I don't think I've told you this on Fem Fri yet, but I'm between jobs right now so have had plenty of time to read books, see art, and perhaps most importantly, cultivate weird habits. Including a weird habit that has been waiting in the wings of my life for years now; guerrilla gardening. Apparently this is at best semi legal, so please don't call the cops on me if you see any unauthorized cornflowers in South East London.
I've used two techniques, one which I like to believe I developed myself (kicking and scraping at the ground with my boots then adding seeds and kicking and stamping soil on them) and one which is seed bombs. You can buy these at Wilko like I did, Kabloom seems like a pretty good option too, or if you like to save money and are crafty here are many ways to make your own:
Here's an article by Vanessa Harden on how to get started. You'll notice that she's writing #content for Amex, so she says to ask for permission but I bet there are times when she has instead fixed to seek forgiveness. She also makes the point, not in the pullquote, that one could argue that property is theft anyway, which is punchy given the context:
A good guerrilla is always armed (with seedbombs) and ready (to drop them). The easiest, most cost-effective and sustainable way to prepare your own arsenal is to make seedbombs out of seeds from your own garden or from seed swaps, baked into a mix of soil and clay. Make sure the seeds – ideally from native plants – are suitable for the climate and soil prevalent on your chosen battleground. Store them in a dry place to prevent early sprouting, and always carry one or two with you on urban expeditions.
Of course this is something that is ideal for people without gardens, but if you have a garden - or, for example, 1,400 hectares of farmland - here's Isabella Tree of Knepp Farm with advice for rewilding at the small to medium scale:
“It goes back again to this theme that seems to be possessing us at the moment, which is connectivity. If you have a back garden, you can persuade your neighbours to cut a hole in the fence or hedgerow, and that becomes a hedgehog highway. If everyone in the street goes pesticide- and herbicide-free, and perhaps one person can have a pond, another a beetle bank, then suddenly you’ve got a chain of habitats that becomes really significant.”
This is one of those Fem Fris where I just want to look at pretty dresses, and I hope that you are going to enjoy that too.
There is seemingly no upper bound to my enthusiasm for articles about adapting Jane Austen books for the screen. I'm not totally sure why that is because I don't especially love Regency fashion. Maybe it's because it takes so much thinking to do justice to the sincere and radiant world that Austen created. Anyway, here's a really long article from a fashion historian about all of the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice in order:
It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that, aside from a few too many low necklines during the day on women’s gowns, the designer Dinah Collin was as close to accuracy is it’s possible to get. In her own words, the production’s costumes had to appear ‘fresh and light…as natural for each character as possible…The key is to make the clothes like real clothes from a wardrobe rather than a set of costumes worn by actors.’
Maybe you're looking for something a bit more modern, though. In that case, how about the fashion in Spencer, a film which walks the line between real and not at all real in a way that I loved:
Since the film is set in the early 1990s, she looked through images of Diana from about 1988 to 1992 to get a sense of her overall style at the time and identify what she wore repeatedly in that era — plaid and gold double-breasted buttons, for example. “I’m sure that doing The Crown, for instance, is good fun because you’re trying to find the exact details and replicate,” she said. “But given that our movie isn’t one of exact replication, it’s a work of art you’ve got leeway to interpret in different ways. It’s great to do costumes that have that freedom.”
I am sure that you, like me, are wondering what you can do to help the people of Ukraine, so here is a Fem Fri about women you can support who are making a difference.
We start with Lena Rozvadovska, who is the co-founder and CEO of Voices. This organisation works with children who have been traumatised by war, and helps their families as well. Real frontline stuff. Here's an article about Lena at work:
- You see, - says Lena. - To deal with children, the adults don't have to stand over their heads. I need children to feel free. Thank God, spring arrived, and we moved to the street - we play volleyball there, and "Uno", and "Memo"… But sometimes we just sit there and laugh …
I also caught up with Wioletta Hass-Lipinska, who is working in the Perth/Kinross/Tayside/Fife area to get needed supplies to Ukrainian refugees in Poland. This is an incredible story of community organising and she lists out what's needed and what is at stake.
This situation showed all of us that people can work together, give their heart, time and money and thoughts to the people who really need this. […] All of Europe are working together, and we work together with the fantastic people we’ve got around us. It’s not about me. It’s about us.
If you want to donate supplies, let me know - I know there's a collection in SE London and I'm happy to share details. If you're in the east of Scotland (or Scotland in general? But you'd need to drive east is what I'm saying) I can put you in touch with people who are working with Wioletta.
Finally, this isn't a woman but it is a company that is matching donations up to €100,000. So if you want your money to go further, try some links here:
This is a Fem Fri about the first album of 2022 that I really love. It's by Anaïs Mitchell (I don't think we are related) who you might know from the musical Hadestown. Here's my favourite track from the album, this is Revenant:
I'm playing it in the study where I'm writing and it is so lovely.
Also, wow this was kind of a lockdown album. I'm always impressed by people who did activities other than cry all the time in early lockdown:
As an early lockdown activity, some members committed to writing a song a day. To her surprise, Mitchell emerged with the bones of an album. “There was something about being completely removed from my milieu and also feeling a reconnection with my childhood,” she says. “I felt really invisible. I wasn’t doing it to prove anything. I wanted to do it before I even noticed what I was doing.” It could not be more different from Hadestown: a sprint rather than a marathon; intimate rather than epic.
In solidarity with the UCU strike, today's Fem Fri is all about labour organising. I hope you enjoy it.
Let's start quite far back in history, with Mary Fildes who survived the Peterloo Massacre. I like the detail that she wore her best frock to the protest:
Like many of the women who attended that day, Mary Fildes wore her best clothes. When the yeomanry attacked, Mary attempted to escape, but was caught when her dress caught on a nail on the speakers’ platform. Mary was attacked by the yeomanry, but survived. Another woman, Elizabeth Gaunt, was found in Henry Hunt’s carriage, perhaps shielding herself from attack. She, alongside Hunt, was put on trial for treason.
Now how about Rose Schneiderman, who made this speech in 1912. She kind of caught the conservative trade union movement off guard as they had assumed that only men could organise:
“What the woman who labours wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”
Hattie Canty organised the longest strike in US history. It lasted for six years!
Canty had this to say about striking: “… when there’s a strike like that, you’re not just striking for the benefits from that hotel. But you are learning to take up for yourself. You are learning to defend your rights. You are not letting people just run over you or you’re taking anything they give you.”
Also at the above link is Lucy Parsons, who was branded by the Chicago police department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters." It's really worth a click.
Finally as well as keeping the red flag flying here is a nice Autostraddle article on "green flags" to look out for when you are dating:
This green flag is a proxy for understanding two things about them: Are they honest? And, do they have a clear sense of self? Of course, this one is dependent on you, first, recognizing that the things you like aren’t you. That you are not just an amalgam of your job, hobbies, and interests.
How is it going? I've been watching films from the start of cinema on Thursday nights, so here is a roundup of the women of early film.
Sarah Whitely was the earliest born woman to appear in a film, because she appeared in the first film ever made, Roundhay Garden Scene. It's only 22 seconds, and you can see the full thing at the link:
You can read more about her here, and about her daughter Elizabeth who did early work in photography:
Louis and Elizabeth experimented with colour photography on metal and pottery, fixing the colours in a special kiln built at the Whitley home in Roundhay, and they founded the Leeds Technical School of Applied Art in 1877.
Next up we have Something Good, starring Gertie Brown. This is ten years after Roundhay Garden Scene and is the first time there is noticeable onscreen chemistry. Don't take this as a diss on the early films that are basically just people falling over! I LOVE those. Some of the finest innovations in hilarious physical mishaps happened in the 1800s! Anyway, here's Something Good (full 29s at the link):
Here's more about Gertie Brown in an interview with Allyson Nadia Feild, who identified the performers:
Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle were partners in a group called the Rag-time Four with John and Maud Brewer around 1898 and 1899. And they were largely responsible for craze and the cake dance, which was a variation of the popular cakewalks at the time. And I believe they were at Selig Studios filming a cakewalk film and then did this film as a kind of impromptu parody of the May Irwin kiss, which was the very famous kiss filmed in 1896 - one of the first films that was publicly exhibited, which featured a kiss between May Irwin and John Rice.
Last night I watched Cendrillon by Georges Méliès, which is the first film I've seen that had a plot (again, beyond "falling over") and which has a much less identified cast than I'd expected. Jehanne d'Alcy stars as the Queen, though, and was one of the first performers to quit the stage for films! You can see her here, full film (six minutes!) at the link:
Here's something that's I've been appreciating a lot lately, it's walking. Of course this is still mostly walking in South East London although this week I must have gone a full half mile into North London!
This would be absolutely nothing to Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, though, who did a tour of the Highlands that she finished by WALKING FROM GLASGOW TO EDINBURGH, not something that I would have previously considered possible:
By the 1820s it was reasonably common for tourists to be found travelling throughout the southernmost Highlands, especially after the publication of the numerous works by Walter Scott set in the area. It was almost unheard of, though, for a foreign woman to be found walking alone, yet that is what Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt did. Without companion and only occasionally with a guide, she set off from Stirling on a week’s tour of the southern Highlands that took in many notable sights – the Falls of Leny, Loch Katrine, the Falls of Clyde – but which veered considerably at times from the standard tourist routes. During this period she covered distances of between 20 and 30 miles each day and endured considerable physical danger. In the course of her tour, Stoddart Hazlitt walked 180 miles back to Edinburgh via Lochs Katrine and Lomond and the settlements of Dumbarton and Glasgow, before a 17-mile walk in the Southern Uplands to return to her Edinburgh lodgings.
The writer of that article, Kerri Andrews, has written a whole book on women and walking. Here's an interview with her, I loved this pullquote on the experiences her subjects had that give us a new perspective on what it is to walk and what is good about walking:
Dorothy Wordsworth is invited into a female-led household and witnesses a private act of mourning over the death of a child: men would not have been allowed in. Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt has lovely conversations with local women, and Wild and Doubling Back are both full of experiences that are particular to women. Admitting that these sorts of domestic, private, familial moments are important in walking literature makes our history of walking more fully human. These moments aren't lesser because they don't (only) involve grand views and enormous danger – these are people's lived experiences possible only on foot.
These are all countryside yomps of course, so to balance that with the city, plenty to think about in this quotation from Lauren Elkin on walking in/writing about cities:
Coming from writing to flâneusing and back to writing has been about situating myself in time and space and becoming attuned to how the world is put together around me and becoming attuned to the ways in which you and me and everyone on the street are contributing to the city in a certain way. The buildings we see around us, the shapes of the streets, the obstacles of walls and gates: that’s the “hard city,” but then there’s also the “soft city,” as Jonathan Raban calls it, which is the one that we’re all creating and participating in.
I hope you are well! The theme for today's Fem Fri comes from me staring into space and thinking about what today's Fem Fri should be. It's about staring.
Because if apparently if you stare at another person for not really all that long at all you start to hallucinate. Jenni Avins did this and I'm not sure I want to:
Then she told me why she laughed halfway through our sitting. "You started to look like a weird little animal!” she said.
“YOU started to look like an animal!” I shrieked. “A lion!”
“You were a lion!” she yelled. “A lioness,” she corrected herself.
June Almeida (who was also Scottish!) did a lot of staring in her life, in this case down a microscope. She didn't have a degree but her innovations are the reason we can see viruses clearly under a microscope:
The microscopy technique Almeida developed was simple, yet revolutionary for the field of virology […] Since electrons have much shorter wavelengths than light, this shows scientists an image with much finer, smaller detail. The challenge is discerning if a tiny blob is a virus, a cell, or something else. To solve the problem, Almeida realized she could use antibodies taken from previously infected individuals to pinpoint the virus. Antibodies are drawn to their antigen-counterparts—so when Almeida introduced tiny particles coated in antibodies, they would congregate around the virus, alerting her to its presence. This technique enabled clinicians to use electron microscopy as a way to diagnose viral infections in patients.
Finally, how about staring through some actual emeralds for a bit:
Each of the lenses are flat-cut with a bevel around the upper surface, and together they weigh 27 carats. They’re perfectly matched in saturation and color, which means they both came from the same original emerald — and therein lies the awe. Emeralds are incredibly easy to fracture, so it would take incredible skill, patience, understanding of the stone and some serious mental freaking fortitude to slice into an emerald which, in order to produce those two perfect lenses, must have weighed over 300 carats.
If you are in my phone book, the chances that I have texted you about my present decluttering project are basically one. Are you bored of it yet? Don't worry, I'm well on my way. We'll be through this soon I promise.
NOT THROUGH IT YET THOUGH, ARE WE? That's right, I'm going to do a whole Fem Fri on decluttering. Like so many things in my life, this newsletter is one that I wanted and expected to be easy – as easy as typing "history of decluttering" into a search engine. It… was… not.
Instead, I started as I so often do with an ngram:
This makes sense, I think. As consumerism starts to really bite in the 1980s, we start to buy more stuff and need to get rid of that stuff. And then in the 2000s (I want to link this to eBay, but time is limited) we REALLY REALLY want to get rid of stuff and we KEEP WANTING TO DO THAT.
On the basis of this ngram, I did searches over time for books that mention decluttering. Highly conveniently they are mostly written by women so fit the rubric of this newsletter. One of the first books to mention decluttering is Kathy Mayer Braddock's The Intrepid New Yorker from 1992, which looks like a quite sweet book of tips for anyone who is moving to New York for the first time. Because apartments are tiny, this means getting rid of a lot of kipple:
It's notable that there's no spiritual element to this. It's all practical/financial – you need room to exist and storage units are expensive.
The spiritual element comes in pretty fast. A notable early example (1999) is Donna Schaper's Sabbath Keeping, which has a whole chapter called Decluttering as Sabbath. Here's an extract:
And then, wow, here's something I'd forgotten, it's that everyone was super into Feng Shui in the early 2000s. Obviously as a culture we were not ready to drop the idea that giving Joshua Ferris books to charity was somehow a spiritual practice. Anyway, Google Books reminded me of this and here's the start of Mary Lambert's 2001 book, Clearing the Clutter for Good Feng Shui:
I love that she reminds you not to buy crystals until you have got rid of stuff from whatever you were into before you were into crystals.
For the decade after that there was a hard stop on the Feng Shui chat but still decluttering was pitched as a quasi- or actual spiritual activity. And then, of course, Marie Kondo's book was translated into English and people went AN ABSOLUTE BUNDLE on that. Including me! I got a ton out of her book and techniques and thinking. Here's an interview with her on her work with clients:
We should see that our goals are aligned and that we can work toward them. Everyone has a slightly different vision. I also want that individual to know what items or objects spark joy and to be able to really cherish them. When challenging moments occur, the most important thing is to discuss again “What are our goals?” and “Can we realign?” It’s important to always come back to why the work is worth it.
And here's a soothing Autostraddle guide to her Netflix show, which I also watched and enjoyed:
Their first date lasted for three days, they seem to have moved in with each other essentially immediately and their primary concern is somehow impressing upon their parents the seriousness of their relationship via the cleanliness of their house.
I hope you have enjoyed this quick journey through decluttering discourse since 1980. DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OUT MY EBAY STORE ahahaha just kidding guys I'd never do that to you.
How are you! Well, I hope. I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God this week so this newsletter takes Harlem as its starting point.
We start, though, not with the Harlem Renaissance but with the modern day, and the figurative painting of Jordan Casteel. I love her depictions of the everyday and, in her own words, "behind the scenes":
I took art classes in college, but my major wasn’t studio art until my junior year, when I studied abroad in Italy and took my first painting class. It was kind of like, “Here’s a palette knife. Make some colors and throw it on there. Drink cappuccinos and have the wind blowing in your hair. Paint portraits or whatever you want.” And I did. I painted portraits of a lot of the grounds-keeping staff, which isn’t far from my practice as it stands right now. I was very interested in trying to capture the people behind the scenes. Those were the relationships that I found to be the most intimate and important to me.
Okay now let's talk about Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance. Apparently she was a celebrity and a known… what is the word for when you invite someone to a party despite your fears that/in the hope that they'll do or say something controversial? That was apparently Hurston in Harlem in the 1920s. She also did some incredible and important anthropological work:
One of the most important stories she shared was of the man many called Cudjo Lewis, but whom she called by his African name, Kossola. Lewis was kidnapped from his home of Dahomey, Africa, and enslaved in Mobil, Alabama in 1860, 50 years after the American Slave Trade was deemed illegal. After he was emancipated, he and a group of freedmen bought land to live out their freedom days in a settlement they called Africatown. In 1928, Hurston was sent to interview Lewis at his Africatown home. Many months of meetings led to the eventual 2018 publication of Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, written by Zora Neale Hurston and edited by historian Deborah G. Plant. It took 80 years for Hurston's vision of Cudjo Lewis to be seen.
Moving away from Harlem, did you know that Dahomey had a highly regarded female army? I've had this saved in my links for ages and this feels like a decent time to bring it up:
Historians disagree about when the women’s palace guard expanded into an army. But by the 19th century witnesses regarded the women’s army, though smaller than its male counterpart, to be superior. Where the men shot muskets from the hip, the women took aim and fired from the shoulder. They were ‘the mainstay of the kingdom’.
