I didn’t know what I was going to write about today, then The Economist arrived and I read their obituary of Heather Heyer and cried like a lady in a David Lynch film. I love the Economist obituaries for their focus on the everyday of their subjects. That’s especially evident here, as are the consequences of letting our everyday be profaned:
Her way was to stand up loudly for them, and to ask anyone who disagreed why they believed that? And how could they think it? But the sheer size of the white nationalist rally planned for August 12th made her feel, for the first time ever, that she really had to get out in the street. She and her friends could try to spread a different message, that Charlottesville was a place of love. Suddenly, she had to do more than just argue. More than just cry.
Enjoy now an interview with the writer of this and all Economist obituaries, Ann Wroe. A bit of classic The Hairpin to brighten your Friday:
“I don’t think of dead as dead, that’s the thing, and therefore it doesn’t trouble me. It’s an absence, if you like. It’s not the end.” She notes how “I never mention how people die, because I don’t think that’s important at all. I think an obituary is a celebration of a life.”
I’ve been reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which inspired today’s Fem Friday. Important note, my actual favourite “woman in the wilds” book is Tracks by Robyn Davidson, which I strongly recommend. You can buy it now if you want! It’s an easy read and you’ll be done with it over the weekend.
By way of context for what follows, Cheryl Strayed walked a significant chunk of the Pacific Crest Trail, which looks like this on a map:
Let’s start with Catherine Montgomery, who first had the idea for the Pacific Crest Trail. She came from a time when women could be spinsters and hiking was called ‘tramping’, as this charming article details. She made things happen. I like her:
Montgomery found a fellow tramper in Ida Baker, another of the founding faculty. Baker was Montgomery’s best friend, and one of the very few who ever called the stern Montgomery “Kate.” When Baker died in 1921, Montgomery wrote a eulogy for the paper titled “Tramping Together.” “Memories of financial struggle, of trans-continental trips, of farming together, come to me as I recall the locking of Ida Baker’s life with mine, but above all comes the memory of tramping together,” she wrote.
Longtime subscribers will know of my fondness for Margery “ye arn no good wyfe” Kempe, but did you know that she was also a prolific pilgrim, traveling to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Italy and Germany? In the medieval age, this too would have involved a lot of hiking, and in much worse shoes even than Catherine Montgomery wore. Margery also made things happen, over a timeline of 500 years:
"The story goes that when Colonel W Butler Bowdon was looking for a ping-pong bat in a cupboard at his family home near Chesterfield in the early 1930s he came across a pile of old books. Frustrated at the disorder, he threatened to put the whole lot on the bonfire the next day so that bats and balls would be easier to find in future. Luckily a friend advised him to have the books checked by an expert and shortly afterwards Hope Emily Allen identified one as the Book of Margery Kempe," said Sarah J Biggs, from the British Library's medieval team.
Another big thing that Margery Kempe did was cry a lot, and – to bring us back to the Pacific Crest Trail – this is a lovely description of not only the trail itself but the cleansing power of having a massive cry:
There were days when I cried for 10 miles in anger; days when I cursed myself for not standing up for myself and letting myself be treated poorly. I cried in sadness over putting my family member through rehab. I cried for family I had lost, for relationships I could not salvage, and for all the mistakes I had ever made. And, after all those tears, I felt light and relieved. A huge weight had been lifted from my heart and everything going forward was new.
Kind of an abstract theme this morning, I hope you enjoy it. It’s about the bracing moment when you see a situation clearly for the first time.
You might have seen that Maryam Mirzakhani, leading female mathematician, died recently. She was the only woman ever to have won the Fields Medal, which almost all news outlets describe as “the Nobel Prize of maths”. The Fields Medal is much harder to win than a Nobel Prize, though! It’s awarded once every four years and only to people under 40. Back to Maryam Mirzakhani, I love this quotation about how she conceptualised and worked through problems until she had the clarity she was looking for:
The point, she said, was not to write down all the details, but to stay connected with the problem. She also likened mathematical inquiry to being lost in a forest, gathering knowledge to come up with some new tricks, until you suddenly reach a hilltop and “see everything clearly”.
Similarly, the moment of clarity or revelation in this poem by Izumi Shikibu is a delight:
It seemed the plum trees
were already in bloom
but when I picked a branch
what fell—so much like flowers—
was snow.
SOME FACTS about Izumi Shikibu if you want them! She was a court poet in medieval Japan, and one of the Thirty Six Immortals Of Poetry. The internet is pretty well stocked with her poems, so you can have a nice Friday morning google of her works.
Finally, here is a bonus Izumi Shikibu poem. It’s the most emo thing I have ever read, and I say this as someone who recently sang I’m Not Okay (I Promise) thrice at karaoke. I love it, obviously:
I had planned a really in depth Fem Friday this week that was also going to be deeply personal and heartfelt and maybe even moving! But also I read some really funny things on the internet this week and my feelings will for sure keep, so enjoy these and I’ll loop you in re: my emotions next week unless something better comes up.
To start with, though, here are some turn of the century women illustrating ship’s distress signal’s on cigarette cards. These are not intentionally funny, just enjoyable to look at:
This parody of a Lord Byron poem appeared on the internet two days ago and I have already read it in full about seven times, and will probably read it again before I send this newsletter “just to check the link works”. I love laughing at Lord Byron. As usual, fabulous prizes* await subscribers who read all or some of this poem aloud and send me a link to the audio file:
But you should just know, like for the record,
that I actually still love you,
like a lot, like a really incredible amount,
in a way that says more about the kind of person I am
Are you at work? Depending on who can see your screen, you might not want to have Reductress open for all to see, but it is honestly worth switching to your phone for this article on 5 Satisfying Snacks Over 3K Calories. I started laughing normally about one third of the way through and had progressed to an undignified laugh-screech-gurgle by the end:
Cook one whole box of pasta [NOTE FOR EUROPEANS! I imagine this is maybe a kilo] and just leave it in the pot, because you don’t have a bowl big enough to hold it, anyway. That’s 1,520 calories right there—but you’ll need more fuel to get you through that 4 PM conference call! Melt half a pound of Swiss cheese and pour on top of the pasta. Top with 15 slices of crumbled bacon and a generous sprinkling of Parmesan. Now you’re full of zest and pep to get you through the rest of the workday!
I’m currently reading a book about shyness, and whilst it’s not by a woman it is superb and it features a lot of women, so I am taking shyness as my theme for today.
Tove Jansson has certainly featured in this newsletter before, but did you know that she lived on a variety of islands, every time pining for an island more distant than the one she was living on? This short article is about Tove and her partner building a house and a life on an island they bought. It sounds like a very happy sitch, particularly if you are an introvert:
“I suppose I have rarely been as happy as I was during those weeks when the timbers were being put up, we hammered as if our lives depended on it! We slept in the Bredskär cottage (I, discretely in the loft) and early each morning we went over to Haru […] it was a stormy autumn, a constant 6 [or] 7 on the Beaufort scale. Gradually snow began to arrive. I made food for us on Haru, under a tarpaulin, mostly fish.”
Another thing that delights me about this book is that it has introduced me to an author I’ve heard of before only very vaguely – Elizabeth Taylor. She sounds pretty great and I look forward to reading her books, but first, just drink in this quotation about the asocial horrors of her afternoon teas with Ivy Compton-Burnett:
Each luncheon was an awkward and wooden occasion, with Taylor fretting about the flaky pastry from her Banbury cake cascading on to her knees, the shakiness of her hand as she helped herself to raspberry fool or the superannuated cheese her host liked to serve, which made her guests fear that the flat’s dodgy drains had finally given up the ghost. At the end Compton-Burnett would whisper ‘Would you like to…?’, and Taylor would say ‘no’ before hurrying to the ladies at Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge.
This expresses perfectly how I feel when I read Ivy Compton-Burnett books. Perhaps the promise of a trip to a large department store at the end would make them slightly more bearable, but I’m not planning on testing the theory any time soon. As that’s a quotation from the book, there’s no link, but you can enjoy this Atlantic article about Elizabeth Taylor and her works:
the English novel was born and perfected as a means to explore women’s interiority and bourgeois domesticity, and these remain subjects at the heart of the modern experience, to which the novel as a form is ideally suited. Amis responded to a critic who submitted “importance” as a criterion of Taylor’s worth: “Importance isn’t important. Good writing is.” Her prose was at once effervescent and smooth, and its clarity and precision sprang from the astringency of her vision.
Today’s Fem Friday is about where we find joy and how we build it for ourselves.
You might remember that The Underground Girls Of Kabul was one of Fem Friday’s books of the year for 2015 – here is another story of a (in this case Pakistani rather than Afghan) girl passing as a boy, in this case to get amazingly good at squash:
“I know that the higher I go, the greater the risk will be,” says Maria. “But I am from the Wazir tribe and we never give up. I have a very strong faith: if death is going to come – it can come on the road, it can come in bed or it can come from the Taliban – at least I know that I can do this.”
It’s been a while since I featured a long article about Old Hollywood, so I hope you’ll enjoy this one about director Dorothy Arzner. She started directing in the late 1920s and is still Hollywood’s most prolific female film director. I love this quotation about the montages female characters got in the movies of the period:
Arzner argued that the [puritanical Motion Picture Production] Code did force female characters to the centre of the frame: In the Hollywood “women’s film,” they could live wildly, go crazy, abandon their families, even if they had to be destroyed or redeemed by the time credits rolled. Jeanine Basinger’s book A Woman’s View describes the “bliss montage” that interrupts many of these movies: “The leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side … [The Bliss Montage] is a woman’s small piece of action, her marginal territory of joy.”
I also just generally love a montage, so if you have a particular favourite please let me know so I can also watch and enjoy it. Bonus points if it involves tidying.
Treats for all this morning, assuming all of you have felt angry and wanted to act on it before.
Firstly, though, maybe you have already read this article by Jia Tolentino about the how and the why of there being so many fewer deeply personal first person essays on the internet than there were. Like all Jia Tolentino pieces, it’s well written and engaging, but if you don’t have time to click right now, here’s the net net:
What happened? To answer that, it helps to consider what gave rise to the personal essay’s ubiquity in the first place. Around 2008, several factors converged. In preceding years, private blogs and social platforms—LiveJournal, Blogspot, Facebook—trained people to write about their personal lives at length and in public. As Silvia Killingsworth, who was previously the managing editor of The New Yorker and took over the Awl and the Hairpin last year, put it to me, “People love to talk about themselves, and they were given a platform and no rules.”
That said, here’s a really superb example of the personal essay genre – it’s an exciting story about a horrible accident, and a court case, but it’s also a cultural history of anger, particularly (of course) women’s anger:
Anger can quietly highlight how the spectacle of a scene simply requires your removal from it, or it can stir you from a temporary state of suspension. At Old City Hall that day the damp lethargy I’d been content to live in like some swamp creature dissipated, and anger shot up in me like flares out of fog. I’d found it.
Finally, a problem page answer, which is also a personal essay in its own way, and is not even about getting in touch with anger but about getting in touch with “a bit nettled”. This is important too! Who would want to feel a bit nettled constantly!
Would you really keep giving money to a personal trainer you hated, who did not listen to you, who doesn’t help you with your goals? I am fainting at this thought. It seems to me a lot of people go through life like this because it’s just the kind of person they “are” to not “make a fuss.” Per above, you can be whatever you want. Even if you’ve been that person all your life, you can be not that person tomorrow. The world will not end.
Thank you Teasdale for the stellar guest editing last week! Now I'm back and I hope you are looking forward to some links on what people think women do.
To kick us off, let’s have exactly the sort of middlebrow whatnot Fem Friday is built on. I was really interested in this study of how people perceive the time men and women spend talking, although I might write a huffy letter to The Economist to ask why mansplaining is not included as a proper word in their style guide yet:
When they played scripted conversations in which male and female speakers took perfectly balanced speaking times, respondents heard the woman taking 55% of the speaking time (even when the male and female actors swapped scripts). […] In one study, women were more likely to offer reactions (“yeah” or “that’s right”) and men more likely to offer answers. […] this would help explain […] “mansplaining”. If one partner in a conversation is seeking dominance and the other is seeking co-operation, the status-seeker will wind up hearing co-operative conversational turns as submissive. That may explain why people think women talk more: in the stereotype, it seems they are nattering on with no clear purpose.
I’d never noticed this phenomenon before reading this article, but it’s true, there are so often shots of women moisturising their hands or bodies before bed in TV shows! I have done this recently, but only because I’m British and therefore an idiot who gets sunburned every June like I never saw the sun before. Enjoy this primer on the Night Lotion Instagram account:
This is neither death wish on buying Jergens in bulk, nor a critique on moisturizing; we all need a bit of softness in our lives. The problem here is that the lotion, whether sensually applied or rubbed vigorously, is a visual distraction during moments of potential character development and depth. “Is there anything else a woman can do?” Wawerna asks me in giddy exasperation. “Can we just sit with this woman, who’s clearly having a moment with herself, or going through something?”
Finally, if you are not aware of the “Ken of Barbie and Ken is a lesbian” meme, please take this opportunity to acquaint yourself with it. This post gets extremely good around #60 (it’s ordered descending) and maintains the pace:
Stef: girl that mesh top
ken is a go-go dancer at hot rabbit but doesn’t like to talk about it
Jenna: sun sensation ken has definitely been awake for at least 36 hrs and she’s just running on cocaine and glitter
GUEST EDITOR NEWS! I'm delighted to announce that Fem Friday next week will be edited by Jenny Teasdale. Jenny is a dear friend and soon to be former colleague, and I'm really stoked for the sensibility she will bring to Fem Friday; get excited for community engagement, travel, gardening and 🐝s. There has never been a better time to be a subscriber.
In the meantime, enjoy these two articles about women who were hothoused to be funny by their family, in better and worse ways.
First, a long article on The Toast Dot Net and its co-founder, Mallory Ortberg. Her father set up an incentive structure to make sure the children were being funny at dinner, and it obviously works, but when I imagine it there must have been a lot of yelling bon mots increasingly loudly and clearly to be sure that everyone heard and that you were in with the chance of a reward:
But some of The Toast's, and Ortberg's, most salient characteristics came from her parents. "Irreverence was inculcated in our family," says Turner, her sister. At dinner, John paid his kids a dollar for every good joke, and they wandered through riffing narratives together. "They were trying to make that a safe space to say what you're thinking," says Turner.
The Nora Ephron story is quite famous, but to my chagrin I can’t find the article where Nora describes coming home from school with some sort of problem and her mum refuses to listen to her until she (Nora) imposes an interesting narrative structure on said problem. Maybe that didn’t happen, it doesn’t sound like a very nice thing. Perhaps a kinder approach would be to say, you can have my sympathy plus a dollar if you get some narrative technique around this!
Phoebe gave her eldest daughter the now iconic advice, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” […] Nora took her advice. “My mother taught me many things when I was growing up, but the main thing I learned from her is that everything is copy … As a result, I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book—if I could just stop crying.”
I'm Jenny Teasdale, your Feminist Friday guest editor this week. Thanks Alex for letting me take on the task; continually sending you links for inclusion has clearly paid off!
The theme this week is women doing amazing things around the world, despite being told they can't or shouldn't. I hope it serves to inspire you all to do amazing things, wherever you are and whatever people say. Follow your dreams.
First up, how Nikki Misurelli motorcycled 17,500 miles across the world on her own. Why? Well, because a man told her she couldn't do it - red rag to a bull ladies! We all know that feeling.
"He said he wanted to motorcycle all the way from Alaska down to Argentina. I asked if I could go with him but he said no, that it was a 'guys only' trip. 'It's too dangerous and intense,' he said. 'You probably couldn't handle it.' "So we broke up and I went by myself."
I've done a lot of work with teenagers from Afghanistan in the last couple of years. I've loved hearing their strong views and seeing their determination, as well as enjoying the music they've shared with me from their home country, where music is often not allowed. Rap is a big, but new thing for young people in Afghanistan.
Sonita Alizadeh got my attention last year with her song, "Brides for Sale." Having seen her powerful video, I found out more. In this interview, Sonita speaks about her experience and what she wants for the future for all women.
"In my country, a good girl should be silent. A good girl should not talk about her future. A good girl should listen to her family, even if they say you have to marry with him. A good girl means you should be like a doll. Everyone can play with her."
"I had designed a shiny future in my mind for myself and I couldn't believe I had to forget my dreams. I wanted to be an active woman."
And finally, a story from a country I'm visiting in December - Colombia - how 300 women decided to work together to build what is now known as the "City of Women." These quotes say it all:
"Everyone - including our own partners - said that we were crazy. [They told us] that this project was impossible. But we demonstrated that it is possible… It's the only housing project belonging to female victims in the country. It's not just the fact that we have a City of Women, but that it was us who built it. We had to learn about construction, topography… Some women designed the blocks. Others built them."
Let’s start with Catherine Montgomery, who first had the idea for the Pacific Crest Trail. She came from a time when women could be spinsters and hiking was called ‘tramping’, as this charming article details. She made things happen. I like her:
Stef: girl that mesh top
