Has it felt like a long week? Yeah, for me too. Of course last week felt long as well but this week kind of caught me off guard, to the extent that I made other people at work confuse the days as well. Anyway, let's do what we do after a long week and enjoy some art together.
Let's start with Corita Kent, nun and collage/pop artist:
Her posters took the slogans and packaging of corporations and products of the time and repurposed them. In the mid-sixties a series of screenprints used Wonder Bread packaging to look at an everyday foodstuff in a new light. Kent reproduced the packaging in its trademarked bright colours, but inserted other quotes in ways that played off their branding. Where the slogan claimed Wonder Bread ‘helps build strong bodies,’ Kent uses Nehru’s writings on the importance of children’s blindness to barriers of class and caste. In that they may have life (1964) she adds to the bread’s bold packaging quotes from Gandhi: ‘There are so many hungry people that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread’ — and the account of a ‘Kentucky miner’s wife’ about the difficulties of feeding her five hungry children.
Don't worry I didn't forget about you! Just had a busy morning. Here's a Fem Fri of women who stood up for what they believed in in the face of injustice. Real bread and butter Fem Fri stuff, one of them is even a saint.
Let's start with Nonetha, prophetess. She had a series of visions around the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic, resulting in her unifying disparate groups of her people and establishing her own church which afforded high status to women. Obviously the authorities who were working on the principle of divide and conquer hated this, but people loved her and the church she founded exists today:
among her contemporaries, she was revered. She was to attract many local women (especially diviners) to her cause and they soon became prominent in her Church of the Prophetess Nontetha, which still exists today. The church enabled women to articulate gender and generational concerns, while their prophetic role offered the prospect of enhanced status. By the 1920s, Nontetha had gained immense respect in African society, for she was not only a respected seer and herbalist but also a middle-aged and fully initiated woman and household head.
Now here's Walatta Petros, who resisted religious hegemony and won! Her people loved her so much they wrote the first biography/hagiography of an African woman for her, and you can read it too:
The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. When the Jesuits tried to convert the Ethiopians from their ancient form of Christianity, Walatta Petros (1592–1642), a noblewoman and the wife of one of the emperor’s counselors, risked her life by leaving her husband, who supported the conversion effort, and leading the struggle against the Jesuits. After her death, her disciples wrote this book, praising her as a friend of women, a devoted reader, a skilled preacher, and a radical leader. One of the earliest stories of African resistance to European influence, this biography also provides a picture of domestic life, including Walatta Petros’s life-long relationship with a female companion.
How are you faring? Well, I hope. Today I want to share with you some films by Joanna Hogg, whose work I have been enjoying enormously recently. I don't know if you remember or enjoyed films made under or adjacent to the Dogme 95 manifesto. I did and Joanna Hogg's films remind me of the best of those – seethingly awkward actual silences, like dead air, meaningful and desperate glances between characters, high tension hovering in the background. AAAAAAaaahhh they're so good. Let's start with The Souvenir.
This is an autobiographical piece which is, as you might have guessed, fairly excruciating to watch on a number of levels. This is a good interview with the director, in which she talks about memory and objects (the objects she has in her films are perfect):
I didn’t want to have that kind of period detail that was outside of my experience just for the sake of expressing that point in time. Everything that I’ve included in there, in terms of political events, is true to my memory. This relationship I had was tied into some of those events, and even beyond that, they were possibly connected to that person that I was with.
If what you want though is to experience pure discomfort in the knowledge that it's not happening to you, what you want is Archipelago. Here are some stills that illustrate what's going on:
Everyone is wondering when this conversation is going to end:
Anxious hovering:
NO ONE IS HAVING A NICE TIME:
The scene described in this review had me keening with frustration and rage. So good.
In an exquisitely timed and observed scene of escalating embarrassment, they all lunch at the otherwise empty restaurant of a local hotel. Under Cynthia's direction, they change tables until finding the right one and the proper seating order. Then Cynthia, who combines insecurity with social assertion, criticises the food and demands to see the chef.
