I'm currently reading Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is about being at university and which makes me feel like Sally Rooney is having a good old stir around in all of the pond mulch at the bottom of my psyche. It's great! If you aren't reading it because of that sniffy LRB review that compared it unfavourable to Conversations With Friends, I might actually be liking it more.
Anyway, thinking as I am about university, here's a Fem Fri about women of incredible scholarly achievement. The sort of bread and butter of Fem Friday.
Let's start with Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the oldest continually operating institute of higher education in the world. This is the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco in 859. Indirectly, it's the teaching of this University that speeded the adoption of the Arabic numbering system in Europe! Here's more about Fatima herself:
We know little about Fatima. Kairouan was a center of learning, and we know that Fatima was well educated. We know that her father did very well as a merchant in Fez, and that she and her sister inherited quite a sum. We know that she was married, and then widowed, all of which left her a wealthy, educated woman with control over how her wealth was to be spent (which was a significantly more likely combination in the Islamic world than it was in Europe in the 800s AD).
Probably right now you are thinking, universities are cool, but what about the world's oldest continually operating library? I guess what you are looking for is St Catherine's Monastery, and here's Giulia Rossetto who is doing unbelievably exciting work on the ancient manuscripts it holds:
The style of the script suggested that it was probably written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, and Rossetto expected another Christian text. Instead, she began to see names from mythology: Persephone, Zeus, Dionysus. The lost writing was classical Greek. There was no internet connection on the train. But as soon as she got home, Rossetto rushed to her computer to check her transcription against known classical texts. “I tried different combinations, and there was nothing,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is something new.’”
I'm not done with St Catherine's Monastery, because the first travel book was written by Egeria, who wrote about her pilgrimage to the monastery to her friends at home. I hope you enjoy this blog post about mapping her pilgrimage route and the inherent ambiguities of doing such a thing:
The geography detailed in Egeria’s extraordinary itinerary letters help us to reconstruct the broader network of movement amongst pilgrims in the late antique Mediterranean. Her itinerary, along with earlier itineraries such as the Itinerarium Burdigalense (Bordeaux Itinerary) of ca.333, together give us a good idea of the pilgrimage routes regularly used in the fourth century by both men and women. With the advent of GIS, there has been a push to map these pilgrimage routes, which in their original formats formed a textual list rather than a geospatial visualization.
How is it going? Hope you're well. Today's Fem Fri comes from a charm bracelet I inherited from my mum. The name of the charm bracelet was Spiney Norman, because of this little fella:
When I was young, sometimes I'd sit with my mum on my parent's bed and she'd take it out of her jewellery box and talk me through the charms and the stories behind them. Eventually, I would know all the stories from having heard them several times before, and she knew that, but I would always ask about the same ones, and she would tell the same stories, and to think of that now is one of my happiest memories.
After my mother died, for a long time I wouldn't wear any of her jewellery. Spiney Norman was the first thing I started wearing again, and something happened that I hadn't expected (why?) – people asked me about the stories behind the charms. It felt like this really beautiful connection with my mother, firstly to be wearing so much of the story of her early life around my wrist, but secondly to be doing with someone else exactly what she did with me; twisting a bracelet around my wrist and saying "ah, this one – look at this one – so this one is…"
I thought it might be nice for us to talk through some of the charms together today. I hope you enjoy this.
My parents met in Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast. I don't know when my mum acquired this charm – maybe when they went back there the year after they met – but I really like the little boat. Here's Olive Edis, war photographer, innovator and Sheringham native:
Olive Edis (1876 – 1955) [Fig. 1] was one of the most successful portraitists of her day. Starting out in 1905 photographing fishermen with her sister in their Norfolk studio, over the course of Edis’s career suffragettes, authors, politicians and even royalty sat in front of her camera. During the First World War Edis was commissioned by the National (now Imperial) War Museum to photograph the British women’s services in France and Flanders […]. The documentary photographs that Edis produced of women at work obliquely speak of the devastating impact of war on human lives and the natural environment. We see these women, impeccable in their uniforms, looking responsible, industrious, stoic, not stopping to mourn for there was work to be done.
