Paris! What a city. Enjoy some stories of women who have created a life for themselves in this amazing place.
To begin, Meta Vauz Warrick Fuller, who took the time honoured route of leaving her bourgeois family to be an artist in Paris. Here is one of her sculptures:
And here is her story:
Making her arrival in Paris […] she attended classes at Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts, became somewhat of a darling of the Parisian art community, was invited to present her works in several esteemed salons, gained well-known patrons […], and was personally invited by none other than François Auguste René Rodin himself to study as his apprentice during her last year abroad after he beheld some of her works and deemed that she was worthy of his mentorship.
Of course it is very hard to talk about the women of Paris – particularly in a newsletter called Feminist Friday – without talking about Simone de Beauvior. Enjoy this 1974 interview with her, or at least this description of her odd if delightful living situation with Satre:
Looking at Mile. de Beauvoir's life, you see how determinedly she has lived her theories. She met Sartre when she was 20 and he was 23. For 45 years they have seen each other—except on rare occasions—every day, but apart from a short spell immediately after the war when they lived on separate floors in the same hotel, they have never shared a house. They have always addressed each other as vous not tu. A friend tells of visiting them one afternoon in 1948 in the flat Sartre shared with his mother and finding Sartre and Mile. de Beauvoir working in different rooms, like children doing their homework.
More dispatches from the world of bookselling! Sylvia Beach Whitman, like Christina Foyle last week, took over a famous bookstore (Shakespeare & Co) from her father. Unlike Christina Foyle, she seems to have become involved in professionalising the operation:
She has installed a phone and computer (much to her father's disgust), launched a website, and limited the number of people allowed to sleep in the store at one time to six.
Speaking of Christina Foyle, a bit of a follow up from last week. Many, many thanks to the subscriber who sent me their own favourite Christina Foyle urban legends from the bookstore itself. Caveat from both of us, these are for entertainment purposes only and may not be actual truth (but I hope they are):
- in later years her hiring process was: a group of promising people were shuffled into her apartment above the shop, where she was reclining on her chaise longue. She'd ask them if they played any instruments, and anyone who did would be automatically hired. The rest would be shuffled off into another room where the real interview would take place
one time a violinist was fired for stealing. Reinstated at Christina's insistence; "such a talented young man"
she fired an entire department for talking too loudly
it was accepted that, if you had any specialist knowledge – art history, for example – you'd be staffed in a completely different department.
there was one phone line for the store and if you called it you got a message telling you to write in instead.
Today’s Fem Friday is a celebration of the women of New York, and I’d like to start with a MEDIA ALERT for a book that I think you are going to love. Do you remember the toast dot net’s HEY LADIES series? If you do, perhaps you also knew that its creators were writing a book, this is the book I recommend to you today:
Oh and look, the authors – who live in New York – that is the connection to today’s theme – have done a March Madness bracket on the terrible #content people make about/around their weddings:
It’s just disappointing that these are the options we’re faced with. Hey Ladies! and this bracket are both so much about the inescapable basic bitch that lives inside of all of us, like it or not. So when you’re forced to caption a really nice picture of you and your significant other, try coming up with literally anything clever. “Me and Dan on the mountain” kind of sounds like your mom labeling the back of a CVS-printed photo with a Bic pen. But then the other side of the spectrum becomes, “Lookin out into forever with this guy!” :(
Here’s another great New York writer who avoided writing about weddings in the most heartbreaking ways; it’s Edith Wharton! According to this obituary, it was her family – the Joneses – who gave rise to the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”:
Edith, in accordance with the customs of her class, was forbidden to read any novels, until 'the day of my marriage'. Yet, as a child, she was a natural, even compulsive writer, 'making up' incessantly – a solitary, ritualistic, obsessive activity. Her first literary efforts were quelled. Aged 11, she showed her mother a story which began, ' "Oh, how do you, Mrs Brown?" said Mrs Tompkins. "If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room".' 'Never shall I forget', Edith wrote bitterly, 'the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment: "Drawing rooms are always tidy." '
Finally, this is not a literary lady of New York, but it is an amazing one. Sylvia Bloom worked in a law firm as a secretary for 67 years and, when she died, donated $8.2M to charity. I love this:
“She was a secretary in an era when they ran their boss’s lives, including their personal investments […] So when the boss would buy a stock, she would make the purchase for him, and then buy the same stock for herself, but in a smaller amount because she was on a secretary’s salary.” Since Ms. Bloom never talked about this, even to those closest to her, the fact that she had carefully cultivated more than $9 million among three brokerage houses and 11 banks, emerged only at the end of her life.