Heading into autumn/winter reminds me that I slightly regret not getting to see what dumb fashion ideas would have been big this year if we'd been going out and seeing each other. WHAT ABOUT THE SLEEVES. If you're missing this too, how about we look at some fashion through the ages together and imagine what might have been.
Let's start with a primer. I really like this compilation of fashion sketches between 1784 and 1970. Some amazing stuff here. I like how 1926 and 1927 have clearly just met but are really enjoying each other's company:
I'd also forgotten until I looked at these pictures that tuberculosis was extremely trendy in the nineteenth century. Being really thin and pale and wafty, basically. Check out 1809 at the above link for an example, and here's a history of that:
“Between 1780 and 1850, there is an increasing aestheticization of tuberculosis that becomes entwined with feminine beauty,” says Carolyn Day, an assistant professor of history at Furman University in South Carolina and author of the forthcoming book Consumptive Chic: A History of Fashion, Beauty and Disease, which explores how tuberculosis impacted early 19th century British fashion and perceptions of beauty.
Finally, here's what I think (fashion historians please correct me) is universally hailed as the silliest fashion of the last several centuries; it's bustles. Maybe bustles would have been back in fashion this year! We can only guess. Anyway, here's what bustles were made of. I am not sure how women could have sat down in these circumstances:
The slim dresses that lasted until 1883 were swiftly replaced with a totally new style in 1883 when in the UK the bustle reappeared. It had been introduced in Paris 3 years earlier, but had failed to take off. This was a new bustle in a much more exaggerated shape. The bustle consisted of a straw filled cushion sewn into the skirt with a series of steel half hoops inserted in the skirt lining down to the ground. This had the effect of throwing the skirt out almost horizontally from waist level behind. Women appeared to have the hind legs of a horse.
What's up! It's Friday. NO THEME FRIDAY today, just some writing by women I've really enjoyed recently, and I hope you will it too.
As you perhaps know, Rosa Lyster is great. I've recently read her piece on "ultra-humans", or how she imagines a life where you don't think about what people think about you. There's some good stuff about poetry, and also critters, so pretty squarely in the Fem Fri sweet spot:
Imagine! Imagine how much you would get done, how soundly you would sleep. Imagine you were able to counter the question “Do you ever think about how you come across?” with “When did you last win the Olympics?” You would be so rich, and you would never worry about the implications of that either. You would just saunter into a room and charge on up to people. Leave it to them to manage the conversation and chivvy things along. You are just here to be you.
One for the modernists now. Umn, kind of. This Jenny Turner piece on Tolkein has just kept giving:
A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The first is short, elegant, an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.
A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.
Finally, a site that I often turn to on these days of no themes. I laughed so so hard at this Reductress piece:
Approximately seven months into quarantine, Brooklyn resident Lucia Delgado is making the slow transition from thoughtfully baked sourdough loaves and three-course, home-cooked meals to slamming loose ham and flat Diet Cokes five times a day.
I've not had a Diet Coke in so long. The last time I went this long without a Coke was when I was a little child, when my parents would only let me drink it on holidays and I was too young to buy my own. Is it still good? Do write in to let me know.
How's it going? I hope you are alright. I hope everyone you love is alright. You might remember Kerry's excellent Fem Fri on Judith and Holofernes, I thought that this morning you might enjoy firstly revisiting that story and secondly spending a bit of time with Artemisia Gentileschi who has a major new National Gallery exhibition on right now.
Artemisia enjoyed fame and fortune in her own time, which was the tbh not 100% women friendly early modern age. It also appears that she married for love since it certainly wasn't for money or influence. It's nice to read about women doing well, let's do that now:
Artemisia married a little-known Florentine artist, and left Rome for Florence. There she had five children and established herself as an independent artist, becoming the first woman to gain membership to the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in 1616. Artemisia returned to Rome in 1620, by which point she had become an extremely sought-after artist with a “house full of cardinals and princes wanting pictures from her”. […] The last 25 years of her life were spent in Naples, where she had established a successful workshop – an extraordinary achievement considering she wasn’t permanently employed at one royal court, nor did she enjoy the protection of a wealthy, powerful or influential husband.