Here's a charm that my mum must have got from her parents or my dad's when they got married.
Look, when you open it up there are wee people in the church getting married!
Let's remember that Sarah Losh, with no architectural training at all, designed a beautiful church:
St Mary’s was built between 1840 and 1842 under the personal direction of Sarah Losh. She based the form of the church on a Roman basilica, a rectangular nave with a semicircular apse, a building type that was used by the first Christians for worship and which Sarah had seen on her ‘grand tour’ of the Continent.
This was always one of my favourites. It would have marked when my mum got pregnant with me, because it is the old woman who lived in a shoe and who had so many children she didn't know what to do:
Again, check it out, you can see all the children!
Here's an article on reading again after having children. The short answer is, it's quite difficult. If you are thinking about reading again after having children, let me know if this resonates. I've obviously chosen the dreamiest pullquote, most of it is more practical than this:
Sometimes, in the middle of a long Saturday or Sunday at home, I suggest to my toddler that we have “family reading time.” Then I get out about a dozen books for her, and my husband and I each select one of our own books, and we try to sit in silence while my daughter looks at pictures in her books and we read words in ours.
Many thanks to the subscriber who suggested today's topic as today's topic. There should be lots to entertain you throughout as we talk about start ups, but we start with a serious point:
I’m super glad that we’re starting to question some of these practices that I think have been common so long in startups. We’re holding startups and tech companies to a higher standard, but I also want to make sure that this questioning is being applied across the board to all companies.
This gives me an excuse, however flimsy, to tell you some funny stories about the worst CEO I've ever had (a man). Sometimes I think about these things and need to actively remember that they actually happened to me. Anyway let's kick off:
This CEO was very into painting. Some generic AbEx stuff but mostly self portraits. Sometimes when I went to his desk – on an obviously unrelated matter – he would show his horrible paintings. I'd know in my heart that there was only one way to get out of this, but the solution would feel so personally and morally abhorrent that conversation would trail on for up to fifteen minutes before I could bring myself to say "these... are... good" and go back to my desk.
This next article about startups is written by a woman and thus totally on brief for Fem Fri. It's a McSweeney's list, "Are you working at a startup or are you in jail?". The pullquote here is particularly poignant to me as I have just moved teams in my current (excellent) startup:
Regardless of compliance, are you immediately made part of a specific tribe full of others like you? Say, Team BackEnd or Team Marketing, Team West Coast or Team Least Coast. Is it awkward or even dangerous if you have to interact with people from other tribes?
I was chastised in a half-yearly appraisal for not bringing the degree of feminine charm that the CEO had expected of me during my interview process. Although this should not matter, it's important for you to know that I wore a dress and heels every single day that I worked there. This was so that no one knew that I was interviewing for other jobs.
Obviously silly office decor is something we can all enjoy, Chappell Ellison's thread on this topic is a classic:
Now that you know I was wearing heels every day, let me tell you about our standups. For readers who don't work in technology, standups are a sort of meeting you do standing up, so the meeting doesn't run long. A memorable such meeting at this startup that the CEO ran lasted for two hours, until 6.45 in the evening. For those of you who have not stood in place in heels for two hours, what happens is you start wondering when the UN are going to intervene around minute eighty. Also, this whole thing happened on Valentine's Day.
I hope you have enjoyed this newsletter. If you want to know how to avoid horrible startups, a good tip is to not go to places where the CEO calls themself a "Founder". I am also available to talk about this stuff.
Have a lovely weekend, don't think too much about work,
A xx.
BONUS CONTENT:
He called another two hour meeting – although you were allowed to sit down in this one – to talk about his feelings the day Steve Jobs died.
One of the chief joys of writing Fem Fri is when I do an email about a topic and I get an email back from a reader saying, my aunt does this too! The world is full of remarkable aunts. Let's meet some of them today.
