I hope that you are well and that if – like me – you had your work Christmas party last night I hope that you – unlike me – got more than four hours of sleep. POWERING THROUGH, THOUGH. Here are my albums of the year, don't worry I made this list a couple of weeks ago so it's not just all the albums to make you feel better about temporarily impaired information processing.
I have written about Julien Baker on Fem Fri before, and here is boygenius, her "sad supergroup" with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. There was a period in the late summer when I would listen to this song at least three times a day, it's quite lovely:
Here's what's great about Tracey Thorn, other than her lovely singing voice – it's her gift for singing about her teenage years like she is thoroughly embarrassed by them but also like she is really enjoying remembering them and living through that magic again. This song illustrates that dynamic well, I think, but the whole album is good and you will enjoy it.
More often than not this year, this is the album I've wanted to listen to on Sunday afternoon. It's drifty and elegiac and just a delight from start to finish. This song basically chosen at random, I do recommend listening to the whole thing today (particularly, again, if you have had a Christmas party and can't currently have a little nap)
Sad Afrobeats is a great microgenre and Simmy makes lovely, lovely sad afrobeats. This album is produced by Sun-El Musician, whose music you may have heard, if you enjoyed that certainly jump on this:
Hope you're looking forward to a Fem Fri filled with interesting thinking about the internet, and the often-weird culture that the internet creates!
Jenny Odell is a heroic chronicler of Weird Internet Stuff, please enjoy (perhaps in your lunch break) this long investigation of… I don't really know how to describe this. Fraudulent(ish) Amazon store fronts, a fraudulent (or at least under investigation) university, and real life locations which, if not fraudulent, are so incredibly odd that I feel a bit uncomfortable just reading about them:
“Do you want to check out those books?” the guy asked. No, I said. I wanted to buy them. “Oh!” he said, and then laughed to himself. “That’s right … we’re not a library.”
Hey and WERE YOU AWARE that Jenny Odell is writing a book based on her talk/article How to Do Nothing? I eagerly await it.
Next up we have our first historical analogue, in a highly enjoyable article about selfies in the Paris Review. If you're a bit wary of clicking on this one, don't be, it's light on the "selfies are bad and you should not do them" message that you have read before and are probably a bit zzzed with by now. Instead you get a great woman from history, Mary Morris Knowles, and what her work and self expression might mean for the work and self expression of women in general:
She’s smiling, her eyes are bright and calm. She has a charisma that so often resists artistic capture […] This is a woman who understood the power of her work and the radical nature of depicting herself doing it. The confidence in her gaze weaves its own kind of spell, creating a sense of the artist regarding herself as she actively constructs her self-image. Enmeshed in that self-image, central to it, is the work. The work of the piece and the work within the piece are indistinguishable.
Finally, in another historical analogue, we have Sei Shonagon, author of one of the classics of Heian Japanese literature which is also full of analogues in the modern world. The most obvious comparison is Tumblr, but I have another social network in mind when I read her. I am not going to say that Sei Shonagon invented humblebragging, exactly, but humblebragging certainly found an early perfected form in The Pillow Book:
Often though she dispenses with all pretences at humility! At least 80% of her stories end with a statement that boils down to "and I was very pleased with myself, and so was everyone else". I personally am not at all above concluding anecdotes with the phrase "and then I felt very pleased with myself", and it's good to read a book by a woman who is so clearly not even trying to perform low self esteem. Sei is always prepared say, "I did this thing, and it was good, and I'm happy about that", which is a refreshing message:
The impression Sei gives is of a woman absolutely satisfied, with herself, and with her world — which, it never occurs to her to doubt, is the whole world.
I went to this brilliant exhibition at the British Library this week, if you have the chance I definitely recommend that you go as well. It's maybe of particular interest if you are interested in Old English and illuminated Bibles but there is truly something here for everyone. Let's look at some of the women named in this exhibition!
How about Cynethryth, the only Anglo-Saxon queen to have a coin issued in her name?
Part of the Fem Friday rubric is about celebrating ambitious women, but also celebrating women who make time for the things that matter in their lives. From the below detail, it looks like Cynethryth hit both out of the park, being too busy ruling her kingdom to spend time reading whatever nonsense her correspondents chose to flail together:
Cynethryth must have had a noticeable and prominent place in Offa’s court. There was a cleric, Alcuin of York, who was an English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher. In a letter Alcuin wrote during Offa’s reign, he hints that Cynethryth was too busy with the king’s business to read correspondence.
Here is another queen, Emma, who enjoyed being Queen of England so much she married two kings of England:
Emma was in England during these latest battles, but with Edmund Ironside’s death, she must have been uneasy about her future. This was resolved when it was announced that she and Cnut would marry. Although it is unclear under what circumstances this transpired, it is likely that she did not want to return to Normandy where she would no longer have the prestige that she enjoyed in England.
Finally, some material culture for you in the form of this incredible gospel made of gold and covered in jewels, owned by Judith of Flanders:
Here's more about Judith of Flanders, who for sure did not care about her dad's thoughts on who she should marry:
her father sent her to the Monastery at Senlis, where she was to remain "under his protection and royal episcopal guardianship, with all the honour due to a queen, until such time as, if she could not remain chaste, she might marry in the way the apostle said, that is suitably and legally." Presumably, Charles may have intended to arrange another marriage for his daughter. However, around Christmas 861, Judith eloped with Baldwin, later Count of Flanders. The two were likely married at the monastery of Senlis at this time. The record of the incident in the Annals depicts Judith not as the passive victim of bride theft but as an active agent, eloping at the instigation of Baldwin and apparently with her brother Louis the Stammerer's consent.
We did a board game night at work last night, and it was great. In celebration of this, here's a Fem Fri about women who design board- or card- or, more broadly, not-computer-games.
Firstly, before I started writing, I had no idea that a woman invented Jenga, enduringly fun game for children, adults, and adults in pubs. All the key game demographics. Here's Leslie Scott talking about sticking to your guns:
The first ‘key moment’ came when I refused to allow either Irwin Toy or Hasbro Corporation to drop Jenga as the name of the game. Both companies wished to acquire the rights to the game (Irwin for Canada, Hasbro for the rest of the world) at a time when I was up to my ears in debt from having published and marketed the game for three years entirely on my own. Both companies loved the game, but both ‘hated the name because it didn’t mean anything’. It was a potential deal breaker, but I stuck to my guns.
Here's another loved game that was designed by a woman – it's nerdy favourite Set! You can really crush people emotionally in this game, which is something you only really understand when you play it against someone slightly less good at pattern matching than you. Or when the reverse happens to you. Highly recommended, anyway. Marsha Jean Falco, game designer and geneticist, explains its origins:
The idea for the SET game came when I was trying to understand whether epilepsy in German Shepherds was inherited. To track the individual traits of the dogs, I created file cards with blocks of information for each dog. Because certain blocks of information were the same for many dogs, I drew symbols to represent the information rather than writing out the data each time. […] While explaining the mathematical properties behind the combinations on the file cards to the veterinarians, I saw the fun in finding the different combinations and SET was born. Over the years, I refined the game by playing with my family and friends and SET was finally released in 1990.
Holly Gramazio does all sorts of charming real life games. Definitely not board games but fitting the not-computer brief so I think we are okay. Let's start with an article by Holly! About games and cities:
For game designers who are interested in articulating or exploring a particular place, the attraction of making a game that takes place physically within that space is clear: creating another layer of meaning, a different way of interpreting the streets, drawing players’ attention to things they would never otherwise notice, galvanising activity, bringing people together, taking advantage of the whole real city that is already there and the people within it, and the joy we can feel at the physical pleasures of play.
Holly's game about being a blackbird in London remains entirely delightful. It's on the internet, so technically I suppose a computer game, but it's pretty arty so even if you are not usually a games person I think you will enjoy this one:
HUGE FEM FRIDAY NEWS: friend and subscriber Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has a book out. It is about the development of smart homes from a feminist perspective, so in topic could not be more aligned to the Fem Fri project. If that's all you need to know you can buy it here, and if you want to know more you can hear from Alex herself here:
Many new technologies in fact have productised and individualised a communal experience which would have brought with it many social and psychological benefits. I discuss some of the attempts to re-communalise individual home experiences and their failures […] privacy as we consider it now was a long, slow process of shutting out the world from our own lived experience. Sitting alone at home with the television on, browsing on a phone, like so many elderly people (or teenagers) do, is experiencing the world as we wish to see it, without changing ourselves, nor having to adapt or learn.
I agree with Alex that our current ideas of privacy are newer than we might imagine, but with the caveat that, whilst more people used to know our private information, they were less likely to use that information to plaster our immediate environment with advertising. You know what information is currently considered ripe for weaponising? Periods. Here's an article:
This app wasn’t designed for me. It wasn’t designed for anyone who wants to track their period or general reproductive health. The same is true of almost every menstruation-tracking app: They’re designed for marketers, for men, for hypothetical unborn children, and perhaps weirdest of all, a kind of voluntary surveillance stance.
If you would like a period tracking technology that has been designed by a woman (me) for a woman (also me) just reply to this email and I will send on the Excel file I use with instructions. It's one of the best Excel files I have made and is guaranteed free of commercial messaging.
Of course, information about our financial transactions – like information about our bodies – is top of people's list of "things to keep private". So you might want to check your Venmo settings given the incredible human dramas that Do Thi Duc found as a result of their public-by-default settings:
What Do Thi Duc found was a soap opera-worthy set of stories, with a few specifically standing out: There were what seemed to be couples fighting and flirting, sending messages along with payments and requests like “You don’t love me,” and “I’m waiting for the sugar daddy.”[…] “The moment when I went, ‘Wow this is just unbelievable,’ is when I discovered the stories of the lovers,” Do Thi Duc told me in an email. “Just the intimacy of those conversations—this was definitely not mean to be public. But that also applies to all the stories, this information shouldn’t be that easy accessible.”
Today we celebrate something that I think of as sort of a magical mystery – it’s translating other people’s literary works into another language.
This topic was inspired by this lovely Economist obituary of Anthea Bell. As a reminder, the Economist obituaries are the finest writing you get to read every week, they are written by Ann Wroe and are amazing celebrations of what is weird and interesting about people. Get on this train:
At the desk where she worked in her small house in Cambridge, she looked out at the garden through two panes. One was modern, perfectly transparent; the other old, with small distorting flaws. She felt she was the second, interpreting freely rather than literally. What mattered was to spin the illusion that the books she translated—chiefly from French and German, though she had learned Danish, over a single Christmas, for Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—had originally been written, even thought, in English.
And now – getting a bit topical here – we come to Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante. Ferrante fans, are you excited for the HBO series which is coming this actual month? If you are not a Ferrante fan, she’s been very involved in the TV show so there is reason to believe this will be a great intro to her world. Here’s Ann Goldstein talking about what it is like to inhabit that world:
With The Days of Abandonment, partly because it was the first one and partly because it is so haunting, and it’s so concentrated, I was very upset by it. There were things in it that I think everyone recognizes. Like the scene with the key where she thinks she’s locked herself in—I have trouble with keys. And with something like that, she’s writing your nightmare. Those things really did upset me and haunt me. I identified with the narrator—one naturally identifies to some extent with an “I” female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you’ve gone through it or not. But many times with Ferrante there’s a point where I feel that I wouldn’t do that, so then I would be really upset by thinking, “Oh, what is this person doing, what’s going to happen, where’s she going to go?”
Finally, here’s Katrina Dobson on translating Clarice Lispector, who is influenced by yet more languages. This is why translating is such an incredible thing! How can you convey that! And yet people do:
In translating Clarice Lispector, I thought about her relationship to Portuguese as the child of immigrants who spoke with an accent and who brought other languages into the home—Yiddish and Hebrew. Lispector clearly dominates the Portuguese language in her writing yet makes these deliberate distortions that I feel must have started from having that window onto other languages that comes with being part of a diasporic community.
It’s the Friday closest to Hallowe’en! Long term subscribers will know what that means – it means it’s time for a photograph of Susan Sontag in a bear suit:
Those of you who are going to a party this weekend and have not yet figured out your costume, you could do a lot worse than Susan Sontag in a Bear Suit. Here's a great article about the woman herself:
The point was to be serious about power and serious about pleasure: cherish literature, relish films, challenge domination, release yourself into the rapture of sexual need—but be thorough about it. “Seriousness is really a virtue for me,” Sontag wrote in her journal after a night at the Paris opera. She was twenty-four. Decades later, and months before she died, she mounted a stage in South Africa to declare that all writers should “love words, agonize over sentences,” “pay attention to the world,” and, crucially, “be serious.”
Or here is another costume idea; this photo from the next article, which is about Edith Nesbit. This is not a photo of Edith Nesbit, I confirmed this via reverse image search and deleted my little paragraph about how wow this is heavy Victorian Gothic even for someone who was pretty much a Victorian Goth:
It sounds like E Nesbit's marriage had its horrifying moments, though:
As a person, Nesbit often appeared to be a mass of contradictions. Despite her delicate, Pre-Raphaelite appearance, she smoked like a chimney and was in many other ways amazingly unconventional for a woman of her times (she lived between 1858 and 1924). She was [eighteen and seven months pregnant] when she married and her relationship with her husband, Hubert Bland, was a stormy one. Bland was a noted philanderer and fathered a child with one of Nesbit’s best friends – a child whom she eventually adopted as her own.
Anyway, about Nesbit's achievements – were you aware that she wrote extremely chilling horror stories, along with her delightful children’s books? Here’s one of the classics, Man-size In Marble, as PDF for you to frighten yourself with:
Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a "rational explanation" is required before belief is possible. Let me then, at once, offer the "rational explanation" which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life's tragedy. It is held that we were "under a delusion," Laura and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis.
Finally, doesn't everyone love lists. Enjoy an Autostraddle list of witches, ranked ascending by lesbianism. You will perhaps be able to guess who number one is, but I won't spoil that for you. Here's Morgan le Fey at number 40:
Most depictions of Morgan le Fey have her in some very strong outfits, and indicate that she is hated and feared by men, which are positive, if vague, indicators of lesbianism. Could also just be indicators of being a powerful witch trying to usurp her brother’s prophesied throne though! Tough call here.
A history focus for today, as we turn to the Silk Road. Lots of great women on the Silk Road, including longtime Fem Fri heroine Sorghaghtani Beki, and for today we have two historical women and one modern woman.
Starting with history, how about Empress Irene of Byzantium, at the westernmost limit of the Silk Road. She was key in promoting and expanding the silk industry in the area but for whatever reason articles about her tend to focus on her wresting power from her own son when he acted like he… actually wanted to rule as Emperor rather than letting her do the hard stuff for him? Anyway, that’s what this next article is about rather than the development of the silk industry. I’m not above sensationalism:
Irene and Constantine had to leave the city for a safer hideout, giving Staurakios time to counter-plot. He stirred up Irene to punish her son’s co-conspirators and to reprimand Constantine. Irene locked her son up for several days and Constantine was still no closer to his rightful place as ruler. Their relationship went downhill from there.
Further east, we find Princess Wencheng – apparently one of the lesser princesses of the time, but who is laughing now because she was instrumental in developing the Tibetan writing system amongst many other achievements. Really making the most of being married off to an emperor for diplomatic reasons. I would probably just sulk and form little alliances with his other wives. Way to rise above the situation, Wencheng:
She arrived with the intent of introducing new agricultural methods. Seeds of grains and rapeseed which can adapt to high altitude climates were planted by Chinese craftsmen. Hoe plows, and other farm tools, and technical advice to on how to increase Tibetan agricultural productivity appeared. Han artisans also were brought to pass on their skills in metallurgy, farming, weaving, construction, and the manufacture of paper and ink. Wencheng is also credited with helping to developed Tibetan alphabet and writing.
Finally, you know how sometimes you don’t look at the notes in your phone for ages, and then you do and you have absolutely no memory of why you wrote that down or what it means? Imagine my delight to find that in fact the only thing in my Notes app was the words “abigail lost libraries” – I’d clearly been having a great chat because a search brought up this cool project – Abigail Reynolds went on a road trip to research and photograph the lost libraries of the Silk Road:
About six months ago I spent a few weeks intensively researching the lost libraries of the Silk Road from my home in Cornwall, England. I wrote to countless academics, scoured museum websites, and eventually identified 16. That is, I found 16 names, histories, and basic locations.
Let's talk about fighting! It seems to come up a bit around here so I clearly like it. Here are women – and groups of women – who learned to fight with the tools available to them. Their bodies and their fiction and their ecstatic visions. Prepare to be delighted.
First up – bodies, and a brilliant new (to me) portmanteau word. SUFFRAJITSU. Ju-jitsu, based on using the other person’s strength against them, was a great martial art for the suffragist movement:
"They wouldn't have expected in those days that women could respond physically to that kind of action, let alone put up effective resistance," says Martin Dixon, chairman of the British Jiu-Jitsu Association. "It was an ideal way for them to handle being grabbed while in a crowd situation."
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun left academia because it was too misogynist and started writing mystery novels as Amanda Cross. One can only assume this allowed her both to make more money and be less frustrated. Not least because she could write all of her former colleagues into her books, including renowned Middle Eastern Studies professor Edward Said, who she depicted being thrown out of a window and then hotly denied it was Edward Said. I refuse to believe this. And for some reason I have a strong desire to see a picture of Edward Said being pitched out of a window, if you draw one please send it to me and I’ll feature it next week if you want.
Even colleagues who insist they've never read an Amanda Cross book ("well, maybe skimmed") still know their criminal geography, confidently pointing out the hallway where the bull terrier Jocasta considers losing her lunch in "Death in a Tenured Position," or the window from which a professor of Middle Eastern studies is tossed, to widespread rejoicing, in "A Trap for Fools." ("No, the victim is not Edward Said," says Heilbrun, with the patience of one who has fielded the question many times.)
Finally, ecstatic visions! There will always be space for female mystics in Fem Fri, here’s Anna Trapnell:
In 1654, when Trapnell was in her twenties—the exact year of her birth being unknown—she traveled to Bridewell Palace and sat in ecstatic vigil against the increasingly tyrannical theocracy of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. She spent twelve days in a trance, speaking paradox and poetry, prophecy and prayer, predicting the collapse of the government so many had initially welcomed after monarchical absolutism. Attended by non-conformists, dictating to an amanuensis, Trapnell repeated prayers like “The Voice and Spirit have made a league / Against Cromwel and his men, / Never to leave its witness till / It hath broken all of them.” She was apprehended and put on trial for witchcraft, but against all our presumptions of her era she beat the charge. She was simply too popular, too brilliant, too powerful for the state to end her ministry.
Happy Friday! I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, which is about work by and for women’s hands.
Let’s kick off with the illustrator Tom Seidman Freud, who developed a lovely illustration technique involving hand colouring on stencil. FYI if you want to click through on this, it is a very sad story, so if you’re feeling fragile today just enjoy this illustration for a children’s Hebrew alphabet book:
Tom was born in Austria in 1892 into the assimilated bourgeois Jewish Freud family. Her given name was Marta Gertrud, but at age fifteen she chose to be called by the name “Tom.” The family wandered from Berlin to London, where Tom studied art. When she returned to Germany, she continued her studies in Munich where she published her first book of poems featuring her own illustrations.
There’s a mini-genre of photo that I’ve not featured in Fem Fri in ages, which is women operating industrial machinery. This ends today with these photos of women welding Waterloo Bridge. And there’s more in the accompanying article!
By the time war broke out in 1939, 500 men were reportedly working on the bridge; by 1941, that number had dropped to 50. And so, as with other wartime labor shortages, the contractor, Peter Lind & Company, drafted in women to do the work. According to the U.K.-based Women’s Engineering Society, around 350 women worked on Waterloo Bridge.
Finally, enjoy the work of jeweller Ebba Goring, who makes pieces based on traditional handicrafts like crochet and knitting. So every ring is made for hands, and by hand. Here’s the full (I mean, to the extent that anything on Instagram can be “full”, I expect there were a load of boring bits in between as well) journey from design to making to the final piece:
And here’s a nice interview with Ebba about the materials and traditions she works with:
All my jewellery designs are inspired by a love of traditional needlework, and a passion to translate textile skills – handed down from generation to generation – into a material that will preserve them forever. I’m fascinated by changing the nature of a material. My designs start off in cotton thread, something that is malleable and perishable, but then I cast it in silver or gold and the piece become something that could last forever.