Last weekend I went to Lindisfarne. If you’ve not been before, I recommend it as it abounds in both rugged beauty and friendly sparrows. I also enjoyed finding out the stories of the women of Lindisfarne and surrounds, presented here for you to enjoy as well.
Lindisfarne Castle was a Tudor fort until a rich publisher bought it as a fun side project to ‘do up’ and make into a summer home. Gertrude Jeykll designed the garden for it, with no apparent regard for convention:
In order to plant the crag on which the castle stands, Gertrude supposedly fired seeds at the rock face from a large fowling gun and lowered a small island boy, 7 year old Harry Walker, in a basket from the Upper Battery to access the difficult ledges.
The Castle also has an Anya Gallaccio installation currently – I’d not been aware of her work before but this installation of 10,000 roses on a gallery floor looks brilliant:
For a small window of time, the piece is a gorgeous display of velvety flowers that viewers will want to reach out and touch. But, the artist is more interested in what happens next. As the roses gradually wither and die, Gallaccio says, “I like the mixture of celebration with death or decay.” The dying flowers are a visual gesture of passion, but the artist doesn't want it to be a sentimental piece. She focuses more on the collaboration between herself and the objects, and enjoys the enigmatic process of natural decay.
Finally, one of the local heroes of the Farne islands is Grace Darling, who rowed out in a storm to save the lives of people from a wrecked paddle steamer. The RNLI’s email address for her museum is AskGraceDarling@rnli.org. I very much want this to be a problem page you can write to in which Grace Darling always suggests the most butch solution possible in your situation.
William thought the sea was too rough for the lifeboat from Seahouses to set out […] He knew the rocks and he knew the tides. Grace pleaded with her father that they both take out the coble to rescue them. Thomasin feared they would both be lost but Grace was already down at the coble [NB this is a little boat, I didn’t know that before last weekend either].
I’ve been reading a lot about the Fitzgeralds lately, and as a result today’s Fem Friday is all about Zelda, who was talented, beautiful and F Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. There are some particularly haunting quotations in this New Yorker story about her ballet career. Something that I think about often is that Zelda started ballet dancing at twenty five and by twenty seven was good enough to join a ballet company. As ballet is usually as something you can only do if you start at three years old, this is very inspiring:
“I’ll tell you about my mother,” Lanahan said of Zelda and Scott’s only child, Scottie Fitzgerald. “She felt her mother’s curse was that she had so much talent it was hard for her to focus on one.” Dancing was an achievement that Zelda wanted completely for herself.
DID YOU NOTICE that Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald called their daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald? I intermittently strongly approve and strongly disapprove of this. Send your thoughts and ideas on the topic to the usual address. If you called your daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald, I think you’re great.
Here’s something else: Zelda’s novel, Save Me The Waltz, about the ballet learning time of her life. If you’ve read Scott’s Tender Is The Night, this covers the same period and I think you’ll really enjoy it. This link isn’t to a proper ebook and you might object strongly to the fact that her main character is called Alabama, I recommend that you ride these objections out:
There is a brightness and bloom over things; she inspects life proudly, as if she walked in a garden forced by herself to grow in the least hospitable of soils. She is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop with marigolds. She wants life to be easy and full of pleasant reminiscences.
Enjoy a lunchtime read of some links about women making art and being a part of a diaspora.
I’m currently reading Nadifa Mohamed’s Orchard of Lost Souls, and it’s great! She was the starting point for this week’s theme. I love the way she talks about the cities of Somalia here – makes them seem beautiful and magical and weird, like the cities in Invisible Cities. Enjoy this interview and I highly recommend her book as well:
But Mohamed speaks of Hargeisa with great affection, as a place in which she feels safer than in London. Indeed, Hargeisa is famous for its safe streets and low level of crime – money changers sit fearlessly behind huge piles of notes unprotected on the roadside and a gold market casually operates in the middle of town: “these feel like secrets, like secrets only people from those places know.”
Here’s an interview with Min Jin Lee about home, cities and diaspora life. As someone who has not moved a lot, I love to read stories of people who have, and the ways they find of fitting in and making their new locations fit them:
In cities, I get to have both the nearness of many people and a kind of particular privacy found only in crowds. I was born in Seoul and have lived in New York, New Haven, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. I feel the pull of suburbs and rural areas, too, but I feel most at home in cities.
Finally, some visual arts for you – here’s susan pui san lok’s work for the Venice Biennale’s Diaspora Pavillon. I promise I tried very hard to find an interview with her, but there was nothing about this piece which is the one I want to show you:
The opening gambit of the show is to make the visitor enter through the glorious golden foil curtains of a work by susan pui san lok. Her sound piece, formed of extracts from songs all with the word ‘gold’ plays you in and instantly everything else you have seen that day is forgotten.
I hope you enjoy today’s tribute to the beautiful city of London and its many awesome women.
Let’s start with the gloriously weird Christina Foyle. Reading this obituary makes me very pleased that I don’t know or work for her but also fills me with delight that she existed and that I can read about her. This pullquote is really the tip of the iceberg, I strongly encourage you to read the whole obituary:
Wealthy and eccentric, she boasted that she had never done her own housework or cooked her own meals, and that she drank only champagne. Even in her last years, she said that she continued to read an entire book every day.
Next up, Nell Gwynne. In these times of heightened excitement about the romantic lives of the Royals, it’s good to remember how that panned out in the 1600s. There is a story I love about Nell Gwynne – not at the below link and in no way verified – please don’t put it in a history essay and then write to me when you get a low mark – anyway, she was at Charles II’s deathbed. And just before he died he said to all of the listening courtiers (and maybe his wife as well?) “let not… my… poor Nellie… starve”. His poor Nellie, who had a clear sense of the side on which her bread was buttered and the likelihood of these deathbed wishes being respected, twisted a bunch of his rings off as soon as he died and absconded to France. Playing the long game, according the below:
During Nell's time at court she also spent a lot less than the others. Her annual expenditure was about £60,000 whereas both Barbara and Louise's was much more. Indeed, Nelly's annual pension was less than the other two also - she was paid approximately £6000 per year, and along side which she also received wine licences for around £8000 per year, along side other such licenses Hopkins reckons she brought in around £30,000 per year. Alongside Barbara's £2.25 million and over £4 million by Louise, it was certainly a very modest amount.
Back in the modern age, one of the things I love about London is how green it is as a city, and here are designer and guerilla gardener Vanessa Harden’s devices that you can use to make it even more colourful:
American installation designer Vanessa Harden […] showed us technical drawings inspired by the glamour of James Bond and Q’s gadgets. Need to dig a furtive planting hole? Mark 2 Agent Deployed Field Augur comes in an elegant handbag. Drill the hole, collect the surplus soil in your bag and hurry away. Device no 2 can be fixed to the side of your shoe to scatter seeds along the bedraggled pavement edges as you walk.
Two links today, and they are both on the topic of fighting, in various ways. Enjoy!
I’ve been waiting for ages for an excuse to show you these pictures of Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac illustrating how to do self defence. She was, apparently, a real pro. Unaccountably, this book is now out of print, but you can enjoy the photographs here:
"On this day of the shoot I was standing in my martial arts training uniform, wearing my Black Belt. Then Stevie appeared, her hair done to resemble the mane of a lion. She was psyched up for some serious photographing."
This account of trying out for Masterchef is quite harrowing. Quite aside from the fact that I am an indifferent cook, I don’t think I’d be very good at this. Have you ever tried out for a reality TV show! Do let me know as I’d love to know what your experience was.
I am not generally fazed by strangers trying to stress me out, but the wranglers and interviewers are pros. […] When contestants talk into the camera in a reality show, they are answering questions that have been carefully and tactically worded to create an interestingly uncomfortable moment […] Why did I decide to use a Japanese mandolin when I had never used one before? Because I wanted to know how it worked just like I wanted to know how a reality TV show worked. But, it turns out solving puzzles with a clock running down while people try to destabilize you is less satisfying on set than in real life.
Lots of cultural treats for you this morning in the form of women pioneers of electronic music. This was a super fun one for me to research so I hope you enjoy them as well.
ARE YOU AWARE of Delia Derbyshire, who arranged the Doctor Who theme tune? If not, this obituary is a lovely tribute to her work and her life, and if yes, please enjoy this lovely tribute to her work and her life:
In the last few years she was beginning once more to take an interest in electronic music, encouraged by a younger generation to whom she had become a cult figure. The technology she had left behind was finally catching up with her vision. One night many years ago, as we left Zinovieff's studio, she paused on Putney bridge. "What we are doing now is not important for itself," she said, "but one day someone might be interested enough to carry things forwards and create something wonderful on these foundations."
Perhaps you were fascinated by her “Dreams” project, in which ordinary people spoke about their dreams. This sort of thing is catnip to me. I found at least some of these on YouTube – we start with “Falling”:
I’ve got a YouTube coming for algorithmic composer Laurie Spiegel as well. Delighted to see that she is also into folk music, too:
Electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel began her musical life as a folk guitar player and has never abandoned that music. But she fell in love with machines the first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University on a field trip there with her high school physics class and has been finding ways to humanize them in her own musical compositions and software development ever since. She sees a lot of common ground between the seemingly oppositional aesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm.
Here she is on video playing a synth in 1977. In her words:
This 1977 tape is one of the earliest examples of purely digital realtime audio synthesis. It manages to achieve an analog synth sounding quality, but it is entirely digital synthesis and signal processing.
Of course, no discussion of women’s contribution to the development of electronic music is complete without Dahpne Oram:
She is credited with the invention of a new form of sound synthesis – Oramics. Not only is this one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, it is noteworthy for being audiovisual in nature – i.e. the composer draws onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlay a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency and duration.
France! What a nation. Here are three things they take extremely seriously in France; language, food, and fine wines. As if by coincidence, today’s Fem Friday covers the French language, food and fine wines.
The inspiration behind today’s theme came from a friend telling me the French for mansplaining: mecspliquer. I didn’t know enough French to properly enjoy this the first time round, so here it it:
Mec = guy
Expliquer = to explain
M’expliquer = explain it to me
In a bonus round, unrelated to feminism or women; if you want to know what they call fake news in France, it’s apparently infaux.
It was only last weekend that I read about Eugénie Brazier of Lyon as the first woman to receive three Michelin stars – apparently that is somewhat disputed, but she was certainly the first woman to receive six Michelin stars (for two restaurants each getting three – this isn’t like when they open a new hotel and say it’s an eight star hotel because the Burj Khalifa is a seven star hotel)
Brazier was awarded those first six stars having been in professional kitchens for just 15 years. She was 38 years old and the chef-owner of two establishments, La Mère Brazier in Lyon and a restaurant at Col de la Luère. In a career that spanned half a century, it’s scrimping to focus solely on that singular achievement. Her two restaurants held six Michelin stars for a total of 20 years. La Mère Brazier held three stars for 28 years.
Finally, fine wines! Isn’t champagne great, and did you know that it was a woman, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, who innovated modern champagne production. Before her, champagne beset by problems created by the dead yeast at the bottom, which sounds unappealing. Barbe-Nicole's story has everything – true love, financial peril, and marketing:
Facing bankruptcy, Barbe-Nicole took a huge business gamble: she knew that the Russian market, as soon as the Napoleonic Wars ended, would be thirsty for the kind of champagne she was making–an extremely sweet champagne that contained nearly 300 grams of sugar (about double that of today’s sweet dessert wines, like a Sauterne) […] There was only one problem: the naval blockades that had crippled commercial shipping during the wars. Barbe-Nicole smuggled the vast majority of her best wine out of France as far as Amsterdam, where it waited for peace to be declared. As soon as peace was declared, the shipment made its way to Russia, beating her competitors by weeks. Soon after her champagne debuted in Russia, Tsar Alexander I announced that it was the only kind that he would drink. Word of his preference spread throughout the Russian court, which was essentially ground-zero for international marketing.
I’m aware that Fem Friday has been a bit home based of late, which is probably because I’ve been home based of late.
This week, though, we start by looking at squatting, which is a particularly difficult way of being home based. This is from a site all about Olive Morris, a black feminist squatter activist to whom a subscriber recently alerted me. She is great:
Liz and Olive resisted several eviction attempts, and were arrested in many occasions. Every time, they went back to the squat and just carried on. The most notorious of the evictions was well documented in the local press. On a January morning of 1973, while Olive was away at work, the police forcefully took Liz from the house and brought her to the police station. When Olive returned to the house, she simply got back in the building. The police came back to take her away too, but Olive climbed onto the roof of the house and from there she harangued the policemen on the street.
About as far away from squats as you can get, here’s some amazing interior design work by Odile Decq (a woman) in an amazing property. I can’t believe that this exists, it is like a mid century modern hobbit house:
Decq, who was named as this year's recipient of the Jane Drew prize for raising the profile of women in architecture, is known for her bold approach to colour with projects like the 2010 glass-covered extension to the Museo d'Arte Contemporanei di Roma, which includes a red lacquered auditorium.
Okay so you probably don’t live either in a squat or in an awesome hobbit house in the south of France but you know what you can do? Invite madness into your home. Reductress shows you how:
Lace curtains add a delicate elegance to any home, and the sheer material makes it almost certain that everyone can see what you’re doing, day and night. Are you ready to upgrade your lifestyle and downgrade your mental health? Here are five lace curtains that will perfectly complement your decor and intermittent bouts of paranoia.
The opening gambit of the show is to make the visitor enter through the glorious golden foil curtains of a work by susan pui san lok. Her sound piece, formed of extracts from songs all with the word ‘gold’ plays you in and instantly everything else you have seen that day is forgotten.