We start with Annelia Sargent. Professor Sargent is an astronomer specialising in star formation, winner of the NASA Public Service medal and was a key player in the Obama administration. And also somehow found the time to be Vice President for Student Affairs at Caltech. Honestly, this is so much to do, and she also made time for science, here's an article about one of her and her team's discoveries:
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena last week reported the discovery of a giant disk of gas and dust that shows some of the clearest evidence yet of the early stages of the formation of planetary systems. The disk is more than 10 times the size of the solar system and is rotating around a young, massive star in the constellation Auriga. The star, designated MWC480, is 450 light-years away.
There is maybe some sort of music of the spheres connection here as we move to Leonie Holmes, modern composer. You can listen to one of her compositions here:
If you are at the University of Auckland, you can attend one of her lectures as she is a senior lecturer there. If you are not at the University of Auckland you can enjoy this interview:
I work on bringing out little details to create the right effect, but in quite a subversive way in that you don’t notice them until they are gone. Rhythmic simplicity is key.
Finally, I don't have an interview here, but I'd like you to know about Sister Marisa, another reader's aunt who founded the Marian Co-Educational School in Kolkata to give underprivileged children a good school to go to. No links here, just the opportunity to think about how every day many many aunts are out there doing unambiguously good things for the world.
I hope you have a great weekend. Please continue to tell me about your remarkable relatives.
I've spent most of this week making powerpoints, which as you will know involves considerable staring at a screen. In a fun contrast to this, today's Fem Friday is devoted to noise and light and colour. Lots from various periods of history here, I hope you are looking forward to it. Let's dig in!
We start with Natalie Kalmus, innovator in Technicolor. She has 383 film credits on IMDb between 1928 and 1956, which seems like a tremendously high number. I don't know if I've made 383 powerpoints, I certainly haven't made 383 powerpoints that people will have enjoyed as much as they have enjoyed the work of Natalie Kalmus:
A former art student, Natalie became the ultimate mediator between the lab and the silver screen, unwavering in her commitment to make Technicolor shine. She made decisions about makeup, costumes, sets, and lighting, and even went behind the camera as a cinematographer a few times. She controlled (some say with an iron fist) the aura of Technicolor, describing her role as "playing ringmaster to the rainbow."
Sticking with the artifice of theatre, how about the early modern era? Lots of theatre going on then and lots of women taking part as well, even if famously the female parts tended to be played by men. Enjoy this article on women's noisy voices in the early modern theatre:
“Early modern theaters would have been alive with women’s actions and voices—the cries of orange-women, the dalliances of female spectators, and the songs of Mary Frith,” […] The “most powerful link between these women is that they did not sit silently watching the play.”
Maybe not noisy but certainly consistently stating her point, we have Lal Ded, foremost female rebel saint-poet. What a description. Very hard to choose a pullquote here as there is so much to drink in ("shunned clothing"):
Lal Ded stands as not only a pioneer Kashmiri poet, an intrinsic part of the folk tradition of the region, but also as a foremost female rebel saint-poet. […] Lal Ded was perceived as a threat to the status quo. Married at the age of 12, she suffered unendurable mistreatment and left her marital home to wander the forests of Kashmir. This – along with the fact she shunned clothing – was a bold and transgressive act. She was branded insane in an effort to keep her at a ‘safe’ distance from mainstream society, lest her radical views inspire people to follow her. She cared little about societal restrictions, though, and continued to spread her teachings on life and spirituality. Her vakhs express the soul’s yearnings and are profoundly spiritual in nature, but the language she used to convey her longing for her god remains passionately human.
Happy new year! I hope you had a break, and I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you are pumped for a cool project in the year ahead.
As usual, I have written a review of the books I read over the last year. You will notice, if you read it, that I have supplied various ready-to-go opinions on the Arabian Nights for you to use as needed. There was one I forgot to put in the review, so have it here as a newsletter exclusive:
"There's a reasonable amount of gay stuff in the Arabian Nights!"
