The Bluestocking

Feisty fighting females

2011-11-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

The British Pathé blog has a wonderful post entitled Ladies Who Lunge: Women Fighting Through History (great title too). It features early film clips of women stage fighters doing boxing, judo, and so on. I had rather hoped that it was about women fencers, which would have been a very bluestocking activity, but nevertheless these gals certainly have gallantry and gumption!

Women's rights around the world

2011-07-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

The United Nations has just published a report on women's rights around the world, and The Guardian has created an interactive timeline of when women got the vote in various countries around the world, as this is a key indicator of women's rights being taken seriously.

However, women's rights more generally are still a work in progress:

More than half of working women in the world, 600 million, are trapped in insecure jobs without legal protection, according to the first flagship report of the new agency UN Women. A similar number do not have even basic protection against domestic violence, it finds, while sexual assault has become a hallmark of modern conflict.

Suffragette surveillance photos

2011-07-06T07:07:00.000-07:00

BoingBoing has a great blogpost about surveillance photos taken by Scotland Yard of suffragettes in 1912.

The original article from which the photos came was in the BBC Magazine in 2003.

"On the one hand, the state considered them dangerous terrorists, but on the other it simply did not know what to do with them," says Ms Tulloch.

"The police and prison officials were so worried about what to do they made sure that every step they took was authorised by the Home Office. In the records you can find daily communications between the governor of Holloway Prison and Whitehall. In that era it was extremely rare for government to communicate so quickly."

But the police surveillance did nothing to stop the movement - nor did it dim the growing support they were finding in the country.

There's also a potted history of the suffragettes on the BBC site.

Alan Turing revisited

2011-04-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

There's a fascinating blogpost about Alan Turing by Christopher Pressler, who is descended from another hero of Bluestockings, Charles Babbage - he who encouraged the Enchantress of Numbers, Ada Lovelace Byron.

Do peruse it, gentle readers.

Mary Wollstonecraft talk

2011-04-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 22nd May, after morning service at 11 am in the chapel of Harris Manchester College (Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TD), there will be a talk at 1 pm by Lyndall Gordon, the author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, concerning the life and times and Unitarian connections of the 18th-century feminist (wife of William Godwin, mother of Mary Shelley, and “the foremother of much modern thinking about education and human rights, as well as about women's rights, female sexuality and the institution of marriage"). Please bring your own sandwich lunch; for directions to the college, consult the Chapel Society website.

Happy International Women's Day

2011-03-08T03:27:00.000-08:00

Today is International Women's Day - sadly hardly even noticed in the UK. It has been celebrated around the world since 1910. In Russia and Italy, the mimosa or Silver Wattle flower is associated with International Women's Day.

The Bluestocking would like to wish all our readers a happy International Women's Day - and believes that we should continue to celebrate International Women's Day until gender equality is achieved.

Daniel Craig and Dame Judi Dench have teamed up for a two-minute film highlighting the need for gender equality:

Dench rattles through a grim list of statistics detailing continuing inequality of the sexes worldwide. "Every year 70 million girls are deprived of even a basic education and a staggering 60 million are sexually assaulted on the way to school."

The film concludes: "So are we equals? Until the answer is yes we must never stop asking."

There is also an International Men's Day on 19 November, just in case the chaps were feeling left out.

All About Eve

2010-10-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

Recently two books about Eve have come to my attention... Eve, the Mother of All Living - the one who dared to eat the forbidden fruit and take the next step in evolution.

The first is Eden: the Buried Treasure by Eve Wood-Langford.

The author writes:

As a Unitarian, I was brought up not to believe in the concept of Original Sin based on the beautiful Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Moreover, this magical story, complete with speaking serpent, was accepted as an important myth-history long misinterpreted in the Judaic/Christian tradition. When the story of the naked couple was seen in the light of its pre-biblical origins in Abraham's country of Mesopotamia, however, it guarded an inspirational 'history' of value to all human beings.

Unfortunately, in the age of science a story complete with speaking serpent is seen in terms of fairy story, but this throws a valuable baby out with the bath water, for myth is a form of history. It cannot be interpreted correctly, however, in factual terms, or without cognisance of its integral images. In the pre-biblical world, the archetypal images of serpent and tree were important signposts associated with the Great Mother Goddess. They offered guidance to the illiterate polytheist populations of the world in which the garden paradise story had origin.

Nevertheless, as Eden: the Buried Treasure reveals, the garden paradise still guards its treasure of truth, and that meaning may yet be glimpsed when the story is seen in the light of its Mesopotamian origins. Look into the garden in an earlier, more pristine light, and the naked Eve that stands behind the biblical one, offers a gift from the ancestral world having nothing to do with the origin of sin.

Another book has recently been published, this time from a Jewish and Kabbalistic perspective, called Dancing in the Footsteps of Eve, by Heather Mendel. The author writes:

What if the story of Eve is wrong? Beneath the literal surface of text, Eve, the quintessential hero and positive feminine archetype for our evolving consciousness awaits our recognition, remembrance and reclamation. Symbolic of the innate curiosity that moves our human adventure forward, Eve can lead the way to hope and healing for the global human family as she reaches for the forbidden fruit once again. Dancing in her footsteps, we joyfully commit to taking the next step in the spiritual expansion of consciousness.

It Gets Better

2010-09-25T01:22:00.000-07:00

Recently the media has been paying more media attention to teen LGBT suicides.

In response to this, Dan Savage has started a YouTube channel, "It Gets Better".

Nine out of 10 gay teenagers experience bullying and harassment at school, and gay teens are four times likelier to attempt suicide. Many LGBT kids who do kill themselves live in rural areas, exurbs, and suburban areas, places with no gay organizations or services for queer kids. (...)

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So here's what you can do, GBVWS: Make a video. Tell them it gets better.

This deserves wide publicity, so please blog about it, tweet it, and post it on Facebook.

(via Geeky Sex and sexgenderbody)

"Traditional" marriage

2010-08-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent blog-post on the ever-changing tradition of marriage on a blog entitled "This is what I think", by Archie Levine.

It is quite similar to a blog-post that I wrote earlier this year entitled "The changing face of marriage". In fact, mine could be a sequel to his, as his is more about marriage from Biblical times to the 19th century, and mine focuses more on how marriage changed in the twentieth century.

The Secret Gender Test

2010-07-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

This was quite an interesting test, and the results were not a surprise to me.

Your result for The Secret Gender Test...
Hermaphrodic/Androgynous
33% Masculine / 48% Feminine
Likelihood if you got this result, it's either because you have behavior equally matched of both genders or neither. This result means your gender identity is androgynous. This means that you can probably equally understand average men and women, but don't understand super-men and super-women all that well. Your male and female side is either well balanced, or not present in the normal manner. Your sexual inclination is either dual-role, or assexual. This means you may very well be single because of a lack of the same compelling drives average men and women have in this world. Your also very likely gender-queer, or non-gender conforming. Meaning, male or female you dress androgynously. Some people may even refer to you as a gender-bender.
This doesn't mean you won't, and there is a chance that your still have some growing up to do, and given a lack of experience of your gender has left you with little to speak of in the sense of what this test can provide. Sometimes gaining experience with reference with the questions will result in a conclusion that is different from this one. Either way, your balanced. If this is what you want then you are happy, and among a fairly small group of people in the world satisfied by gender neutrality.
Whether you were born male or female, your brain is variably somewhat intersexed, and if you were born intersexed then this would also be consistant. You have senses and abilities of both sexes likely to varying degrees. You can date any other gender type easily, though the greater extremes will still be difficult. There really isn't a gender type you can't date as long as you understand what dating that particular type intails. All this being said, your ideal types are likely as close to center as you, or gender neutral, or gender reversed. Those groups are likely to have respect for your androgynous nature. You have an experience where gender is concerned that makes you an ideal counselor for issues regarding gender for others.
If you were born male, your very androgynous, or you lack strongly defining deviations from male or female aspects. If you were born female the above applies as well, however female androgyns are more prevalent do to societal acceptance than male androgyns. It's more acceptable for women to be tomboyish than men to be femmeboyish. You can date any other type, but standard and higher male and female types may and most likely will not understand your gender neutrality. As long as you understand this and take your balance and use it to your advantage you will manage okay.
Take The Secret Gender Test at OkCupid

Save philosophy at Middlesex

2010-04-30T02:50:00.001-07:00

Late on Monday 26 April, staff in Philosophy at Middlesex University in London were informed that the University executive are to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject at Middlesex University, with 65% of its research activity judged 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent' in the UK government's recent Research Assessment Exercise. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world. Its MA programmes in Philosophy have grown in recent years to become the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009. Middlesex offers one of only a handful of programmes left in the UK that provides both research-driven and inclusive post-graduate teaching aimed at a wide range of students, specialist and non-specialist. It is also one of relatively few such programmes that remains financially viable, currently contributing close to half of its total income to the University's central administration.

This is a shameful decision which essentially means the end of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, a hub for internationally renowned scholarship; staff include Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Mark Kelly, Christian Kerslake, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford). This act of wilful self-harm by the University must be resisted.

Please join the facebook group, sign the petition and spread the word.

Source: Radical Philosophy group on Yahoo

The Island of Lesvos

2010-04-06T14:02:00.000-07:00

A short story by Jeanette Winterson, The Poetics of Sex, is available on the Random House website. It is an extended poetic exploration of lesbian sexuality, written as a response to the sort of questions straights ask, but going far beyond those questions into the land of Sapphic delight. Here's an excerpt...

Hang on me my darling like rubies round my neck. Slip onto my finger like a ring. Give me your rose for my buttonhole. Let me leaf through you before I read you out loud.

Picasso warms my freezing heart on the furnace of her belly. Her belly is stoked to blazing with love of me. I have learned to feed her every day, to feed her full of fuel that I gladly find. I have unlocked the storehouses of love. On the Mainland they teach you to save for a rainy day. The truth is that love needs no saving. It is fresh or not at all. We are fresh and plentiful. She is my harvest and I am hers. She seeds me and reaps me, we fall into one another's laps. Her seas are thick with fish for my rod. I have rodded her through and through.

It's a wonderful piece of writing, very lush and sensual; it reads more like a prose-poem than a short story, but it has a narrative element.

Feminism and sexuality

2010-03-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

Two articles about pornography and our society's hypocritical attitude to it.

The Power of Porn Stars: Why We Love, Hate, Fear and Want Them
Girls involved with paid sex, who gain benefit from their position as females while remaining independent, are feverishly desired, yet punished for their "transgressions."
By Virginie Despentes

Quiet Riot Girl - This is Hardcore: A feminist's journey into porn

Feminists and others have rightly called attention to the exploitation of women in the pornographic film industry. However, the first article points out that because of our society's assumption that a woman who is sexually active is also a brainless bimbo, actresses who work in porn films can't get jobs in other films, so are forced into a porn-film ghetto.

The second article points out that women can gain pleasure from pornography too; the kind of power games played in these films are part of many people's sexual pleasures, and just because people indulge in them in the bedroom does not mean they have to be acted out beyond the bedroom door. In fact, the playing of such games can resolve anxieties about power. The sociologist Michel Foucault liked S/M for this very reason.

Yes, treating people purely as sex objects is wrong; but lust in itself is natural and healthy; and by eroticising what we fear, it can be transformed into something else, something less frightening.

Hedy Lamarr: an unlikely geek

2010-03-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

In celebration of Ada Lovelace day 2010, here's a biography of someone you might not think of as a scientist and inventor:

Hedy Lamarr (born 1913)
Radio communications system

The Viennese-born femme fatale of 1930s and 1940s films is a lot more than just a pretty face.

The actress, whose real name is Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, immigrated to the United States during the early years of World War II. She is best known for sultry roles in such movies as "Ecstasy" and "Samson and Delilah," but she also coinvented a remote-controlled, anti-jamming communications system, a major contribution to U.S. defense technology.

According to Bethesda resident Anne Macdonald, author of a book about American women inventors and a patent-holder herself for a knitting machine, Lamarr learned about designs for military technologies while married to a wealthy Austrian arms dealer for three years. Soon after Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, she left her husband and went to London, where Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios changed her name and signed her up as his company's newest screen sensation.

In 1942, Lamarr and composer George Antheil received a patent for the communications system, which employed a feature known as frequency hopping. A radio signal, such as those used to direct torpedoes, would "hop" from one broadcast frequency to another at certain intervals. Therefore, if a receiver was not synchronized to receive the entire signal, the signal could not be "jammed" nor deciphered.

Lamarr's invention did not fit MGM's image of her as a glamorous movie star, and her creative side was a well-kept secret in Hollywood. Still, Lamarr was so passionate about helping the war effort that she seriously considered abandoning acting to join the National Inventors Council full-time.

Lamarr's system was never used during World War II, but long after her patent expired, the Sylvania Corp. adopted and further developed the idea.

Source: Female inventors: Mothers of invention

The annual German Inventors' Day is held on her birthday, 9th November:

This lady is Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood diva and inventor.
She is the prototype for the everyday life an inventor, not because she was an Edison, but simply because she was someone that tried to realise her idea.
She did not become rich or famous from her idea (as an actress she was already). Her invention however, the frequency hopping process is still in daily use and an integral process in our mobile phones.
Her birthday, 9th November, has been taken to represent all inventors and this Inventors' Day.

My other Finding Ada blogposts:
Lisa Barone
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Kate and the Angels of Xara

2010-03-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Kate and the Angels of Xara (by Brendan Hanley) is a coming-of-age story taking place in the near future. The heroine, Kate, becomes an astronaut, and grows up in the process. The story was apparently inspired by the author's admiration for brainy sassy tomboys (the kind of gals we at the Bluestocking also admire).

I enjoyed the contrast between the dangers of space and the dangers that one can encounter on Earth. I also liked the descriptions of landscape. I thought the level of technical detail in the space scenes was rather satisfying, because it really made it feel like I was there, and thinking through the dangers and the technical details makes the reader feel like a real astronaut for a bit. The fortune-telling scene was exciting, and I really liked the way it was handled - the initial scepticism giving way to fear that it might actually be true, and Sunita's reaction. I'm agog to see what happens next. I also liked the mixture of real and invented Tarot cards (rather like in T S Eliot's poem The Wasteland). I also thought the scene where the Angels rescued the boy Otto Muller from space was great - I was on tenterhooks to know if they would all get back into the spaceship safely, which shows that the characters were real enough to be cared about by the reader.

The scene where Kate watches the shuttle launch was well written, and I thought her response to it (and that of the other people present) was very believable. Another scene describes one of the characters cutting herself; I don't think I've ever seen a description of cutting in a book before; it was really well described, as it's how I imagine it would come about.

It's funny that I have written more in response to the scenes on Earth - perhaps because they resonate with experiences that I have had - rather than the scenes in space, which were also really good, but outside my experience. But the space scenes were good too - I enjoyed the bit where Kate gave Earl the controls of the ship for re-entry, that was great. Also the stunning views of Earth from from space, and the geographical detail about the Niger delta, and the really poignant bit at the end where they see the Earth and the Moon receding away from them as they set off for Mars.

It was really noticeable how much more confident and fluid the author's writing is after the first third of the book, once it gets into space; but also the emotions of family members and Angels are handled well and realistically. I also think the pace of the writing (and the handling of conversations) was better, and about right, in the latter two-thirds. I noticed a few typos here and there, but the actual writing is excellent - very clear, and I never had to go back and re-read anything to make sense of it.

For me, the major theme that emerges from the book is the tension between life and death -- wanting to live life to the full and wring every last drop of experience out of it, whilst being aware that we will die. I thought that this was explored really well. The only other book where this theme is explored at all (that I know of) is The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates, and even there it's only touched on briefly, whereas I think this book is an extended meditation on it, and brings out the tension and the contrast, and the implications for how one should live one's life, really well. There's a great poem by Mary Oliver, The Summer Day, which includes the line "How will you spend your one wild and precious life?" It seems that the Angels of Xara have answered this question for themselves, and live in an awareness that each day might be their last, and therefore live it to the full, whilst everyone around them has not answered that question, and that's one of the reasons why the Angels make them so uncomfortable.