Okay, but the paintings! These are all stories from the Bible/Apocrypha, let's start with Judith and Holofernes. Quick reminder, the situation here is that the Assyrians, led by Holofernes, are about to destroy Judith's home town. Holofernes, though, is kind of into Judith so invites her to his tent, gets drunk in front of her and passes out (classic move) whereupon, she. Well. Let's allow Artemisia to show us what happens next.
Many pictures of Judith and Holofernes show considerably less effort than this. Artemisia takes care to remind you that Judith is not carving a perfectly cooked turkey here.
How about the story of Susanna and the elders. The text next to this painting in the National Gallery's permanent collection is a quiet masterpiece of understatement, something like "despite having relatively little religious prominence or significance, this story was a favoured subject for wealthy patrons of the arts". The story of Susanna and the elders is the story of a woman being spied on and pressured into sex but standing her ground and winning out. Traditionally artists show the first bit of that story, as Artemisia does:
Finally, here's a story you can read in any Bible today (the others are in the Apocrypha, books of Judith/Daniel respectively if you have a copy) – it's the story of Jael and Sisera! Sisera was an oppressor who sought shelter in the wrong tent; that of Jael, who drove a tent peg through his skull as he slept. Here's Artemisia's rendering of this:
You can also get her picture printed up to mural size. Out to the company who suggested that this would be a good "statement wall" for a hotel room:
How is your day going? Well, I hope. I've been reading a book about teenagers, and didn't know that just riding the railroads was a big teenage activity during the Great Depression. Obviously that culture also included women, so let's have a look at some of the women who hit the road in the early twentieth century.
Let's start with Ethel Lynn, who was an incredibly accomplished woman – a doctor – who decided to hit the road (on a tandem!) when she was diagnosed with the early stages of TB. She wrote an autobiography about it, and if you are a fan of survival or even just making do, you might enjoy building this rocket stove based on her instructions:
Not to be defeated, (after all, how many female physicians were there in her day), she trades her only remaining prized possession, an opera cloak, for a green tandem bicycle. With a hell of a lot more “nerve and grit” than her whiney husband, Dan, she declares they’re riding the bike from Chicago to California. Which they do, with their portable “cooking stove outfit”. […] we can find out how the story ends while we sip on a bit of thin hobo stew that we’re going to make on our home-made tin can rocket stove. Grab your green tandem bike and let’s go!
Oh, my beautiful, my California! The whistle of the quail on the open benches is calling me; the mating songs of the mocking birds vibrate in my heart. Up the wide valley the warm wind sweeps, heavy with the fragrance of blossoming trees; on the uplands brilliant masses of flaming poppies and the silvery blue of slender lupines spread a feast of colour for my weary eyes; oranges blaze out in golden glory against the dark green foliage of the thrifty groves; the deep blue of the cloudless sky seems infinite in depth; and in the purple distance the white-capped peaks of San Bernardino and Grayback rear their lofty heads.
Alas Project Gutenberg does not have Barbara Starke's autobiography, Born In Captivity, sounds like she spent a lot of the experience a bit stressed about where the next bar of soap was coming from which I can understand:
In the 1920s, Barbara Starke (a pseudonym) was on a free-ranging runaway trip at 17, wearing ‘corduroys’ and carrying very little. Despite the clear signal that she was on the road and living rough, she made frequent references to her efforts to stay ‘clean’, to wash her clothes or herself in a stream, or in a host’s bath, whenever the opportunity arose.
How are you doing? I don't have a big theme for this week except that the world is beautiful and here are some links about women who have encountered the beauty of the world in a really significant way.
Let's start with Joan Feynman. I love this story of two siblings who would definitively change physics just dividing their subject up, like this is my side of the car and this is your side of the car and let's agree to stay on our own sides of the car. And they did! Joan made Richard stick to the bargain! And she discovered the science behind the aurora boarealis and aurora australis. Amazing woman:
[A]round 1963, she at Columbia, he at Caltech, Joan Feynman and her brother Richard divvied up the universe. She took auroras, the Northern and Southern Lights that shimmer through the night sky in the highest latitudes. He, nine years older and fast becoming a world star in physics, took all the rest, which was fine with her. The arrangement was serious. When, many years later, Richard was asked to look into auroras, he said he would have to ask Joan’s permission. She said no.