This is true. In one story there is just a guy who goes to a bath house, has a gay experience, and enjoys it. Nothing else happens to him and he's never mentioned again. Anyway, here is the Vincennes Review of Books:
[P]art of the joy of the Vincennes Review of Books is sharing some of the more demented ways I think about my cultural throughput over a 12 month period. This year, I’d like to introduce you to the Finchy Line. So named for Chris Finch (bloody good rep) of The Office (UK), who famously read a book a week, the Finchy Line measures exactly what you have just guessed; did I read more than, or less than, a book a week in any given year?
I read fewer than a book a week last year, by the way, in case that changes your mind about whether or not you should read the post.
Here's a good article on the Arabian Nights and the way that the woman who frames the stories, Shaharazad, has been used in popular culture:
Students and scholars in Gender Studies have studied the Arabian Nights by looking at gendered norms over time and place, as well as recasting characters as contemporary figures. This last perspective has also made its way into modern popular culture. The documentary film Scheherazade Diary (2013) tells the stories of several female inmates of a Beirut prison as they embark upon a 10 months drama therapy workshop and share their stories illustrating difficulties women often face in societies governed by entrenched patriarchy. Similarly Scheherazade Tell Me a Story (2009) is an Egyptian film that tells stories of everyday women as they "struggle against legally sanctioned male entitlement."
Finally, it's the time of year for resolutions, and maybe yours is to read from a wider variety of cultures! If yes I have a link for you, here's a woman who read a book from every country in the world and she has done a nice list if you are in need of ideas:
Both expatriate and immigrant authors are okay, but a book by a native or long-term resident is preferred
If no book is available in English, and I cannot read the language, a biography of someone from the country is a poor yet acceptable substitute
There is also a woman who did this project in a year, which is impressive and I respect it. However she also did a TED talk about it, and is the start of the year not cloyingly "inspirational" enough without TED talks? I kind of think it is. If you have done a TED talk, I think you are great. xx
How are you doing, did you have a nice Christmas? I hope so. Now that we are safely settled in the bit of the season where we play mêlée games with the people we love the most, please enjoy the Official Fem Fri Guide to the female playable characters in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate! This is the approximately once a year that I do video games #content and I hope you enjoy it.
Anyway, on with the rankings, which I have split into categories because wow this game has a lot of characters.
Just Playing
19. Jigglypuff
I know that technically a Jigglypuff could be male as well as female, but as Jigglypuffs are 80% female I'm playing the numbers here. Chances are excellent that the Jigglypuff you have on your SSBU install is female and so is mine. Anyway, it's a moot point really, she's a not very effective character as her only move seems to be to make her opponents a bit sleepy.
18. Inkling
Look, this is going to sound a bit prissy, but I just don't like mess very much. Inkling's deal, basically, is making a mess. Other than making her opponents sad that they need to wipe down all of the surfaces when she leaves, it's unclear what sort of damage Inkling actually deals. Certainly not the sort of damage that knocks them flying off the screen, which is the entire point of the game.
17. Lucina
Lucina looks cool, but doesn't have a signature move that is irritating or silly enough to truly engage with. If Lucina has hidden depths that you know about, please tell me. I am open to knowing this character better.
16. Ice Climbers
ICE CLIMBERS!!! The Ice Climbers, a husband and wife team, have the happy to be here vibes that I love in a computer game character. Also the announcer is always very pleased when you choose them. They are, however, extremely difficult to control, and when the husband Ice Climber (Popo) has fallen over the edge, he drags the the wife Ice Climber (Nana) right down with him even if she isn't even close. I had a good run with them when I tested them for this newsletter though! They are fun but inconsistent. Look at their happy little faces:
Tough Ladies
15. Zero Suit Samus
No one is more beleaguered by the gig economy than Samus, and when you play as Zero Suit Samus you are uprooting her from a nice weekend at her mum's, drinking sugary tea and catching up on invoices, to get her to deal with your emergency. And what is your "emergency"? It turns out to be "punching Kirby in the face", which Samus, without any of her equipment (why would she keep a suit at her mum's place) is not necessarily ready for. She is still, honestly, very good, but there are many political as well as practical reasons not to play as Zero Suit Samus.