The naked lady

2010-03-22T02:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Cat just tweeted about the blog of Tessa Chernoi, entitled Ramblings of a Naked Lady, in which she talks about her experiences of nude modelling and how it has enabled her to take pride in her body, and to help other women to do so too. She writes:

This enlightenment is also something that feeds my own photography, I don't care who she is, what she looks like, I would love to photograph every woman I meet. I want to be there when they discover that they are beautiful. My greatest triumph to date has been the reaction I received when I showed a good friend the pictures I had taken of her one evening as we tried to mend her broken heart with red wine. She started crying and asked how I had made her look so beautiful. I replied that I hadn't done anything. She was beautiful and all I did was see it, and photograph it.

How beautiful, and what a wonderful thing to do. Women are so constrained by the narrow mainstream definition of female beauty - it's time we reclaimed our bodies and celebrated them.

Bluestocking of the Week: Lisa Barone

2010-03-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Kirsty just tweeted about an article by Lisa Barone rebutting an article in Canada's Globe and Mail claiming that men are better than women at blogging. And the offending article was written by a woman.

Lisa writes:

if you went to The Globe and Mail site expecting to read statistics about how men dominate the blogosphere and researched ideas as to why that was so, you would have come away disappointed.

Instead, Margaret did what women too often choose to do to one another – she cut them down for sport.

Margaret’s article featured nothing but a stereotyped opinion as to how blogging is really just a man’s task, similar to driving a snowmobile straight up a mountain, she says. Us, girls, just don’t have the stomach for opinions and pissing contests. Women are not interested in these sorts of things. We’re more restrained and less concerned with public displays of prowess.

Lisa Barone is the Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media.

You Shan't Go To The Prom!

2010-03-12T03:50:00.000-08:00

I've just seen a shocking story about how a school in Mississippi won't allow a lesbian student to attend the prom with her girlfriend, and they wouldn't let her wear a tuxedo either.

Here's the email that I sent to tmcneece@itawamba.k12.ms.us, twiygul@itawamba.k12.ms.us

Dear Superintendent McNeece and Principal Wiygul,

I am writing to point out that lesbian and gay students have a right to bring a same-sex date to the prom and wear clothing congruent with their gender identity under the First Amendment, and the US Supreme Court has ruled that a policy or public entity that is based on discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

Simply cancelling the prom seems like a disproportionate response to a simple request to bring a same-sex partner. Please reinstate the prom and allow Constance McMillen to bring her partner as her date, and wear a tuxedo if she wishes.

I am deeply dismayed by your discriminatory practice, and feel that it should be a matter of regret to you that your school is now infamous around the world for this bigoted, disproportionate and unjust response to a lesbian student and her partner.

Yours sincerely

I would encourage Bluestocking readers to write to the school on similar lines. You can get more information from the ACLU's letter on Constance's behalf (PDF).

Update: apparently the email addresses above are now closed (wonder why?)

The ACLU has produced an online resource for LGBT students who want to take their partners to the Prom.

I am woman, hear me roar

2010-03-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

I have just watched a fascinating documentary on BBC iPlayer that completely changed my view of second-wave feminism. When you realise the utter sexism that most men (and many women) espoused in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it's hardly surprising that many women thought that men were a write-off.

And in fact, many of the ideas which I had thought were third-wave feminism were actually formulated by the second wave - ideas like the social construction of gender, for instance. Also, second-wave feminists invented consciousness-raising groups, and demanded equal pay for equal work, and abortions, and contraception, and the right to walk down the street at night without being in danger of getting raped or knifed.

And the women interviewed in the documentary admitted that political lesbianism was a bad idea, because it wasn't fair to real lesbians.

Geek Barbie = FAIL

2010-02-16T06:05:00.000-08:00

She wears pink. No self-respecting girl-geek wears pink.

She has a T-shirt and a laptop with binary on it. That would be OK, if it was obviously in homage to The Matrix, but it isn't - it's just obvious that the designers of her outfit thought that you're still likely to see binary on someone's desktop. She should have a t-shirt with GOT ROOT printed on it, or maybe SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE CLUE > 0 - perhaps ThinkGeek could produce a range of T-shirts for her. And her laptop should have some code on it, maybe some Java or UML.

She works in tech-support. This is a perfectly respectable choice for someone who is just starting out in the world of IT, but someone who has been around since 1959 should be at the top of her game by now - a respected über-geek who gets invited to give keynote speeches at geeky conferences. I mean, I know she has had a number of other careers, but still.

The BBC article about this suggests that her wearing glasses is a bit stereotypical, but on the other hand, glasses do make people look brainy, and quite often, they actually are brainy (I wear glasses, for instance, and I am brainy).

According to the Women in Technology article, geeky Barbie's accessories were created in conjunction with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering. Really?! Then why are they so naff?

Nora Lin, president of the Society of Women Engineers, said: "Girls who discover their futures through Barbie will learn that they - just like engineers - are free to explore infinite possibilities and that their dreams can go as far as their imaginations take them.

"As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can design products that have an important and positive impact on people's everyday lives, such as inventing a technology to conserve home energy or programming a newborn monitoring device."

Oh yeah? Then why isn't she a programmer, or a network manager, or a systems administrator, or a web developer?

Women inventors

2010-02-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Women Inventors page at About.com has a huge selection of biographies and resources.

Women Inventors A to Z
Women Inventors A-Z the biographies - inventions and photos of inventors from Randi Altschul to Mary Walton.

Randi Altschul

Randice-Lisa Altschul invented the world's first disposable cell phone.

Dr. Betsy Ancker-Johnson

Dr. Betsy Ancker-Johnson was the third woman inventor elected to the National Academy oF engineering.

Mary Anderson

Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper. Anderson was issued a patent for the wipers in 1905.

Virginia Apgar

Apgar invented a newborn scoring system or "Apgar Score" for assessing the health of newborn infants.

Barbara Askins

Developed a totally new way of processing film.

Patricia Bath

The first African American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention.

Miriam E. Benjamin

Ms. Benjamin was the second black woman inventor to receive a patent. She received a patent for an invention she called a "Gong and Signal Chair for Hotels".

Patricia Billings

Patricia Billings invented a indestructible and fireproof building material called Geobond®.

Katherine Blodgett

Invented the non-reflecting glass.

Bessie Blount

Blount invented a device to help disabled people eat with less difficulty.

Sarah Boone

An improvement to the ironing board was invented by African American Sarah Boone on April 26, 1892.

Rachel Fuller Brown

Rachel Brown co-invented Nystatin, the world's first useful antifungal antibiotic.

Josephine Garis Cochran

In 1886, Josephine Cochran invented the first practical dishwasher.

Martha J. Coston

Martha Coston invented a pyrotechnic signaling system known as maritime signal flares.

Dianne Croteau

Invented Actar 911, the CPR mannequin.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie also known as Madame Curie discovered radium and furthered x-ray technology.

Marion Donovan

The convenient disposable diaper was invented by New Yorker Marion Donovan in 1950.

Gertrude Belle Elion

Elion invented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine, drugs that facilitated kidney transplants and other drugs for the treatment of cancer and leukemia.

Edith Flanigen

Flanigen was the inventor of a petroleum refining method and is considered one of the most inventive chemists of all time.

Helen Free

Free was the inventor of the home diabetes test.

Sally Fox

Sally Fox invented naturally-colored cotton.

Frances Gabe

Gabe invented the "Self Cleaning House".

Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an inventor, author, industrial engineer, industrial psychologist, and mother of twelve children.

Sarah E. Goode

Sarah Goode was the first African American women to receive a U.S. patent.

Bette Nesmith Graham

Graham invented liquid paper, also known as White-Out™.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin invented livestock-handling devices.

KK Gregory

KK Gregory is the ten-year old inventor of Wristies®.

Ruth Handler

The Barbie doll was invented in 1959 by Ruth Handler.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen

Elizabeth Hazen co-invented Nystatin, the world's first useful antifungal antibiotic.

Beulah Henry

All told, Henry made about 110 inventions and holds 49 patents.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Hodgkin used x-rays to find the structural layouts of atoms and to discover the overall molecular shape of over 100 molecules including: penicillin, vitamin B-12, vitamin D and insulin.

Krisztina Holly

Co-invented the telephony software called Visual Voice.

Erna Schneider Hoover

Hoover invented the computerized telephone switching system.

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was a computer inventor best known for the Mark computer series.

Mary Phelps Jacob

Mary Phelps Jacob invented the bra.

Amanda Theodosia Jones

Jones re-invented American food production by inventing vacuum packed canning.

Marjorie Stewart Joyner

Joyner invented a permanent wave machine that would allow a hairdo to stay set for days.

Anna Keichline

Architect, Anna Keichline created inventions for the home.

Mary Kies: Patenting Pioneer

Kies was the first women to receive a U.S. patent on May 15, 1809.

Gabriele Knecht

Patented the Forward Sleeve design for creating clothing.

Margaret Knight

Margaret Knight was an employee in a paper bag factory when she invented a new machine part to make square bottoms for paper bags. Knight can be considered the mother of the grocery bag, she founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870.

Stephanie Louise Kwolek

Kwolek invented a material five times stronger than steel called Kevlar.

Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr was a movie star and inventor.

Ada Lovelace

Wrote a scientific paper in 1843 that anticipated the development of computer software artificial intelligence and computer music.

Sybilla Masters - First American Woman Inventor

Masters was the first American female inventor in recorded history, but no doubt women have been inventing since the dawn of time without the deserved recognition.

Ann Moore

Invented the Snugli baby carrier.

Krysta Morlan

Krysta Morlan invented a device that relieves the irritation caused by wearing a cast - the cast cooler.

Ellen Ochoa

Ochoa invented optical analysis systems and was the world's first Hispanic female astronaut.

Alice Parker

Alice Parker invented a new and improved gas heating furnace.

Betty Rozier and Lisa Vallino

Rozier and Vallino, a mother and daughter invention team, invented the intravenous catheter shield.

Patsy Sherman

Patsy Sherman invented Scotchgard™.

Valerie Thomas

Received a patent in 1980 for inventing an illusion transmitter.

Ann Tsukamoto

The co-patenter of a process to isolate the human stem cell.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was considered the "Moses of the Civil War" for her work on the underground railroads.

Madame Walker

Madame Walker was a St. Louis washerwoman-turned-entrepreneur, who in 1905 invented a method to soften and smooth African American hair.

Mary Walton

Walton invented several anti-pollution devices during the Industrial Revolution.

Carol Wior

Invented the Slimsuit, a slimming swimsuit.

Quote of the Day: Intersectionality

2010-01-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

If, as a member of an oppressed group, I take a stand against that oppression and decide that I will work against it, it doesn't make any sense to work only for my own personal interests. It doesn't make any sense for me to only fight for marriage equality when there are other queer people losing their jobs for being queer or killing themselves for being queer because THAT'S how much they hate themselves. (If you are unfamiliar with my usage of the word "queer," it goes like this: "queer" used to be a derogatory term aimed at LGBTQ people. It has since been liberatingly reclaimed by LGBTQ people to generally refer to that which is not heteronormative. The non-heteronormative part is why I like to use it-- it's shorter than LGBTQ and also rhymes with "cheer.") The people within my oppressed group that are more oppressed than I are more oppressed for reasons that inevitably have to do with issues of money/class and race. That is how I understand intersectionality. It's all connected. And it doesn't make any damn sense to forget about other oppressed peoples while I work my own way out of oppression because that doesn't do anything to end oppression-- it only ends MY oppression. It only moves oppression around-- shifts it from one group to another. Meanwhile, the dominant group stays dominant while the system they sit atop says, "suckeeeers!!!" And by forgetting and/or not recognizing the other oppressed, I become the oppressor. I'm not down with this. This is what "no one is free when others are oppressed" means to me. No one is better than anyone else.

-- Jennifer Luu, 2010 Equality Rider

Worrals of the WAAF

2010-01-18T07:36:00.000-08:00

Worrals of the WAAF is clearly a feminist icon - feisty, independent and a pilot. According to the Gad, Sir! Comics blog:

Captain W E Johns had written and published no fewer than eleven (prose) books about Flight Officer Joan Worralson of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, starting with Worrals of the WAAF in 1941, previously serialised in Girl’s Own magazine. Like her more famous male predecessor, Biggles, Worrals was a pilot known by an abbreviation of her surname, had a sidekick nicknamed after her physical appearance (“Frecks”, rather than “Ginger”), and showed an alarming propensity to stumble on spy rings while on routine missions. There was no romance, Worrals’s family never showed up, and she acted for King and country rather than personal interest.

She's plucky, intelligent, independent and in charge of her own plane - what's not to like?

The author of the Worrals books, W. E. Johns, also wrote the Biggles books, of course, and several science fiction novels. His politics were clearly different from other children's writers of the era, as according to Wikipedia:

Unique among children’s writers of the time, from 1935 Johns employed a working-class character as an equal member of the Biggles team - "Ginger" Habblethwaite, later Hebblethwaite, the son of a Northumberland miner (we never learn his real Christian name, and he proclaims himself a Yorkshireman once or twice).
Other less-famous characters created by W. E. Johns include commando Captain Lorrington "Gimlet" King; aviatrix Joan "Worrals" Worralson (essentially a female Biggles, created at the request of the Air Ministry to inspire more young women to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force); and pioneering astronaut (ex-RAF, naturally) Group Captain Timothy "Tiger" Clinton, who first rocketed into space in 1954.

Women alchemists

2010-01-16T02:43:00.000-08:00

Women alchemists were not just the soror mystica of their male counterparts, but researchers in their own right. For instance, the bain-marie was invented by a female alchemist, though exactly which one is disputed:

According to culinary writer Giuliano Bugialli, the term comes from the Italian bagno maria, named after Maria de'Cleofa, who developed the technique in Florence in the sixteenth century.
Alternatively, the device's invention has been popularly attributed to Mary the Jewess, an ancient alchemist traditionally supposed to have been Miriam, a sister of Moses. The name comes from the medieval-Latin term balneum (or balineum) Mariae—literally, Mary's bath—from which the French bain de Marie, or bain-marie, is derived.
According to The Jewish Alchemists, Maria the Jewess was an ancient alchemist who lived in Alexandria—although this would seem to contradict the tradition that she was Moses' sister: Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, while Moses is thought to have lived around 1450-1200 BC.

There is a website devoted to women alchemists, including Sophie Brahe, Anna Maria Zieglerin, Marie Meurdrac, Katherine Boyle Jones and Margaret Cavendish. The author of the website, Robin L Gordon, also has a forthcoming book, Searching for the Soror Mystica.

Lesbian separatist ants

2010-01-13T04:38:00.000-08:00

Mad Science reports that there is a female-only species of ant.

Technically these ants reproduce asexually, not through some kind of Nicola Griffith-style lesbian parthenogenesis. They are, however, one of the only known all-female animal species. Who is to say whether it wasn't some lesbian urge that caused them to diverge from other ant species and give up sperm altogether?

I am reminded of the ant society in T H White's The Once and Future King.
Males = Not-Done.

There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites — there were only two words for qualifications, Done and Not-Done — which applied to all questions of value... Their life was not questionable, it was dictated...

The changing face of marriage

2010-01-12T11:54:00.001-08:00

I've just been watching a fascinating documentary on BBC iPlayer about the history of British marriages in the last fifty years. It shows how much marriage has changed. Kirsty Young interviewed lots of couples and marriage guidance counsellors to explore the changing concept of marriage: from an institution to a relationship.

One significant factor was the availability of divorce, which meant that people actually had to work at it rather than taking it for granted, and that they could escape miserable and failed marriages. But until the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, a divorce was still quite difficult to obtain; one or other party had to be at fault. After that, separation could be grounds for divorce. By seeing marriage as a terminable arrangement, this completely changed the way people viewed marriage: it means that the quality of marriage matters, and it is socially acceptable to end one.

The Second World War had a huge impact; there were 30,000 divorces in 1946 (more than three times the pre-war numbers) because people's expectations of marriage had changed, and many people had had affairs while they or their partners were away, or both parties had simply changed in the intervening years since they had last seen each other.

Then there was the advent of marriage guidance (the National Marriage Guidance Council was formed in 1946). The NMGC promoted the concept of companionate marriage — the idea that the partners are equal and provide companionship for each other.

Another significant change was women going out to work. In the early 50s, only one in five women worked. This changed fairly rapidly in subsequent decades. At about 25 minutes into the documentary, Kirsty Young takes a pot-shot at that idiot John Bowlby, who placed having a mother in full-time employment on the same level as war and famine in the scale of calamities that might befall a child.

The increasing availability of contraception also had an effect, together with increased expectations of sexual fulfilment. Until the "sexual revolution", people often had little or no sexual experience when they got married, so had no basis for comparison to know if their partner was any good in the sack. Reliable contraception allowed them to gain pre-marital sexual experiences; and also meant that they could choose whether or not to have children. And increased availability of knowledge about sex (orgasms and so on) meant that expectations were raised, and extra-marital affairs became more common. Prior to that, they were pretty clueless about sex; a NMGC survey in the early 50s found that only one in three couples had a fulfilling sex life. A 1958 NMGC booklet, Sex in Marriage, pointed out that some couples, once they get closer, might like to try having sex with no clothes on; and pointed out that some women might need more than orgasm before they were satisfied. (Hurrah - multiple orgasms!) People were also clueless about conception and contraception - at the beginning of the 1960s, one in five women were already pregnant when they got married. Many others died of botched abortions.

Feminism also had an impact, encouraging women to expect economic, intellectual and sexual freedom, and legal and social equality. Men started to help with the housework, or with pushing the pram or holding the baby in the late 1950s. (The next programme in the series deals with feminism and sexual liberation.)

Education (including sex education) improved massively, making people better informed about life and about the choices available to them.

All of these factors mean that marriage at the end of the twentieth century was a completely different concept than it was at the beginning of the century. So, if you are one of those people who thinks that same-sex or polygamous marriage would change the concept of marriage beyond all recognition, you are closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Only women bleed

2010-01-11T01:54:00.000-08:00

I see radical lesbian feminist philosopher/theologian Mary Daly has died. The blog-obits have varied between the naffly saccharine (from the Pagans, as per: 'May you rest in the sweet arms of the Goddess and have good joy of the Summerlands!' kind of thing) and the excoriating, taking Daly to task for her failings, perceived or actual. (There's a hilarious piece over at Melissa McEwan's on Daly, in which McEwan, having come to praise her, contorts herself into a flailing ecstasy of right-on self-abasement in the Comments once she's told that Daly was once nasty to transsexuals.)

It's rather difficult to write about Daly, as a man, without being accused of bigotry. A keynote of her playful style was the making of very extreme statements forte con brio which might or might not have been merely throwaway. In this she was like a kind of philosophical performance artist of woman-rage, but the line she trod between radical art-speech and radical hate-speech was, sadly, a narrow one. I'm not sure becoming a kind of mirror-image Tertullian really did her, feminism, or the world much good in the end, nor how deliberate a pose it was. But more on this anon.

Credit where credit is due: Daly wrote some wonderful, profound, clever things that totally put the bomb under the 'kyriarchy' (great word, all credit to her). Beginning with work on the great Jesuit intellectual Jacques Maritain, she moved into skeweringly accurate analyses of patriarchal religious structures, especially in her early works like The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father. These did much to enable women and men alike to see the hierarchies of institutional Christianity as contingent and Kafkaesque, and in them she laid bare---with lacerating, scornful wit---how deeply that religion's pompous absurdities of practice are in fact rooted in the murky bowels of its theology. (A metaphor Daly would have liked, that.) I find this a tenable if intellectually-unsubtle view, but then Daly was never really interested in nuance: her favourite word was 'BIG!'. I respect Daly a great deal for her refusal to bill herself as any kind of dutiful patriarchal daughter, utterly rejecting any concession, and, sometimes, using language with a kind of bubbling, fierce humour. And may her name be forever blessed for the wonderful coinage academentia: don't we all just know what she meant.

Unfortunately, she then began a period which lasted until her death in which she gradually lost touch with the world around her whilst claiming to see it ever more clearly. As Lord Shaftesbury remarked, '[T]he most ingenious way to become foolish' is 'by a system.' For a deeply learned woman, Daly's scholarship became erratic: she clung, for example, to the notorious 'nine million women' figure for the number of deaths in the early modern Witchcraze, and completely ignored the emergent and specifically radical feminist scholarship of the 1980s which demonstrated that her view of the witch trials was simply mistaken---a note of intellectual high-handedness with other women scholars which sadly came to blight her work. She was not in any way a competent historian (except perhaps, once, of the Church) but ultimately a kind of philosophical propagandist; when history becomes martyrology and persuasion is replaced by propaganda---in however prankish a spirit and in however good a cause---then the scholar ensures the eventual academic evanescence of their own work, because it will have to be redone properly.

This propaganda settled into the form of a radical feminist Manichaeism, in which the world is divided down the middle into men (bad, intrinsically disordered, violent, oppressive and 'necrophile') and women (good, intriniscally oriented correctly towards life and each other, peaceful, oppressed and 'biophile'.) One of the saddest things to watch, as one reads Daly's later works, is the way that the first category grew ever more capacious and the second shrunk ever further as the ideological strictures tightened. By the late 90s, 'women' had come to mean radical feminist lesbians, or, as Daly might have put it, only Positively Revolting Hags who had Crone-ologically seen through the patriarchal pompenile parades, rejected intercourse in favour of Outercourse, and had joyously up-risen into Quintessential Be-ing. As her remaking of the dictionary, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, makes plain, Daly was, alas, no Joyce when it came to wordplay. The experience of being trapped in the book's thuddingly-repetitive, elephantine punning makes me feel like Victoria Wood's wonderful character Kitty, a formidable Manchester matron of decided views, who tells us:

--She said, 'Kitty, do you like fun?' I said, 'No, I don't!--I had enough of that in 1958 when I was stuck in a lift with a hula-hoop salesman.'

(As Daly might have said, 'We may be overthrowing the patriarchy, but I want it to be fun fun fun.') As her throught developed, she appointed herself the arbiter of who of who was not 'a real woman' according to her own exalted criteria, eventually defining which women were and were not worthy of a feminist revolution. Sex-workers, transgendered women, Christians, straight women who enjoy straight sex, mothers of boys, women who love their male relatives, women who have undergone male-derived kinds of psychotherapy---all were eventually excluded in Pure Lust as 'imitation males.' Men, of course, had to go too, via a shady and unspecified process of 'decontamination'. I find it astounding that a woman of Daly's obvious intelligence felt able to use that term in a post-Holocaust world, in which it is a clear and sinister synonym for 'extermination.' As she said:

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Change 'males' to 'Jews', 'blacks', or 'gays' and see how it reads. Whether or not she meant this statement seriously, and whether or not anything can be said on the grounds that it's merely playful, philosophical free-association, Daly struck here a genuine note of wistful Stalinism once too often for my liking.

There are a variety of questions that can be raised about Daly's career, beyond the infamous banning of male students from her advanced classes; on the latter, I can see her point, but on the other hand it's little better in my opinion than the ghastly Islington registrar Lilian Ladele refusing to perform Civil Partnerships: in other words, whatever wacko views you feel it incumbent upon you to hold, you have to perform the job you were employed to do fairly. I find it striking that Daly told women to leave the Church en masse, but continued to work for a Jesuit university for over three decades. Intellectually, the main problem is her apparent inability to conceive that there might be other axes of oppression beyond men vs women, and that perhaps class, education, race, and economic status might just possibly complicate such a simplistic binary. It mystifies me that such a sophisticated thinker could be so tin-eared at times. Hers was ultimately not a flexible mind; her intellectual style closely resembles that of that Eagleton-coined atheist pushmi-pullyu, 'Ditchkins', i.e. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchkins. Whereas Ditchkins sees religion itself as an irredeemably corrupting influence on the human mind and writes from a position of withering intellectual certainty, Daly saw the kyriarchical forms of religion as the monstrous leviathan to be slain by herself as a labrys-wielding female Marduk. Both often hit the target and hit it hard; both are often guilty an obtuse lack of imaginative sympathy and intellectual manoeuvrability.

There were other problems: the issues about Daly's unedifying fear and loathing of transsexual women (to whom she implied actual violence should be done) have been well picked over on the blogosphere, as has womanist poet Audre Lorde's famous open letter accusing Daly (in polite terms) of a privilged, colonialist and unconsciously racist mindset and methodology---to which Daly apparently never publicly responded. I'll let you hunt those out for yourselves should you wish to do so.

All in all, I'm glad feminism has moved beyond Beyond God the Father, as it were, jettisoning Daly's utopian flights of fantasy and lurid lesbian neo-hierarchies, despite her importance. Daly once wrote: 'I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism – or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism – which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!' I find in this---Maoism and Marxism aside---a recipe for the reductive suicide of human culture, and an extraordinary sense of intellectual contempt deriving from unconscious feeling of vulnerability to pollution. (She could have done with thinking about Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger a bit harder.) For Daly, there is no point even thinking about, say, the three-thousand year old legacy of Hindu culture, spirituality, literature, art, ritual, architecture, medicine, or philosophy: it is merely an instantiation of the patriarchy. (Someone had better pop Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty a note through.) I find myself questioning whether Daly was really learned enough in, for example, Buddhism or Jungian thought to pronounce them valueless and 'itty-bitty' in this way. Judging by her basic lack of attention to them and the historical errors of her scholarship, I rather doubt it. As she gradually lost interest in any account of literature, psychology, biology, history, or religion which conflicted with her stark worldview, she became increasingly ideologically self-marooned; a great loss to the world, as she had an exceptional mind.

There's one term in particular that I do wish that she had picked up from Jung: enantiodromia, that is, 'the tendency of polarised extremes to come to resemble one another via a process of compulsive unconscious compensation.' Ultimately, Daly was an extraordinarily powerful and yet limited thinker, who took the tools used to construct patriarchal religion and analysed them in great and mordant detail. Alas that she went on to use those tools to erect a house of mirrors, which came strangely to reproduce the original patriarchal edifice. By being hierarchically exclusivist, by claiming privileged access to truth, by erecting purity laws about sex and by anathematizing dissent, Daly created a house in which every surface reflected only her own face. In the end, perhaps the best---and the worst---that I can say about Mary Daly is that after a lifetime's striving in the service of feminist thought and nine or so books, historically she won't even be as important as Camille Paglia, another lesbian feminist and her thorough-going ideological opposite.

Anyway, despite my misgivings above, rest in peace, Mary.

Female spies

2010-01-10T02:30:00.000-08:00

Sarah Emma Edmonds was a remarkable woman who disguised herself as a man to fight for the Union cause in the American Civil War. She

enlisted in a Michigan volunteer infantry company as Franklin Thompson, successfully evading detection as a woman for a year. She participated in the Battle of Blackburn's Ford, First Bull Run / Manassas, the Peninsular Campaign, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Sarah Edmonds sometimes served as a spy, "disguised" as a woman (Bridget O'Shea) or as a black man.

Aphra Behn was one of Britain's first professional woman writer, author of plays and novels, and also a spy.

She was reportedly bisexual, and held a larger attraction to women than to men, a trait that, coupled with her writings and references of this nature, would eventually make her popular in the writing and artistic communities of the 20th century and present day.

By 1666 Behn had become attached to the Court, possibly through the influence of Thomas Culpepper and other associates of influence, where she was recruited as a political spy to Antwerp by Charles II. Her code name for her exploits is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she subsequently published much of her writings. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665.[3] She became the lover to a prominent and powerful royal, and from him she obtained political secrets to be used to the English advantage.

The Women's History site at About.com has a massive site about female spies, including American Civil War spies, Second World War spies, and Cold War spies. Times Online has a detailed site about the Special Operations Executive, including Lise Villameur, Pearl Witherington, Odette Hallowes, and Yvonne Cormeau. And not forgetting Violette Szabo.

Patriarchy

2010-01-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

Some second-wave feminists insist that there is something essentially female about women; that men are the oppressors; and that the patriarchy is everywhere, insidiously sending its messages of subjugation wherever you are, like a giant phallic panopticon.

I remember in the late 1980s going to join the lesbian society at university, and when I asked why they didn't have a joint society with the gay men, the response was, "They may be gay, but they're still men." (So yeah, obviously part of the patriarchal conspiracy, just by virtue of having tackle. Right.) (Most universities now have a joint LGBT society.) As you can imagine, this was one of the formative experiences that made me a third-wave feminist.

Many second-wave feminists propagate the myth of an ancient matriarchal or matrifocal society. Now, don't get me wrong, I do think this is a rather lovely idea (at least a matrifocal society would be - I'm not sure that matriarchy would be any better than patriarchy), but I doubt that it was ever actually a reality. Though it must be said that there are societies which retain traces of matrifocality, for example those cultures that count descent through the female line, like the Jews do.

What we do know is that from about 500 BCE onwards, there was suddenly a reaction against sex, and particularly sex with women. Celibacy and male friendship were in, and women were out. This phase was particularly virulent until about 500 CE, when it began to abate. Unfortunately, the middle and latter part of this period coincided with the rise of Christianity, which is why that religion was so anti-women. Some of the writings of the Church in this period are eye-wateringly misogynist. Of course, this general negativity towards sex and the body must also have adversely affected men.

In this 14th century illustration from a copy of Euclid's Elements, a woman is shown holding a compass and square, teaching geometry to a group of monks.

In fact, the fortunes of women have fluctuated quite dramatically during the last 2000 years. During the 14th century, women could own property and businesses (which is why we have surnames like Brewster, a female brewer, and Webster, a female weaver, because surnames were formalised in the 14th century). Women could also learn Latin, and obviously therefore many were also literate. Nunneries were not just places of seclusion, but communities of learned women. Things weren't 100% rosy for medieval women, but they were definitely looking up. But then the Reformation created problems for women, because the Virgin Mary and female saints could no longer be venerated, and the Divine was seen as exclusively male. Suddenly, women were very much back to being second-class citizens again.

The view of women as utterly crushed by patriarchy denies agency to women, portraying us as passive victims. Our ancestors were just as capable of feminism as you or I. Take Christine de Pizan, for instance, Europe's first professional female writer, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, an important feminist work of the early 15th century:

By 1405, Christine de Pizan had completed her most successful literary works, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or The Book of the Three Virtues. The first of these shows the importance of women’s past contributions to society, and the second strives to teach women of all estates how to cultivate useful qualities in order to counteract the growth of misogyny ... Christine’s final work was a poem eulogizing Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who took a very public role in organizing French military resistance to English domination in the early fifteenth century. Written in 1429, The Tale of Joan of Arc celebrates the appearance of a woman military leader who, according to Christine, vindicated and rewarded all women’s efforts to defend their own sex (Wikipedia)

Life was hard in the medieval period for everyone; I would rather have been an upper-class medieval woman than a male serf, thank you very much. There were still misogynists around, but some women did have and wield power.

In the seventeenth century, a small army of women marched on Parliament to demand the vote. In the eighteenth century, women again had some economic power and a measure of sexual and intellectual freedom. Things took a down-turn again in the nineteenth century with the construction of middle-class womanhood (the "angel of the house") and the pathologisation of women's sexuality. But then along came first-wave feminism (at last) to campaign for legal rights and suffrage.

Furthermore, focussing on how women are oppressed under the current system obscures the complex hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality. It also obscures the ways in which men are constrained and bounded by gender stereotyping.

First let's look at how race, class and gender intersect. In the typical hierarchical view (circa 1930), a straight white upper-class man would be top of the heap. Just below him would be the straight white upper-class woman and the straight white upper-class gay or lesbian. Just below them would be the white middle classes, followed by well-to-do Asian and Black people (though perhaps the white working classes, being quite racist, would have regarded themselves as above any non-white person). So it would simply not be true to say that men were always regarded as superior to women — it depended on their race and class. Of course, all this is deeply uncomfortable to contemplate — it's not pleasant trying to get inside the mind of a sexist or a racist or a homophobe or a snob.

Second, let's look at how "patriarchal" attitudes affect men. Men are not supposed to dress in certain ways (no skirts, dresses, frills, make-up, nail-varnish, or anything remotely "feminine" — even moisturiser is viewed with suspicion); they are not supposed to show much emotion, and especially aren't allowed to cry. They are not supposed to be interested in "feminine" pursuits - botany, needlework, jewellery-making — even religion and spirituality are seen as a bit "feminine". Men must be taller than their girlfriends; they must not have girls' names (ever noticed how any boy's name that gets given to girls suddenly ceases to be regarded as a boy's name?) Masculinity is hedged about with so many taboos and prohibitions, it's no wonder that men are confused and insecure about it.

If we want to liberate women from the "patriarchy", therefore, we also need to liberate men from it. Otherwise, how can it be completely dismantled?

Alternative history

2010-01-06T13:52:00.000-08:00

And talking of alternative history, check out this fabulous blog entitled Woolf and Wilde, which presents

vintage photographs of men together (and sometimes women together) circa 1880 to 1950, a longtime passion of mine.

I pair the photos with text to narrate what, in my imagination, the couples might be saying, doing, feeling. Text is drawn from poetry, fiction, letters, lyrics and my own writing. Assembling these Imagined Histories creates a gay ancestry of sorts that I have always longed to know — even if I have had to make it up myself. This is the lineage I wish had been passed down to me like so much treasure, like other cultures do to honor a common identity.

Not only is this a beautiful idea, but some of the pictures are wonderful, and the poetry is good as well (with selections from e e cummings and Walt Whitman, among others).

Here's my favourite so far - how luscious!

I wonder what the sitters of these photos were really thinking? Some of them certainly seem quite gay and lesbian - and who is to say that they weren't? There was a thriving lesbian and gay underground in the late nineteenth century, with toms and mollies and their own special clubs.

You can also follow Woolf & Wilde on Twitter, which was where I discovered them when they kindly followed me. It's rather like the telegraph craze of the 1890s, don't you think?

science fiction

2010-01-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I love science fiction. All of it. From space opera all the way to hard SF, stopping off at planetary romance, what-if scenarios, alternative histories, and social science SF, and so on and so forth.

Science fiction is a great way to think about the world in a different way - imagining what it would be like if this or that aspect of society, or evolution, or the environment, were different. You might think it's about the future, but it's actually a commentary on the present.

SF is a wide-ranging genre which includes a number of different approaches. Essentially the question being posed by an SF novel is "What if...?" This may be speculation about the possible impact of a certain technology, as in Ursula K le Guin's stories of the Ekumen, where nearly-as-fast-as-light space travel is possible, and she explores the socio-psychological impact of time dilation, amongst many other issues. It may be the socio-psychological impact of a different social, psychological, or economic state of affairs than exists at present, as in Ursula K le Guin's The Dispossessed, the story of an anarchist planet. It might be an alternative history, as in the excellent Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, which explores a reality in which Europe is Muslim.

SF is much more than merely nerdy "toys-for-the-boys" space opera - it is a literary form in its own right, and one which mainstream writers are increasingly exploring. For example, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is about clones; Margaret Atwood's classic The Handmaid's Tale, and her more recent novel, Oryx and Crake, are clearly SF, even though their authors deny it. Many SF writers are beginning to be taken seriously as literati, for example Neil Gaiman's excellent book American Gods has received favourable attention from critics.

Reading SF (especially Ursula Le Guin) pretty much formed my entire world-view.

There are many other fine female SF authors. Here are just a few book reviews to whet your appetite.

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993)
Natural History, Justina Robson (1993)
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (1996)
The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon (2003) - reading group guide
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)
Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree Jr / Alice Sheldon (1978)
The Telling, Ursula Le Guin (2000)
Empire of Bones, Liz Williams (2002)

Geraldine Brooks

2009-12-29T03:33:00.000-08:00

I just read a review by Cliff Reed of Geraldine Brooks' novel March in The Inquirer, which made me want to go and buy it. Having looked at her other books, I also bought Year of Wonders (which is about the plague year in Eyam in Derbyshire) and People of the Book (which is about a book restorer who restores and investigates the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah).

March is a novel about the father of the March girls in Little Women, and is based on the life of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's father. I like novels which throw a sidelight on other novels (Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea being another excellent example), so this should be an excellent read.

From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war leaving his wife and daughters. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In Brooks’ telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body, and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.

Year of Wonders should be of interest to British Unitarians, as the village of Eyam is only just up the road from Great Hucklow, the Unitarian conference and holiday centre. The story of Eyam is incredibly moving; I first heard of it at school when I was 10 or 11, and it made a big impression on me; but this summer was the first opportunity I had had to visit Eyam itself, and witness the scene of the amazing self-sacrifice of its people, who quarantined themselves to protect the rest of Derbyshire from the plague.

People of the Book is a fictionalised account of the remarkable preservation of the Sarajevo Haggadah. The real story of this book is amazing, too:

The history of the remarkable man, Dervis Korkut, who saved the book from the Nazi officers who sought it, was told in the December 3, 2007 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The article, entitled "The Book of Exodus", also by Geraldine Brooks, sets out the equally remarkable story of the young Jewish girl, Mira Papo, whom Korkut and his wife hid from the Nazis as they were acting to save the Haggadah. In a twist of fate, as an elderly woman in Israel, Mira Papo secured the safety of Korkut's daughter from the Serbian genocide of the 1990s.

The pictures in the Sarajevo Haggadah depict scenes from the Torah, including Jacob's ladder, Joseph's dream of the wheat and the cattle, the offering of Isaac, Noah's Ark, and many more.

The real heroes of LGBT liberation

2009-12-28T10:44:00.001-08:00

Over at Pink News, Peter Tatchell (a hero of mine) reminds us that Quentin Crisp had feet of clay. He did not support LGBT liberation in the 60s and 70s, and wanted to be "the only gay in the village"; he also made that stupid comment about AIDS. He had clearly internalised the homophobia of those around him.

On the other hand, a friend of a friend called him up when he was in New York, and Quentin Crisp invited him round for tea, and they spent about an hour chatting; I think my friend's friend found him charming.

Peter Tatchell continues:

The true icons and pioneers of the modern British gay community are heroes like Allan Horsfall and Antony Grey. They were the driving forces of the first gay rights organisations in Britain – the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee set up in 1964 and the Homosexual Law Reform Society, established earlier in 1958. These two men, who are still alive and have never received the public recognition they deserve, have done far more for gay dignity and advancement than Quentin Crisp.

Crisp is a pale shadow of US gay rights trailblazers like Harry Hay, Frank Kameny, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

So yes, let's celebrate the real heroes and heroines of LGBT liberation:

Harry Hay - founder of the Radical Faeries; came up with the theory of subject-SUBJECT consciousness
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-founders of the Daughters of Bilitis
Allan Horsfall, co-founder of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality
Antony Grey: In 1958, Grey started voluntary work for the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS). He became the Society's Honorary Treasurer in 1960 and its Secretary by the end of 1962.
Frank Kameny, astronomer and gay rights activist
Edward Carpenter: poet, Pagan, vegetarian, pacifist and socialist; and apparently the catalyst for E M Forster to write Maurice.
Dudley Cave, co-founder of the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard
Radclyffe Hall, lesbian novelist (yes her theory of "inversion" was a bit off, but her novel was an inspiration to generations of lesbians)
Peter Tatchell - human rights campaigner extraordinaire
American LGBT rights activists
British LGBT rights activists
and many more who can be explored at the GLBTQ encyclopedia, the LGBT Religious Archives Network, and many another LGBT history website.

Elizabeth Gaskell

2009-12-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810-1865

Novelist, daughter of William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister, and for some time Keeper of the Treasury Records. She married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, at Manchester, and in 1848 published anonymously her first book, Mary Barton, in which the life and feelings of the manufacturing working classes are depicted with much power and sympathy. Other novels followed, Lizzie Leigh (1855), Mr. Harrison’s Confessions (1865), Ruth (1853), Cranford (1851–3), North and South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), etc. Her last work was Wives and Daughters (1865), which appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, and was left unfinished.

Mrs. Gaskell had some of the characteristics of Miss Austen, and if her style and delineation of character are less minutely perfect, they are, on the other hand, imbued with a deeper vein of feeling. She was the friend of Charlotte Brontë, to whom her sympathy brought much comfort, and whose Life she wrote. Of Cranford Lord Houghton wrote, “It is the finest piece of humoristic description that has been added to British literature since Charles Lamb.”

[From A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin, 1910]

Beatrix Potter, another Unitarian, was a family friend; and Frances Power Cobbe, the Unitarian feminist, was a personal friend.

A compendium of sites about Elizabeth Gaskell

Skirts for men

2009-12-15T03:11:00.000-08:00

It seems bizarre that people are still hung up about seeing a man in a skirt. Women have been wearing trousers since 1850 (earlier in the case of female miners), so why has it taken so long for men's fashion to be rationalised in the same way? There was a brief bout of skirt-wearing in the nineties, but it seems to have subsided.

Men can wear sarongs on the beach, kilts and priestly garb (and there are plenty of pictures of Jesus in a dress), but people are still intolerant of men wearing actual skirts. Why? It's only a piece of cloth. It must be because the Western definition of masculinity is still so circumscribed by convention that people can't imagine a man being a man unless he's hairy and/or betrousered. There's still a strong taboo against men crying, for instance.

Men who wear skirts: I salute you from the bottom of my heart. You are pioneers as much as the early feminists in their bloomers.

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

~ Walt Whitman

Here's some sites about men in skirts:

Why have I got a website about Men in Skirts?
A website advocating the wearing of skirts by men. Western men seem to have a phobia about wearing a skirt, sarong, toga or similar garment.
Skirts for men
Votes for Women / Skirts for Men, the progress of liberation continues in the 21st Century.
Men's skirts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Men's skirts are skirts worn by men. Outside of Western cultures, male clothing includes skirts and skirt-like garments.
Men in Skirts - Victoria and Albert Museum
A collection of images and representations of men in skirts since the 14th century.
Utilikilts
These non-tartan kilts are very popular in Seattle

Bloomers

2009-12-15T02:57:00.000-08:00

Bloomers (trousers for women) were invented by Elizabeth Smith Miller and pioneered by early feminists and advocates of rational dress. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (May 27, 1818 – December 30, 1894) was an American women's rights and temperance advocate. Even though she did not create the women's clothing reform style known as bloomers, her name became associated with it because of her early and strong advocacy. She was the the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women, The Lily, which was a voice for many women reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It spoke on many issues such as dress reform and the need for enfranchisement for women.

The first woman to wear trousers (circa 1820) in America was arrested for indecency.

I very rarely wear a skirt and feel deeply uncomfortable in one, so I salute these pioneers of trouser-wearing.

Congratulations!

2009-12-13T23:37:00.000-08:00

How lovely. Susie Orbach and Jeanette Winterson are an item. And they're in love. Winterson wrote in her blog:

I am in love. Unexpected. Glorious. Happy. A great dancer and an amazing cook. How lucky am I? And yes, she is very smart and totally together. And she loves me too. Wow.

And when I say unexpected, I mean that I wasn’t looking, and certainly not in that direction. As ever, the important things happen by chance, unplanned, unseen.

Jeanette Winterson is one of my favourite authors - Oranges are not the only fruit was a very important book for me when I was discovering my own inclinations (I'm bisexual), and I love her other stuff as well.

I never got around to reading Fat is a feminist issue (I preferred Shelley Bovey's The Forbidden Body) but I notice that Orbach is doing the 2010 Price lecture at the "birthplace of feminism" Newington Green and Islington Unitarians, the church attended by Mary Wollstonecraft.

There is some speculation that the press will be all sleazy about this - that would be terribly sad in this day and age, but sadly it does happen; people still have misconceptions about LGBT people, and we have not yet reached the stage where your gender and/or sexual orientation is irrelevant. On the other hand, the Evening Standard has a rather positive article about this and Mary Queen of Shops' relationship.

Anyway, I hope that Mss Orbach and Winterson will be very happy together. We here at The Bluestocking would like to raise a virtual glass of champagne to toast their continuing happiness.

Belle de Jour

2009-11-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

Belle de Jour - on science and prostitution (New Scientist)

Under the name Belle de Jour, Brooke Magnanti wrote about her experiences as a prostitute for a London escort agency, and her blog became a bestselling book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, and a television series.

She has a master's degree in genetic epidemiology and a PhD from the University of Sheffield's department of forensic pathology.

I think Brooke Magnanti qualifies as a bluestocking. Pleasingly, the interview starts with details of her scientific research, including a possible link between thyroid cancer in women in Cumbria, in north-west England, and fallout from Chernobyl in Ukraine; and an examination of policy for the assessment of risks from organophosphates.

Is prostitution necessarily degrading? Well in an ideal world, sex should happen in an atmosphere of mutual respect, kindness, and with respect for the other person - as a person, not an object. Most prostitution fails in that respect. However, history is littered with stories of men who fell for ladies of the night, and not all of them are fictional. And Belle de Jour was careful about who she slept with; she says, "I trusted my instincts, and the agency was very good about vetting clients as well." So clearly, she was not degraded or treated as a sex object.

I think prostitution should be properly regulated (but no-one should ever be pressurised into taking a job as a prostitute).

We need to end the exploitative and dangerous side of prostitution - streetwalking, the links with drug addiction, pimping etc.

It's not just men paying for sex with women; there are plenty of women who would pay for sex with men, as long as it was safe to do so. And I imagine the same applies to same-sex arrangements as well. This happens in other countries where they don't have such ridiculous double standards.

Let's get over the ridiculous idea that men are beasts with insatiable sexual appetites and women are frigid, so men must pay women to do it. It just happens that we all have urges and sometimes paying to satisfy them would be the simplest solution.

Best wishes to Ms Magnanti for a successful scientific career. I hope that this revelation will make no difference to her career. After all, science is meant to be rational and sensible, right? And based on empirical evidence like how good you are at your job - not on what you did to get by as a student. Besides, it's obvious that she is really dedicated to science if she was prepared to do something so controversial to fund her studies.

Oh yes, and let's fund PhDs properly too, so people don't need to do other jobs to fund them.

A Room of One's Own

2009-10-29T04:21:00.000-07:00

This month marks the 80th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Radio 4's Woman's Hour on 22 October was dedicated to it. If, like me, other Bluestockings relish the concept of a place to write and think in peace, you will enjoy the musings of the four women writers in the programme on their own 'rooms' (or lack of).

From the BBC website:

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". 80 years ago this month Virginia Woolf published these words in an essay that was to become one of the seminal feminist texts of our age. A Room of One’s Own has shaped the way in which creative achievement by men and women is viewed, and provided a point of reference for generations of female writers. Woolf uses the ‘room’ as a symbol for privacy, leisure time, and financial independence, all of which have been historically lacking for women. To mark the anniversary, a special programme looks at this remarkable essay and its continuing relevance to women today who are struggling to find the mental and physical space for their creativity. Jenni talks to Hermione Lee, author of an acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf; the academic and author Susan Sellers; and the novelists Val McDermid and Jill Dawson. We also visit a room that Virginia Woolf called her own - a specially constructed writing lodge at the bottom of her garden at Monk’s House in Sussex.

Jennie Loitman Barron (1891-1969)

2009-10-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Judge, lawyer, and suffragist
president of the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers
campaigned for uniform marriage and divorce laws, as well as for women’s right to serve on juries
had a thirty-five year career as a judge
became associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1957 — the first woman to hold this position
remained active in the Jewish community throughout her career
first president of the Women’s Auxiliary of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital
first president of the New England Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress

More at Jewish Women's Archive

Elinor Ostrom

2009-10-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, who has jointly (with Oliver E. Williamson) won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. According to Wikipedia:

Ostrom is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources. In particular, Ostrom's work emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. Ostrom's work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoided ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her current work emphasizes the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" for individual social-ecological system problems. .... In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance," saying her work had demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed by groups using it.

Barbara Bodichon

2009-10-05T02:25:00.000-07:00

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a Unitarian and a Pre-Raphaelite painter. I discovered this by chance because I was reading The Unitarian Life by Stephen Lingwood and Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn at the same time, and her name appeared in both. She was also a pioneer of the women's rights movement, a founder of Girton College, Cambridge and The Englishwoman's Journal. She knew George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, and was related to Florence Nightingale (another famous Unitarian). Definitely a top-flight bluestocking.

Climate Rush

2009-09-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

The delightfully eccentric Climate Rush will be travelling to Bristol on Sunday 20th September and staying there for Monday. They are travelling from Heathrow to Totnes by horse and cart, dressed as suffragettes and spreading the word about climate change and celebrating the best practice that they find.

Whilst in Bristol they will be holding a picnic on College Green at 1pm (until 3-ish) on Monday 21st and as they say:

"Bring food, drink, family and music to our anti-airport expansion picnic protest – to be held on College Green. We'll be holding forums on the grass with Friends of the Earth to discuss BIA issues and celebrate the city council's formal objection to it!"

Feminist conference

2009-09-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

Feminist Theory & Activism in Global Perspective 26 Sept London – free

To celebrate 30 years, Feminist Review is organising a conference to address theory and activism:

Why is feminism still globally resonant?
How are theory and practice regionally and disciplinarily located?
How do we integrate feminism in our own work?
What does global feminist dialogue look like?
How is transnational feminist theory being produced?

Saturday 26th September 2009 from 9.30 to 18.30
Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Russell Square, London
Attendance is free, but RSVP to Gender.Institute.Frconference@lse.ac.uk

Feminism as an intellectual tradition

2009-09-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

The first feminist was of course Lilith, who refused to lie underneath Adam. Apart from these mythical origins, the first stirrings of feminist thought appear in the Middle Ages with a treatise by Christine de Pizan cautiously arguing that women are just as good as men; and in the fourteenth century, women could practise trades (such as brewing) and learn Latin and so on. Unfortunately the Reformation was bad news for women, as many of our freedoms were taken away. But in the seventeenth century, a huge band of women marched on Parliament demanding the vote (sadly I think I don't have the book that described this any more, and can't find anything about it on the web).

In the eighteenth century we have Mary Wollstonecraft and A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), in which she argues that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. And of course her daughter arguably founded science fiction with her Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft was one of many women writers in the 18th century (not all of whom were feminists, however).

In the 19th and early 20th century, there was the first wave of feminism, primarily concerned with women's legal rights. Two important legal landmarks here: the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 which said that a woman's wages were her own; and 1882, which said that a woman's property remained her own after marriage; and the granting of women's right to vote.

The second wave

refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted throughout the late 1970s. Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on overturning legal (de jure) obstacles to equality (i.e. voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism successfully addressed a wide range of issues, including unofficial (de facto) inequalities, official legal inequalities, sexuality, family, the workplace, and, perhaps most controversially, reproductive rights. (Wikipedia)

Critics of second-wave feminism point out that it merely inverted sexist gender stereotypes and was essentialist in its view of gender. Some feminists claimed that women were naturally nurturing and men were naturally aggressive, but whereas patriarchy valued male aggression, second-wave feminism valued female nurturing.

Third-wave feminism points out that gender is a performance and the importance of biological sex is socially constructed. This wave is influenced by postmodernism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Critics have complained that it lacks a single issue to focus on, but so did the second wave. It has also been suggested that the third wave is more sensitive to women in other social contexts (different classes and countries), whereas the second wave was unintentionally colonialist in its universalising tendencies.

Another way of characterising the different strands of feminism is to divide it into subtypes:
Amazon · Anarchist · Atheist · Black · Chicana · Christian · Cultural · Cyber · Difference · Eco · Equity · Equality · Fat · Gender · Global · Goddess · Individualist · Islamic · Jewish · Lesbian · Liberal · Lipstick · Marxist · Material · New · Postcolonial · Postmodern · Pro-life · Proto · Radical · Separatist · Sex-positive · Socialist · Standpoint · Theology · Third world · Trans · Womanism

(Oh dear, now I am going to have to read all of these articles to work out what type of feminist I would be classified as. Isn't there a Facebook quiz for this sort of thing? I did one the other day which worked out what kind of anarchist you were - I was a post-structuralist anarchist. Aha, found a quiz on Quizilla, Which Western feminist icon are you, and I came up as Judith Butler (no surprises there, but I hope I write more comprehensibly than she does). And SelectSmart has a What type of feminist are you quiz, which classifies me as a liberal feminist.)

The underpinnings of feminism

2009-09-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

Heresy Corner critiques an article by one Melissa McEwan.

Misogyny, Up Close and Personal, by Melissa McEwan, in The Guardian.

She complains that when she makes a feminist statement, intellectual men like to argue the toss with her about it, which makes her cry because they don't understand her trauma. Well, surprise, feminism is an intellectual tradition and a set of propositions about the underlying causes of social phenomena: so it's open to debate.

Yes, her lived experience has clearly been traumatic, and I am sorry she has had a rough ride. But one person's life experience does not make a sociological treatise - it's anecdotal evidence. Her experience is not the same as mine - most men I know are very supportive of my feminist views; and I have not experienced nonconsensual frottage on public transport. I have not been raped. I have experienced sexual harassment and verbal abuse, but it is increasingly rare.

I can't abide the sort of essentialism that assumes that women are all-nurturing earth-mother types and men are all abstract intellectuals, or inherently violent, and never the twain shall meet. It's like something out of GK Chesterton (who said something along these lines).

I can back up my particular variety of feminism with intellectual arguments, and moreover, would expect to do so if challenged. If feminism is a worthwhile discourse, we must be able to back it up with sound intellectual arguments and real sociological and ethnographic evidence.

Alan Turing petition

2009-09-02T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Bluestocking has already identified Alan Turing as one of our heroes. Now it's time for ardent bluestockings to put our money where our mouths are, and sign up to the petition for a public apology to recognise that he was hounded to his untimely death by a bigoted establishment.

The details from the petition's creator state:

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man's life and career.

I have long been an admirer of Mr Turing and urge you to sign this petition without delay.

Sixth Sense

2009-09-02T08:18:00.001-07:00

Pranav Mistry has developed absolutely amazingly awesome wearable technology, called the Sixth Sense. It's a device that can project data onto stuff you are looking at; like Amazon ratings of books you are browsing in a bookshop, or whether the toilet-roll in the supermarket is environmentally sound. Go and watch the video, it's quite mind-boggling really (and no brain implants are required - yet). More information is available at his website.

A commenter on the TED site points out that you could use it in museums to learn more about the artefacts. It could have scary applications, like seeing data about people (though it would be an interesting ice-breaker at parties). But that is the case with all new technology.

The aspect of this that beats being able to browse the web from your mobile phone is that it selects the information you need instead of you having to searchfor it; so it knows you're looking at a book or a newspaper and reacts accordingly. How? How does it know?

Anyway, in short, I want one of those.

stories that never were

2009-08-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Wired.com has a wistful yearning for stories that never were.

I agree that I would like to see Harry Potter as an Auror, but suspect that Ms Rowling will turn to other things. I am not sure what else could be done with Lord of the Rings, but interestingly, Tolkien didn't mind the idea of other people writing stories in his universe.

So here's my list of books that I would like to read:

A sequel to Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin. This is one of my favourite books, and is about the deep mythological and spiritual relationship that is possible between people and landscape
The final part of Robertson Davies' Toronto Trilogy (I loved the second one, The Cunning Man, though I was not so keen on the first one, Murther and Walking Spirits)
Branwell Brontë's diary, conclusively proving that he did not write his sisters' novels (well, obviously I know he didn't, but it offends me that some people think he did)
Radclyffe Hall's lost lesbian steampunk novel
The gospel according to Jesus (he was writing one, but "I'm not the one and only Messiah" and "why can't you all be nice to each other for a change" were not messages that went down very well with the gospel-reading public). Fortunately you can now read fictional gospels according to Judas and Mary Magdalene and Jesus too.
The original scripts for the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were probably never written down, as the mysteries were only ever revealed to initiates. The rites were suppressed by the Christians and lost.

What books-that-never-were would you like to read?

sinister and proud of it

2009-08-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

Happy International Left-Handers' Day.

(And thanks to Geekologie for reminding me - I forgot!)

Cleopatra

2009-08-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

A guest post by Sannion.

Kleopatra was an awesome woman, no doubt about it. Here are some of my favorite passages about her showing just how awesome she could be. (Some of these stories are pure fabrication – but they’re still fun to read and go towards establishing the mythical persona of Kleopatra which, more than the reality - which we can never really know - is what we revere.)

She was charming and learned
“For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behavior towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased, so that in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians. Nay, it is said that she knew the speech of many other peoples also, although the kings of Egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language, and some actually gave up their Makedonian dialect.” – Plutarch, Life of Antony 27.2-4

She was a philosopher and alchemist
“Ptolemy was succeeded by his daughter, Kleopatra. Her reign lasted twenty-two years. She was wise, tried her hand at philosophy and was a close companion to wise men. She has works, both bearing her name and ascribed to her, of medicine, magic, and science, known by those well-versed in such things. This Queen was the last of the Greek Queens, so that with her death their reign ended, their era was forgotten, the vestiges of their civilization were obliterated, and their sciences, except for what remained in the hands of their wise men, disappeared.” – Al-Mas’udi, Prairies of Gold

She worked tirelessly for the interests of her people
“And she raised a dike against the waters of the sea with stones and earth, and made the place of the waters over which they voyaged formerly in ships into dry land, and she made it passable on foot. And this stupendous and difficult achievement she wrought through the advice of a wise man named Dexiphanes. Next she constructed a canal to sea, and she brought water from the river Gihon and conducted it into the city. This made it easier for ships to come into port. And by this means she brought it about that there was great abundance and much food for the people to eat. And she executed all these works in vigilant care for the well-being of her city. And before she died she executed many noble works and created important institutions. And this woman, the most illustrious and wise amongst women, died in the fourteenth year of the reign of Caesar Augustus. Thereupon the inhabitants of Alexandria and of lower and upper Egypt submitted to the emperors of Rome, who set over them prefects and generals.” – John, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle 67.5-10

She was the physical incarnation of Isis-Aphrodite
“Kleopatra, indeed, both then and at other times when she appeared in public, assumed a robe sacred to Isis, and was addressed as the New Isis.” - Plutarch, Life of Antony54.6

Venus has come to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia
“Though Kleopatra received many letters of summons both from Antony himself and from his friends, she was so bold as to sail up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her. Likewise also the fairest of her serving-maidens, attired like Nereïds and Graces, were stationed, some at the rudder-sweeps, and others at the reefing-ropes. Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks. Of the inhabitants, some accompanied her on either bank of the river from its very mouth, while others went down from the city to behold the sight. The throng in the market-place gradually streamed away, until at last Antony himself, seated on his tribunal, was left alone. And a rumour spread on every hand that Venus was come to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.” - Plutarch, Life of Antony 26.1-3

There was a wild streak to her
“But Kleopatra, distributing her flattery, not into the four forms of which Plato speaks, but into many, and ever contributing some fresh delight and charm to Antony's hours of seriousness or mirth, kept him in constant tutelage, and released him neither night nor day. She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms; and when by night he would station himself at the doors or windows of the common folk and scoff at those within, she would go with him on his round of mad follies, wearing the garb of a serving maiden. For Antony also would try to array himself like a servant. Therefore he always reaped a harvest of abuse, and often of blows, before coming back home; though most people suspected who he was. However, the Alexandrians took delight in their graceful and cultivated way; they liked him, and said that he used the tragic mask with the Romans, but the comic mask with them.” – Plutarch, Life of Antony 29

She had a wicked sense of humor
“Now, to recount the greater part of his boyish pranks would be great nonsense. One instance will suffice. He was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Kleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover's skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day. So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Kleopatra said: ‘Imperator, hand over thy fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Kanopos; thy sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents.’” – Plutarch, Life of Antony 29.3-4

They knew how to throw a party
“Antony sent, therefore, and invited her to supper; but she thought it meet that he should rather come to her. At once, then, wishing to display his complacency and friendly feelings, Antony obeyed and went. He found there a preparation that beggared description, but was most amazed at the multitude of lights. For, as we are told, so many of these were let down and displayed on all sides at once, and they were arranged and ordered with so many inclinations and adjustments to each other in the form of rectangles and circles, that few sights were so beautiful or so worthy to be seen as this.... In Alexandria, indulging in the sports and diversions of a young man of leisure, he squandered and spent upon pleasures that which Antiphon calls the most costly outlay, namely, time. For they had an association called The Inimitable Livers, and every day they feasted one another, making their expenditures of incredible profusion. At any rate, Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that he was in Alexandria at the time, studying his profession, and that having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded by him (young man that he was) to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. Accordingly, he was introduced into the kitchen, and when he saw all the other provisions in great abundance, and eight wild boars a-roasting, he expressed his amazement at what must be the number of guests. But the cook burst out laughing and said: ‘The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and this an instant of time reduces. For it might happen that Antony would ask for supper immediately, and after a little while, perhaps, would postpone it and call for a cup of wine, or engage in conversation with some one. Wherefore,’ he said, ‘not one, but many suppers are arranged; for the precise time is hard to hit.’” - Plutarch, Life of Antony 27,28

The incident with the pearl
“There have been two pearls that were the largest in the whole of history; both were owned by Cleopatra, the last of the Queens of Egypt--they had come down to her through the hands of the Kings of the East. When Antony was fattening himself every day at decadent banquets, she with a pride both lofty and impudent, a queenly courtesan, disparaged his elegance and sumptuous display, and when he asked what magnificence could be added on, she replied that she would spend ten million sesterces on a banquet. Antony was curious, but did not think it could be done. Consequently, with bets made, on the next day, on which the trial was carried out, she set before Antony a banquet that elsewhere would be magnificent, so that the day might not be wasted, but that was for them quite ordinary, and Antony laughed and exclaimed over its cheapness. But she, claiming that it was a gratuity, and that the banquet would complete the account and she alone would consume ten million sesterces, ordered the second course to be served. In accordance with previous instructions the servants placed in front of her only a single vessel containing vinegar, the strong rough quality of which can melt pearls. She was at the moment wearing in her ears that remarkable and truly unique work of nature. Antony was full of curiosity to see what in the world she was going to do. She took one earring off and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was melted swallowed it. Lucius Plancus, the judge of the wager, put his hand on the other pearl since she was preparing to destroy it also in a similar fashion, and declared that Antony had lost, an omen that later came true. With this goes the story that, when that queen who had won on this important issue was captured, the second of this pair of pearls was cut in two pieces, so that half a helping of the jewel might be in each of the ears of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome.” – Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 9.119-121

Men thought death a small price to pay to sleep with her
“Cleopatra was so lustful that she often prostituted herself, and so beautiful that many men bought night with her at the price of their lives.” – Sextus Aurelius Victor, De Viris Illustribus Urbis Romae 86.2

A modern Russian adaptation of the above anecdote
“I swear, O mother of passion, I will serve you in unheard ways, on the couch of passionate sins I will come as a common slave. So look, powerful Cytherean, and you underground kings, O gods of ferocious Hades; I swear to the morning sunrise the wishes of my lords I will tire with voluptuous passion and with all secrets of kisses and with wondrous nakedness those wishes I will quench. But as soon as with a morning purple the eternal Aurora will shine forth, I swear: under the deadly axe the heads of these lucky ones will fall.” – Alexander Pushkin, Egyptian Nights

She knew how to get her point across
“For in preparation for the Actian war, when Antony feared the attentiveness of the Queen herself and did not take any food unless it had been tasted beforehand, she is said to have played on his fear and dipped the tips of the flowers in his crown in poison and then put the crown on his head; soon, as the revelry proceeded, she suggested to Antony that they drink their crowns. Who would thus fear treachery? Therefore with a hand put in his way he was beginning to drink the pieces gathered into the cup she said, ‘Look, I am she, Mark Antony, of whom you are wary with your new wish for tasters. If I could live without you, this is the extent to which I lack opportunity and motive!’ She ordered a prisoner who had been led in to drink it and he promptly expired.” – Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 21.12

Beloved by the gods of Egypt
“The young girl, Kleopatra, daughter of the ruler, created by the ruler, beloved of the gods of Egypt, adorned by Khnum, the regent of Thoth whose might is great, who pleases the two Lands, who gives the people in perfection to the Two Ladies, who Neith, the Lady of Sais, makes strong, who Hathor praises for her popularity.” – Inscription from the Temple of Edfu

Helped install the Buchis bull
“There appeared Buchis, the living Ba of Re, the manifestation of Re, who was born of the Great Cow, Tenen united with the Eight Gods. He is Amun who goes on his four feet, the image of Monthu, Lord of Thebes, Father of the Fathers, the Mother of the Mothers, who formed the Ennead, who renews the life of every one of the gods. He is the image of Onnophris, the justified, the sacred image of the Ba of Re, the bik n nb in … he came to Hermonthis in the goodly festival of the twentieth day of Pakhons, the festival of Monthu, Lord of Hermonthis, his seat of eternity. He reached Thebes, his place of installation, which came into existence aforetime, beside his father, Nun of Old. He was installed by the King himself in year 1, Phamenoth 19. The Queen, the Lady of the Two Lands [Kleopatra VII], the goddess who loves her father, rowed him in the barque of Amun, together with the boats of the King, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis and priests being with him. He reached Hermonthis, his dwelling-place on Mechir 22. The length of his life was 24 years, 1 month, and 8 days. His Ba went up to heaven as Re.” – The Buchis Stele

It was feared that she might bring about the end of the world
“And thereupon shall the whole world be governed by the hands of a woman and obedient everywhere. Then when the Widow shall o'er all the world gain the rule, and cast in the mighty sea both gold and silver, also brass and iron of short lived men into the deep shall cast, then all the elements shall be bereft of order, when the god who dwells on high shall roll the heaven, even as a scroll is rolled; and to the mighty earth and sea shall fall the entire multiform sky; and there shall flow a tireless cataract of raging fire, and it shall burn the land, and burn the sea, and heavenly sky, and night, and day, and melt creation itself together and pick out what is pure. No more laughing spheres of light, nor night, nor dawn, nor many days of care, nor spring, nor winter, nor the summer-time or autumn. And then of the mighty god the judgment midway in a mighty age shall come, when all these things shall come to pass.” – Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, 3.75-92

Public intellectuals

2009-08-13T05:31:00.000-07:00

Let's hear it for the public intellectuals - those splendid thinkers who can not only think deeply and originally about a subject, but communicate it to the general public without dumbing it down. In other countries, it seems, they are better at appreciating intellectuals, particularly philosophers. But perhaps, as David Gauntlett argues, it's something about the way the arts are funded? Or is it just that we are a nation of lowbrows?

Whatever it is, let's ignore the zeitgeist and celebrate those British public intellectuals.

Three cheers for Jonathan Miller, Roy Porter, Simon Schama, Ronald Hutton, Iris Murdoch, A S Byatt, David Attenborough, Stephen Hawking, Alain de Botton (yes I know he's Swiss but he writes in English), George Monbiot, Melvyn Bragg and the fabulous In Our Time programme, and many more. I know that Bo will say that Rowan Williams should be on this list, but I would argue that he shot himself in the foot with his comments about sharia law. But he can be on the list, I guess.

New Doctor

2009-07-31T03:43:00.001-07:00

The Bluestocking commends the tweediness and general chappishness of the new Doctor Who, but we are not too sure about the bow-tie. There are so many elegant and suitably retro choices of neckwear, that one would think that something rather more original than the slightly weedy looking bow-tie sported by Mr Smith could have been chosen. Of course the tweed jacket, being hard-wearing and reasonably impervious to stains, is an excellent choice for slumming it around the universe and mixing with all those grubby aliens. But I do feel he should have chosen brown shoes to go with the brown tweed. Surely Doctor Marten's practical footwear is available in brown? Indeed, I have just checked on Mr Google's patent search machine, and they have a marvellous colour called Peat - very appropriate to accompany tweed.

In a spirit of constructive criticism, may I refer our esteemed Broadcasting Corporation to the gentleman's guide to the tying of ties, from which they could have chosen a Windsor Knot, a Half-Winsor, a Pratt-Shelby or a Four-in-Hand.

Ladies (and gentlemen of a transgender persuasion) may be interested in this scarf-tying guide.

Celia Fiennes

2009-07-31T03:21:00.001-07:00

Celia Fiennes was an intrepid lady traveller who journeyed through the island of Britain in the late seventeenth century. She was also the ancestor of the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, and numerous other famous scions of the house of Fiennes.

Fiennes never married and in 1691 she moved to London, where she had a married sister. She travelled around England on horseback between 1684 and c.1703, "to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise" (Journeys). At this time the idea of travel for its own sake was still quite novel, and Fiennes was exceptional as an enthusiastic woman traveller. Sometimes she travelled with relatives, but she made her "Great Journey to Newcastle and Cornwall" of 1698 accompanied only by one or two servants. Her travels continued intermittently until at least 1712 and took her to every county in England.

A Vision of Britain Through Time has excerpts from her books:

I went to see Hampton Court 10 mile from London; it looks Like a little town y^e buildings runn so great a Length on y^eground, Y^e old buildings and y^e New part w^ch King William and Queen Mary built. Y^e Queen took Great delight in it. Y^e new was but just y^e shell up and some of y^e Roomes of State Ceil'd but nothing ffinished. The roomes were very Lofty, round a Large Court and all the appartments intire. The old buildings were on the other side the priory Garden: there was the water Gallery that opened into a ballcony to y^e water, and was decked with China and ffine pictures of y^e Court Ladyes drawn by Nellor. Beyond this came severall Roomes, and one was pretty Large, at y^e four Corners were little roomes like Closets or drawing roomes, one pannell'd all w^th jappan, another w^th Looking Glass, and two w^th fine work under pannells of Glass. There was the queens Bath and a place to take boat in the house. The Gardens were designed to be very ffine, Great fountaines and Grass plotts and gravell walkes, and just against the middle of y^e house was a very large fountaine, and beyond it a large Cannal Guarded by rows of Even trees that runn a good way. There was fine Carving in the Iron Gates in the Gardens w^th all sorts of ffigures, and Iron spikes Round on a breast wall and severall Rows of trees.

Her style is somewhat breathless but has a charm all its own.

Happy birthday

2009-07-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

... to Kate Bush and Emily Brontë, two eminent bluestockings who share the same birthday, July 30th. This was one of the things that apparently inspired Ms Bush to write the song Wuthering Heights, based on Miss Brontë's eponymous novel.

The Ladies of Llangollen

2009-07-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

I just found out about these two lovely ladies, who were intellectuals and very close friends.

The Ladies of Llangollen were two upper-class Anglo-Irish women whose relationship scandalised and fascinated their contemporaries. The Ladies are interesting today as an example of historical romantic friendship (and some would argue lesbianism).

Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) was considered an over-educated bookworm by her family, who occupied Kilkenny Castle. She spoke French and was educated in a convent in France. Her mother tried to make her join a convent because she was becoming a spinster.

The Honourable Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1832) lived with relatives in Woodstock, Ireland. She was a second cousin of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough, and thus a "second-cousin-once-removed" of his daughter the Lady Caroline Lamb.

Apparently they had a lapdog called Sappho. They lived at Plas Newydd, and their friends included Robert Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Scott, but also the Duke of Wellington; industrialist Josiah Wedgwood; and aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb.

Camille Paglia

2009-06-19T05:56:00.000-07:00

This is my first post on this esteemed blog.

Continuing the theme of writing about 'People we Like', we come to Camille Paglia. Whilst not exactly a bluestocking, she is certainly a female intellectual, as well as a love-her-or-loathe-her personality. I'll never forget my dear friend Melanie spluttering at Paglia's frequent references to 'My Sixties generation', with her patented brand of fabulous, withering scorn.

It would be fair to say that Camille Paglia arouses strong reactions in people, from those who see her as the saviour of feminism and Academe to those who regard her bluntly as 'a snake in snake's clothing', as a recent American feminist organisation labelled her. Wherever you stand ideologically, she will infuriate you and make you nod vigorously by turns. She's an Italian-American motormouth, a Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a shameless self-publicist, a bisexual rock-buff, and a massively cultured, hugely learned, and viciously witty Joan Rivers of the lecture hall. Something of a one-off, in other words.

Paglia is a scourge of delusion about human nature, as she sees it. This can be what she regards as Judeo-Christian failure to acknowledge humanity's inner darkness, our emergence from the roiling pit of chaotic 'pagan' nature; or it can be late 20th century feminism's weepy victim mentality, lack of aesthetic sense and parallel blindness to the primal forces of sex and violence that surge inside human beings. A typical quote is as follows: 'It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.'

Formidably learned, Paglia also undercuts the theory and jargon that winds around current academia like a serpent's coils. She sees it as frigid and word-obsessed, useless in gaining an understanding of our blitzkrieg electonic visual culture, with its constant barrage of images. By solipsitically contemplating the verbal sign, theory is oblivious to the body and its rhythms, chaotic forces of desire, anger and violence that pulse through art. She brings us back to the body, and out of the head. Part of the problem that contemporary feminism has with her is that they see her as a biological essentialist. In other words, she argues that men and women have fundamental differences which derive from biology, especially hormonal factors, and are not socially constructed. She also accepts as a truth the old identification of Woman with Nature. This is currently a very unfashionable position, but I suspect there is a fair degree of commonsense truth about it. But they point is that Paglia doesn't say women should be limited by their biological nature. She asserts the power of the will, revels in phantasmagoric, decadent disruptions of this simplistic opposition between 'male' and 'female'. No doubt she'd describe herself as a ferocious amazon with a cold, clear male will.

Her first book was the doorstep-sized Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990). I was very lucky (some would said 'permanently tainted') to come across Sexual Personae as the first academic critical book I ever read, aged sixteen. (The chapter on the Marquis de Sade was certainly a bit of an eye-opener.) Based on her doctoral dissertation at Yale, it is a ferocious new reading of western culture, and is simply enormous in scope. As she says: 'Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.' Building on Nietzsche, she sees culture from the time of Egypt as a battleground between the hieratic, eye-obsessed, rational, chilly and male forces of the 'Apollonian', and the squidgy, chaotic, female, chthonian, order-resisting forces of the 'Dionysian'. Her deepest ambition, she writes, is 'to fuse Frazer with Freud.'

According to Paglia, sex and violence, pain and perversity are at the heart of artistic creation, our human mediation of nature. The book is eccentric, brilliant, strange and dark, zooming from Homer to Byron, Shakespeare, Blake, Balzac, Italian Renaissance art, Virgil, Wilde, and The Faerie Queene...She is fond of startling pop-culture analogies, cataloguing a gallery of shifting sexual personae and archetypes. These include the 'Mercurius': the androgynous woman-boy, verbal, presexual, constantly shifting personae, ungrounded, volatile and harum-scarum - Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Rosalind, Botticelli's Mecury in the Primavera, Auntie Mame. (That Shakespeare's Cleopatra is like Auntie Mame is a brilliant insight, and when I saw Frances Barber as Cleopatra at the Globe in 2006 the rightness of Paglia's aperçu was confirmed.)

To continue on this theme for a moment, another archetpe of western culture which she detects is the 'Tiresias', or 'Male Mother' - this includes the river gods of Italian Renaissance fountains, their massive pectorals echoing female breasts, surrounded by laughing infants--but also American chat-show hosts with their schmoozy manner. Then comes the 'Epicoene', or 'Man of Beauty': Byron's self-presentation is brilliantly compared to that of Elvis Presley. Up springs the Gorgon, the Ephebe...Rita Hayworth rubs shoulders with Spenser's Britomart, the Golden Age of Hollywood with Classical Epic and Euripidean tragedy.

As far as Paglia is concerned, paganism never ended. It continues in the gorgeous sex-and-violence soaked imagery of Catholicism, hieratic and eye-intense, and now appears again fully-formed in Hollywood. She sometimes calls her system of thought 'Italian Pagan Catholicism', meaning that it's ultravisual and packed with sex and violence, that it's about the senses and sensuality, that it's realistic, passionate and not frigid, and that it lacks the chilly Protestant distrust of iconography and the display of the body.

As a close-reader, capturing the mood of a piece, Paglia is astonishingly gifted. 'The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.' This approach has profoundly influenced the way I teach. Brilliant close-reading and a Paterian style (with some amazing purple-prose) combine in this bizarre, fanatical, rather marvellous book. There is a fabled second volume underway, looking at popular culture, and presumably examining Hollywood through the eyes of the ancient world. My favourite personal example which has been rumoured to be appearing in Sexual Personae Vol. II is a comparison of the famous bust of Nefertiti and David Bowie, perfect down to their wierd, mismatched-eyes.

Sexual Personae catapulted Paglia to some fame, and since then she has capitalised on it, making a name for herself as a cultural commentator and wisecracking provocateuse. As an opinionated, even obnoxious, maverick, she crops up everywhere. She mystifies and maddens. Pro-sex, pro-risk, pro-porn, the clash between her and the feminist mainstream was like watching a bunny be sucked back into the blades of a Boeing 747 engine. (And, for the record, Paglia wasn't the bunny.) She waded into just about any argument, laying about her with her verbal broadsword, famously ripping Andrea Dworkin to shreds. She uttered the unsayable, suggesting that the bizarre multiple assaults alledged by the morbidly obese Dworkin, famous for her 'all men are rapists' line, were a sign 'of her own inability to cope with life rather than the Patriarchy's fault.' She also, hilariously, wrote that Dworkin 'neglects to mention her most obvious problem: food...'

A vicious intellectual attack like that will then be followed up by a brilliant miniature article on 'Alice in Wonderland as Epic Hero', or an elegant, sensitive piece on the history of love poetry in Greek, Latin and English. A fax war with Julie Burchill ('Fuck off, you crazy old dyke!' quoth Burchill) came hard on the heels of a scathing and mordant critique of the croneyism and jargon-choked vapidity of modern Academia, 'Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders', delivered as an address to the students of MIT.

It seems to be working. I was delighted to see that Naomi Wolf got roundly booed for her feeble attack on the elderly Harold Bloom, alleging that he touched her thigh--the horror, the horror!--after too much sherry when she invited him over for dinner as a grad student, twenty years before. So what? It doesn't say much for feminism if a (then) supposedly highly-intelligent and confident young woman can't say 'Eew, back off, grandpa' in response to a drunken pass from a professor. (I was once groped as a student by a very drunk, very famous popular historian of dear old London town. So what? I found it hilarious.) To Paglia's delight, and mine, many commentators, most of them women, rolled their eyes and wearily said Grow up, and grow a backbone when the Wolf-Bloom story broke. An amusing commentary can be found here.

Back to Paglia. It's easy to forget that during all this fame (but not, I suspect, fortune) Paglia continued to teach full time, and if her recent book Break, Blow, Burn is anything to go by she must be a truly fantastic classroom teacher--it's unusual for Professors in American Universities to be so hands-on: classroom drudgery is normally left to grad students to do, one of Paglia's major criticism of American Humanities teaching. That book - close readings of 43 poems, from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell's song-lyric 'Woodstock' - is a brilliant introduction to poetry and should be on the English A-Level syllabus. In spiny, terse snippets she captures each poem's atmosphere before carefully teasing meanings from it. She dismisses the word-fetishism of frigid post-structuralism and return poetry to the savage realms of nature and the flesh. It's sharp, earthy, and intellectual - Paglia's vision of poetry showing us 'the interconnectedness of the universe.'

Maddening, crazy, formidable, quixotic, I think she deserves respect. I won't say 'even if you don't agree with her', because no one is likely to agree with her all the time. Or even much of the time. But if you want to be made to think about nature and culture, she can't be bettered. You're unlikely to like what you read first off; it's uncomfortable but compelling. Paglia's furious pagan morality, her acerbic wit, astonishing range and depth of learning, frenetic personality and sheer bloody chutzpah derserve attention and consideration. She can't be dismissed as easily as her numerous critics allege.

Certainly, she inspired me when Academia seemed dead and dry as dust, and made me stand up and say what I think. She introduced me to dozens of brilliant critics and thinkers, including the psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown, the philosopher Suzanne Langer, the sociologist Gillian Rose, the critics Wendy Lesser and Leslie Fiedler, the historians Oswald Spengler and Denis de Rougemont, and many others. She writes with superb clarity on both academic topics and popular culture. Reading her pithy, sinewy phrases honed my writing skills. So - all hail Camille! Give that woman a star in the amazonian--and the blustocking--firmament.

***

For a sample of her writing, here is an article on the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, written for the Classics journal Arion.

Frances Power Cobbe

2009-06-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Frances Power Cobbe was one of the most accomplished and influential Irish women of the 19th century. She was an early feminist, campaigning for female suffrage and for the acceptance of women into the ministry, and she devoted much of her later life to the cause of animal welfare, founding in 1875 the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection.
~ Bill Darlison, The Secret Life of Bees

Frances Power Cobbe definitely qualifies as a bluestocking.

Active in several social reform movements, Cobbe placed women and the unfortunate at the center of her analysis. Today she is best known for her anti-vivisection work, campaigning energetically against the use of live animals in scientific research. Yet she had devoted much of her energy to the nineteenth century British women's movement. An early British suffragist, she also supported higher education for women and the reform of poor laws. Her strongest efforts were directed to alleviating violence against women, especially violence by men against their wives.
~ Sunshine for Women

She also met a hero of mine, Rammohun Roy, who campaigned against widow-burning in India.

Iris Murdoch

2009-06-16T21:28:00.000-07:00

Iris Murdoch... brilliant writer of scintillating prose, philosopher, fearless sexual adventurer, communist, and sharp observer of the human condition. Definitely qualifies as a top-notch bluestocking. Three cheers for Iris!

Her later novels went off the boil a bit, but the glittering and claustrophobic atmosphere of The Bell (about a small quirky spiritual community and its internal tensions) assures its place as a classic. Her writing style was similar to that of A S Byatt (another great bluestocking). I can honestly say that Iris Murdoch taught me to look at the world in a different way.

She read classics, ancient history, and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she attended a number of Ludwig Wittgenstein's lectures. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.

There are even videos of her on YouTube. Whatever next? It's almost as though intellectuals were becoming popular and mainstream!

Women are fat, always.

2009-06-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

[A semi-oldie/semi-goodie from the Lover of Strife vaults.]

I just saw the most ~~fucked-up~~ mind-boggling, bobbin-popping commercial.

It was an ad for a hotel chain, who, for the purposes of this blog, shall remain nameless. The premise is that a group of corporate business types are having breakfast at their hotel before heading out for an important meeting. One of them, Boss Guy, gives a hearty pep talk, then directs his attention to an attendee named Wilson.

[The camera pans to Wilson. Wilson's a big boy; tall and doughy; no perceivable neck.]

Apparently, the airline has lost Wilson's luggage, and as such, Wilson has nothing to wear to the important meeting. But no worries, because Wilson and Brenda...

[The camera pans to Brenda: she's about 5'5" in heels, slim and healthy.]

...Wilson and Brenda are the same size. So Wilson is wearing one of Brenda's blouses, and everyone is telling him how good he looks in it. How (I'm not making this up) slimming the blouse is. Being a poly-blend and all.

Let's break this down, just to make sure everyone caught the important part. The tall, doughy man and the short, slim woman are the same size. That is, they wear the same size in clothes. On account of she's lean, but not anorexic. And he's overweight. So, you know, same difference.

Not to make crass generalizations, but this sums up a sizable chunk of what is wrong with... well, everything.

Because every movement needs a theme song

2009-06-08T14:32:00.001-07:00

We at The Bluestocking commend Susan Boyle on a brilliant showing; for being true to herself; for ignoring adversity (step 2, incidentally); and for not going overboard with her makeover... which was, in case you haven't found the right words, a study in sensible, understated elegance.

Wouldn't she be fabulous as the Official Voice of the Bluestockings? Now we just need a strong, postmodern anthem for her to own. I have thoughtfully provided a selection from which to choose, some of which may be a bit more postmodern than others:

"Children of the Revolution" by T. Rex

"I Am What I Am" from La Cage aux Folles

"Galileo" by the Indigo Girls (I'm not sure if Ms. Boyle would be interested in indie folk-rock, but it couldn't hurt to ask.)

"Star" by Erasure

"Love is a Battlefield," or "We Belong," or pretty much anything else that comes out of Pat Benatar's mouth.

"Stronger" by Britney Spears (Hey, now. Let's not give up on Britney. She hasn't flashed the paparazzi in ages.)

"When You're Good to Mama" from Chicago

"Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets" from Damn Yankees (My friend Sarah told me not to include this one, but I totally think it could work.)

That song at the end of The Wicker Man that the villagers sing while waiting for Edward Woodward to catch on fire.

Something by U2. Probably from The Joshua Tree.

What other songs would you suggest? Keeping Ms. Boyle's signature sound in mind, I've focused primarily on showtunes and pop numbers that translate best when belted at the top of one's lungs, but do feel free to explore other genres.

Fabulous female occultists

2009-05-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Margot Adler (Wicca)
Louisa May Alcott (Unitarian / Transcendentalist)
Alice Bailey (Theosophy)
Annie Besant (Theosophy)
Elena Petrovna Blavatsky (Theosophy)
Eleanor Bone (Wicca)
Emma Hardinge Britten (Spiritualism, Theosophy, OTO)
Zsuzsanna Budapest (Feminist Witchcraft)
Mary Cardell (Witchcraft)
Christina of Sweden (Alchemy)
Sandra Tabatha Cicero (Golden Dawn)
Bridget Cleary (Witchcraft)
Ithell Colquhoun (Golden Dawn)
Isabel Cooper-Oakley (Theosophy)
Ida Craddock (OTO) - 1857-1902
Vivianne Crowley (Wicca)
Patricia Crowther (Wicca)
Dafo (Wicca)
Helen Duncan (Witchcraft)
Biddy Early (Witchcraft)
Florence Farr (Golden Dawn)
Janet Farrar (Wicca)
Morgan le Fay (Witchcraft)
Dion Fortune (Golden Dawn)
Maud Gonne (Golden Dawn)
Alison Harlow (Feri Tradition)
Fiona Horne (Wicca)
Annie Horniman (Golden Dawn)
Georgie Hyde-Lees (Golden Dawn)
Anodea Judith (Feri Tradition)
Anna Kingsford (Theosophy)
Sybil Leek (Witchcraft)
Moina Mathers (Golden Dawn)
Dolores North, aka Madeline Montalban (Order of the Morning Star)
Dorothy Morrison (Witchcraft)
Rosaleen Norton (Witchcraft)
Maxine Sanders (Wicca)
Pamela Colman Smith (Golden Dawn)
Anna Sprengel (legendary Golden Dawn founder)
Starhawk (Reclaiming)
P L Travers
(author of Mary Poppins and many articles on spiritual life)
Doreen Valiente (Wicca)
Various Wiccan founders - Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther, Eleanor Bone, Lois Bourne, Dafo, Monique Wilson, Dayonis, Donna Gardner, Barbara Vickers
and the many female members of the Golden Dawn

Nonconformist pioneers

2009-05-21T04:53:00.000-07:00

First women ministers

Gertrude von Petzold was the first woman to be ordained as a Unitarian minister in England, in 1904. She also campaigned for women's suffrage.

Olympia Brown was the first woman Universalist minister, in 1863.

In the United States, the Congregationalists ordained Antoinette Brown as a minister in 1853, while the Universalists ordained Olympia Brown in 1863. In Australia, Martha Turner was appointed minister to the Melbourne Unitarian church in 1873, and, in Scotland, the Glasgow Universalists ordained Caroline Soule in 1880.
(from an article by Keith Gilley)

First gay ministers

1969 September—LaForet, CO—The Reverend James L. Stoll publicly declares himself to be homosexual at Student Religious Liberals (SRL) Conference.

1979 The Reverend Douglas Morgan Strong called to serve All Souls Church, Augusta, Maine, thus becoming the first out gay man in the UU ministry to be called to serve a congregation.

from History of UU involvement in & support of LGBT issues

What Fun!

2009-05-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a new toy known as Wolfram Alpha that us gels can horse around with. A computational wizard that can calulate many interesting things such as answers to mathematical, geographical and scientific queries....

If for example, one inputs the question 'what is the meaning of life?' the answer is displayed as '42'.

On the day I was born, (12077 days ago) there was a waning crescent moon, the sun rose at 5:49 and set at 20:47 ....

However, it wasn't much cop at topics such as 'Chicken Breeding' or 'Famous Roses'....

With gleefulness
Blossom.

The fabulous Joanna Lumley

2009-05-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

I have always admired Joanna Lumley and regarded her as a bit of an intellectual as well as a fab actress - but now she is the people's heroine as well.

I think it should be completely obvious to the government that they should let all the Gurkhas stay - as someone said, if someone is prepared to die for this country they should certainly be allowed to live here (and the same applies to any other overseas soldiers). And I think Ms Lumley is doing a great job of getting that across.

Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I propose a toast: please be upstanding for the magnificent Ms Lumley, Bluestocking of the Week. And here's a toast to the Gurkhas too. Please sign the petition to let them stay in the UK.

And I've just discovered that Camilla Parker-Bowles supports Ms Lumley's campaign too - so I nominate her to be a Bluestocking too.

centenarian bluestockings

2009-05-02T02:20:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday to a truly great bluestocking:

"ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said."

Meanwhile, Margaret Caldwell, who is 102, has expressed interest in Wicca - there must be something about the wisdom of experience that makes one willing to explore new avenues...

An old crone, my dears, is a wise, old woman, one of the four aspects of Mother Earth, young and innocent in the Springs, full of seed and motherly in the Summer, ripe and bursting with produce in the Fall and wise and knowing in the fullness of Winter.

Nerd Girls

2009-03-30T01:46:00.001-07:00

Just been alerted by a friend to the Nerd Girl Army (clearly allies of the Bluestockings - perhaps the militant wing). They have created an aetherweb site where you can post your thoughts, contribute blog posts, and generally associate with other Nerd Girls.

Happy Ada Day

2009-03-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ada Lovelace

In celebration of Ada Lovelace, nearly two thousand bloggers have signed up to a pledge to blog about women in technology.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

There is a big list of women computer scientists on Wikipedia, so it was difficult to choose, but I have chosen Wendy Hall, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Southampton, because I have actually seen her give a keynote at a conference, and because I was born in Southampton.

She is also a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative, and is interested in human-computer interaction:

Wendy Hall

Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems.

The UK Fawcett Campaign for equality between men and women named her as an Inspiring Woman in 2005, and the UK Research Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology selected her as one of six world-class Women of Outstanding Achievement in SET in March 2006. In October 2006 she was the first non-US woman to receive the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership.

She is particularly prominent as a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in SET and for the need to ensure that girls are not excluded from participation in science and engineering careers. In her research and her public life she has sought to ensure that women are equal beneficiaries of technological advance, and her example of achievement and dedication has made her a distinguished role model for women.

Happy Ada Day to Wendy and all geeks of whatever gender!

You can read about more women in technology at the Ada Lovelace Day Collection.

All the currently registered posts can be seen:

Spirited women

2009-03-24T02:31:00.000-07:00

More bluestockings for your consideration:

Elizabeth I - she may have had but the feeble body of a woman, but she had the heart and stomach of a king (despite him having asked for it back several times)
Bess of Hardwick - an independent lady
Charlotte Brontë - author
Emily Brontë - author
Anne Brontë - author
George Eliot - author
Aphra Behn - 17th century dramatist and spy
Rachel Carson - biologist and ecologist
Valentina Tereshkova - first woman in space
Hildegarde von Bingen - inventor of the symphony and great mystic, writer and artist
Agnes and Margaret Smith - lady travellers and manuscript-hunters
Victoria Woodhull - presidential candidate and stockbroker
Emma Hardinge Britten - spiritualist, theosophist, OTO founding member
Anne Bonny and Mary Read - pirates
Marjorie Lee Browne - Doctor of Mathematics
Evelyn Granville - Computer Programmer, NASA

More bluestocking heroines

2009-03-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

More suggestions from Brass Goggles aficionados:

Emily Warren Roebling - Co-builder of Brooklyn Bridge with husband Washington Roebling.
Edith Cowan - Feminist, fought for suffrage, then first woman elected to an Australian parliament.
Annie Oakley - Famous trick sharpshooter of Old West.
Mary Anning - a fossil collector that discovered a dinosaur species or two.
George Sand: novelist, feminist, bon-vivant and quite possibly the first openly-acknowledged "Drag King."
Rear Admiral "Amazing Grace" Hopper: co-developer of the UNIVAC I, inventor of the compiler, pioneer in the development of computer systems standards and the FORTRAN and COBOL languages, and the Data Processing Management Association's first "Man of the Year."
Hedy Lamarr: co-inventor of frequency-hopped spread-spectrum radio communication, which is the basis for nearly all modern radio data communications systems.
Beatrix Potter studied lichen and presented a paper to the Linnean Society in London.
Isabella Bird - Traveller and explorer
Sarah Guppy, the inventor of the suspension bridge (also a woman); she is featured in Local Heroes by Adam Hart-Davis.
Grace Darling - a girl who rowed out with her father to rescue people from a sinking boat
Emilie du Chatelet - Enlightenment mathematician and physicist (and Voltaire's lover) rigged lotteries and used mathematics to win the card games that upper class women played in those days.
Elizabeth Fulhame - author of An Essay on Combustion, 1794, a landmark text on Catalytic Chemistry and Colloidal Photochemistry.
Female explorers:

Women pilots

2009-03-20T10:19:00.001-07:00

I've just been tipped off about the existence of this splendid website about women pilots in Soviet Russia by a kind gentleman called Gryphon over at the Brass Goggles forum.

Intriguingly, the pilots who flew at night were called the Night Witches. Above is a photo of one of their planes.

Another bluestocking

2009-03-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Bath graduate Bijal Thakore was announced the winner of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) prize for her service in the engineering sector at a recent prestigious award ceremony.

Congratulations to Bijal for her excellent achievement.

She also works for Lego and is on the board of directors of the Planetary Society.

Thakore also works as a technical consultant for a number of global clients, including working with LEGO System A/S as a Global Client Development Officer for LEGO Play for Business.
Representing the activities of young people internationally as a liaison for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, Thakore is also a member of the Special Advisory Committee to the International Astronautical Federation on Space and Society. Thakore’s goal is to help make humanity a multi-planet species.
Past positions include serving as a Teaching Associate for the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, where she furthered her interdisciplinary research in Robotics and In-Situ Resource Utilization for space exploration. She also worked for the X PRIZE Foundation, where she devised prize concepts to bring radical breakthroughs in attempts to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges such as eradicating poverty and providing clean drinking water to all.

Completely awesome.

Edwardian feminists

2009-03-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

The printing press of Cambridge University has issued a treatise upon our esteemed Edwardian forebears.

Early twentieth-century feminists caused controversy with the Magisterium by embodying the terrifying spectre of equality of the sexes.

The book also documents the changing meaning of the word feminist, originally used for the French women's movement, and then developing in Britain and America.

The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century by Lucy Delap (Cambridge University Press)
Edwardian commentators were clear that feminism was no unified entity, but should be divided into competing groups. A survey of ‘modern feminism’ produced in 1914 by a British-born feminist living in the United States, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, used the metaphor of an army to delineate the main body of parliamentary suffragists, the rear of municipal suffragists, a vanguard of ‘advanced feminists’, and an ultra-radical group of ‘skirmishers’. This study is concerned with delineating the political argument, discourse and intellectual influences drawn upon by these last two groups, whose members referred to themselves as the feminist ‘vanguard’, ‘advanced feminists’, or ‘modern feminists’. I examine the languages, the conceptual resources, the political argument available to feminists, gaining a sense not only of what they said, but how it was possible for them to say it, and the intellectual reception feminism had.

Lola Montez

2009-03-13T04:36:00.000-07:00

Trestle theatre are touring a production of Lola, an exploration of the life of the extraordinary and larger-than-life Lola Montez. If, like me, you have ever read the Flashman novels (a guilty pleasure, to be sure), you will know that Lola was quite a firebrand, counting among her lovers Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria (and of course, none other than Harry Flashman).

the show celebrates the life of an extraordinary woman who lived like she danced, with all the might of her body and the fire of her soul.

Perhaps not exactly a bluestocking, but certainly an extraordinary woman.

Lola Montez c.1851

In a bizarre footnote to Lola's story, it was claimed by William Wynn Westcott that Anna Sprengel, the alleged Secret Chief of the Golden Dawn (to whom Westcott and MacGregor Mathers wrote after deciphering her address from an old book) was the love-child of Lola Montez and Ludwig I of Bavaria.

Gracefully late for IWD

2009-03-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

So, it was International Women's Day on 8th March.

I was going to write about it but was delayed by the necessity to foil a dastardly plot to create a world chocolate shortage. Fortunately I was assisted by my trusty differencing engine, Profound Cogitation.

Ms Niblock has recorded in her diary a selection of bluestockings of whom we can only say we wholeheartedly approve; those who were not already in our own canon of heroines shall forthwith be co-opted. Her list is Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Isabella Eberhardt, Simone Weil, Gertrude Bell, Katherine Stinson, Joanna de Tuscan, Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Rutherford and Leonora Carrington. Excellent choices all, among whom only Leonora Carrington was already enshrined here at The Bluestocking.

Steve Hayes commemorated IWD by honouring St Theodora the Iconodule - also an excellent choice, as one who wanted people to be able express their spirituality with icon-writing, and for others to access the numinous through icons.

IWD was celebrated around the world; this year's theme was stopping violence against women and girls (though stopping violence in general would be a very good thing).

As that was the theme, I would like to celebrate Eve Ensler, playwright, performer, activist, and author of The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body, among other things. She writes wittily and entertainingly, and invites us to celebrate our bodies and our orgasms. Hurrah!

There are some extracts from The Vagina Monologues at ivillage for those who are not familiar with it.

Your hosts

2009-03-09T14:35:00.000-07:00

As mentioned earlier, I am Angharad V. Setherwood, known as "Bunny". In between competing at archery and fencing competitions, I paint scenes of bohemian life. Artists and writers turn to me for a little stability in their lives; which is fortunate as I only have a little of that commodity - maintaining a large rambling house in the country (Setherwood Grange), and being a breeder of prize ferrets, is somewhat taxing. But I relax by swimming in the River Cam and researching the witchcraft traditions of rural Cambridgeshire. My greatest chums (apart from Blossom and Dauntless of course) are dear Rafe and Jessie.

My esteemed colleagues on this august publication are Isobel G. Sissinghurst, otherwise known in her set as "Blossom", and Chalmers Z. Vanderbilt, my delightful American cousin.

Isobel acquired the moniker of "Blossom" from her interest in garden design. She can often be seen pottering about with her chum Gertrude J., discussing the finer points of lavender, lovage and whatnot. She rides a large penny-farthing to suffragist meetings, and lives in an artists' colony in rural Gloucestershire with her collection of Houdan hens. Her other interests include amateur operatics and dismantling clocks.

Chalmers is a gossip columnist of some distinction, but he has a shocking propensity for wearing quite dazzling tartan creations at odd hours of the day (hence his nickname, "Dauntless") - and with a green carnation; would you credit it? His collection of monocles is unrivalled, and he also plays a mean hand at euchre. He will recite Betjeman poems at house parties, especially if the hostess summons her guests to the piano. He is accompanied everywhere by Cuchulain, a large Irish wolfhound, and a young gentleman who rejoices in the name of Temerare K. Marchpane; both are devoted to him - the dears.

So, pull up a chaise longue, top up your glass with port, and settle in for an evening with the bluestockings.

Hail Gail!

2009-03-06T01:52:00.000-08:00

We here at The Bluestocking are not the only Gail Trimble enthusiasts... many other bloggers have been writing in praise of the intellectual blitzkrieg.

Walking randomly says:

If Gail Trimble programmed computers then she would use butterflies.
Gail Trimble can determine the next random number in a sequence.
When you search for “guru” on Google it says “Did you mean Gail Trimble?”

Life must be filled up says:

Congratulations to Gail Trimble and her team on winning University Challenge. I was astonished to hear that far from being praised for her success, the poor girl has come in for a load of abuse.

Sze Zeng says "Gail Trimble the genius"

Michael Axelsen doesn't know who Dylan Thomas was or what nationality he was, but he knows he likes geek girls:

I think any woman who is intelligent, smart, presents herself well and knows her way around Latin literature should be celebrated for their ability and skill.

It's good to know that there are others who appreciate intelligence. I note that her page on the well-known electronic school yearbook has 424 fans. I think Gail's undoubted sartorial elegance is irrelevant to her intellectual prowess; she should be celebrated for her brains even if she dressed in potato sacks.

Bluestockings group

2009-03-06T01:35:00.000-08:00

A charming young lady by the name of Dana McGee has created a group called Bluestockings on that well-known electronic school yearbook.

We at the Bluestockings blog must naturally wish her and her friends every success in their endeavour, and hope that they will drop in here for a nice cup of Lady Grey tea and some intellectual conversation.

It's delightful to discover that being a Bluestocking is once more in vogue, and that we are not so much (re)creating a subculture as joining one that is already in full flow.

You still have your testicles. Now let go of them.

2009-03-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I somehow screwed up my Karma, or if the Gods are playing a practical joke on me, or what the hell is going on right now. But for some reason, I can't set foot in an online forum these days without going head to head with a Men's Rights Activist. An "MRA," as the kids like to say.

Because white men between the ages of 18 and 35 are so very oppressed in our culture. Apparently. The poor dears.

Allow me to share a few general observations.

If you're an MRA, you're ignorant.

If you're a Pagan MRA, you're dead to me.

If you're a gay Pagan MRA, then what the fuck is wrong with you. And please note that this is a statement, not a question.

To sum up: If you identify, for whatever reason, as an MRA (and I really hate to say this, on account of the irony will be a distraction), you have Mommy issues.

And I'm sorry about that; I'm so very, very sorry. But you do. At some critical point in your emotional development, Mommy was unkind. Or Mommy had another baby, or went back to work, or wouldn't let you have the car keys just this one time. Or Mommy suggested that, at the age of 47, you might want to consider moving out of her basement.

Whatever the traumatic event that was instrumental in shaping Who It Is You Are Today... you have Mommy issues.

And again, I'm sorry, but agreed? Good. Now please get over them. Or, at the very least, stop dumping them over the rest of us, because here's the thing: While your existence is ultimately irrelevant, I cannot begin to describe how uselessly annoying you are.

[Cross-posted at Lover of Strife]

Hypatia

2009-03-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

The 1867 photograph Hypatia by Julia Margaret Cameron

The forthcoming film about Hypatia of Alexandria, Agora, reminded me that there is a lovely photo by Julia Margaret Cameron (pioneer woman photographer) of a woman dressed as Hypatia.

A nice conjunction of two bluestocking heroines - the one a great classical pagan philosopher; the other an artist in the nascent field of photography.

Cameron's picture represents Hypatia as a strong (if slightly bored-looking) woman. Other portrayals represent her as too dreamy, or too vulnerable (though to be fair, many of them were focussing on her just as she was about to be dismembered by the Christian mob).

She is also the patron of Cherry Hill Seminary:

Hypatia was a pagan, a woman, a martyr, and most importantly, a scholar. Born in 370 CE in Egypt, she was considered both eastern and western: She flourished and taught in the Mediterranean area and was fed by rivers of learning from all the civilizations in the mid-east. Hypatia was one of the mothers of our western traditions and embodied the scholarly riches of diverse cultures. Described by her contemporaries as a charismatic teacher, Hypatia was later murdered by a mob of zealous Christians in 415 CE.

scholarly interest

2009-03-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

Some scholarly articles about the original Bluestockings (available from JSTOR):

Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating FeminismSalonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism
Evelyn Gordon Bodek
Feminist Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3/4 (Spring - Summer, 1976), pp. 185-199

Bluestockings, Spinsters and Pedagogues: Women College Graduates, 1865-1910

Mary E. Cookingham

Population Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Nov., 1984), pp. 349-364

Subjectivity Unbound: Elizabeth Vesey as the Sylph in Bluestocking Correspondence

Deborah Heller

The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002), pp. 215-234

Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women
Anna Miegon
The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002), pp. 25-37

Clara Reeve, Provincial Bluestocking: From the Old Whigs to the Modern Liberal State

Gary Kelly

The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002), pp. 105-125

Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire

Susan S. Lanser

The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002), pp. 257-275

bluestockings and witchcraft

2009-03-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

Intellectual women down the ages have frequently been suspected of witchcraft (muttering strange formulae, speaking foreign languages, and generally being cleverer than their peers).

Readers of a romantic disposition may recall the scene in Ivanhoe, when Rebecca, the beautiful and intellectual Jewess, is accused of witchcraft because she speaks Hebrew. Apparently the character may have been inspired by the real life bluestocking, Rebecca Gratz, a preeminent Jewish American educator and philanthropist who was the first Jewish female college student in the United States.

Then of course there are the fictional witches featured previously in this august publication, Mss Weatherwax and Mss Hawthorne. Both highly intelligent and independent women.

More recently, the vitriol heaped on the highly intelligent, beautiful and charming Gail Trimble, always correctly attired in classic and timeless garb, has led to the suggestion that she should be burnt as a witch (this article is of course a spoof, but it's a spoof of the actual sexual innuendo and general opprobrium that was heaped on her merely for being an intellectual).

Indeed, nineteenth-century bluestockings were frequently branded "witches" according to the abstract of the article Bluestockings Beware: Cultural Backlash and the Reconfiguration of the Witch in Popular Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Linda J Holland-Toll.

Feminist witches have always looked to our foremothers for inspiration - one of the earliest feminist covens in America was called the Susan B. Anthony Coven No 1. In fact, it's still going! (Definitely a second-wave feminist type of organisation, though.)

The connection is probably because both intellectuals and witches transgress against the patriarchal dictum that women are not allowed to be powerful. And of course, there is significant overlap between intellectuals, feminism and witchcraft.

the name of the rose

2009-03-03T15:13:00.000-08:00

The Bluestocking title of choice is always Ms or Mss (like Mss Weatherwax), never Miss or Mrs (except for eighteenth century ladies, when Mrs meant simply an adult woman and did not denote married status).

Bluestocking first names tend to be robust - the sort of name you could travel round the world in - but never derived from masculine names. Examples include Angharad, Ada, Alice, Octavia, Olivia, Olive, Elizabeth, Gloria, Damaris, Tallulah, Radclyffe, and so on, but never Charlotte, Henrietta, or Yvette.

A Bluestocking frequently has a middle initial, but never reveals what it stands for (to preserve her mystique you understand - it's this sort of thing that puts the fear of Goddess into the more timid variety of Chap, you see).

The Bluestocking surname, if double-barrelled, is never hyphenated. For example, Augusta Ada Lovelace Byron.

Bluestockings frequently have nicknames, possibly expressing their particular literary or scientific bent.

The use of names and the preservation of mystique are minor branches of the art of Headology.

My Bluestocking name, just for the record, is Angharad V. Setherwood, known to the gels of my immediate circle as "Bunny".

oaths and imprecations

2009-03-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

Bluestocking oaths are colourful but not unladylike. The bluestocking tends to utter such imprecations as "Cripes!", "Jiminy!", "Bobbins" and frequently to use colourful Shakespearian language (probably due to a misspent youth in the theatre).

Of course the more dashing set among the bluestockings simply let rip like navvies, or like Father Jack (Feck! Arse! Girls! I love my brick! and so on.)

Sandi Toksvig: Bluestocking Pin-up

2009-03-03T08:11:00.000-08:00

Sandi is the epitome of Bluestocking greatness; in looks and style, in wit and raconterie on Radio 4, in academic prowess, in adventurous spirit; having yachted around Britain in 1995, written such fantastic books as 'Whistling For The Elephants', being openly a lesbian and a mother to three children...Three Rousing Womanly Cheers for Ms Toksvig!!

bluestocking heroes

2009-03-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

Patrick Leigh Fermor - travel writer, wit, raconteur, war hero (SOE), swam the Hellespont at age 70
Lawrence Durrell - travel writer
WB Yeats - poet, intellectual, occultist
Edward Carpenter - gay genius, poet, intellectual, occultist
E M Forster - novelist
Alan Turing - gay genius and IT pioneer
Eddie Izzard - now there's a man who knows how to cross-dress
Stephen Fry - bon viveur, wit, intellectual

fashion tips for bluestockings

2009-03-03T03:13:00.000-08:00

Never wear anything that actually is in fashion;
Tweed is good (but not twinsets, and certainly not pearls);
Waistcoats are good - somewhere to store gadgetry. Remember to leave the bottom button undone (out of respect to George III, who left his undone to accommodate his girth);
Gadgetry is good; always remember to carry your Swiss Army Knife and your pocket watch;
Handbags - large, practical and roomy; capable of holding several books and doubling as a weapon in extremis (as demonstrated by the redoubtable Olive Hawthorne, who hit a would-be assailant over the head with her reticule - which happened to contain her crystal ball);
Trousers (often referred to as bloomers) are just the thing for ladies of a practical disposition;
Hatpins - never go out without one;
Frills and flounces are out.

kindred subcultures

2009-03-03T03:08:00.001-08:00

Steampunk - plucky chaps in brass goggles reviving the Victorian aesthetic
Goth - elegantly dressed folk with a penchant for Gothic literature
Geeks - especially GirlGeeks

bluestocking heroines

2009-03-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

The bluestocking's heroines may include:

Flora Poste - The Higher Common Sense - need we say more?
Stella Gibbons, wit, author, genius
Granny Weatherwax - for sheer attitude (fictional witch)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas - proper bluestocking names
Leonora Carrington - fabulous paintings
Radclyffe Hall - rather too keen to be a chap, but splendid taste in hats
Celia Fiennes - lady explorer
The Pankhursts, and all the Suffragettes
Mary Wollstonecraft - early feminist
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - first SF writer
Augusta Ada Byron - lady genius and programmer of the Babbage Difference Engine
Amelia Earheart - pilot
Josephine Baker - artiste
Octavia Hill - co-founder of the National Trust
Olive Hawthorn - fictional witch in Doctor Who
Gwen Raverat - artist
Annie Horniman - occultist
Florence Farr - actress & occultist
Female occultists generally
The Pre-Raphaelite women artists
Hypatia of Alexandria - philosopher
Marie Curie - scientist
Women scientists generally
Artemisia Gentileschi - Renaissance artist
Dorothy Parker - wit and raconteuse
Gertrude von Petzold - first woman to be ordained (Unitarian)
Hildegard of Bingen - female mystic & artist
Mrs Seacole - female doctor in the Crimea

The postmodern bluestocking

2009-03-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

The postmodern bluestocking is a third-wave feminist with an interest in first-wave feminism. She knows what postmodernism and queer theory are. She regards men as equally oppressed by the hierarchical arrangement sometimes referred to as the patriarchy.

She knows how to change a tyre, and is clubbable, affable and witty. Keen on science, exploration, literature and art, she never talks about babies or make-up. Nor does she talk about sport, unless it is archery or fencing, which are of course martial arts rather than sport. She prefers science fiction over fantasy. She knows the difference between domestic violence (deplorable) and consensual SM (well, some gels like to play rough).

Her hobbies are never demure; not for her cross-stitch and watercolours, bridge and bricolage. No, she engages in intellectual conversation, hiking, birdwatching, climbing, white-water canoeing, wit and repartee, poker, reading novels, exploration, battle re-enactment, steampunk, science fiction conventions, and so forth.