Now, how about Robyn Davidson, who walked 1,700 miles across the interior of Australia. Her book, Tracks, is an incredible story of a flawed person figuring things out for herself, and it's also a love story where she just falls properly in love with her beautiful country. I recommend it to you all. They made a film too, which is covered in this interview, but really you just get the love, thirty years on and still utterly real:
I don’t think I ever became blasé about the landscape. The landscape in the film is beautiful but, frankly, nothing compared to what I saw. It’s an achingly beautiful landscape and incredibly varied.
I'm reading a great book right now, Helen Damon-Moore's Magazines for the Millions, about the development of "women" as a market segment in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. That seems highly specific now that I write it down. One reason why I find it so charming is that when it writes about Louisa Knapp, co-founder and editor of the Ladies Home Journal, it's very clear that she treated the whole enterprise sort of like I treat Fem Fri:
The underlining is not mine. You know that if I had been underlining this paragraph I would have gone nuts on "bee-keepers". 🐝
Anyway, because it's about women in that era, it's really a lot about housework and about how editors and advertisers spoke to women about their work in the home. The author makes the point (with which I agree) that women don't just do what they are told in adverts, but the effect of reading so much about housework is that I just… constantly… feel like I should be doing housework when I read it. So here are some links about the history of housework to make up for the fact that I have not unstacked the dishwasher yet.
On the topic of dishwashers, this article is about the history of advertising labour saving devices. Turns out it's all still work:
The idea that household technology would liberate women from work was never a predominant theme in the ads. Some ads did promise a vacuum that “does all my work” or a sewing machine that relieves “weariness and exhaustion.” But this theme was present in only 13 to 21 percent of the ads in each of the periods Fox studied from 1909 through 1950. In the later periods, between 1969 and 1980, it figured in only 5 to 6 percent.
This feels like a lot of passive consumption, how about developing products for the home! Here's Lucy Maltby, innovator in that space, who made a new department in a glass works and designed a load of products we probably still use today. And she got a PhD for it:
That same year, a young home economics teacher from Mansfield State College approached Corning Glass Works with a proposal to provide an X-ray of the Pyrex customer. Lucy Maltby, a Corning native, was also convinced that companies were ignoring customer needs. She had ideas about how Corning Glass Works could improve its sales by making better Pyrex products and marketing the features that were of most value to customers. Corning executives listened to Maltby’s ideas and soon after, Maltby became Corning’s first director of home economics.
Thank you for being with me as I work through my feelings about the tidiness of my home. The next book I read will be about the invention of adolescence so I guess it's going to be looking a lot less tidy for the next 450 pages.
Good morning! Just. I've been heads down in work this week, but that's fine as it's reminded me of some of the thinking by women about work that I've found useful recently.
Let's start with Meri Williams, whose thinking about "culture add not culture fit" I quote at even the slightest provocation. I've found it really helps to reframe conversations about hiring, at the level of choosing between candidates as well as at the wider level of how you get candidates in. Anyway, this is a whole long, good post and that's the bit that resonated most deeply with me:
Culture add matters a lot more than culture fit. You don't need someone who's just the same as you. "I'm not saying hire people who will cause huge ructions in your team," says Meri, "but someone different enough to add something new."
Of course, you might be reading this and thinking, this is not strictly relevant to me as I don't have a software job. If that is you, there is still something for everyone in this piece by Helen Hou-Sandí on what software teams can learn from music, specifically the practice of masterclasses. If you ever need to give or get feedback, there is lots here that I'm going to be thinking with for a while:
Not only does feedback need to be inclusive of a group while also targeted to each individual, it needs to be clearly contextualized. In music, that means including music history and theory as well – the performance practices of the era, specific notational quirks of the composer, what harmonies are and how do they drive the piece, and limitations of instruments and how they interact together.
Finally, here is someone who is good at presentations – it's friend of Fem Fri Alice Bartlett, who has generously put together advice for all on how to be better at them. It's great and it's funny and you get a sense of how true it is from this slide:
