alone any other form of contraception, to the discrimination against older women in the Jewish world, to the progress made by women in Pakistan and that not made in the Caribbean, where Christian leaders refuse to take on the issue of domestic violence.

A whole world of feminism is there: please check it out, and help to spread the word!

A new medical condition

2006-04-18T21:23:00.000+01:00

A discovery for medical science: I've identified a new syndrome - leafletter's knuckle. After delivering about 2,700 Green Party leaflets over a couple of days, most of the skin has gone off the knuckles on my right hand (the result of paper cuts and encounters with letter-boxes that seem to have been adapted from a design for mousetraps).

I've also had lots of encounters with deadly basement flat stairs, and some horribly bodgy lifts. At the fourth rattle and the fifth squeak, I think: "I'm glad mobile phones were invented; at least it will be easy to call the fire brigade." That is often followed by the thought: "What was this building called again?"

Reading and listening

2006-04-18T11:35:00.000+01:00

Carnivalesque No 14 is now up on Earmarks in Early Modern Culture and it is a fascinating "Cabinet of Curiosities", with a particular focus on women's history, from the diary of an aristocratic figure (Lady Shelburne) to Takeri Tekakwitha, the first Native American to be beatified by the Catholic Church. Do check it out! (And thanks to Kristine for giving my posts such a great run.)

On the listening side, I've just heard the second programme in Radio Four's Fascinating Deaths series, and it was again excellent, this time about the 2 million-year-old Taung child - the first identified Australopithecine found.

Women explode from traditional society

2006-04-18T10:56:00.000+01:00

It looks like India is producing a new "Bandit Queen".

The report:

Three years ago, 16-year-old Jagari Baske vanished from a remote village in the Indian state of West Bengal. But unlike most girls her age who suddenly flee their homes in the country’s conservative countryside, she was not eloping with a boyfriend opposed by her family. Instead, Baske ran away to join Maoist rebels who claim to be fighting for the rights of the rural dispossessed but who have been responsible for a wave of killings this year as they step up their battle with the state.
Now 19, Baske is described by security forces as a dangerous foe. "Jagari is fearless and a crackshot," said a senior intelligence official in West Bengal’s capital, Kolkata. "She is ruthless and has taken part in dozens of Maoist attacks in the last two years."

Food for thought there for those opposed to women in Western militaries. You've got one of the most patriarchal, restrictive-to-women states on earth, and women are emerging from it as fighters, warriors even you might say.

Lest anyone should think I'm celebrating this, I stress that such extremes usually only emerge from societies under extreme pressure, and societies where many other women are suffering horribly without rebelling. As this report says:

Poverty among the region’s traditionally marginalised tribal people-who make up many of the movement’s guerrillas and sympathisers-is a major factor in driving women into the hands of the Maoists in a matrilineal society where mothers and wives play the dominant role in managing families. "Most of them cannot afford one square meal," says Ajay Nand, police superintendent in Maoist-infested West Midnapore district of West Bengal. "With money and food assured, some women do not think twice about joining the rebels.

And as the Cambodia Killing Fields demonstrated all too clearly, when you allow such pressure to build up, nasty events tend to explode.

An alternative, feminist, pin-up

2006-04-17T13:40:00.000+01:00

That great Sydney tradition, the Royal East Show, has one seemingly inexplicable, but highly popular, element - the woodchopping. In a small arena, a line of people armed only with an axe line up for the starting gun. Then the chips fly and they'll each slice through a hefty lump of wood in no time at all. Why is it so popular? I suspect it has a lot to do with the Australian mythology of "The Bush", the theory that Australians are bushies at heart, despite living in one of the most urbanised societies on earth.

I learn from the Sydney Morning Herald that the Americans are now competing in force, and their lumberjills (wince) are presenting an alternative image of womanhood. Not at all bad... every woman should know how to chop her own wood. (Before you ask, yes I am a dab hand with an axe. Never chopped down a whole tree, but have split up a lot of firewood in my time.)

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To something closer to most people's - and particularly women's - working reality, being a waitperson. This article sets out the realities of this job in America - where the workers are almost entirely dependent on tips for their livelihood. Theoretically, this is supposed to be the ultimate in "performance-related pay", but the article explains that the actual level of service has almost no effect on the level of a tip: "How sunny it is outside has the same impact on a tip as good service does."
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And finally, good environmental news. Hate to say it, but this will probably have more effect than a thousand sensible messages: the US glossy magazines have decided that "Green is the new black".

"Vanity Fair, the self-confessed bible for America's high rollers, has emphatically embraced the green cause. Inside a leaf-coloured cover, an alpha list of names from Julia Roberts to Robert Kennedy Jnr, and George Clooney to Bette Midler are sending a message to their President and all those still in eco-denial. "Time to get real, " the magazine tells its 1 million buyers. "Global warming is the problem the biggest problem. It's not a matter of when any longer. It's here. Green is the future the only future."
Hot in pursuit, Elle magazine ("go green with our round-up of the best organic treatments for your body") will unveil its own environmentally friendly issue this week for May with a competing clutch of celebrities, including Cameron Diaz, television star Evangeline Lilly, supermodel Carolyn Murphy, and yes Robert Kennedy Jnr."

The reality still has some way to go to catch up with the rhetoric, however:

The "green edition" [Vanity Fair], critics calculate, has used up 2,247 tons of trees. And that's not to mention the production of 4,331,757 pounds of greenhouse gases, 13,413,922 gallons of waste water and 1,744,060 pounds of solid waste.

Elle at least managed to print on recycled paper.

A coup attempt, and a great scandal

2006-04-17T13:08:00.000+01:00

My 19th-century retroblogger, Frances Williams Wynn, is today writing on one of the great 19th-century European scandals, that of Caroline Ferdinande Louise, duchesse de Berry.
From Wikipedia:

She was the daughter of Francis I of the Two Sicilies and married Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry in 1816, thus becoming duchess of Berry. She became an important figure during the Restoration after the assassination of her husband in 1820. Her son, Henri V, was named the "miracle child" because he was born after his father's death and continued the Bourbon line.
She unsuccessfully attempted to restore the Bourbon dynasty in the reign of Louis Philippe (1798-1890), known as the July Monarchy. Her failed rebellion in the Vendee in 1832 was followed by her arrest and imprisonment in November 1832. She was released in June 1833 only after giving birth to a child and revealing her secret marriage to an Italian prince.

Dumas wrote up her story at the time, and Baroness Orczy wrote a biography in 1935, but there doesn't seem to have been much done on her since. (Unless anyone can tell me of other material?)

The Deutz mentioned is the man who betrayed her to the French authorities. Miss Williams Wynn thinks he was the baby's father, but that doesn't seem to be the view of the modern sources.

Appearing on 'Life Matters'

2006-04-17T12:34:00.000+01:00

Australian readers might have been surprised this morning to hear something sounding familiar on their radios - I did a long interview (which covered a lot of ground about the Carnival of Feminists and other blogging topics) on Radio National's Life Matters.

You can find the podcast, or listen through your computer, here.

I am not sure that I will listen to it - experience suggests that I will think on every second sentence "Could have said that better", and of all the things I should have said but didn't!

Final call for the Carnival of Feminists

2006-04-16T23:46:00.000+01:00

Don't forget that you've only got a day to get in your nominations for the Carnival of Feminists No 13, which will be posted on I See Invisible People on Wednesday.

The theme of the issue will be “Feminism and Challenges - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.” Possible topics including: self-determination in health and mental health care, disability issues, transgender issues, issues of aging, integration of religion and feminist beliefs, economic issues, etc.

Nominations can be sent to ISeeInvisiblePeople AT gmail.com or through the online form.

Friday Femmes Fatales No 52

2006-04-16T19:41:00.000+01:00

Late again this week. Sorry. Am I regretting putting a day of the week in the name? Yes. Have I been a journalist so long that I should know better? Yes. Sorry. Will do better.

So, the ten brilliant posts, and ten new (to me) women bloggers worth waiting for...

First up, a huge find, (thanks to the latest History Carnival), The Old Foodie, who has a daily posting about food and history. Friday was - what you didn't know? - St Lidwina’s Day, and her herb is borage. The Foodie not only tells us all about its culinary and medicinal properties (it might, modern science says, be useful against eczema), and a recipe - not any old recipe, but one from the "first English cookbook", from 1390, from Richard II's cooks.

Staying on the food theme, want to know how to make your garden into a feast? On Eat Your History, Deborah offers her practical, spectacular example. (Although the California climate must help.)

And while on gardens, on The Ethel Experience, a wonderful range of pictures from the Chicago Botanical Gardens. No 1, 2, 3 and 4. The swans (No. 2) are in there to make up for the fact that I didn't get to take any pics of the many I saw while cycling the Thames path today. (I was too busy just keeping up with the group.)

Moving into the workplace, Simplicus, on the group effort Blogging the Renaissance, has a post that will have resonances for academic readers (in fact for anyone who socialises professionally). She reports on the social traps and frustrations of the academic conference. On The Hag's Mouth, The Hag reports on staff from failed but cool companies who use them as models at staff meetings. (I've been reading a fictional account of the dotcom crash, so this really resonated.)

Turning to books, on Between an Oxymoron and a Redundancy (what a great name!) Lucyrain starts to read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and finds a sentences that speaks volumes to her. Then, getting artistic, Lisa on Digital Medievalist (no, not a contradiction), offers thoughts on the National Gallery's attempt to buy a portrait of John Donne.

Turning personal, Caron on Women Creating the World is hoping to create a community of debate. She's looking now for thoughts on dealing with difficult family relationships.

Then OK, The Chronicles of Hermione Granger Reed is a dog blog, but it is a very classy dog blog, not written in the dog's voice, and this post has an hilarious twist in the tail... it involves Harvard Law school and mange.

Finally (and this comes with the warning that it might be upsetting to some), two shattering posts about itinerant thinker's gradual discovery of the extent of health problems of her foetus Annabel, starting with the 19-week ultrasound. Part 1 and Part 2. (The story has not yet been finished.) Those producing hysterical vitriol about "late" abortions should be made to read this. (Not of course that they will - might interfere with some of their comfortable preconceived notions.)

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If you missed last week's edition, it is here.

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think "that deserves a wider audience" (particularly someone who doesn't yet get many hits), drop a comment here.

It really does make my life easier!

Spring on the Thames path

2006-04-16T19:15:00.000+01:00

Well, having managed not to fall off my bicycle and into the Thames, I'm back from my jaunt. The Thames path is gorgeous in many places and the English spring was doing its stuff: the new lambs were gambolling, the daffodils were blooming in the churchyards, the coxes at Henley-on-Thames were bawling at their crews, and the flocks of parakeets were swirling. (Those of you who find the last of that group odd; yes they were originally Australian, but escaped pets are apparently naturalising very successfully, and in large numbers, in the south-east of England.)

There was also a hovering raptor, but I wasn't close enough to the front to hear the identification. I wasn't Tail End Charlie ALL day, just most of it. This was a group I would never have kept up with were it not for the large numbers of otherwise irritating stiles that dot the path. We made it from Reading to Windsor (and some people set off to cycle on to London - though not on the Thames path, since it had taken us from 10ish to 4 to get that far.)

That was at least 35 miles, about half of it on non-sealed paths, forest tracks and straight out rough fields - and those soft and spongy river meadows are damn hard riding. I may have done a bit more than that - the juddering shook loose the speedo magnet; my knees are swearing it must have been at least 40 miles total for the day, and they might even be right.

UPDATE: in case you should think this means I'm a "real" cyclist, read this post to discover what real cyclists do.

SECOND UPDATE: Thanks to Barry, the organiser, I learn that the raptor was a red kite, "Very rare a few years back...now spreading".

History carnival, and an apology...

2006-04-16T08:16:00.000+01:00

First the apology, to those who've asked and those who haven't: yes Friday Femmes Fatales is running late again this week. (Hopefully it will arrive tonight.)

Now the excuses: Green campaiging (1,000 newsletters out in the past two days, and 2,000 sitting reproachfully on the floor that should mostly be delivered before postal ballots go out at the end of this week for the May 4 election), and I'm working on an all-new, shiny Philobiblon. There's nothing but a rough layout yet (no content), but it is philobiblon.co.uk, for anyone who feels like being a design critic.

And today I'm off on a jaunt - to cycle the Thames (well as much of the Thames path as I can manage).

But would I leave you without anything to read? Of course not! History Carnival No 29 is up over on (a)musings of a grad student. I haven't had time for a proper read, but it looks like a cracker.

Four per cent of domestic attackers jailed

2006-04-15T14:56:00.000+01:00

It really hasn't been a good week for women's view of the "protection" of British law. After the "cautions for rape" cases earlier in the week, today it emerges that only 4 per cent of men convicted of domestic violence are sent to jail. Fifty-nine per cent are fined, which strikes me as a particularly stupid penalty, given that it inevitably penalises the victim as well as the attacker, in affecting the family budget(directly, if the couple are still together - as sadly they all too often still are, or indirectly if the father is providing child support); surely if you are going for non-custodial sentences a community service would be more appropriate?

Now I'm not, even on an issue like this, a Daily Mail "lock 'em up and throw away the key style person. Jailing should be rehabilitative purposes and, where necessary, for the protection of the community. (And that protection might be particularly necessary if the couple are still "together".)

But I'd like to see a comparison between a group of "domestic" assaults and "non-domestic" ones, grouped by the seriousness of the injuries caused to the victims. I suspect this would show that domestic assaults are still being treated as "less serious", and particularly that "respectable", relatively wealthy men who can present well in court are getting away with them, with a fine that will have little or no real meaning.

The government reflex of "make a new law" is not, however, likely to deal with this problem. The problem is not the law, or even the magistrates and judges, beyond the fact that they represent their societies. What needs to change are attitudes that make victims feel this is "just life", or "their fault", and attitudes among police, juries, lawyers - in fact everyone, that something "domestic" is somehow different to a random attack in the street. (Something that is actually statistically highly unlikely.)

To put this in context:

The annual BCS [British Crime Survey] estimate says that there were about 401,000 incidents of domestic abuse in 2004-05. However, the special BCS study points at more than a million victims each year, with 15.4m incidents involving threats or force happening each year in England and Wales. Researchers say the number would be even greater if the many sexual assaults that take place within the home were also included.

It should not be forgotten -- indeed it should be celebrated -- that we have come a long way in only a couple of decades in at least recognising that these assults are crimes. We still have a long way to go in treating them with proper seriousness.

Fear prowls in Zimbabwe

2006-04-14T19:36:00.000+01:00

Fear is on the prowl in Zimbabwe - in, sadly, the real Zimbabwe, and in the Zimbabwe of Fraser Grace's Breakfast with Mugabe, the RSC New Work production now at the Soho Theatre. The beast first unleashed, perhaps, when a group of Australopithicenes turned first on a sabre-toothed tiger and made themselves not prey but predator, the beast of revenge, of the anger born of suffering, is here. It was reined-in, controlled, soothed, managed - so miraculously - in South Africa by Nelson Mandela, but not in Zimbabwe.

So it is appropriate that Grace should build his play around a psychiatrist - a white, liberal psychiatrist who's spent his life studying the intersection of western thought on the brain and African spirituality - called in to treat the problems of President Robert Mugabe (Christopher Obi), who's being tormented by a ngozi, the angry spirit of a former comrade-in-arms. The psychiatrist, Andrew Perric (David Rintoul) - in appearance and voice all bluff, red-faced classic settler type - is patently aware of the dangers of his position, but determined to turn the President into "Robert", the patient. Although his motives might just extend beyond a doctor's desire to heal.

The lighter relief - this is always dark comedy, but there is no shortage of laughs - come chiefly through Grace Mugabe (Noma Dumezwemi). She is brittle, smart and grasping, with no illusions about the way modern Zimbabwe functions. Grace doesn't fear ghosts, but has a healthy horror or her husband's mental instability. Her scene with the strong-arm bodyguard Gabriel (Christopher Obi) - no angel he - conducted entirely in Shona, except for two key words, "Mercedes" and "Coupe", is a tiny comic masterpiece of writing and acting. READ MORE

Women freed and women trapped

2006-04-14T11:52:00.000+01:00

Given all the concern about mental health, some interesting figures are out indicating the UK suicide rate is the lowest since records began in 1910. Partly this is due to measures that have reduced the availability of methods of suicide, the experts say, but there is another factor:

One of the most dramatic falls in suicide rates is among 45- to 75-year-old women, which are down to a third of the level of the 1960s.

The Telegraph, given its ideology and audience, struggles to deal with this, saying:

Women aged 45 to 75 are also apparently happier these days despite - or perhaps because of - soaring divorce rates, leading to a reduction in suicides among older females.

I'd say it is definitely "because of". Something to think about when you next here a commentator thundering on about "family values". That was where "family values" got you.
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And to point to the proponents of faith schools. Polly Tonybee has a lovely thundering piece about them this morning, wondering why the government is so in favour of them when 64 per cent of voters are opposed to them.

Ask most Labour MPs and they abhor the devious abuse of religious schools and the segregation they cause. It's not "choice", since most parents would never choose faith schools if they were not the flag for assembling the better pupils locally. Baroness Morgan, until last year a close Blair ally as No 10's director of government relations, spoke out boldly against religious schools in the Lords. (Note how everyone leaving No 10 suddenly speaks their mind - and it is rarely the mind of their leader.) ICM polling shows that 64% of voters think "the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind" - a surprisingly strong position. So what on earth is a Labour government up to - and why don't Labour MPs refuse to let this happen?

She's barred, of course, from the Guardian's pro-Labour position from answering that question - perhaps the fact that the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary are religious fanatics has something to do with it?
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My mail box has been full lately of accounts of the latest "honour killing" horror, this time in Germany, involving a Kurdish family of Turkish background.

Forced to marry a cousin in Turkey as a young girl, Ms Surucu later broke with her Turkish-Kurdish family in Berlin and was living independently with her five-year-old son, to the intense disapproval of her relatives, prosecutors said.
Ayhan Surucu, 20, who confessed to pulling the trigger, was sentenced to nine years and three months, close to the 10-year maximum allowable as he was a minor, aged 18, at the time of the killing.

Such crimes seem to come around, all too sadly, in regular cycles, but I've been musing about how many cases there must be that don't get to this point - all of the girls and women who must be terrorised into submission, into submitting to rape by their "husbands", behind the cases that hit the headlines. And how many suicides there must be...

What the Romans did TO us (i.e. women)

2006-04-13T19:57:00.000+01:00

A recent popular history television series ran along the lines of What the Romans Did For Us - with lists of all the usual "civilising influences" - "concrete, fast food to frescos and lighthouses to loos".

Yet having just finished Boudicca's Heirs, by Dorothy Watts, I also know what the Romans did to "us" - if you count the (roughly, very roughly in their case) half of the population that is female as "us". Watts work is subtitled "Women in Early Britain" and is an up-to-date (2005) account of what the archaeological record reveals (with also notes of how this matches the historical record).

The overwhelming, almost shattering, fact is that while in the preceding Iron Age numbers of men and women were pretty much matched, soon after the Romans arrived there is a suddenly shift in the nation's graveyards - the number of women drops significantly. The only explanation, Watts concludes, is that the Romans brought with them, with all their "civilising" influences, the previously unknown practice of female infanticide - and female infanticide to the level of the worst of India or China today, that saw up to seven per cent of the women "lost".

You might ask where the babies' bodies went, but the Roman practice was that infants and young children were not -- at least until the influence of Christianity -- buried in "adult" graveyards, but in domestic or city contexts where bones, if they survive at all, will only occasionally be found. Also, children being abandoned were usually just dumped, rather than killed, so their bodies would usually have fallen to scavengers.

It is worth noting too that when the Romans went, so did the practice of female infanticide. (Although the arrival of Christianity does appear to have ameliorated it.) It was only in the Saxon burial grounds, however, the sex ratio is restored to natural equality.

Watts's writing is often technical and detailed (she goes into all the statistics and the potential factors that contributed to them) - this is certainly not an "introduction to the women of Roman Britain book" - yet in the end her conclusions are clear, if undramatically presented:

"In Chapter 2 the burial evidence was extrapolated from 16 sites from the late pre-Roman Iron Age. It was shown that there were equal numbers of males and females in Iron Age cemeteries. When those figures are compared with those of the Roman period (M=57 per cent, F = 43 per cent), it is obvious that there was a decline in the number of females being reared." (p. 53.)

Even those women who survived this early danger were likely, the archaeological evidence suggests, to see their status decline as Roman influence took hold:
"In most sites in the Iron Age females had larger and deeper graves than men. The graves with the largest dimensions were in fact for women from the earliest cemeteries studied - the Aras burials in East Yorkshire, dating from the third to the early first century BC." (p. 72)

Yet, Watts makes clear, the archaeological evidence suggests that women could have strong positions within elite families - being in higher numbers than males among what she describes as "status" burials - those that featured lead and stone coffins, and/or had the bodies packed with variously constituted "plaster", which probably started as a Christian practice to try to preserve the body for Judgement Day, but then spread more widely. But the top men were most likely given even more status in death, in mausolea, vaults and enclosures, which are overwhelmingly given over the male bodies.

Also, that doesn't mean girls, once they had been chosen for survival, were not valued. The graves of adolescents and young women are frequently rich and well marked. Indeed, she suggests that there was for girls who died before marriage were "dowered" in some way in the grave, in a ritual for which it appears there is no literary record.

"At Dunstable, a teenage girl had three bronze bracelets on her left wrist, two bronze and one iron ring on her left hand, and a necklace comprising 61 small glass beads around her neck; an 18-year-old also had a pile of jewellery in her coffin ... At Lankhills, a young woman aged 17-20 had, besides a spindle whorl and hobnailed footwear, seven bravelets, two rings and some beads..." (p. 83)

Wherever possible (which isn't all that often), Watts records the human details behind the archaeological statistics. These are the simple human tragedies that could be Any Time, Any place. Simplicia Florentina was aged just 10 months when she died in York, mourned by her father, a soldier of the Sixth Legion. Her coffin refers to her as a "most innocent soul". That, combined with her name, suggests the family was Christian, as does the enclosure of the child's body in plaster. (p. 145)

That story might be balanced by that of Claudia Crysis, who died at Lincoln at the advanced age of 90. Probably a freed slave, her name came from the Greek, meaning gold, and she must have had golden luck to have lived to such an age in Britain, for one of the things that emerges, perhaps surprisingly, is that few people lived beyond the age of 45, unsurprisingly given the evidence of their bones, which show rampant malnutrition, particularly outside the wealthier urban centres, the dangers of childbirth, and the rates of infectious disease.

Beyond the evidence of the graveyards (so information-rich and as Watts says, with advances in DNA technology likely in the future to yield far more data), she conducts a brief survey of what can be known about the lives of these women before they reached their final resting place - their daily work and leisure activities, their religious beliefs and activities. The answer still, all too often, is "we don't know".

This is, however, a fast-moving area - with an enormous amount of data added to the records every year, even if only the occasion "sexy" find makes the newspaper headlines. To give just one example, Watts notes that in her study of 1991 she concluded there were 13 cemeteries in fourth-century Britain that might be seen as Christian. Just over a decade later "to that list might now be added the cemeteries at Bletsoe, Newarke Street Leicester, and Shepton Mallet." (p. 147) It seems unlikely, however, that the basic conclusion of what the Roman did to us will be overturned.

A women's story through male eyes

2006-04-13T14:45:00.000+01:00

The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller's powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's version - its first Miller production - has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you'd expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding "glorification of terrorism" coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who've used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold - just - the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without. READ MORE

How the "other half" live

2006-04-13T13:41:00.000+01:00

Living on a council estate, you get occasional, sometimes shocking, insights, into how the "other half" live. I just had pushed through my door as junk mail a "refinancing offer" from a finance company, offering rates of 15.3 per cent on secured loans on a property, and 8.1 per cent on secured mortgages (both of those would be "average" figures).

Pretty bad, although I suppose fairly par for the course for people with bad credit records, County Court judgements etc. But then reading the fine print, I found that "there will be a fee for mortgage advice ... normally 3% of the mortgage balance". Three percent of what is probably near the total value of a home, for organising the mortgage! (And nothing specifies if this is still applied even if no loan results.)

This is the underbelly, the dark side, of Thatcher's "right to buy" revolution, and indeed London's property revolution, on which Anatole Kaletsky is writing today. Some "right to buy" people have done very well out of it, but some have been left with crippling maintenance and general debts, and end up with no equity, and no home.

Kaletsky concludes that London's property market has largely been decoupled from British economic performance, because the city's economy is so dependent on the global economy, but that it reconnects through people selling their homes here and moving out to the rest of the UK. Fine if you've got enough equity to do it.

The non-religious Settlement

2006-04-13T11:35:00.000+01:00

Interesting comment piece in the Guardian this morning, which suggests that the post-Civil War settlement between the Church of England and the government and society involve a tacit agreement:

Safe though he was, the nice country vicar in effect inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity. A religion of hospital visiting and flower arranging, with a side offering of heritage conservation, replaced the risk-all faith of a man who asked his adherents to take up their cross and follow him. The nice country vicar represented a very English modus vivendi between the sacred and the secular, with the sacred, in swallowing many of its convictions, paying by far the heaviest price for the deal.
In exchange for a walk-on part during major family occasions and the opportunity to be custodian of the country's most impressive collection of buildings, the vicar promised discretion in all things pertaining to faith: he agreed to treat God as a private matter. In a country exhausted by wars about religion, the creation of the nonreligious priest was a masterstroke of English inventiveness. And once the priest had been cut off from the source of his fire and reassigned to judge marrows at the village fete, his transformation from figure of fear to figure of fun was complete.

I tend to broadly agree with that, although not with his next step - he wants to restore the fiery religion, I'd like to take this historical progression to its logical conclusion - get rid of the religion altogether, run the church as a community centre and choose a community worker to do the visiting, tea drinker and marrow-judging.

While I'm talking history, if you're a history blogger, watch out. The UK glorification of terrorism act comes into effect today. Be careful what you write about those Vandals....

You know you are getting old when ...

2006-04-13T02:02:00.000+01:00

... after spending a whole day pulling together the paperwork for your tax return, you think: "Next year I will organise this better", then a second later think "who am I kidding? Of course I'll continue to file the papers in a heap on the floor for months at a time. I always have."

Still, I rewarded myself by going to see the RSC's The Crucible (brilliant - report later today) and strolled home through the West End enjoying the emergence of the rituals of the spring mating season (even if the weather still isn't co-operating). The provincial flocks in their best new denims were pouring out of Les Mis on to the tour buses that had entirely blocked Shaftesbury Avenue, while outside the nightclub near Oxford Circus Tube, a chorus of pavement T-shirt-sellers had set up a melodious version of "Skinny, Hoodie, Skinny, Hoodie" for a band whose name I couldn't quite read upside down.

Call for nominations: Carnival of Feminists ...

2006-04-13T01:45:00.000+01:00

The next carnival is sweeping up fast, and with a lot of the world celebrating Easter soon, make sure you don't miss out!

The second call for nominations is up - the suggested (although not compulsory topic) is "Feminism and Challenges - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.” Possible topics including: self-determination in health and mental health care, disability issues, transgender issues, issues of aging, integration of religion and feminist beliefs, economic issues, etc.

They can be sent to ISeeInvisiblePeople AT gmail.com, or submitted via the nomination form.

Please help to spread the word!

'Licence to batter'

2006-04-12T10:40:00.000+01:00

Imagine the case: a bloke is down the pub, has a drink or two too many, loses his temper with a man at the next table who is, he thinks, "looking at me funny" and beats the hell out of him. Duly hauled before a magistrate, he says: "Sorry. Really sorry. Didn't mean any harm. Won't do it again." The magistrate says: "That's all right then. Here's a slap on the wrist."

No, I can't imagine it either. But that is what is proposed, at least for cases of domestic violence, in new draft guidelines.

MEN and women who attack their partners should have the chance to avoid being sent to jail if they appear genuinely sorry for their violence, according to sentencing proposals published yesterday.
Instead, wife-beaters could receive a suspended prison sentence or community order. The proposals also recommend that perpetrators of domestic violence attend courses to tackle their offending, even though it is too early to know if they are effective in curbing violence.
The head of the leading domestic violence charity attacked the draft guidelines. Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said: “It would be a travesty if the Sentencing Guidelines Council proposals on domestic violence come into effect. In short they give men a licence to batter women as long as they are able to put on a remorseful act in front of a judge.”

That fits nicely with an excellent interview with Catharine McKinnon, whose latest book, Are Women Human? has just been published.

She writes: "[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody."
Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists' points of view, I ask MacKinnon? "Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren't even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don't, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction."

Coverage of the Green Party local election launch

2006-04-12T09:32:00.000+01:00

The BBC goes very straight:

The Green Party hopes to have more than 100 councillors after the local elections in England on 4 May.
The party is calling for good local services within walking distance and protection for local businesses.
The Greens already have 70 council seats including six in Oxford, where they hold the balance of power.
The party's Caroline Lucas told the BBC they did not expect to win overall control in any council but were hopeful of boosting numbers of councillors....

The politics wonks' site, ePolitix.com, is into the numbers:

Launching its poll push on Tuesday, the party said it was fielding a total of 1,294 candidates.
There will be a particular focus on London, where 567 of the candidates are standing.
Camden, Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham and Merton are among the London boroughs where the party is hoping to make gains...

The Guardian, meanwhile, takes the anti-Conservative, national politics line:

The Greens are grateful to David Cameron for pushing environmental issues up the political agenda, the MEP Caroline Lucas said yesterday as the party began its local election campaign.
But Ms Lucas, who represents south-east England in the European parliament, added that the Tories had no policies to back up their claims to care for the environment. She believed their leader's promise to lead a green revolution was a case of "the emperor's new clothes", which was bound to backfire.
At the Greens' press conference in London, Ms Lucas said every time Mr Cameron was asked "to deliver on a specific policy proposal, you see him ducking and diving, slipping and sliding".
She added: "When people see the lack of substance behind his rhetoric, that can only do us good."...

I went out for a short canvassing session on the council estate on which I live last night (when the rain stopped). And I was surprised anew at the highly positive response I got. The Labour Party really is in the stink with its traditional supporters.
***
I was also pleased to see this morning that Jean Lambert, the other English Green MEP, has taken up the case of the murdered Thai human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit.

MEPs Jean Lambert, from Britain, and Frithjof Schmidt, from Germany, also asked the Council if it had communicated to the Thai government its concern over security threats to Somchai’s wife, Angkhana.
Angkhana has been threatened on several occasions and warned not to pursue her husband’s disappearance, most recently last month.
The issue of allegations of torture by members of the Thai security forces and its effect on Thai-EU relations was also raised by the MEPs.

Aphra Behn's tomb...

2006-04-11T15:54:00.000+01:00

An interesting query from Holly, who's been contributing to the "really dead women authors meme" about the location of Aphra Behn's tomb in Westminister Abbey, and why she isn't in "Poets' Corner".

I happen to have sitting beside my bed in my "to read" pile Maureen Duffy's biography. It says:

"Thrysis [Thomas Sprat, "Birmingham's old chaplain, who was Dean of Westminster], I believe, was responsible for her burial in Westminster Abbey on April 20th, no doubt backed by Burnet and by those of sufficient wit and position not to mind the odium or satire that accure to them from such an act. She lies in the cloister and not among the 'trading poets' in poets' corner, but with the Bettertons and Anne Bracegirdle." (p. 294)

So it sounds like she was classed as "theatre" rather than "literature".

There's an image of the tomb here.

Can anyone add to this?

Little reassurance in rape "cautions"

2006-04-11T11:30:00.000+01:00

More emerges on yesterday's story about offenders being cautioned for rape, none of it reassuring:

RAPISTS who are cautioned are being put on the sex offenders register for a maximum of two years after the Government relaxed registration rules three years ago.
Young rapists go on the register for only a year from the date on which they are cautioned after admitting the sex attack, The Times has learnt. Yet a rapist convicted in the courts and given a jail term of 2½ years is on the register for the rest of his life.

***
The NHS might be bad at managing dying, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the private sector nursing homes are even worse. This is something as a society we really, really have to get better at.
***
And I won't give away the ending, but if you want to hear a detailed tale of the death of a mammoth in England about 700,000 years ago, Fascinating Deaths from Radio Four is well worth a listen. (Not a podcast - you can only do it through the computer, and it doesn't say how long the link will work for, but usually it is at least a week.)
***
Australia has new draconian employment laws. One of the effects:

Unions will take legal action after workers were docked four hours' pay for stopping work for 15 minutes to collect money for the family of an employee killed on a construction site.
The workers were docked for taking unprotected industrial action under the Government's new workplace legislation.
CFMEU organiser Martin Kingham said about 25 workers stopped for up to 15 minutes last Friday to take up a collection for the family of building worker Christos Binos, 58, who was fatally crushed by a concrete slab in Melbourne last month.

The company says the law gives it no choice, and if it did not dock the pay, it could lose government contracts and be fined itself.

Beauty and fashion as a cultural construct

2006-04-10T23:59:00.000+01:00

This is a postcard postmarked in Bristol at 10pm on April 11, 1907, labelled "Miss Edna May". That anyone could have considered that hat a flattering or attractive piece of fashion is beyond me...

I think this must be the actress who was born Edna May Nutter (can see why she dropped the surname...) although the photographer (or perhaps retoucher) has done a good job in this pic in hiding her "horse face". (Who says the past was genteel?)

The message on the back, sent to a Miss E.M. Ingles of 71 Marle Hill Pde, Cheltenham, is equally blunt: "Dear Eva, Just a postcard to help you on. Can you let know by Sunday morn. the name of the Sec.y of the Education Cmm.ttee for Cheltenham. That means I want a letter. Yours etc. Percy."

The tone is definitely exasperated and blunt. You have to wonder why it mattered...

UPDATE: Thanks to Penny, who in the comments pointed out that I had the wrong actress Edna May.

A caution for rape. Rape?

2006-04-10T12:14:00.000+01:00

The Times is reporting today that in the last year for which figures are available (2004) 40 offenders (who admitted the offence) were cautioned for rape, i.e. they got a bit of a talking to down at the police station, and that was that.

It is one of those stories to which the first reaction is horror, but listening to various explanations this morning (very young offenders for whom psychiatric treatment has been arranged and even younger victims, or crimes that occurred decades ago) I suppose there may be cases where it is appropriate - at least it puts the attackers on the sex offenders' register, which helps to protect others. And it may save victims giving evidence in court - although of course that just highlights what an ordeal that still is.
***
Of course many women around the world get even less protection - attempts are now being made to save the life of an Iranian woman, Nazanin:

Amnesty International has said the woman was 17 when she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005.
Now 18, Nazanin was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging.
Amnesty International and human rights workers said they had been unable to contact her family, and did not know whether legal appeals were scheduled.

***
An interesting comment piece in the Guardian not so much for its contents - a fairly standard debate about "the Enlightenment", what it was and what it is today, but the fact that it is structured pretty well entirely as a reaction to Guardian blog material.

Add your five early women authors to this cumulative meme...

2006-04-09T21:42:00.000+01:00

A brilliant idea, which I just found on Heo Cwaeth. This is a collection of pre-1800 women authors. You take the existing list, and add five of your own.

So, the existing list (taken straight from Heo Cwaeth, who describes it as "the really dead women authors meme". She also links to many of the texts, but I'm still defrosting after a very cold, wet afternoon of canvassing, so I'll send you back to her for those):
Bardiac's Starter five:
Behn, Aphra - Oroonoko
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) - The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Locke, Anne (aka Ane Lok, etc) - A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France - The Lais of Marie de France

Dr. Virago adds:
The Paston Women - The Paston Letters
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
Anonymous - The Floure and the Leafe(Her reasoning for this is on her blog)
Lady Mary Wroth - Poems

La Lecturess adds:
Anne Askew - The Examinations of Anne Askew
Mary Sidney - Psalms
Anne Finch - Poems
Katherine Phillips - Poems
Teresa of Avila - Life

Amanda adds:
Bradstreet, Anne: collected poems
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Lanyer, Aemilia: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania

Medieval Woman adds:
Trotula - The Diseases of Women
Female Troubador Poets:- La Comtessa de Dia - "A chantar m'er" & other Trobairitz poetry excerpted.
Hrostvitha of Gandersheim (c.930-c.1002) - Plays Gallicanus & Dulcitius (My note: She wrote a few more plays and poems listed on this post here.)

Heo Cwaeth adds:
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Scivias and Liber Divinorum Operum (plus a whole bunch of other stuff I plan to address later in a MWIA post)
Rachel Speght (1597 - Some time after 1621) Mouzell for Melastomus and Mortalities Memorandum
Anna Comnena (1093-1153) The Alexiad
Frau Ava (1060-1127) First named German poetess. "Johannes," "Leben Jesu," "Antichrist," "Das Jüngste Gericht" (That's in MHG)
Dhuoda (9th century, inexact dates) Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman's Counsel for Her Son (at Sunshine for Women) and a dual-language version from Cambridge UP

And my additions:
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (A lady in waiting to the Japanese empress c. 965AD) Favourite extracts here and here.
Eliza Haywood The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless (1751) (and much else)
Chen Tong, Tan Ze and Qian Yi, authors of The Peony Pavilion: Commentary Edition by Wu Wushan's Three Wives (1694) They were his successive wives, by the way...
Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter, lately written in meeter by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573)
Elizabeth Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715).

Friday Femmes Fatales No 51

2006-04-09T11:30:00.000+01:00

Building on my collection of 500 female bloggers - 10 each week. (Yes there are millions out there, this just seeks to highlight a nice range of them and give them a bit of publicity.)

Why "femmes fatales?" Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

The Publishing Contrarian, Lynne W. Scanlon P.E.A. (Publisher/Editor/Author), has been to a Harvard power breakfast, and provides an amusing account thereof.

Staying in the literary field, Jenny Davidson on Light Reading discusses a range of books that don't really deserve that title, including one on the place of the public intellectual.

On the Sigla Blog, Sinéad Gleeson ponders public spats between women, and the media's affection therefore, prompted by a row between Sinéad O’Connor and Mary Coughlan.

Turning personal, and coming with a warning that this is a very disturbing post, Jules on Depressed Single Mother commemorates the ninth anniversary of death of "the first person I ever fell in love with". She says: "I know that she really died because her father couldn't keep his filthy hands off his vulnerable, tiny three year old daughter."

Sage on Persephone's Box has a great collection of musings on sexual intercourse, and ignorance thereof among men, and some women. "I also briefly dated a health teacher once who was adamant that menstrual blood is made up of dead embryos. WTF???"

Koonj on HU, a group blog for Muslim women, reports on her victory, as a pregnant, about-to-give-birth woman, over doctors convinced they, not nature, knew best.

On Always Aroused Girl, moving on through the lifecycle, a description of the magic glider on the porch, and its place in soothing a stressed child, or adult.

Ozarque collects words for the sense of touch that we've (almost) lost: e.g. "felth - the power of feeling in the fingers".

Moving into political territory, on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty, Maia reports on a New Zealand case in which three police officers were accused of raping an 18-year-woman. Again, it is not pretty reading; sorry. (I'm pointing there to one of the central posts, but it is well worth reading the whole succession, although it is a story we've no doubt heard the like of before. For a rape victim, the big problem, it seems, is to behave "properly".)

On Tired of Men, "a 20-something woman" finds that Canary Wharf in London (the new financial district) is a great place to find dinosaurs.

Finally, to finish on a cheery note, a post from Mom-101 on the Things I've Won in My Life, which reminds me of the "I Love My Computer" mug I won in an introduction to computers one-day course back when I was 20 (for writing a short "Basic" programme, if I recall correctly - which really does date me. There were these new things called computers, and I was about to buy my first one; it had twin floppy drives and no hard disk, for the record.

***

If you missed last week's edition, it is here.

***

Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think "that deserves a wider audience" (particularly someone who doesn't yet get many hits), drop a comment here. (Thanks to Jonathan and Maxine in particular this week.)

It really does make my life easier!

P.S. Yes it is Sunday. Sorry!

Well done to the Guardian

2006-04-09T11:27:00.000+01:00

Someone (perhaps even listening to me) has made all the blogs named in its article on feminist blogging clickable, which they weren't before. Which is making a huge difference to traffic. Thanks!

The younger generation

2006-04-09T11:04:00.000+01:00

'Midst all the stories of Botox, make-up, fashion etc in the Observer Woman, a proper story, shock horror, about a "Michael Moore-style feminist", Periel Aschenbrand, author of The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own:

Aschenbrand, who made an unscripted appearance at the 2005 Republican Party Convention dressed in vest, knickers and a handmade 'Fuck Bush' necklace, says she was originally inspired by a group of young women to whom she taught philosophy one summer vacation. 'I couldn't believe the apathy. They were not at all politicised. They'd come into class wearing idiotic T-shirts advertising garbage. "Mrs Timberlake", "Team Aniston". It was absurd. I told them: I think we should put our tits to better use. This is prime advertising space wasted on vapid slogans like "Princess". We should use them to make people think about things that no one else is making them think about.'
When the T-shirts took off, Periel, the rebellious daughter of upper-middle-class parents from Queens, suddenly had both an income and a message. As she succinctly puts it, 'I'm on a mission to change the world - one pair of tits at a time'.

It turns into the inevitable "future of feminism" debate, but is a bit more informed than many such articles.
***
And a further retort to all of those who bemoan the "lack" of activism among young women, one of the victims of a rape gang in Sydney, aged just 18 now - 14 when she was hideously attacked - has spoken out about her ordeal, and her refusal to be destroyed by it.

Standing in the NSW Supreme Court last week after MSK and MAK were sentenced, Wagner yelled: "F--- you, go to hell, mate."
"I'd like to say, 'Have fun in prison, boys, I won," she told reporters, as she waived her right to anonymity.
"We're not telling people so they know we've been raped," she told Channel Nine's A Current Affair on Thursday night.
"We're telling people so other victims know they have support . . . to just show that you need to be confident if you're a rape victim, especially from these boys. You need to come forward. We all need to be strong and stick together and convict these people."
Sitting alongside Wagner was Cassie Hamim, who was 13 in 2002 when she was lured home by the brothers and raped. It was just a month after Wagner's ordeal.
Inspired by Wagner last week, Hamim, too, waived her right to anonymity. "Tegan's grown stronger," she said. "I'm proud of her. I realise I need to be strong and move on."

***
And showing what campaigners really can make a difference, Burger King is bringing in a new healthy menu prior to a stock market float in an attempt to assuage market fears. And the story reports that the campaigners are preparing a book and other materials directed at children - to try to at least partially match all that fast food advertising, which sounds like a great idea.

Mr Schlosser's 2001 book revealed in gory detail the nutritional paucity and health risks of junk food, galvanising opposition to the industry.
Now Mr Schlosser is promising a transatlantic tour to promote a children's version called Chew on This. And executives at McDonald's and Burger King are nervously awaiting the premiere of a fictionalised film version of Fast Food Nation, which could be ready in time for next month's Cannes Film Festival.

Just talk among yourselves ...

2006-04-08T23:49:00.000+01:00

The observant will have noticed that you haven't had a Friday Femmes Fatales yet this week. I've got some excellent recommendations, but after nearly three hours of representing the Green Party at a hustings this afternoon run by the Camden Federation of Private Tenants, and various other duties this evening, the energy just isn't there.

So you might want to chat among yourselves, or alternatively fill in the alternative energy survey (from The Greens of course), that is our answer to Tony Blair's crazy rush to nuclear power. It won't take long. Go on. Please.

You wouldn't get away with it today

2006-04-08T23:43:00.000+01:00

My retroblogger, Miss Frances Williams Wynn, is today reporting on the conditions in 1830s France, and particularly on the early days of passports...

The strictness about passports was most absurd. Dr. Somerville went with Mr. Hankey to the Passport Office, where every individual was then expected to appear, and all, even children and maids, were obliged to have their separate passports, describing person, age, &c. Dr. Somerville, having seen this ceremony performed on the four elder children, at last said to the official, 'I see you are a gentleman, and I am convinced that a secret entrusted to your honour will, in spite of everything, be in safe keeping. I will, therefore, in strict confidence, tell you an important secret: you see there the Duchesse de Berry in disguise,' and he pointed to the youngest child, a girl of four years old, who, upon being looked at, hid herself under the table.
The officer, laughing, said: 'Que voulez-vous, monsieur? Je sens comme vous tout le ridicule de ce que je fais; mais les ordres nous viennent d'en haut; nous devons obeir a la lettre.' [Roughly: Who are you? I know this is ridiculous, but I have orders from on high that must be obeyed to the letter.]

Today they'd probably bang up the four-year-old for a few hours, just to be certain...

Weekend reading

2006-04-08T09:47:00.000+01:00

The BNP reveals its true colours:

The British National party was riven last night over its decision to select the grandson of an asylum seeker to fight a seat in next month's local elections.
Sharif Abdel Gawad, whom the BNP describes as a "totally assimilated Greek-Armenian", was chosen to stand in a Bradford ward as part of the party's biggest ever electoral push.
The decision has provoked a backlash among BNP hardliners who described Mr Gawad as an "ethnic" who should be barred from the party on race grounds. One regional organiser responsible for the candidate's selection is thought to be under pressure to resign. Another regional organiser is leading the dissent against the party leadership, saying it had betrayed the members and would confuse voters.

***

We need to change back from a hydro-carbon economy to a cellulose economy. An interesting over-view of chemistry history. Really! I promise. e.g.:

The first plastic was a bioplastic. In the mid-19th century, a British billiard ball company determined that at the rate African elephants were being killed, the supply of ivory could soon be exhausted. The firm offered a handsome prize for a product with properties similar to ivory, yet derived from a more abundant raw material. Two New Jersey printers, John and Isaiah Hyatt, won the prize for a cotton-derived product dubbed collodion.
Ironically, collodion never made it as a billiard ball: The plastic, whose scientific name is cellulose nitrate, is more popularly known as guncotton, a mild explosive. When a rack of cellulose nitrate pool balls was broken, a loud pop often resulted. Confusion and casualties ensued in saloons where patrons were not only drinking but sometimes armed.

***
Amazing how these things go missing, but a letter from the executioner of Louis XVI has just resurfaced.

An article in Thermomètre du Jour, a revolutionary journal, soon afterwards provoked Sanson’s response a month later.
Promising “the exact truth of what occurred”, he set out to contradict suggestions that Louis had to be led to the scaffold with a pistol at his temple, that he had let out a terrible cry and that he had been mutilated because the guillotine struck his head rather than his neck.
Sanson described how the King arrived at the place of execution in a horse and carriage and mounted the scaffold, stretching out his hands to be tied and asking whether the drums would continue beating.
Sanson wrote: “It was answered to him that no one knew and that was the truth. He mounted the scaffold and wanted to rush towards the front as though wanting to speak . . . He was again told that that was impossible; he then let himself be led to the place where he was tied up, and where he exclaimed very loudly, ‘People, I die innocent.’ Then, turning towards us, he told us, ‘Gentlemen, I am innocent of everything of which I am accused. I wish that my blood may be able to cement the happiness of the French’.”

***
I've been debating modernism and postmodernism, and admit to some affection to art generally grouped in both categories, including that ofBanksy, who demonstrates again that art can be both subversive and witty.

An excellent half of a play

2006-04-07T21:27:00.000+01:00

There's a lot to praise about 412 Letters, the inaugural production of the play by Matthew Wilkie that opened tonight at the Union Theatre in Southwark.

There's an affectionate, sparky chemistry between its two actresses, Emma Field-Rayner, who plays Ros, the uptight, respectably middle-class, high-flying PR executive, and Louise Kempton, who's Charlotte, the working class, mixed-up but determined would-be writer.

The script is beautifully structured around the letters the two have exchanged - letters written primarily by Ros, that Charlotte has appropriated for her latest attempt to write the Great British Novel. We jump back and forth through time, as the carefully catalogued sheets reveal how the two met - Charlotte was the drummer in a band booed off-stage, who typically decided to take on the whole abusive audience with her fists, and came out worst from the deal - and how their relationship developed, then imploded.

The repartee is fast and witty, even if the roles the two play - Ros the grown-up, bossy organiser, Charlotte, the rebellion child, are, except for the lesbian nature of their relationship, already widely explored, perhaps to the point of cliche.

"I need closure," Ros exclaims.
"Do I look like a fucking door?" Charlotte replies.

Two in the eye in the fundamentalists

2006-04-07T10:49:00.000+01:00

After the discovery of the "missing link" fish/amphibian yesterday, today it is the unveiling of the Gospel of Judas:

The Gospel of Judas, a fragile clutch of a leather-bound papyrus thought to have been inscribed in about AD300...
According to this version of events, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ's most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge.
According to the 26-page gospel, copied in the ancient Coptic language apparently from a Greek original more than a hundred years older, Jesus told Judas: "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal."

Scholars are saying it doesn't reveal anything fundamental that wasn't already known about the gnostics (about whom I've written here and here), but it is a nice reminder that the whole idea of the Bible as a single, unchanging document, set in stone, is utterly ridiculous - a bit of a problem for the fundamentalists.
***
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today is getting stuck into modernist architect. That left me looking out my Sixties tower block window (and a very nice, practical, well laid-out, light and airy flat) it is too, wondering if the fault on "failed estates" really is with the architecture, or with the lack of investment in maintenance, services etc? I tend towards the latter view.

Perhaps some of the huge estates, with their linked walkways, as seen for example in east London, do by their nature create problems, but to sweep up all modernist architecture in that seems a bit harsh.
***
The Tories have decided that prison doesn't work and the solution lies in rehabilitation not punishment. Meanwhile Labour keeps locking more and more people up without making any provision for their rehabilitation. It is getting to be a funny old political world.

One figure of note from that article: 2 per cent of the prison budget is spent on education - TWO PER CENT! No wonder the recidivism rate is awful.

A sceptical view of Sir Walter Scott

2006-04-06T23:41:00.000+01:00

My 19th-century retroblogger Frances Williams Wynn is again telling tales of Sir Walter Scott, for whom I suspect she has a soft spot, although she's again displaying her sceptical streak in questioning whether his apparent sang froid in the face of royalty was anything more than the calm of a practiced performer ...

My uncle mentioned this as an extraordinary feat of self-possession and ready wit. I am certainly not inclined to doubt the extraordinary talents of Scott, but in this instance many circumstances appear to me to diminish the wonder. The trade of Scott in his character of London and Edinburgh lion was as decidedly at that period that of a teller of stories as it has since been that of a writer of novels. The tales had probably been told a hundred times, and on this occasion his friend Mrs. Hayman, I doubt not, gave him a previous hint of what would, be asked from him.

Elsewhere in the diaries, she heard him telling traditional stories.

If you are a chicken, be a bit worried

2006-04-06T14:23:00.000+01:00

... if you're a human, just snort with annoyance at the hysteria over bird flu. It is the only symptom you are likely to see, unless you are in the habit of rooting in the entrails of dead birds in the park, or collecting guano for garden fertiliser, in which case it would probably be a good idea to stop. Yes, I am very fed up with bird flu stories already, and there'll be days and days and days of it yet...

Meanwhile, the government is destroying civil liberties and centuries of checks and balances in government, as neatly laid out by Jenni Russell in the Guardian:

The government is briskly and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the individual to the state, of the Lords to the Commons, and of MPs to ministers. The ID cards bill will allow the authorities unprecedented surveillance of our lives, and the power to curtail our ordinary activities by withdrawing that card. The legislative and regulatory reform bill, now entering its final stages, will let ministers alter laws by order, rather than having to argue their case in parliament. Then this weekend brought another shocking government proposal to increase its own power and weaken the restraints upon it. Lord Falconer made clear that the government intends to drastically curtail the powers of the Lords. The current convention is that peers cannot block any legislation contained in a party's manifesto. In future peers will have to pass any legislation that the government deems important, whether it was in the manifesto or not. They will effectively be neutered.

Now that really is something to get hysterical about.

And to demonstrate what these sorts of things mean in practice, two Yorkshire grandmothers face up to a year in jail for taking a walk:

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.
Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary's Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

Finally the good news, the discovery of the missing link between fish and land creatures. The Guardian is hopeful that this will be a blow to the proponents of "intelligent design", but that of course presumes that their views have anything to do with evidence, which sadly I doubt.

The Carnival of Feminists No XII ...

2006-04-05T22:01:00.000+01:00

... is now up on Written World, and it takes the event to a whole new world. Ragnell stepped aside to allow a woman from another planet, indeed perhaps another universe, to run the show - Star Sapphire, "Sovereign of the Planet Zamaron, President of Ferris Aircraft, Super-Villainess, Much Maligned Strawfeminist, Recurring Green Lantern Antagonist, the Killer of Katma Tui". From that, you might gather, this is a carnival unlike any that has been before.

Despite her "foreign" origins, Star Sapphire is up with all of the latest feminist issues, from the Duke rape case to women in Zambia stepping into politics, but you'll also find a feminist analysis of topics that mightn't usually jump to your attention, from the hair colour of cartoon characters to the models they provide for young girls.

Please help to spread the word!

Returning to 1982

2006-04-05T16:34:00.000+01:00

Plastic Zion, which has just opened at the White Bear, was written in 1982, and is very much an artefact of that time, featuring a representative subset of the angry, disillusioned youth of Thatcher's Britain, and their music.

At the centre of this discordant little group, transplanted by some unfortunate attempt to experience kulture to an abandoned cafe in backwoods France, is the working-class lad made rock star hero Clem (Nigel Croft-Adams) and his middle-class rebel, self-mutilating, self-hating, girlfriend Josephine (Caroline O'Hara).

Their "groupie" pack - much depleted from Clem's glory days - consists of his longterm and faithful schoolfriend Yak (Ben Richardson), who's been unable to imagine a life of his own, and two spongers, the transvestite Carly (Tim McFarland), a petulant, camp imp, and the dim but assertive Dagmar (Minouche Kaftel).

Over the course of a moderately drunken evening they squabble, make-up, and act out all of their anxieties and problems. Yet at the end of it, with the exception of one, perhaps shattering, revelation, they are at the same point as they started.

This is a play that is both better, and worse, than that description suggests. A sketch of the characters suggest stereotypes, and yet the playwright, Chris Ward, makes each of these come alive as real, suffering human beings. READ MORE

Whoo-oo Camden Greens in the national media ...

2006-04-05T15:01:00.000+01:00

Today's Guardian diary:

It comes to something, we think you'll agree, when elections are decided by plastic bags. But such seems to be the case in Camden, where the council's ruling Labour group is so scared of losing overall control in May's poll that it has sent redoubtable ex-leader Dame Jane Roberts (who isn't even standing this time) out to do battle with the Greens in the Ham & High over this important policy issue. Oddly, our old friend Cllr John Thane, who will be hard-pressed to hang on to his Highgate ward, was passed over for the key task of defending the council's outstanding record on reusables, even though he chairs its environment subcommittee. From such seemingly slight and inconsequential scraps of evidence, reader, do we conclude that Labour is bricking it.

A country depending on a single heartbeat

2006-04-05T11:30:00.000+01:00

Thaksin Shinawatra has declared that he will not remain as Thai Prime Minister. The decision is said to have come after "a word in his ear from the country’s 78-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej". Huge protests on the streets of Bangkok, and a very strong "none of the above" vote in an election boycotted by the opposition had earlier failed to achieve this result.

Once again, as he has many times in the past, the King, through a mixture of moral, religious and traditional authority, has brought Thailand back from the brink. But he is, of course, the 78-year-old king, and although his mother lived to 99, he's not going to go on forever.

And the recent political turmoil has once again illustrated the huge gap in Thailand between Bangkok and the rest. The geographers tell us it is the most absolutely primate city in the world (meaning wealth, education etc is most concentrated there). Bangkok was resolutely anti-Thaksin - responsible for both hideous human rights abuses such as the killing of "drug dealers" in custody and for some distinctly dodgy financial deals - but the rest of the country, where political opinion is controlled almost entirely by local "big men", and which benefited from largess flung to farmers, was resolutely for him.

There is, in Thailand, the kind of division that existed in Cambodia before Pol Pot, and the same culture, that insists on public decorum and a jai yen [a cool heart] - no display of emotion or feeling. (It is no accident that the word ~~beserker~~ amok (amuck) comes into the English language from this part of the world.) When such repressed feelings finally emerge, they tend to do so explosively.

I wouldn't be making any longterm investments in Thailand.
***
Elsewhere, an example of what the hysterical beating up of "terrorist threats" has done in the UK:

A MAN was "frog-marched" off a plane on suspicion of being a terrorist - because he'd played the Clash song London Calling on his MP3 player.
A taxi driver called the cops after Harraj Mann, 24, played him the punk anthem, which includes the lyrics "now war is declared and battle come down".
He also played Nowhere Man by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, which includes the line: "The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!"

He was inconvenienced, and no doubt a bit scared, but for where this sort of thing really leads, three men, subjected to the American "rendition" procedure have spoken about their 18-month ordeal.

The three men, none of whom was ever charged with any terrorism-related offence, were seized in 2003 and then held in four secret locations by "black-masked ninja" US operatives who made considerable efforts to ensure the prisoners did not know where they were being held. They were eventually released about a month ago.

A great week to be born...

2006-04-05T00:54:00.000+01:00

A short list of birth dates:

March 30: Anna Sewell (1820-1878) - author of Black Beauty - yes, pure melodrama, but like many, many seven-year-olds before me, I was entranced. (And the book hasn't been out of print in 130 years.)

April 2: Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) - she took what we might call a mid-life gap year, or otherwise an astonishing adventure, and made it pay with her art. (Some of the images here. Or you can see some of the originals in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum - I admire them regularly.)

April 3: Jane Digby (1807-1881) - more full-on adventure - this English aristocrat eloped with the Greek count, then ran off with an Albanian general, then finally finished up with a desert sheik about 20 years her junior. But really, what she loved, I reckon, was adventure.

(I know these dates thanks to the excellent Born On This Day Yahoo group, which has a daily email on a woman subject, complete with a links and references collection.)

Advice from the older generation

2006-04-04T22:29:00.000+01:00

I couldn't find it on the web, but was reading in the Sunday Telegraph a review of the autobiography of the actress Liz Smith, Our Betty: Scenes from My Life. It records:

"Her grandmother [who had raised her] died while Liz was serving in the Fleet Air Arm. Her parting words as she set off for the Second World War were: 'Always make sure your vest is aired."

That reminded me irrestibly of our "home economics" teacher from high school, who was a very old-school "cookery" teacher who'd never quite made the leap. (She thought I was great because I was always finished first; little did she know that I achieved that by only really cooking the top layer of pikelets or whatever, and burying the half-cooked ones underneath. It didn't really matter, since nothing we cooked was actually edible anyway. The "boiled frozen vegetables in white sauce" still sticks in my memory as a particularl culinary highlight.)

She was very concerned about safety when the Indonesia class went on a field trip to that country, and had some essential advice:

Always carrying a clean pair of underpants in your hand luggage, in case you get kidnapped.

A full supermarket, and nothing to eat

2006-04-04T13:38:00.000+01:00

The world's top 25 food companies have not taken significant action to improve diets, with only a handful acting on excess fat and sugar and only 10 are tackling salt levels. That explains why, increasingly, when I pop into Sainsbury's (sorry - I try to avoid it, but it is on my way home) about 10pm, starving, without having made any dinner preparations, I increasingly can't find anything I want to buy. (Increasingly because I have got more fussy since I've got into organic fruit and veg and more home cooking - or at least home food-assembly ...)
***
The arrest of Charles Taylor and his trial for war crimes is one further small step for humanity. A reasonable comparison with him is probably Idi Amin - who was able to live out his natural lifespan in peace and comfort in Saudi Arabia. The increasing application of international law is a really significant advance for the human race and might, you can only hope, act as a check in future on dictators tempted to act similarly. An interesting thought:

The term “international law” was invented in 1780 by the jurist Jeremy Bentham who said he hoped it was an “intelligible” phrase. By 2080 it will probably be the most important form of law across the world.

***
Combining history and politics, Jonathan on Frog in a Well reviews Libby Lewis's novel The Apprentice. Apparently the history is reasonably well done - as for the politics, well you can judge for yourself...

Fanny Burney versus Maria Edgeworth

2006-04-03T22:45:00.000+01:00

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is returning from a break today (sorry - the Green Party has taken precedence), and being rather nasty about the author we know as Fanny Burney, while defending - obviously against some challenge - her right to be known as the author of Evelina.

I cannot endure her excessive personal vanity, her nauseous repetition of all the compliments made to her under the shallow pretence of telling the world how much pleasure the paternal heart of Dr. Burney derived from them.

But we can't accuse Miss Williams Wynn of being prejudiced against women writers, for she sings the praises of Maria Edgeworth, of whom, I confess, I had not previously heard.

Spring has sprung

2006-04-03T20:13:00.000+01:00

If you saw the standard bay tree and the Salix caprea walking up the stairs at Euston Square Tube this afternoon I hope you didn't get too much of a shock - it was just me spending the Homebase vouchers acquired during last year's DIY frenzy before they ran out.

Having got them out without home without too much damage to the skin of my hands (standard trees not being well-balanced for long-distance carrying), I decided before setting them in place on the balcony it really was time to clean the windows - which is pretty well what counts as spring cleaning as Chez Natalie.

So I guess you could say spring is sprung ...

A Monday morning inspiration

2006-04-03T11:44:00.000+01:00

The New York Times has just run a long portrait of Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who, having spoken out against her own gang rape, has become a magnet for similar victims, who she is trying to help, while also running a girls' school and campaigning to change the position of women within her tribal society.

Every day, poor and desperate women and girls with tear-smudged cheeks arrive in this remote and impoverished village, seeking sanctuary. Every night, up to a dozen of them sleep on the floor in Mukhtar's bedroom beside her. (She has given her bed to the principal of the girls' elementary school she started here.)
One visitor is a lovely 7-year-old girl who breaks down in huge, heartbreaking sobs as she tells how the servant of a rich family raped her, and how the rich family then threatened to kill her and her family unless she recanted her accusation.
Then there's Fauzia Bibi, a 30-year-old who was raped and tortured by eight men for two days to punish her family because her uncle supposedly had an affair with a woman from their clan. The attackers are threatening to kill her entire
family unless she recants.
Inspired by Mukhtar, these women are standing their ground. They are risking their lives -- and, in anguish, those of their loved ones -- to prosecute their attackers. It's a lesson in courage and civics I'll never forget.

OK - it is a bit heavy on the melodrama, but there is a wonderful story to tell. The NYT has hidden the story behind a paywall but it is interesting that it has been picked up by the Pakistani Daily Times. A demonstration of how Western journalists can sometimes make a difference.
***
An interesting piece about the environment which suggests that greens should stop talking about saving the planet and start talking about saving the human race. We might manage to wipe out most of the vertebrates, but the microbes and the insects are pretty much human-proof, and no matter how much of a mess we make, they'll carry on.

Final call for nominations for the Carnival of Feminists

2006-04-03T00:17:00.000+01:00

The carnival will be on Written World on Wednesday ... so hurry, hurry, hurry and get your nominations in today, to ragnellthefoul AT gmail DOT com, or via this nomination form.

Do click on the link to Written World above, where you'll find Katma Tui - who'll indicate to you this will be a carnival unlike any that have come before. So don't miss out on the chance to take your place, or to nominate another worthy feminist blogger....

The anti-4x4 campaign has a success

2006-04-02T12:06:00.000+01:00

THANDIE NEWTON, the British star of Crash, the Hollywood hit film, has become a crusader against gas-guzzling cars after a Greenpeace activist slapped stickers on her 4x4 accusing her of adding to global warming.
This week, Newton, 33, will make her support for the anti-emissions campaign public by writing to fellow Hollywood stars and other celebrities who drive such vehicles, asking them to join her in switching to greener forms of transport.

One solution to this problem is to make these dinosaurs in cities profoundly unfashionable; to make their ownership symbolic of ignorance and irresponsibility. (Which of course it is.)
***
OK, that's the bit of good news I've found for the day. In Zimbabwe, the situation is going from bad to worse - as shown by the rate of discarded babies being found around the city. (Warning, quite graphic story, complete with an astonishing quote from a quasi-official figure about how they block the plumbing...)
***
Then, with Tony Blair (soon may he go, although from the Green Party perspective perhaps not until after the local election - he is so good for our campaign) seemingly wedded to nuclear power, a timely story on the anniversary of Chernobyl: the BRITISH farmers who still have to get their stock checked with a Geiger counter before they can take them to market.

Quote of the day from the doorstep

2006-04-01T23:36:00.000+01:00

Intercom: Buzz, Buzz

Mature woman's voice: Yes?

Me: I'm one of your Green Party candidates for the local election. Have you thought about voting Green?

Voice: (Laughs.) No. I'm a member of the Labour Party, with all its horrors....

****

The other event of the day was the young gentleman who dripped down the hall from the shower, wrapped in a towel, his face covered with shaving cream.

Sorry!

History Carnival No 28 ...

2006-04-01T22:50:00.000+01:00

... is now up on Patahistory, and it is a whopper. Not sure if there are record number of links, but it sure looks like it.

Some of the highlights include the collections of MUSTS for historical fiction set in the Victorian era - if you've read any Anne Perry you'll realise just how true it is; some great Women's History Month posts, and much more...

P.S. Do check out the booklist for Christian homeschoolers ... showing just what a huge industry this is.

Australia's shame

2006-04-01T21:58:00.000+01:00

Many years ago I covered the Aboriginal issues beat for a regional daily paper in Australia, and it was the most depressing subject I've ever had to deal with. My inability to find a legal way to report the abuse of an Aboriginal youngster counts as one of my greatest failings as a journalist. And Australia's shame just goes on and on.

Jenissa Ryan, 15, was the great-granddaughter of the revered Albert Namatjira, Australia's first celebrated Aboriginal painter. Was.

Police believe Jenissa was bashed by a teenage boy and a girl - almost her own age - as she walked the Alice Springs streets on the last Friday night in January. It may have been the injuries she sustained in this attack that killed her.
Attempting to walk home to the Hidden Valley camp, she collapsed unconscious in the gutter near the college. It was there that three teenage boys found her in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Police have testified that the boys thought Jenissa was drunk or dead. Instead of calling for help, they dragged her 10 metres behind a knoll on the verge of the college grounds and raped her. Discarding their condoms, they left the scene.
...Nobody knows how long Jenissa Ryan lay unconscious in the fierce morning heat as her life slipped away. But by the time ambulance officers arrived, honey ants were beginning to gather on her dishevelled clothes.
That means a number of residents of middle-class Grevillea Drive probably noticed. ...It was not until around 10.30am that a female college employee called for an ambulance.

Now it has made the national media - two months later.

A 15th-century rhyme that is still in use...

2006-04-01T16:28:00.000+01:00

Thirty days hath November
April June and September
Of eight-and-twenty is but one
And all the remnant thirty one.

The oldest known version of this is in a 15th-century manuscript, and I still recite a slightly modernised version to myself when trying to sort the 30s from the 31s.

It is a powerful demonstration of why so much early modern "technical information" is put in verse - while oral transmission and memory remains important, even if the material is also being committed to print, and other media - Thomas Tusser, author of a phenomenally successful book of housewifery, recommends that the "comely decked guest-room" be decorated with painted verses, such as:

"The sloven and the careless man, the roinish [scabby] nothing nice,
To lodge in chamber comely decked, are seldome suffered twice."

A cobbler too, was expected to be able to readily "reckon up his tools in rhyme" - surely a good way of checking nothing was missing.

(From Jones, M. "Such pretty things would soon be gone': The Neglected Popular Verse 1480-1650", in Hattaway (ed) A Companion to English Reniassance Literature and Culture, Blackwell, 2000 p. 457. This is a mammoth tome, but has some really excellent stuff in it. I'm using it to try to ensure I haven't missed anything important in various projects relating to the period.)

Friday Femme Fatales No. 50

2006-03-31T22:06:00.000+01:00

Break out the balloons and the streamers - we reach a total collection of 500 women bloggers. (Yes there are millions out there, this just seeks to highlight a nice range of them and give them a bit of publicity.

Why "femmes fatales?" Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

First off, unusually, I'm going to start with a whole blog, rather than a particular post, since it would be unfair to single any one out: Reading Middlemarch is a group blog of women (at least I think they are all women) reading George Eliot's masterpiece, and reflecting on it as they go. A great idea - and it would be fascinating if someone wanted to do something similar with a feminist classic - say The Female Eunuch? (Just a thought... I'm already committed to a variety of projects for about 23 hours a day.)

Turning back to the politics - well I have too, even if with a heavy heart - but let's start with a positive story: on Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! (which proves from its title that irony is alive and well in America - whew!) an account of the campaign of Tammy Duckworth, "a disabled combat veteran and a woman of color, running on the kind of democratic platform that many of us joined the party for".

Also on a note of celebration, Mikaila on The Pan Collective (a women's blog "on Caribbean life" makes her first blog post, celebrating Jamaica's first female Prime Minister - the Honorable Portia Simpson Miller.

Now I think Hecate on her blog should stop pulling her punches, say what she really thinks, as on the case of the Wiccan high priests versus a Great Falls, South Carolina town council. "The basic premise is that if xians aren't allowed to shove their religion down everyone else's throat, then the xians are being persecuted," she says.

Belledame222 on Fetch My Axe (know the feeling) reflects on sex, porn, oh, all those issues around sex-positive feminism.

Turning to the artistic side, Lisa Call is, I guess you'd say, an artistic quilter, or an artist who quilts...? Forgive me; not my area. But she's tracked the movement of her Welcome to Parker and given us a peak.

Then to the heartbreaking work - in this case medical - side. On Lost in Sasazuka, Kim is a final-year medical student on placement in the "deepest darkest Northern Territory" (Australia). And this is her quite technical, but deeply moving, account of the attempts to treat a young child, a case of 'third world' lifestyle - dirty water & overcrowding, managed with with 'first world' knowledge and resources.

Staying in warmer parts, That Girl in Samoa attends a movie premiere, a rather special premiere, of the the first Pacific Island feature length film, Sione's Wedding.

Finally, a fun link for readers who have lots of computer power to burn - mine is still groaning. (If you're on dial-up DO NOT CLICK.) On i-Anya Angela Thomas has a Tibetan-themed music sim.

And next week, we'll continue on, towards the 1,000 mark....

***

If you missed last week's edition, it is here.

***

Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think "that deserves a wider audience" (particularly someone who doesn't yet get many hits), drop a comment here.

It really does make my life easier!

The Carnival of Feminists makes the mainstream media

2006-03-31T15:41:00.000+01:00

Finally, a mainstream media article that gets beyond Belle Du Jour as a female blogger - indeed to the Carnival of Feminists. Kira Cochrane in the Guardian today explores the phenomenon of feminist blogging, and, yes, I do get in a quote or two as founder of the carnival. Others mentioned include Feministing, Bitch PhD, the F-word, Pandagon, AngryBlackBitch, MindtheGapCardiff and Gendergeek.

I've made all of those links, because the Guardian didn't. It's probably the single most web-friendly newspaper in the world, but it still has some way to go...

(Thanks to Clare on The Ninth Wave who drew my attention to it.)

Another fundamentally anti-female culture...

2006-03-31T10:11:00.000+01:00

A Japanese feminist has beenbanned from speaking at a lecture series by the Tokyo Municipal Government:

"Last July, Professor Ueno was chosen by a citizens’ group in the Greater Tokyo district of Kokubunji as the first speaker in a series of lectures on human rights; the events were to be sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. But according to the group, Tokyo officials objected to the choice of Ueno because she might use the phrase "gender-free" – a poorly defined term originally intended to mean free from sexual bias. The citizen’s group refused to find another speaker and instead cancelled the series of events. ...
"Gender-free" is an imported English phrase that has been used in Japan since the mid-1990s. Some progressive teachers and local education authorities have used the phrase to promote liberal sex education, and the mixed listing of boys and girls on school roll calls. The latter is contentious in Japan where traditionally boys' names are read out first.

Nothing like telling kids from an early age who is regarded as important...

***

I eat organic food (as much as I can, while also trying to take account of "food miles") primarily because I think the form of farming needs to be encouraged. (And organic yoghurt tastes MUCH better than the plastic non-organic stuff.) But like the author of this article whether there is any actual direct harm from the pesticides in food I'm not sure. But he offers an interesting parallel:

He cited the long-burning, but now resolved, debate about the health impact of smoking: "An official at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by RJ Reynolds, once noted in a memo: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public.' Toward that end, the tobacco manufacturers dissected every study, highlighted every question, magnified every flaw, cast every possible doubt every possible time ... It was all a charade, of course, because the real science was inexorable. But the uncertainty campaign was effective: it delayed public-health protections, and compensation for tobacco's victims, for decades."
Pesticide campaigners say that they see some parallels in their own struggle to get pesticides banned or severely restricted.

You might make the same parallel with those proclaiming their doubts about the reality of global warming.

***

Some interesting figures on immigration, legal and illegal:

* There are between 310,000 and 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, according to Home Office estimates
* If allowed to live legally, they would pay more than £1bn in tax each year
* Migrants fill 90% of low-paid jobs in London and account for 29% of the capital's workforce. London is the UK's fastest-growing region
* Legal migrants comprise 8.7% of the population, but contribute 10.2% of all taxes. Each immigrant pays an average of £7,203 in tax, compared with £6,861 for non-migrant workers
* There were 25,715 people claiming asylum last year. If allowed to work, they would generate £123m for the Treasury

Wealth and poverty

2006-03-30T21:03:00.000+01:00

A very curious afternoon of Green canvassing today, from the Regent's Park council estate - and some lovely polite pensioners - over 100 metres or so to the extreme wealth of the Georgian mansions lining the park. Not much luck there, it seems the rich are still in Barbados, or in the office working to pay for all of this. If anyone is at home it is usually "the staff".

Not quite as bad as Manila, where (when I was there anyway) there was a corrugated-iron shanty town in the shadow of the presidential palace, but close.

Seems an appropriate point to direct attention to this article on the measurement of poverty, which argues for adopting a poverty line that measures relative poverty. (And incidentally tells of the career of an obviously very formidable woman, Mollie Orshansky.)

A 'bargain' First Folio

2006-03-30T15:58:00.000+01:00

Should you happen to have a spare £3.5m or so, an extraordinarily rare Shakespeare First Folio is being auctioned on July 13.

Printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, the folio was assembled and edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors who performed with Shakespeare in the King's Men, the company for which he wrote. The folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which - including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It - had never been printed before and, were it not for their appearance in the folio, would most probably have been lost forever. On its publication, the folio sold for around 20 shillings (equivalent to approximately £100 today).

Coincidentally, I've recently been reading about the edition in the small but astonishingly informative pamphlet that accompanied the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition in 1991. (P.W. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, Folger Library, Washington, 1991.)

There are about 240 surviving copies (the "about" is because in the 19th century collectors and booksellers gathered together fragments - sometimes from different editions). Half of them are held by the Folger, and they have been studied in truly exhaustive detail, to the point where the number of typesettersrs, and the pages they prepared, have been convincingly identified.

The one being sold in the summer is one of only two in the original binding to be held in private hands. One of the "public" original versions has quite a tale. Under an agreement of 1611, it was donated to Sir Thomas Bodley's library in Oxford, one of a batch of books sent to the University's binder on 17 Feb 1624. It was sold by the library as a duplicate(!) in the 1660s, but luckily bought back in 1905, when the price was no doubt considerably lower than it would be today.

Should the budget in July not quite stretch to £3.5 million, you can view an online version.

Test your reading skills ...

2006-03-29T21:59:00.000+01:00

I'm drooping over the keyboard, having spent my day dashing around, and around, and around Camden, helping to sort out nomination papers for the total of 54 candidates the Green Party is hoping to stand (so everyone will have the chance to give us their three votes). For those who claim civil society is dead, or that community spirit is, it is lovely to see the response of people when you knock on the door asking for their signature. They are really pleasant and helpful, even when they aren't Green voters.

But a couple of little gems from the Inbox:

Test your ability to read 17th-century handwriting, and learn how to do it better - a great idea. There are seven documents, rated into three levels of difficulty. You type your reading in, and the site compares it to the "perfect" one. Too tired to even think about trying it, but I will. (Although whether I share the results might depend on how I do...!)

Then, we've already learnt to think about food miles, but this article goes further in saying we should look at the "fuel consumption" of everything we eat. Food for thought. Guess I'd better join that 10-year waiting list for an allotment...

Is fashion sex, or is sex fashion?

2006-03-29T09:50:00.000+01:00

I read a comment this morning from someone who's been reading the new Women's Review of Books, about the "raunch culture", on the "sexualisation of fashion". And in one of those epiphanies you sometimes get when half-asleep and caffeine-deprived, I thought: "But fashion has always been sexualised!"

Now I'm a little more awake, and with some tea inside me, I still think that's the case. (Not always what happens with such flash thoughts.) The examples are far too multiple to quote, but think of everything from Tudor codpieces on men, to Victorian bustles, designed, off course, to accentuate women's buttocks.

I find a lot of the feminist criticisim of so-called "raunch" culture offensive, because it reeks of the environment in which I grew up, in which women felt they could and should "police" the behaviour of other women to fit within very narrow confines of what was "respectable". "Tut, tut, mutton dressed up as lamb," was one of the favourite ones, for any woman judged to be wearing clothing "too young" for her.

And many woman lived - and some do still live - in fear of breaking these rules. I recall once being in a hairdresser's in Walthamstow (east London) when a classic blue rinse set lady came in in a flap. She gone out without an umbrella and it had started raining. Her "set", the armour-plated fixing of her hair into a helmet, which she paid for once a week as a sign of respectability, was in danger of being ruined. She wanted a rain hat. No one had one, but the hairdresser offered her a shower cap instead. A look of pure horror crossed the woman's face. "I couldn't go out in THAT. It is not the proper thing."

She was really, genuinely panicking about not looking "right", "respectable".

Whereas I frequently, should I need to go out in the morning, to say walk a dog, stagger out in whatever odd collection of clothing happens to be piled at the end of the bed, with no more attention to my hair than my fingers run through it, and if anyone doesn't like it, tough.

And I mostly wear hipster jeans, because ones with higher waists never fit my shape. (One woman at a bus-stop in central London once told me: "You should be ashamed of yourself at your age with those jeans," and I laughed - genuinely laughed. Because I've been empowered to do so.)

Of course some women, particularly young women, are stressed by pressures to show off their bodies when they are uncomfortable with them, and they need to be told and retold "wear what you want". But attacking other young women for wearing what they want, if that happens to be T-shirts with sexy slogans or midriff-baring tops, is only playing into the hands of the puritan rightwingers, those who are training their girls in ways like this, turning them into "young ladies" of VIctorian form - and with narrowed, restricted Victorian brains to match.

Wear what you like, and tell other women to do the same! And then tell them they look good!

How to put your best ear forward for the Green Party

2006-03-28T23:27:00.000+01:00

Found a new twist to the doorstop canvassing game this afternoon, on a road of Georgian terraces split into multiple, some of them very multiple, flats fitted with video intercoms. This is also a very busy road, with lots of buses and trucks, and generally noisy traffic. And rain - of course - I'm the rain god of canvassers - was making it worse.

So one presses the buzzer, assumes a polite but friendly expression, and tries not to look like a would-be Big Brother contestant while delivering a friendly explanation of your presence. But what to do after you've finished the initial speel? Your only hope of hearing their response is to stick you ear right up to the speaker, so that the person inside is getting a really attractive view of your ear canal.

Mmmm... still trying to work that one out.

But for a relatively unpromising part of Regent's Park got some really positive responses to the Green Party message, and got posters into a couple of really brilliant placed windows, so it was worth an afternoon in the rain.

Labour fails on the environment (again)

2006-03-28T11:48:00.000+01:00

I do try to find good environmental news, really I do, but the bad news keeps coming thick and fast.

First, finally, the Labour Government is having to admit its much-trumpeted environmental policy is in tatters:

Labour had set a target of reducing CO2 levels by 20% by 2010, but Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, will say it is no longer possible. The totemic policy has been an important weapon in Tony Blair's claim to be a world leader willing to go further than others on climate change...
Publishing the government's much delayed climate change review today, Mrs Beckett will say the government believes the UK can achieve only a cut of between 15% and 18% of the 1990 UK emissions.
Ministers will say this still means the government will reach its separate commitment under the Kyoto protocol of cutting CO2 emissions by at least 12.5%. But even reaching the 15-18% reductions depends on the outcome of complex EU negotiations on caps on emissions by heavy energy users in industry, including the electricity generators.

And in Africa, one of the areas where all of that heating is likely to cause the most immediate damage, a lake that is an important hippo habitat is threatened by supermarket demand for out-of-season vegetables and flowers in the West:

According to scientists, the increasing demand for water to irrigate Kenyan farmland is draining Lake Naivasha and destroying the habitat of the hippos that live there.
They say that within five years the lake may be nothing more than a putrid, muddy pond, and that most of its hippos could be dead.
In the past two years hippo numbers have slumped by more than 25 per cent because of the fall in water levels. In 2004 there were 1,500 but this year there are only 1,100.

***

But the good news: there are plans for a contraceptive pill that will reduce cancer risk AND be designed for a life without menstruation. Sounds brilliant to me. That's provided, of course, the anti-abortion types don't manage to scuttle it, because it happens to contain the same drug as that used for chemical abortions.

Hello! You don't want abortions? That means you need contraception ... (Although of course what you really want, we know, is to stop people having sex, except when they are planning babies, and then only in the missionary position, with no pleasure for the woman whatsoever... because you think that is what a white-bearded man in the sky wants.)
***
Finally, a fascinating, if sad, piece about a woman who lived as a man for two years, after having allegedly kidnapped her children after a custody dispute. Until the 20th-century this could be surprisingly easy - as cases from Hannah Snell to James Barry show, but today, with largely androgenous clothing, it must be a lot harder to carry off.

Apologies

2006-03-28T09:53:00.000+01:00

... if this blog is shaking slightly, and making a loud, dentist-drill-style noise. That's the council workmen downstairs making a thorough meal of demolishing a brick wall that is about 6m long and less than 2m high. Five of them, in a whole day yesterday, managed to demolish about a third of it, using a jackhammer with a brick-bolster-style attachment. Or at least one of them used that, one picked up each brick as it came off, and the others stood around and stereotypically leant on their brooms. It is windier today, so they are leaning into the doorways for shelter instead.

Give me a mid-size sledgehammer and crowbar and I'd have done it single-handed in a day. (OK, I'd be sore after, but then I spend most of my day swinging a keyboard.)

Council workmen are easy targets to take a swing at, and generally I try not to do that, but watching it at close hand is painful. (Not to mention in this case hard on the ears.)

Check out Isabella and the dangerous (male) mermaids

2006-03-27T16:29:00.000+01:00

With a hat-tip to Sharon on Early Modern Notes, nice to note that the bulk of the work of my favourite poet, Isabella Whitney, is now readily accessible online, via Representative Poetry Online. (Although there does seem to be a problem with the "Sweet Nosegay" link, which I've emailed them about. That is particularly important since it is the text hardest to otherwise obtain.)

A sample, from Isabella's warning to "all maids in love", about men, of course...

Beware of fair and painted talk,
beware of flattering tongues:
The Mermaids do pretend no good
for all their pleasant songs.

Some use the tears of crocodiles,
contrary to their heart:
And if they cannot always weep,
they wet their cheeks by art.

Ovid, within his Art of Love,
doth teach them this same knack
To wet their hand and touch their eyes,
so oft as tears they lack.

There are plenty of other poets there, from the 7th-century AD onwards. (And a not-bad representation of women.)

Elsewhere, from the inbox: the second edition of The Letters of William Herle, the Elizabethan intelligencer and diplomat, with "20 newly discovered letters".

And Jim Chevallier, who posts a wonderful weekly miscellany on the 18th-century email list, has started collecting them on a website. It is particularly strong on recipes: You can learn how to bake a chicken into a lizard or, for those who think the past was polite, Floozy's Flatulence.

The 'perfect flood' is on its way

2006-03-27T10:34:00.000+01:00

This is being billed as a "test of the systems", and it is good to know that the systems are being tested, but it is hard not to also see it as a prediction:

A perfect storm is about to gather off the east coast of Britain, whipping up the sea and menacing the coastline with gales and torrential downpours. Before long, it will head south and make landfall, sending a wave of water up the Thames estuary, battering the hotchpotch of flood defences erected since Victorian times.
The surge will trigger an alert to raise the Thames barrier, but downstream widespread breaches and floods are expected. Where the most vulnerable areas will be is anyone's guess....
The virtual storm lies at the heart of an unprecedented £5.5m experiment involving the Environment Agency, the Met Office and eight universities to test cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems designed to foresee dangerous storm surges.

Of course Britain might be able to manage such a thing, but you can't but wonder about Bangladesh, or most African states, or indeed when you look at say Thailand and the tsunami, even apparently relatively developed Asian states.
***
The law has been changed to give the state responsibility for children who are in care until the age of 21. (Previously they were on their own at the age of 16.) But it seems the reality is different.
***
Now men should be warned: you may find this next item distressing - a South African woman has invented a female condom that would attach itself to a rapist that could only be surgically removed. Well it is pretty distressing to women, too, that rape should be considered such a danger that someone might even consider this. (And how the rapist would react when he discovered he's been "caught" doesn't bear thinking about.)
***
But finally, a touch of schadenfreude - an "Egyptian 1,300BC statue" has been reidentified as having been made in Bolton in 2003. As I've been told before, such identifications are often an art not a science.

Two theatre reviews to check out

2006-03-26T23:40:00.000+01:00

Just a note that there are two new theatre reviews over on My London Your London, of Gaudeamus or A Very Liberal Education, at the Arcola, Dalston, and Animal Farm: A Fairy Story at the Courtyard Kings Cross. Both written by my classy, well-trained (if unpaid) "staff".

Time to boycott the anti-female Observer

2006-03-26T10:14:00.000+01:00

Once again, the Observer is proving its anti-female credentials, basically repeating the ridiculous Prospect article on which I commented earlier this week, and calling it, ridiculously, academic. Now I think most people would agree that an academic article is one that appears in a peer-reviewed journal, which Prospect certainly isn't. If I were still buying newspapers, I would be boycotting the Observer, which with its anti-abortion and anti-working women stance is looking more like the Sunday Mail every week!
***
An interesting piece in the Sunday Times on online shopping, which basically argues that online, people are "harder" shoppers, shopping around more and less prone to impulse buys. Although what it fails to mention is eBay - which has certainly changed the way I shop. If I decided, as I did say the other day, that I wanted a thermos, it was the first place I went, and I had what I wanted in five minutes - much less hassle than sloping down the shops.
***
Finally, another in the "name and shame" category, from today's Independent:

Stephen Ladyman, the transport minister responsible for green fuels, drives a new diesel-powered Alfa Romeo GT. He has a passion for sports cars and motorbikes. And he is being blamed for personally resisting plans to subsidise the purchase of cars with low carbon dioxide emissions such as the Citroën C1 and Toyota Aygo.

Sounds like a good protest target for me....

The ruling abbesses

2006-03-26T09:55:00.000+01:00

First little gem from the Mediev-L email list, the information that there were German mini-states ruled only by women (abbesses) for hundreds of years.

"...the female abbey of Essen which lasted 873-1803, and was I believe territorially the largest of them. ... The bucolic town of Essen was founded in the tenth century by the abbess Hedwig I. ... It became a principality of the empire in 1275. The ruling abbess was assisted by a chapter of ten other nuns, who were largely aristocratic...
Here is a snip from the 14th century.
Kunigunde II of Berg 1328-1336
Katarina of La Marck 1336-1360
Irmgard II of Bruch 1360-1370
Elizabeth III of Nassau 1370-1412"

I'm keen to find a source to find out more. (In English - can't do German, sorry!)

Morning reading

2006-03-25T10:44:00.000Z

This first link must come with a health warning - some could find it distressing. Karen Armstong provides an account of her mother's horrific, slow, struggling death.

She found it increasingly difficult to speak, but the one thing she said frequently and with clarity was that she wanted to die. It was her last - indeed her only - wish. Thirteen years ago, when in good health, she had made a living will, which stated that, when the time came, she did not wish her life to be prolonged artificially.

Yet the hospital could not let her go... So often the story you hear. The only reassuring thought is that this is going to have to change, given the rapid advances in medical science that otherwise will see vast numbers of people in this situation. The hospice movement has shown the way, but it either has to rapidly expand (tough since it is still - scandalously - largely funded by donations) or else hospitals are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it is time for some people to die, and to let them go, peacefully.
*****
Getting the bad news over together, there has been a rapid increase in the number of glacial earthquakes at both poles, suggesting the ice is melting and breaking up faster than has been predicted:

The annual number of glacial earthquakes recorded in Greenland between 1993 and 2002 was between six and 15. In 2003 seismologists recorded 20 glacial earthquakes. In 2004 they monitored 24 and for the first 10 months of 2005 they recorded 32.
The latest seismic study, published today in the journal Science, found that in a single area of north-western Greenland scientists recorded just one quake between 1993 and 1999. But they monitored more than two dozen quakes between 2000 and 2005.

But some good environmental news - showing what is possible. This is an oddly written story, but the basic message is that simple conservation measures have reduced Japan's water consumption by 10 per cent in just five years. Surely a model for what you could do also for electricity...
***
Finally, a preview of what is sure to be a good old historical row: Tristram Hunt's view of how the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain should be celebrated. John Prescott has been put in charge.

Friday Femme Fatales No. 49

2006-03-24T22:54:00.000Z

"Where are all the female bloggers?" HERE, in my weekly "top ten" - all women bloggers who are new to me. Why "femmes fatales?" Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

"Putting your money where your mouth is" is something we often plan to do, but I anyway, don't always live up to. So good on Rachel K. on Rachel's Random Ramblings for doing her bit to "stop the Christian fascist tyranny" by making sure that she buys a new computer through, at least, the least-bad possible manufacturer and supplier. (Thanks to Penny for that link, despite our recent disagreement on another topic!)

Blue Girl in a Red State, is, however, selling, not buying. A brilliant image, and some interesting thoughts on the state of the US deficit.

And something else to buy: on BlondebutBright some information of a Kenyan jewelry-making project that provides work for disadvantaged women. A great gift idea, for yourself or others!

Then on to an antidote to that Christian fascist tyranny - although one you'd prefer didn't exist: on The Fat Lady Sings a powerful argument for the cervical cancer vaccine.

On to more debatable issues: Veronica on Aldahlia debates sex-positive feminism and what it might or should mean. Then on Feminist Law Professors, why is it that the selection of a few female candidates has led to the Democrats being labelled the 'mommy party'?

But if, after reading that, you need cheering up, hop over to the wonderfully named Climacteric Clambake, and check out the miracle of the uterine wall.

And then check out Bad Feminist's lists of feminist crushes - in other words a collection of role models to look up to. It includes Cecilia Fire Thunder, first female president of the Oglala Sioux tribe of South Dakota, who plans to beat the abortion ban in South Dakota by setting up a clinic on (sovereign) tribal land.

ON the group blog Power Is The Ability Not To Have to Please, Jen Spillane reports on yet more horrific damage to American women's rights to their own body - this time rape victims being denied emergency contraception.

OK - that's enough being miserable - a determinedly cheerful run to finish off:

If you're feeling hungry enjoy The Blythe Spirit's triumph with feta-stuffed chicken.

If you fancy a taste of country life, check out the ladybugs on the shores of Lake Michigan with Nancy White on Full Circling the Globe.

(If you were counting, you'll find that's 11 this week. That's to make up for the sex-change operation I performed on Joida on Buried Voices last week. Thanks for being a sport about it! It was bound to happen sooner or later.)

***

If you missed last week's edition, it is here.

***

Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think "that deserves a wider audience" (particularly someone who doesn't yet get many hits), drop a comment here.

More right-wing, anti-female tripe

2006-03-24T11:58:00.000Z

Prospect in the UK magazine started out as an interesting new project that presented views from across the political spectrum. I took it for several years, but dropped it as it looked more and more rightwing, a trend that seems to be continuing, judging by the Working girls article in this month's issue.

It claims that women's "fully equal access" to professional opportunities (ha!) has three results:
1. The "death of the sisterhood": "an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men.
2. The end of "female altruism" - "The period from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was a golden age for the "caring" sector in one major respect. It had the pick of the country's most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in it as paid employees, but who also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither."
3. A "shortage" of babies: "In most developed countries, birth rates are well below replacement level."

My response:
1. Women never were a "sisterhood", never were allowed to be a sisterhood - because their primarily allegiance was, or was supposed to be, the male to whom they were attached. In competing to get and keep a man, they were forced into opposition with each other, and societal structures pushed them to police each other to enforce "appropriate" female behaviour.
2. Alternatively, of course, you could call this the end to the exploitation of women pushed, by lack of other opportunities, to use their skills and talents for no pay and precious little recognition.
3. The birth rate figure is true, but given the huge number of humans in the world no bad thing. And anyway, the Scandanavia states have shown that if you provide sufficient incentives in terms maternity and paternity pay and leave, you'll get to something close to replacement rate.

This sort of pernicious stuff needs to be challenged, although it is extremely difficult to get anything in the mainstream media, given the views of the average male editor. (Funny how all this equality hasn't produced a flood of female editors...)

A list of email lists

2006-03-24T10:58:00.000Z

Can't imagine why I haven't found this before: a site listing early modern history email lists. There are also list for modern history, and a periodicals listing, and divisions by century.

Of course why I think it a good idea to add to the several hundred emails I get in a day is a question - haven't had any tea yet this morning...

An acute observer

2006-03-24T00:36:00.000Z

As promised, only an hour or so late, I've just posted the second half of Miss Frances William Wynn's account of The Old Woman of Delamere Forest.

In it, she shows herself once again to be an acute observer of human nature. She lacks our vocabulary to talk about mental illness, but she's very aware of some of the dividing lines:

In the strange tale of the old woman, I cannot help believing there was much of self-delusion, and that, when that was removed, she had recourse to falsehood to bolster up her fallen credit: but it seems to me quite impossible to say exactly where delusion ended and deception began. I see that my sister and I should not fix the boundary at the same place: she has more faith in the old liar than I can have.

Miss Williams Wynn certainly paints a strong picture of the women's character, which reminds me, rather too closely really, of someone I know.

Remember: be nice to your sister or else...

2006-03-24T00:21:00.000Z

Deep in early modern ballads today, I came across an account of a beauty of a morality tale. It is the story of a rich woman who mocked her poor sister who had just given birth to twins. (There was a belief around at the time that twins had to have been begotten by different fathers.)

But the rich woman got her comuppance. Immediately. She gave birth, all in one go, to 365 children - one, of course, for each day of the year.

It is called The Lamenting Lady, a broadside (the "newspapers" of the day) printed for Henry Gosson about 1620.

Of course it raises the question of how gullible people were then? Did they read it in the way we read stories about Elvis being alive? Or did they read this as "fact"? Probably a bit of both really - just like today. Ihear these faint sounds of "Blue suede shoes..."

UPDATE: (Really shouldn't do "half-asleep blogging") Sorry, forgot the reference: This is from Shaaber, M.A. Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476-1622, Frank Cass and Co., London, 1966, p. 150, which surprisingly enough is the best source I've found on the subject, even if hardly a recent one.

Not the Budget edition

2006-03-23T10:14:00.000Z

I listened to Gordon Brown's Budget speech yesterday, and David Cameron's response (whatever happened to the end of yahoo-boo politics? - he might have done himself good with his party members, but I doubt the country was impressed.) I was luxuriating in the thought that I wasn't that evening at a newspaper, and wouldn't be running around trying to match up case studies with their pictures, or trying to make sense of two sets of contradictory figures on tax on some form of investment trust I'd never heard of. Budget day is usually the worst day on a newspaper, and somehow I doubt the vast bulk of readers appreciate their 24-page lift-outs with lots of stuff that will probably have been proved wrong within a week, when everyone has read the fine print.

But I will comment on one, much-telegraphed, figure - the miserable, almost useless, rise of £45 in road tax for the worst-polluting vehicles. That is for most of them less than the equivalent of a tank of fuel, as a deterrent roughly the equivalent to being whipped with a wet feather. If you multiplied that rise by 10 it might start to have an effect, and I'ld judge, would be broadly popular. Even other drivers don't enjoy being bullied by drivers of near-tanks like the enormous Range Rovers.
***
Elsewhere, I'm sure I glimpsed a flash of pink and a whiggly tail flying past my window: The Times has a post-particularly nasty murder comment piece that doesn't say "lock 'em up and throw away the key". Camilla Cavendish writes that jails need to be turned into proper schools, quoting some interesting if unsurprising stats:

More than half of offenders are at or below the expected reading level of an 11-year-old. Nearly half were excluded from school. More than half do not have the skills required for 96 per cent of jobs, according to the Prison Reform Trust, and only one in five is able to complete a job application form.

***
Then, possibly the most important news of the day, although only the Independent has it on its front (web) page, there's been a breakthrough in research into rice blast fungus, which "destroys enough food to feed 60 million people".

Home-schooling and back to nature in the 19th century

2006-03-23T00:02:00.000Z

Miss Frances Williams Wynn, my 19th-century blogger, is getting back into the Gothic tale again. At least the the old woman of Delamere forest heads in that direction. It starts as the tale of an educated, independent woman who decides to make an independent life on waste land for herself and her daughter, whom she is "homeschooling".

It is quite a tale - and I promise to post the denouncement later today....

Reasons to be grumpy

2006-03-22T11:18:00.000Z

I can almost never remember my dreams, which I consider to be a very good thing, but for some reason I woke up remembering a stupid, annoying one this morning - "got out of the wrong side of the bed" is the traditional phrase - so if I'm a bit grumpy today, forgive me.

But my day wasn't improved by reading about the latest shooting atrocity in America: a 15-year-old boy gunned down with a shotgun - shot by his neighbour then "finished off" at close range. His crime? Running on the lawn. The context?

A child is killed by a gun every three hours in America. According to the latest statistics, nearly 1,000 children under 19 are shot dead every year. Another 800 use guns to commit suicide, and more than 160 die in firearm accidents.
Forty per cent of American households own guns, but those guns are 22 times more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, or 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide, than in self-defence. On average, more than 80 Americans are killed by gunfire every day.

But, as the story makes clear, gun control has entirely disappeared from the American agenda - indeed controls are being relaxed. So this killer, who his neighbours knew to be unbalanced, was allowed to have a lethal weapon that could be casually unleashed on a child.

Then in Britain, the number of 16-year-olds not in any form of training has risen, from 9.4 to 12.6 per cent. This is the "underclass", and they'll stay that way unless they can somehow be lured back into education.

The figures come in the wake of a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which showed that the UK was 27th out of 29 industrialised nations in terms of the percentage of youngsters staying on after 16. Those figures were described as a "scandal" by David Miliband, who was Schools minister at the time - but today's report shows the percentage who go straight from school either on to the streets or unskilled employment is growing.

Now just about everyone I know is saying, "next weekend, next weekend" life will feel better. It is almost a mantra. That's because we'll suddenly get another hour of daylight when the clocks go forward. Why we are deprived of it all winter in Britain is one of those great little mysteries. But there is a Bill (albeit a private members' bill with almost no hope of passing) now in the Lords to give us that extra daylight.

Either way, I promise to get some more cheerful stories soon....

Carnival of Feminists No XI is up ...

2006-03-22T10:04:00.000Z

... and it is, as ever, a spectacular collection. Please help to spread the word...

Among the posts that took my fancy are one about how humour in the form of insults isn't humour at all on Sivacracy.net. (Oddly enough my post on patriarchy over at Blogcritics has been attracting a whole lot of commenters notable for their lack of a sense of humour ...)

There are several enormously powerful posts from America on the threats to the rights to abortion and contraception, while the UK bloggers are focusing on issues of rape and sexual assault.

But the highlight of those I've read so far is that by Mega on Days In a Wanna Be Punk's Life. She addresses a commenter who called her a "female chauvinist" and thanks him for his concern about her underwear and her menstrual status.

But I won't point you to any others - please do go and read a great selection on Angry for a Reason, who has done a great job!

Those printing nuns at Syon...

2006-03-21T23:40:00.000Z

William Caxton started printing in England, then his sidekick De Worde took over, and whosh, next thing you know you are drowning in a sea of Elizabethan pamphlets, nearly all printed by men, with the odd widow thrown in. That's right, isn't it?

Well oddly enough, it seems there are some unmarried women in the tale, but, surprise, surprise, they've disappeared...

"Single-leaf prints were multiple reproductions of the same image, often accmpanied by xylographic text, that is, with text produced in relief print from a wood-block, painstakingly cut letter by letter ..."

On the Continent the Bridgettine order was well-known for producing these for devotional purposes, with many surviving example being associated with a general chapter held in 1487 at Gnadenberg in the Upper Palatine. There are also a number of English examples, probably printed at the rich and important Syon abbey, in Isleworth (up the Thames from London).

Block books, "printed from wood-blocks, were once thought to represent an interim stage between single-;eaf prints and books printed with moveable type. Paper analysis has shown, however, that block books cannot be dated any earlier than 1460-1470, post-dating the invention of printing with moveable type for at least a ecade. .. generally considered a more primtive technology, but it may not have been so regarded when both were new ad existed side by side."

From: Driver, M.W. The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late MedievaL England and its Sources, The British Library, 2004.

(Although I suppose to fair, gender issues aren't the only thing at work here; they were on the "wrong" side, religious-wise.)