14. Dark Samus
See that's the good stuff. It's Samus, in slightly more muted clothes than usual, but still fantastic at doing all those Samus things; running, jumping, shooting a guided missile at your opponent. I don't particularly engage with Dark Samus, preferring a brighter colour palette, but you won't go far wrong if you choose her as your fighter.
13. Piranha Plant
Right, yes, as you can see the Piranha Plant is a big angry plant. As a Venus Flytrap she is also a female plant which has earned her inclusion here. She's surprisingly good at jumping and for her smash move, turns into a REALLY big angry baby plant that stabs her opponents from on high. She is one of the characters you pay for, and I'm not going to say it is the best £5.99 you will ever spend, but over the long term she will yield much more fun than, for example, a £5.99 pint of expensive beer.
12. Isabelle
Isabelle is charming. I would visit her café and buy many little cakes there. I would also rely on Isabelle in a combat situation as she has a wee fishing rod that looks innocent but which you can use to wang opponents around and cause quite a lot of damage even to big bads such as Bowser. All while telling you that it's fairtrade coffee that you're drinking, yeah I've even visited the place where they grow it? such a cool experience.
11. Mii Gunner
Look at those empty eyes. This is not a woman who has thought of anything other than being great at shooting for some time. Practice makes perfect, clearly, because I had a terrific fight as the Mii Gunner.
YOU ARE MY PRINCESS
10. Zelda
I have just learned that Zelda, the princess in the Legend of Zelda games, is so named because of Zelda Fitzgerald! I like her even more now. In common with most of the princesses in mêlée games, she is beautiful, elegant and highly effective. Looks dreamy rather than triumphal when she wins, which I respect.
9. Daisy
If there's one thing worse than losing at Smash Brothers, it's losing at Smash Brothers while an unconcerned princess festoons you with flowers. Great work, Daisy.
8. Sheik
Sheik is Princess Zelda in drag, but that doesn't mean she's an echo character! She has her own thing going on, specifically white hair, red eyes and a general air of mystery and cool. I read volume one of the Arabian Nights this year, there is tons of cross dressing there as well. Something to think about and enjoy when you win a game as Sheik.
7. Peach
At least three quarters of this game is psychological, and Peach is a solid winner on that basis. She has a little fight helper in the form of Toad (I love Toad) and when she does her power move the whole game is framed by overdone pink hearts and Peach herself holding an umbrella and looking coy. Then you go in for the finishing smash. Just really great stuff.
Actual Goddesses
6. Palutena
Palutena's entrance is through a door behind which there is, basically, heaven. She is a goddess of light, has beautiful green hair and can hurl pretty much any opponent right the way off the screen and into a KO.
5. Rosalina & Luma
Rosalina is, as I have noted before, an actual goddess with a little fight helper star called Luma. Rosalina does most of the work though, and it's good work. I'm going to be honest with you – I don't really remember what exactly was great about Rosalina, but I did win and I remember it being an extremely decisive victory. Here's some footage:
Feminist Heroes
4. Wii Fit Trainer
Look, I'm as surprised as you are to see the Wii Fit Trainer placing so high. She's just so good at jumping though! Other than the psychological element of freaking your opponent right out, jumping is the most important part of this game, the aim of which is not to be pushed over the edge of wherever you are playing. Also it is quite irritating for your opponent when they play as a jacked dude from Final Fantasy (with a magic sword or whatever) and then find themselves defeated by a personal trainer who is really great at standing on one leg. That, also, is what this game is all about.
3. Samus
Samus is exactly the same as Dark Samus, but in better clothes. Red and gold is such a good colour palette and, in combination with a fighter who won't let you down, an absolute winner. What makes her particularly great is that you don't need to be very good at aiming to shoot your opponent – your missiles follow the fighter you are after so you are in with a chance even if they jump. It's exactly the sort of ruthless efficiency you'd expect from a bounty hunter like Samus.
2. Bayonetta
Imagine a character whose signature move is becoming a big fist. Now imagine that this character looks like a more buff Tina Fey. You just imagined Bayonetta, and as well as all this she can slow down time! It's so much fun to slow down time in Super Smash Brothers because you can just keep thumping and thumping your opponent and there is nothing they can do about it. Hahahaha. Bayonetta is great.
1. Mewtwo
Mewtwo is not female but ungendered, which we celebrate here at Fem Friday. Mewtwo is also, literally, a killing machine. Firstly they are huge, unlike several of the other Pokémon options, and secondly they are psychic type. If you want to mess with the mind of your opponent why would you choose anyone other than the gigantic smooth angry genetically modified cat?
It's the last Friday before Christmas! Here at Fem Fri, that means one thing, which is that it's time for my books of the year. If there is someone in your life who is hard to buy gifts for, try one of these books. If you're not sure what you want for Christmas, try asking for one of these books.
I'm leaning really heavily on non-fiction this year, so if you have particularly enjoyed any novels this year, let me know. I love fiction and made up stories.
Onto 2019 recommendations, though! Let's start with Hannah Ewen's Fangirls. I've already written about this pretty much perfect Fem Friday book – it's funny, detailed, charming and all from the perspectives of women and girls. And it's about music and what it is to love music! Hannah Ewens takes as each chapter a different artist or genre and writes about the women who love that artist and that music, so she covers emo and Courtney Love and Lady Gaga and Harry Styles and so many more artists. It's sympathetic and spiky and fun and you'll love it:
Another book that I've given a whole Fem Fri to already is Sheilah Graham's Beloved Infidel. Remember that although this potentially got published because she was F. Scott Fitzgerald's mistress, it's a true delight to read for reasons completely unrelated to Scott Fitzgerald, who comes off quite poorly in the about half of the book he shows up in. Instead, are you interested in life in an East End orphanage at the turn of the 20th century? Are you interested in social climbing amongst the Mitfords and the Coopers and, no word of a lie, Edward VIII as the Prince of Wales? Or maybe classic Hollywood is more your thing. In any case, you get all of this and more in Sheilah Graham's terrific book. It's only available second hand so buy it for someone you will see after Christmas:
I've read more than usual about linguistics this year, it's been really great. Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet is a particular highlight. She writes about how language, the grammar and conventions that underpin how we talk on the internet work and how they have evolved, including pre-internet informal communications as well. There's an amazing chapter on emojis as gesture, which I think about pretty much every time I use an emoji. It is a pretty good measure of a book, I think, to still be thinking about it almost every day four months after you read it:
My sole fiction recommendation is Ann Quinn's Three, one of the several novellas I read this year. You might not have heard of Ann Quinn, she was a British experimental writer in the 1960s and 1970s and her work is strange and compelling and full of emotional truth. Also not many jokes, but the ones there are are good. Everything I have just said there applies to her novella Three, a multi-voiced book about a couple unpicking what happened with their recent lodger. It's pretty dark, but if you are up for that I think you will really like it:
Finally, it's the most wonderful time of the year for men here at Fem Friday. This year's recipient of the "Fem Fri Best Book I Read By a Man Award" is Alex Ross, for The Rest is Noise. I've always loved music and, having no particular talent for playing it, had always thought that understanding music properly was a door that was locked to me forever. The Rest is Noise is the book that showed me that this did not have to be the case. It's a history of the 20th century through its classical music, and it really opened out music theory for me. It's an joyful read and it inspired me to do an Open University introductory course in music theory, which I also recommend. This was a really huge book for me this year and if you've thought of reading it and not done that yet, put it off no longer! I'd love to chat about it with you:
This has been, at least, a great year for music. Let's enjoy some highlights together in this Fem Fri of 2019 albums of the year.
Firstly, Holly Herndon's Proto is terrific. She made an AI (called Spawn, she/her) to collaborate with her and trained it with loads of workshops so it's not just a dry project but also has been made with the help of a community. She's still training her AI too! I went to see her live this year and she said, help me to train Spawn. One of her choir would sing a line, then the audience would sign it back, and it was all recorded for Spawn. It sounded amazing and was a beautiful communal experience to sing with everyone and, together, be a part of Holly Herndon's music in the future. Here's Eternal from the LP:
From the charming and arty to the purely charming, I loved Hatchie's dreamy nu-shoegaze this year. If you want to listen to 45 minutes of sweet, warm music, I can't recommend her album, Keepsake, highly enough. Here's Stay With Me, you will love it:
It's very likely that someone else has already recommended Sudan Archives to you, and if you have not listened to her album, Athena yet then definitely make the time for that today. We're back to arty here, and it's also spiky and fun to listen to. Here's Glorious:
I know I recommended The Japanese House earlier in the year, and I still love her album, Good at Falling. Lilo gets a lot of love but my favourite track, and the one I commend to you here, is Follow My Girl. But the whole thing is great! Listen to Follow My Girl then listen to the whole LP:
Finally, this is an album by men that I am about to recommend to you, if you're not up for that then cool but for me, Copeland's Blushing is a perfect album. It's hazy and dreamy and romantic and diffuse and yes okay you need to listen to it about four times before it clicks but when it clicks, it really really clicks. I highly recommend that you listen to this LP four or five times today but at least to start with here's Night Figures:
This week I was hit in the face by a man! Don't worry I'm fine and it was a mistake – basically I was behind a man who was asking the staff at the station a question, and he gesticulated "that way?" quite expansively, and his hand hit my face with the full force of a quite expansive gesture.
Naturally he apologised very profusely, and because I was confused (I had not expected to be hit in the face) I apologised at least three times as profusely as he did.
Point here is that it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, because now you are going to enjoy reading about some women who would very much not have apologised in that situation.
Here's an article by Anna Freeman, who wrote a novel about a woman pugilist in Georgian England. It's all based on things that did happen in that era! Some good sniping at one another in adverts here:
The section that caught my imagination was a paragraph about 18th-century female prize-fighters. The book reproduced an advert from 1728 that a woman by the name of Ann Field had placed in The Daily Post, challenging Elizabeth Stokes to fight her:
“I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass driver, well-known for my abilities in my own defence… having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing, for 10 pounds…”
That article also mentions Lady Barrymore, "The Boxing Baroness". I love doing research for this newsletter because it has me reading things I would never otherwise have found – in this case, a blog about Staffordshire figurines – anyway, lots of great Lady Barrymore facts here:
It must have been true love for in June, 1792, the couple claimed to have eloped to Gretna Green. Seems they may never have reached Scotland but perhaps they were married soon after. The new Lady Barrymore enjoyed sparring with her husband—bare-fisted, as was the practice in those days.
It's not only women boxing for sport and fun that has a cool history, check out this interview with Dr Wendy Rouse who has written a book on the history of the women's self defence movement:
First-wave feminists sought to raise awareness about the sexual harassment and violence that women faced on the street, at work, and in the home. Advocates of self-defense insisted that all women should learn boxing or jiu-jitsu not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically for the political battles that lay ahead. Women expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through their physical training in self-defense that helped them resist harassment, assault, sexism, and disfranchisement. Women’s self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented women from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.
My parents met in Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast. I don't know when my mum acquired this charm – maybe when they went back there the year after they met – but I really like the little boat. Here's Olive Edis, war photographer, innovator and Sheringham native:
