I went to a conference this week, and I saw one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen, and she is a woman so you get to enjoy her amazing work this Friday as well. Elizabeth Stokoe’s research is on social interaction – the patterns in what people say and how they say it, what patterns are expected and what happens when they break down. What’s really exciting is the richness of her examples. I didn’t go to that conference expecting to hear any of, e.g., police suicide negotiations (it worked out okay btw) or the end of a relationship or enquiries into buying windows, and I certainly wouldn’t have expected to have learned as much as I did from each of those.
You might notice that I don’t feature video very often in Fem Friday, the reason is that I don’t particularly enjoy watching video so I don’t usually have much video to recommend. That being said! If you like me do not like video, I recommend taking a lunchtime to properly watch a couple of these videos of Professor Stokoe's talks as the visuals are important:
On which note! I spoke at the same conference and really enjoyed the experience. If you are organising a conference in Bermuda, feel free to invite me. I will probably say yes. If you similarly like to, or have to, talk and present, enjoy Alice’s blog posts on how to do this well. I really like the point on “power quotes”, which is something I’ve hitherto not thought about systematically enough:
This is the latest I have ever issued a Fem Friday! We moved house today and it took longer than I thought it would. NB I know it always takes longer than you think it will. Let me know if you want recommendations for a removal firm in London though! We were delighted with ours, and thank you to the friend and subscriber who recommended them.
ANYWAY in anticipation of this event I looked up some stuff about Edith Wharton because were you aware that Edith Wharton wrote a big book on interior decorating?
Wharton and Codman took a reformist stance, suggesting that clients stop treating the interiors and the exteriors of their houses as separate projects and start seeking more simplicity and less ornament. Wharton had an opportunity to play architect and decorator herself in Lenox, Massachusetts, where (with the help of professionals) she built the Mount, a Georgian mansion with a cascade of beautiful gardens. She wrote to her sometime lover Morton Fullerton, “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth… ”
Then I stopped thinking about interior decor and private lives and we turn instead to this article on a woman who is running a restaurant in a refugee camp in South Sudan:
A restaurant like Rosa’s relies on those outside business owners to bring literal currency into the economy. Cash is scarce in Yida, and most of the settlement’s residents are largely self-sufficient. Beyond the outsider entrepreneurs, only those who work in cash businesses as traders or vendors — or those who happen to luck into an NGO position and earn a stipend — have money, and can shop or dine in the market. When I visited, all the money Rosa earned went directly back into supplies and ingredients for her fledgling operation, but she hoped to eventually earn enough to improve her family’s quality of life.
Also on public spaces, it might just be that it's a heightened emotional time for me but I cried on reading this article on a piece of public/performance art about holding hands:
For the past five years, I have been touring Walking:Holding, which takes one audience member at a time on a walk through their town or city, and invites them to hold hands with six different individuals along the way. The hand-holders are local participants who range in age, gender, race, sexuality and background. The idea is to give people an opportunity to experience their hometown from someone else’s perspective; and to see what can happen when you share an intimate act with a complete stranger.
Perhaps you have seen around or read this article in which Sara Benincasa responds to an anonymous internet commenter who asks her why she gained weight. If you’ve not read it, it’s definitely worthwhile to do so. It also makes me feel totally inadequate, but for non weight related reasons, as she says it took her ten minutes to write this post and it takes me half an hour minimum to write Fem Friday which, you will note, is usually at least 65% copy-pasted from things other people have written. Anyway, I thought this bit was lovely:
People kept on asking to be my friend, hiring me to do stuff, inviting me places, asking me to work on stuff with them, hugging me and looking after me when I was sad and checking me on my bullshit when I did something stupid. They’d tell me they loved me no matter what. They meant it, too. And I share your astonishment at this. I really do.
Moving from the particular to the Platonic, the LRB did an article about Iris Murdoch! I hadn’t really felt up to reading our copy of the LRB so was delighted, this morning, to find that it aligns nearly 100% to my interests. If you have yet to read any Iris, here are my recommendations (in order) to get you started:
The Black Prince
The Bell
The Red And The Green
A Severed Head
The Sea, the Sea
Onto the review:
Sometimes her novels read as though a French farce were being redescribed by Sartre. Sometimes Hugo (as it were) pitches up for no apparent reason other than to tell the protagonist he needs to sort out his karma, and everyone suddenly falls in love. At these moments it’s hard to tell if Murdoch’s fictional tongue is in her cheek, or if it’s just poor engineering in the plot, over which she laboured with less care than she did over representing material actions, or some deeper failure to recognise that people usually do things for some kind of reason.
The LRB also has a long article on TS Eliot, with lots of words used on my favourite poem. You will note that TS Eliot is not a woman so instead here is a Margaret Atwood poem on similar themes which is also excellent:
This is the 100th Fem Friday, so as a treat you get an emoji in the subject line and some links totally unrelated to the number 100. Today’s links are about or related to being a teenager, which you may remember with either affection or hatred but I hope these links make you smile today.
Let’s start with an oral history of all-time classic high school film Mean Girls. I don’t want to give away the great lines in this piece, but there are many and I strongly encourage you to click and read. It’s also possible that you’ve not watched Mean Girls recently enough, so consider that possibility when making your plans for the evening:
“[The hair stylist] had worked on really big films that had been shot in Toronto. I remember asking her, ‘How do you think this movie is going to fare?’ and she said, ‘Come on. It’s called Mean Girls and it’s starring Lindsay Lohan. It’s going straight to DVD.’”
Here’s an article about being Best Friends, which is still one of my favourite topics:
People talk a lot about whether men and women can be friends, as though the difficulty of friendship stopped there, as though the same question shouldn’t be asked about all friendship—can two women be friends, can two people be friends, can two teenage kids be friends right at the gateway to an adult kind of want[…]?
Perhaps you are going dancing tonight! If so enjoy, and please also enjoy these articles on other women dancers.
If there’s one thing I love it’s the articles you get when people who go undercover in mildly or extremely cultlike environments. As you might expect, this piece in Harper’s about the fourth annual Spirit Weavers Gathering does not disappoint at any turn. Every sentence is a gift, please get a cup of tea and enjoy:
Every night, as I am about to sleep, someone is "called" to start drumming. One night I rose from my tent to go see what the racket was about, and saw women drumming, naked and primal and dancing around the fire, like a Goya painting come to life. I was annoyed because I wanted to sleep, but also because the aesthetic of the wild woman reconnecting with the Earth hadn't changed since the goddess festivals I attended in the early '90s with my mother.
This is a story I think about often, because I find it very inspiring. If you’ve met me you’ve probably heard me say “DID YOU KNOW Zelda Fitzgerald took up ballet in her late twenties* and got good enough at it to dance professionally?”. She did:
When Zelda Fitzgerald started ballet lessons she was 27 years old and determined to become a professional dancer. As the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she had lived in The Great Gatsby author’s shadow for almost a decade. Dancing, for her, was not just a hobby – it was the only way she could have a life of her own. [… Dance teacher] Egorova was impressed by Zelda’s ability. She said that although Zelda started too late to equal stars such as Nemtchinova, she could still dance important roles with great success. On her recommendation, Zelda was asked to join an Italian dance company. But despite the prospect of a monthly salary, Zelda turned the offer down, apparently afraid of the very independence she had so long sought.
We close with the story of Loie Fuller, pioneer of modern dance. She wasn’t classically trained but she created an art form and inspired the creators of many others:
I wanted to create a new form of art, an art completely irrelevant to the usual theories, an art giving to the soul and the senses at the same time complete delight, where reality and dream, light and sound, movement and rhythm form an exciting unity […] For this ideal I am drawn most particularly to modern music where so much pictorial orchestration opens such an enormous field to magical lighting that imagination directs me to unceasing innovation.
DID YOU KNOW that using gas to heat homes was invented in 1919 by Alice H Parker, an African-American woman from New Jersey? I for sure didn’t, but I have only the haziest of ideas how gas gets from a pipe to a home so I’m not really an expert in the space:
In the early 20th Century, Parker graduated from Howard University with honors in an era when few African Americans - let alone African American women - were college educated. Not much is known of Parker's life. But we know she grew tired of the cold Morristown winters and the limited effectiveness of fireplaces in warming her home, not to mention the residual smoke and ash fireplaces created.
This week is also the first time I found out about Lillian Friedman, the first American woman to be a studio animator. Some nice gifs under the link, so I strongly encourage you to click:
After a few months, Shamus Culhane, ‘a very fussy animator,’ liked her work so much that he made her his assistant in February 1932. ‘This required,’ she recalls, ‘some very strong persuasion, or as he put it, yelling and screaming. Culhane taught me a great deal about animation, but his greatest contribution was that he encouraged me for the first time to aspire to become an animator.’
Finally, please enjoy this article about Equity, a film about women on Wall Street that is mostly funded by women on Wall Street:
With “Equity,” a financial thriller that opens Friday, July 29, Ms. Thomas and Ms. Reiner, co-stars and producers of the film, set out to portray the women who take that as an unapologetic stance. In an unusual move, they also sought out those women to finance their work: Much of their budget was raised from 25 female investors, including current and former Wall Streeters, who also shared their own war stories of working in a male-dominated industry. While there are more female financiers now on Wall Street than in generations past, their numbers drop precipitously in the upper reaches of the business, and there has never been a female chief executive of a major investment bank.
All of today’s artists, I found out about via the excellent women’s art twitter account. I strongly recommend that you follow it! What I like about these artists is how tied to their environments their work is, particularly that of Edith Meusnier:
I do not have a studio and my work is seasonal. In winter I plait inside the house, and I go out as soon as time permits. In sprang, I use an old ladder to reach my threads and unroll as I need them. I rarely reuse the same module twice. I consider my work as ephemeral and do not keep it. I like to take my time, patiently plaiting, testing the resistance of structures to the elements, then take the final installation to discover a region and its people.
Kenojuak Ashevak created many lovely pictures, particularly of owls:
“There is no word for art. We say it is to transfer from the real to the unreal. I am an owl, and I am a happy owl. I like to make people happy and everything happy.”
Finally, if you guessed that this newsletter was heading towards a mediaeval German nun, YOU ARE DEAD RIGHT. One of the first women to create a signed self portrait, Guda put herself inside a big letter in an illuminated manuscript with the inscription "Guda, a sinner, wrote and painted this book.". There is not a lot of Guda #content on the internet so enjoy looking at this picture and – if you have particular expertise in the space – you might enjoy adding to her Wikipedia page:
I hope that you and yours are okay. Today’s Fem Friday is about women and their relationships to cities; founding, theorising, and living in them. I also hope that you enjoy reading it.
Julia Tuttle was the only woman to have founded an American city, and that city was Miami, so pretty much a big deal. It sounds like this took a lot of determination but it all paid off in the end:
Julia DeForest Tuttle, the “Mother of Miami,” is widely recognized as the only female founder of a major American city. The visionary widow from Ohio bought hundreds of acres at what is now Downtown Miami, moved down on a barge, and eventually convinced railroad man Henry Flagler to extend his new railway to the Miami River.
Jane Jacobs didn’t found a city but she wrote a lot about them. If you have not read The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, the thing that I found the loveliest about it was how based around the home it was – everything that she wrote, really, was about the time after all of the men had left for work, and she was shopping and taking her children to the park. Here is her obituary from ten years ago:
Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism – in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.
Olivia Laing has written a whole book about being lonely in cities, and the people who have been lonely in cities in the past. Here is a review of what sounds like a wonderful book:
Recently heartbroken, Laing — approaching her mid-30s, “an age at which female aloneness . . . carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure” — takes up residence in a series of vacant apartments in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side. “What does it feel like to be lonely?” Laing asks. “It feels like being hungry.” And it looks like this: the author wandering the streets alone on Halloween, turning pages in silent archives, crying because she can’t get a set of blinds to close, sprawling on a sublet couch mesmerized by her computer screen. In her public isolation, she resembles, she says, the woman in Hopper’s “Automat.”
Happy Friday. I hope you are excited for the weekend! Enjoy these links about enjoyable yet worrying things to do.
I think that Whimpering Pines Retreat sounds fine and normal, no increase in worry or anxiety from reading this at all:
Beside your potentially insect-ridden bed, you’ll find a number of additional anti-sleep aids. Relaxation tapes include […] “Workplace Faux Pas,” and “Why Did You Say That Thing That Time?” For a small additional fee, the Center can arrange to have your ex text you “How’s it going?” at 2 A.M., and then follow up a few minutes later with, “Sorry, wrong number.” As a final courtesy, the ceiling fan directly above your pillow rotates in a jittery manner that appears slightly unsafe.
If you like both women and medieval warfare, you came to the right news source! Please let me know if you want to watch some jousting this summer. It sounds horrifying but if you want to joust competitively, that glass ceiling is now broken. Many thanks to the friends and subscribers who sent me this:
Dutch jouster Alix van Zijl will also bring her A-game against some dude knights at Castle Bolsover and Castle Carisbrooke. Previously, van Zijl was the only lady jouster in competitions like The Grand Tournament in Sankt Wendel. In a 2012 Jousting Life interview, she said of being the lone female knight at a male-dominated tournament, “As long as one is safe and does a good job, has the right attitude and has a good armour, one is welcome. That is the way it should be.”
Please enjoy this Fem Friday about not accepting things the way they currently are. Thank you Saxey for the excellent swordfighting news last week!
We start with a book review about a woman of the Paris Commune, Louise Michel:
It creates a ripping yarn out of the life of Louise Michel, schoolteacher, active communard, exile and anarchist thinker. […] The tale begins on the eve of the Commune, as young Louise agitates among the Parisian workers, goes through her experience of the brief, violent revolutionary moment, her exile in New Caledonia, and a brief switchback to her childhood as the daughter of domestic servants, in Montmartre. Nicknamed the “red virgin” already in the 1870s, Michel has always been considered a saintly figure, and so she appears here, even lending her red scarf to the indigenous residents of New Caledonia as they rise in revolt against the French, in a gesture connecting the Commune and anti-colonial revolt.
For perhaps the first time I’m including an article that directly relates to what I do for a living. This is about insight, branding, segmentation, and leading change in a large organisation. And also, women buying cars. Enjoy. It’s quite long so perhaps you want to get a tea before you read it, or save it to lunchtime:
[I]t took a year and a half to get everyone at Subaru onboard. For a car company, openly marketing to gay customers still felt new, if not taboo. Bennett recalls holding company meetings with names along the lines of “Who Are Gays and Lesbians?”
I’d not heard of the Ladies Of Langollen before this week. It’s like if Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa had a happy ending, as one half of this relationship was suffering the unwanted attentions of her middle-aged guardian, Sir William Fownes. His wife, Betty […] was still alive, but […] Sir William over-eagerly anticipated the day when he could take pretty Sarah as the second Lady Fownes. The below is straight out of a fun adventure story:
Both women felt trapped in an unbearable situation. Clandestine correspondence flew back and forth between Kilkenny Castle and Woodstock, and they decided to elope to England together (elope did not have the same marital connotation that it does today, it just meant run away). Dressed as men, carrying a pistol and Sarah's dog Frisk, they rode through the night to catch the ferry at Waterford, but it did not sail and they were forced to hide in a barn[.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtOG5PK8xDA
I do not have a studio and my work is seasonal. In winter I plait inside the house, and I go out as soon as time permits. In sprang, I use an old ladder to reach my threads and unroll as I need them. I rarely reuse the same module twice. I consider my work as ephemeral and do not keep it. I like to take my time, patiently plaiting, testing the resistance of structures to the elements, then take the final installation to discover a region and its people.
“There is no word for art. We say it is to transfer from the real to the unreal. I am an owl, and I am a happy owl. I like to make people happy and everything happy.”