How are you? I hope you are well on this wet and windy morning. Or maybe it's lovely where you are; that was a pretty London centric thing for me to say.
I do have a Fem Fri for you, and it's about the fine and commercial art by women in the 1920s, but first I want to tell you some Alex news. I have been leaning on the 1920s quite heavily recently for Fem Fri and there is a reason for that – I'm working with the amazing Jennifer Nolan to edit a volume of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories (1921-1924) for Edinburgh University Press.
We'll focus on the magazine texts, which is super exciting because it's how Fitzgerald's first readers would have encountered his work, and for me personally because I get to spend a lot of time with 1920s magazines and their lovely graphic design.
For those of you who are into Fitzgerald, modernism, and/or the early twentieth century, you better believe I'm going to be doing a newsletter on this:
You will be a VERY EARLY subscriber, because I've not made a fuss about this on social media yet, so be aware that you won't be getting emails immediately.
For those of you who are thinking, where is this even COMING from, it comes from this project I finished a couple of years ago:
Okay but look – I know you don't subscribe for Fem Fri for Fitzgerald news or even for Alex news – why don't we actually look together at that art from the 1920s?
I found the art of Florine Stettheimer almost by accident, because I was looking up Asbury Park (the New Jersey seaside resort) and she had painted a picture of it:
Here's more on her life and work:
Stettheimer’s paintings from 1917 form an unprecedented pictorial category that is part portraiture, part history painting, and part genre painting. Many works, such as La Fête à Duchamp (1917) and Asbury Park South (1920), commemorate outings and parties organized by her family and can be read as biographical. But these real events and their protagonists are described in a style so fantastic in its miniaturization and decorative excess that they take on a theatrical aspect that betrays the critical distance of their author.
How about these illustrations by Helen Dryden from a 1922 issue of Vogue, in an article about an imagined golf club by/for/about women? The sheep are part of the plan by the way, they aren't going to have lawnmowers for the grass which should be great for biodiversity. There's also a genuinely good suggestion of using wildflowers rather than sand for… the bit of golf course that is sand rather than grass? I wrote "rough", and I think that's right, but just seeing it written down made me feel like a fraud because the only golf I care about is the golf that is illustrated right here:
I hope you have a lovely Friday. I'm going to leave you with this very 1920s, very Vogue, take on renaissance Italy:
Whilst I usually like to steer away from the topical in Fem Fri, I am as excited as anyone about the return of Succession. Something else I like is interviews with costume designers. Let's have loads of those today, starting with this absolute classic of the genre: an interview with Succession's costume designer Michelle Matland that is more or less entirely about Shiv Roy's high waisted trousers. The difference between the title of this article and the URL gets me every time:
Shiv’s pants are more thoughtful, capable, and sexually well-adjusted than any of Logan Roy’s children. Their high waists, wide legs, and perfect tailoring demand attention and respect and intentionally so; according to the show’s head costume designer, Michelle Matland, the look is meant to signify her desire “to be seen as an equal in the board room.” Indeed, these are pants that could single-handedly orchestrate a hostile company takeover or convince you of the merits of a media monopoly.
Loads of amazing stuff in this interview with Katie Irish, who was the costume designer on another of my all time favourite shows, The Americans. The pull quotes here are about maternity wear because w o w I did not know what maternity wear looked like in the 1980s, but there's also really interesting stuff on how to get enough vintage footwear for crowd scenes and, ones again, high waisted trousers:
“Do you know what maternity fashion looked like in the ‘80s? Because it does not look like what it does today. It is not stylish in the least. I will make it as stylish as humanly possible.” […] Even style icon Princess Diana had her work cut out for her in making these clothes look good and she was one of the inspiration points for Alice’s entire look with Irish referencing this particular moment saying, “God bless this woman she is trying and she looks as stylish as fashion is going to allow her at this moment, but it is still not great.”
I can't find an interview but here is a great, long article about the life and work of Eiko Ishioka, who was the costume designer for Coppola's Dracula as well as a graphic designer who really changed the way women were portrayed in adverts:
Ishioka’s campaigns were a clarion call for Japanese women at the time. With tag lines like “Girls Be Ambitious!,” “Women! Turn Off Your TV Sets! Women! Close Your Magazines!” and “Don’t Stare at the Nude; Be Naked,” her defiantly anti-product ads asked women to reconsider the prevalent culture and challenge their existing perceptions. “Through Parco’s advertisements, Ishioka conveyed the message that fashion is a means to live with independence,”
I found this to be a resonant article, maybe because its title – stop telling women they have imposter syndrome – is something I've said several times. My perspective on imposter syndrome really shifted the day I heard someone say, well, if they've hired me to do something I can't do that's much more their problem than it is mine. So you can have that for inspiration too.
The answer to overcoming imposter syndrome is not to fix individuals but to create an environment that fosters a variety of leadership styles and in which diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities are seen as just as professional as the current model.
OH AND ALSO Autostraddle are doing a fundraiser, and there is a great series of posts on what it is to work on their site. This one about publishing and algorithms is particularly good:
We pull all of that information together and then ask ourselves what the value is of what we published. Was something read by 100,000 people? Heck yes that’s valuable! Was something read by 500 people, three of whom said they’d never seen themselves represented that way before? That is exponentially valuable beyond any measurement! That is why we do what we do!
Also Autostraddle is a good website so if you want to support independent queer media today I am fairly sure that you'll get that opportunity at the link above.
NOT THAT SHORT OF A FEM FRI, HEY. I have to get a train now! Hope you have a great day.
Thank you ever so much to the friend and subscriber who this week sent me multiple links about gnarly cycling races. As you know, I love reading about gnarly stuff from my life which is very much oriented around my immediate physical comfort.
We're starting with the race itself, the Paris-Roubaix, which has just run a women's race for the first time! Cycling is kind of… worse for women than football as far as I can tell, so this is huge. The race is both long and mostly on cobblestones. In case you have never cycled on cobblestones for over five minutes, here is what you need to know:
Incredibly miserable
Arms get really red and puffy, feel like they are entirely the wrong shape for your body
Obviously you'll be wanting a comfortable saddle to but it won't help as much as you think
The woman is Marianne Vos, the best female cyclist of all time. The place is the showers below the velodrome in Roubaix, France. This weekend Paris-Roubaix, the greatest and most prestigious one-day bike race, will hold a women’s race for the first time in the race’s 125 year history. Paris-Roubaix is a muddy, desperate battle across cobblestone farm roads in Northern France. The race finishes on an unglamorous cycling track in Roubaix, and the very few who survive the “Hell of the North” (as the race is called) traditionally clean off the grime and mud in these famous concrete showers below the track that drip out a miserly stream of tepid water.
Marianne Vos did not win this year, that was Lizzie Deignan. She wasn't meant, from a team perspective, to be in front, she just found herself there and thought… well, okay? Why not me? I love that.
She said she was not the designated lead rider for Trek–Segafredo, who also had the Italian Elisa Longo Borghini finish third. “That really wasn’t the plan,” Deignan said. “I needed to be at the front for the first cobble section to protect my leaders as I was kind of the third rider. I looked behind me after the first cobbles and there was a gap. I thought at least if I’m at the front they have to chase me, so I just kept going.”
Shifting sports but not themes, here's a fantastic interview with the climber Lor Sabourin. They talk a bit about why people are fascinated by elite athletes and they talk about finding their place in a culture. I think those two things – the fascination and the finding a place – are really intimately linked! It's exciting to see people find a place for themselves, whether that's in the culture of the sport or at the forefront of the sport or, in the case of climbing, around a boulder. It's a good interview, do have a read:
I’ve had climbing partners that were definitely part of that kind of “old guard” of climbers, that really macho culture. And when I came out to them, they just showed me so much unconditional love, and did their own education to be able to support me. And I never, as a kid, could have imagined that I would have people in my life that did that. I didn’t realize I had that much access to support. And that’s been amazing for my climbing: feeling like I have a safety net under me to try new things and do things that scare me.
I'm reading a book about Ulysses and it has a really super photo in it of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. And I thought that maybe today we could enjoy some photos of women looking (a) great and (b) fully absorbed in being themselves.
Let's start with the photo that started this:
Reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind.
Now here is Nina Simone, who I don't think has ever been photographed looking less than fully absorbed in being herself. I love how relaxed and happy, as well as beautiful, she looks in this photograph:
Simone’s style served as an unapologetic visual counterpart to her art: She favored head wraps, dangling jewelry, loud prints, big sunglasses, and pure white evening gowns that made her skin look even darker, as if to emphasize her young, gifted blackness. Nina Simone dressed to celebrate herself.
Here is Susan Sontag, dressing to celebrate bears. There is no information online about why she was in a bear suit (maybe that is just what she liked to wear to write?) otherwise I'd have a link about that. Regular readers of Fem Fri will have seen this photo before. If that's you, I hope that, for you as for me, this one never gets old.
What's up. I hope many many good things as we head into the weekend. I've got a Fem Friday for you that I think you're going to really like, inspired by a poem that a friend and subscriber sent me in the week.
The poem is You, a Teenager by Ella Frears, which I've read several times in the week and it always feels fresh:
Of course this makes me think about being a teenager in an English class, which reminded me of Sarah Bakewell's delightful book At The Existentialist Cafe. It's a delightful primer on existentialism but she also shares (for fun mostly, I suppose, but there was also a serious point) the "weirdly emphatic marginalia" she wrote as a teenager. Tolkein thought that "cellar door" was the most beautiful phrase in the English language and there's a real case to be made for "weirdly emphatic marginalia". Here's an interview with Sarah Bakewell:
What was unusual was that personal quality—the inhabiting of ideas, a whole philosophy, and living it out in a personal way. That’s part of the existentialism itself— concrete existence, and what you actually choose to do and how you respond to other people. It’s a living philosophy. It’s more intimately linked to what they do in their personal lives.
I also just searched for "teenage marginalia" and there's a whole group devoted to specifically Oxford marginalia. Most of these anonymous authors are probably teenagers so I'm confident that this fits the rubric:
Ms Pierce said: "It's probably not the most enlightened form of literature but it's entertaining and people enjoy it." She said the collected examples of marginalia - a term used for comments made in the margins of books - were "guttural or visceral reactions to a reading experience".
I realised last night that I've been engaged in a project for the last 18 months that I haven't told you anything about! Or if I did tell you, it wasn't in Fem Fri. For the last 18 months I've been watching a film a week for every year since 1944. It's been amazing and I thought this week I'd share with you some of the films I've watched and the women who have starred in and written them.
Brief Encounter (1945) was really early in the project and was immediately one of my favourite films. It's maybe the most British thing I have ever seen, an absolute masterpiece of repressed emotion. You would love it. Celia Johnson, who starred, wrote a lot of very sweet letters to her husband when he was away at the Second World War – there is a stage show about them, Posting Letters to the Moon – and you can read a bit of one of the letters here:
“There is a fair amount of quiet din, going on in the distance. I think they must be rumbling up the tanks. I saw a mass of these monsters parked along the woods near Joyce Grove. One, roughly the size of the Albert Hall was rather charmingly named Cupid. I don’t know why I tell you all about this imitation battle when you know all too much about real ones but at the moment it impinges on our life and it makes a change when walking to the village to see tanks instead of squirrels. I really prefer squirrels but I can visualise a moment when I’d rather see a Cupid.”
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. The story of how she wrote the novel was incredible; she dreamed about it in a vivid dream one night, then for a week thereafter the story revealed itself to her in her dreams. So she wrote the novel all night and recorded it all day. Here's a long, good article about the writing of the novel and the journey to the film:
"Did I think the story was true? We did talk about this. But the truth for Joan was different to the rest of us. She was never straightforward about it. I think I decided in the end that it was a great work of the imagination. I see it as a book of place; a painterly book that captures the atmosphere of the Australian bush."
I sort of assumed I'd already seen Some Like It Hot (1959), then I watched it and found out I'd seen only very short clips. It is, as everyone says, entirely delightful. Approach with caution:
A seemingly innocent movie choice ended in disaster today when you turned on 1959’s Some Like It Hot at your grandmother’s house and discovered that the black-and-white classic is hornier than you could have possibly imagined.
What's going on with you today? I hope it's good and that you've got some good plans for the weekend. I was looking at my saved links and found out that there are loads of women artists that I've not written about in Fem Fri before, let's meet some of them!
We start with Laura Wheeler Waring. The foundation that bought a lot of her paintings was dissolved in the 1960s, so her work is sort of dispersed now. If you are someone who organises exhibitions, it might be nice to display some of her portraits together. Let me know if you do this as I'd definitely make the effort to see it. Here's her most famous portrait and a lovely long essay:
Although Waring became closely associated with her portraits of high-profile members of the African American elite, her most celebrated painting — the one most often reproduced as an indication of Waring at the height of her artistic talent — is of an unheralded, working-class woman named Annie Washington Derry with whom the upper-middle-class Waring interacted while working at Cheyney.
Moving now to Finland, and Helene Schjerfbeck. The things we know about her life are really the things that she wants us to know. For example, we don't know the name or even the nationality of the man she was engaged to because she asked her friends to burn all letters that mentioned his name when he broke it off. And they all did! Delicious.
She made her name with a series of self portraits, but those aren't the ones that are engaging me right now. She also painted still lives as a palette cleanser between portraits:
And here's one of her earlier works, The Convalescent:
To a modern eye, the painting seems traditional but, first presented in Finland, it was deemed, according to Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, “too modern, not polished enough, too French”. Unsurprisingly, the French liked it: it won a bronze medal in Paris and was bought by the Ateneum and has been a favourite with gallery-goers ever since. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff says: “It is the subject that draws people because it is about hope – an unusually positive picture in modern art.”
Now, here's an artist with a very limited online footprint (I mean, information about her online – she was born at the turn of the last century – I don't expect her to be maintaining an active Tik Tok presence). Anyway, Dorothy Holeman was a South East London artist – here's a view towards Greenwich:
As you know I love still lives, here's one of hers:
And here she is on her wedding day. I really like her little hat.
Amazing news from last weekend, I had a go at rollerblading for the first time since I was 14 and it was so much fun. Rollerblades make you so tall and so fast! Also, nowadays, there are techniques for stopping that aren't just "crash into a hedge". Here is a Fem Fri about the women of rollerblading, there are a couple of styles represented here.
Obviously speed skating is the one where you go really really fast, it's pretty close to running but with wheels. What I had not realised is that in speed skating races people aren't all on the same track, it's time trials. I suppose that's to put clear blue water between racing and roller derby, as the crashes could get fairly gnarly:
The still frame in this clip is from the Team USA contestant, Erin Jackson, who realised that she wasn't going to compete in the Olympics with rollerblading so she got into ice skating so that she could. It seems like she expected it to be easier, but also, she did do it:
“We have muscle memory from inline, but it’s not always the right muscle memory; the technique is fundamentally different,” Jackson explained. “We always joke about which muscles are hurting when you’re on the ice. When you’re hurting in your quads, you’re skating like an inliner. When you’re hurting in your hips, you’re skating like an ice skater.”
Away from pure speed, this is slide, the point of which appears to be that you ignore the fact that your rollerblades have wheels, but still use them to move:
Okay and it seems like the rollerblading->Winter Olympics pipeline is pretty well established because Nichakan Chinupun, who you see representing Thailand in the above video, also represented Thailand at skiing:
“The first time I saw snow it was very beautiful and I couldn’t believe how soft it was when I touched it. But I was scared to walk on it”
How has your week been? I have really overcommitted myself socially this week. It's been quite useful to have the reminder that when I'm not being literally told to stay at home, potter around and make a fake soup now and then* I'm not that great at remembering to do those things! Next week will be quieter. All this is by way of saying, let's enjoy a nice relaxing Fem Fri together.
In fact, let's make this about the medieval age, which I totally wrongly assume was mostly pottering about and making meals and sewing. Here's a beautiful Hildegard of Bingen track to get us in the medieval mood:
You will notice that the singer, "Hildegard von Blingin'", also does Bardcore so you can hear her sing other things, like Dolly Parton's Jolene, in the medieval style.
Now here's a woman who was totally committed to the medieval age – Belle da Costa Greene, who ran J. P. Morgan's personal library and was responsible for its (fairly incredible) acquisitions. I would not want to cross her:
It seems that Greene’s reputation was built not only on her having an incredibly sharp eye, but also on an overwhelming and impossible-to-ignore demeanor at auction. Her methods could be considered brash and unconventional, especially for a young woman at the time, like spitting on the page of a manuscript to see if pigment would run off revealing a forgery. Greene also did not seem to be intimidated by the great power stemming from J. P. Morgan’s massive fortune; In fact, she used it to full advantage. In the year 1911, the tenacious Greene confidently placed a bid of $50,000 dollars (roughly over $1.75 million today) for Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur on which she had her eyes set. Nevertheless, Greene’s profound knowledge of illuminated manuscripts and determination to amass spectacular pieces despite hefty costs expanded J.P. Morgan’s collection once Greene became the sole buyers of works for the financier.
There's more about her life here, and a link to a book about her. I respect it when people destroy their own papers, but it does make me sad that we can't know more:
The mixed-race daughter of a prominent black rights activist, Greene lived her adult life as a white woman in a controversial practice termed “passing” [as white]. The self-created mystery surrounding her life has made her fascinating from her own lifetime through today. She was cagey about her past, routinely lied about her age, and burned all her personal papers before her death. She never married, but she flirted constantly and had numerous love affairs. She claimed to hate the rich yet was quite happy to work with them, party with them, and befriend them. She lacked a college education, but PhDs deferred to her authority and expertise. She was unafraid to make waves and skillfully outmaneuvered rivals for major acquisitions in the rare books market.
*in case I have not already told you what fake soup is, it's when you make stock in a mug and drink it. So good and so comforting. Try it this evening!
The woman is Marianne Vos, the best female cyclist of all time. The place is the showers below the velodrome in Roubaix, France. This weekend Paris-Roubaix, the greatest and most prestigious one-day bike race, will hold a women’s race for the first time in the race’s 125 year history. Paris-Roubaix is a muddy, desperate battle across cobblestone farm roads in Northern France. The race finishes on an unglamorous cycling track in Roubaix, and the very few who survive the “Hell of the North” (as the race is called) traditionally clean off the grime and mud in these famous concrete showers below the track that drip out a miserly stream of tepid water.
