This week’s Fem Friday is framed around the indie band Lush, because nothing says “thought leadership” louder than references to a band whose first LP came out in 1989 and whose most recent in 1996. Anyway, it was the 90s and they sang some things about being women, and they were quite fun so here is your newsletter.
Here we have “Single Girl”, which is a song about finding out that being single is actually quite nice:
Related to enjoying being in a demographic, I really enjoyed this article about the ways in which the concept of “empowerment” is packaged and sold. It’s a nice view of the motives behind “inspiring” ads, and what they miss:
“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women. Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.
On which note, in case you missed this American woman Tindering her way through London, Berlin and Stockholm. This is not a use case I would have thought of for Tinder! Sounds like she has intermittent fun though:
Unfortunately, Paul was “working late,” and asked me to come over to his flat to “smoke some weed and cuddle,” because obviously, I’d boarded a transatlantic flight to entertain the same lukewarm offers I did back in Brooklyn.
Which led me down a Rosie The Riveter based rabbit hole. I did not know before today that the WE CAN DO IT poster was not commonly known as “Rosie The Riveter” until well after the war. Here is the actual drawing of same and her excellent lipstick:
The squeamish may want to look away now as move to an article about the women who did this work and its possible dangers. I am kind of squeamish so I’m not thinking too hard about this pullquote, that’s why you’ve got less commentary than you might usually:
Anderson, like the other Rosies, said that even when the work was hazardous — she lost some of her hearing because of the noise and once was sent back to work with just a Band-Aid after a co-worker accidentally drilled her ankle — she thought she was simply doing what she needed to do.
Also related to WWII, here’s a short article on the story of the women of Oak Ridge and their part in the Manhattan Project. Obviously, there’s a photo of machinery too:
College-educated women were recruited for their skills, but not always for their specialties. One woman who had wanted to be an engineer accepted a job as a statistician, which was considered more appropriate for her gender. Unskilled local women were also necessary to the project, and these locals often found themselves applying for work at the very place which had evicted their families.
A guitar is not technically machinery (unless it is? Thoughts, ideas welcome) but the title of this piece is “Hammer In Her Hand” and that’s close enough for me. Either way, this is a great photo and also a great article about the world’s best woman blues guitarist:
Watkins was an instrumentalist, not a singer, which made her even more of an oddity. The images of black men playing guitar and black women cradling a microphone long ago became our ubiquitous hieroglyphs of the blues, and even now the image of a black woman playing guitar still registers as something crackling and new. It’s not that Watkins had no one to look to as she was coming up—in the thirties and forties there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie; in the fifties and sixties, Peggy Jones was performing as Lady Bo in Bo Diddley’s band and Odetta was modestly popular on the folk scene. But the path cut before her by these women was faint, and mostly uphill.
I’ve just today started a book on the UK’s coastline, and have already found out about two women that I didn’t really know about before. Here they are! Of course, both sea themed.
Emma Turner lived a reclusive life – for a while at least – on Scolt Head Island. The photographs make this place look beautiful, but from the descriptions in the book it sounds quite bleak and windswept, the author close to traumatised by childhood holidays there. No trauma for Emma Turner, who looked after the island and its nesting terns for seven months. She lived alone and in fact encouraged the boatman to drown the next load of people who came to gawp at “the loneliest woman in England”. Whether or not he did is unrecorded, but the terns bounced right back under her care.
Have a Radio 4 link about her, for your next tea break:
Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified; the first two plesiosaur skeletons found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.
As with so many stories of the era, this is not the happiest; as working class outsider to the scientific community, she sold a lot of fossils to men who seemed to assume that this sale included the credit for finding it. Dickens, though, wrote a long article on her for his magazine, which is on google books here:
Happy Easter! If you are in Europe, you probably have a long weekend, so enjoy that. If you are not, you get to take the power back by spending fifteen minutes reading about food and its preperation.
Reductress is usually a joy, and yesterday's How to Make the Top Layer of Your Crème Brûlée as Fragile as His Masculinity is a particular highlight. It also seems to contain some actually useful tips for making a crème brûlée, so perhaps this is going to be the weekend where you start your new life as someone with a kitchen blowtorch! They are so much fun.
Before you pour the custard into the dish, dust some sugar over the sides of the bowl to add crispness to the edges. Once baked, the caramelized sides will add the kind of support and coddling that the crust of this dessert needs, much like the masculine whisky drink your man needs to feel confident out at a bar. Heaven forbid they give him a straw!
What nicer computer based treat for yourself on a Friday morning than to read Choire Sicha's profile of Ina Garten? It's still right there! You will feel so reassured and happy all over again.
"Like yesterday," Ina said, "she made a fresh fig jam, and put all the stuff in the pot and she thought, 'How is this going to happen?' And I thought, 'Oh, I can totally understand why it looks like it's not going to happen, but it will.' So I just wrote into the recipe, 'Don't worry! It's going to work!'"
Did you know! It's quite hard to find anything on the classic of the women cooking genre, Like Water For Chocolate, that is not SparkNotes or a website that wants to be SparkNotes. Here you go, though:
The fact that Esquivel has chosen discourses not just outside the canon but specifically associated with women’s values and experiences allows her to set forth an alternative to the hegemonic standard, based upon the real women’s lives.
This is so late, please can we pretend I’m in Seattle this week (I'm not)
I hope you enjoyed A Room Of One’s Own last week. This week I have another out of copyright treat for you, in the form of the autobiography of Mary Somerville. As well as being a 19th century woman mathematician who has an Oxford college named after her, she is also from the town right next to my home town! I did not know this until I went to a café there over the Christmas break, the display of which really played down her attitude to the town:
The manners and customs of the people who inhabited this pretty spot at that time were exceedingly primitive.
Anyway, Somerville was also more or less self taught, which I always enjoy reading about, and did maths problems for fun until the day she died:
Although deaf and frail in her later years, she retained her mental faculties and even continued to, in her words, "read books on the higher algebra for four or five hours in the morning, and even to solve problems" until her peaceful death at the age of ninety two
Speaking of copyright! This is sort of work related, but I really enjoyed this story of “Happy Birthday” and the woman who made it free to sing on television (if that is what you are into)
While doing research and discovery for the lawsuit, documentarian Jennifer Nelson’s lawyers managed to uncover a children’s song book published in 1922 that contained “Happy Birthday” with no copyright notice on it at all — which meant that the song, previously published without copyright protection, has never been protected as Warner/Chappell claimed.
It’s Friday! I hope you are as pleased about this as I am.
If you are reading this newsletter you are most likely familiar with the Bechdel Test, but watching most films you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a very difficult test to pass. Not so. McSweeney’s have illustrated how easily you can improve your film with strong female characters:
TRAVIS: Are you talkin’ to me?
JENNIFER: No, I’m talking to my friend Melinda. Hi, Melinda.
MELINDA: Hi, Jennifer.
JENNIFER: Did you see what happened in the stock market today?
MELINDA: I did. Big morning.
JENNIFER: OK, great chat. Bye, Melinda. Bye, Travis.
Perhaps you didn’t know, because I didn’t before today, that the Bechdel Test is credited in part to Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own. Here’s a nice thing to do over the weekend – read A Room Of One’s Own. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s fiction it’s quite an easy read. Here’s a free version for you to download to your device:
I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [..] They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.
I’ve found several links this week that concern female poets reading their own work aloud. One famous, one not, so you get to enjoy both hearing words you know and (maybe) finding out about someone you did not know before.
Let’s give top billing to the less famous woman, Sarah Webster Fabio, who had a short but incredibly prolific career. You can listen to her poems on Spotify!
Fabio used this vote of confidence to set fiercely into writing, regularly producing and publishing work: “take away the fire-lust, / take away the fire, / send down the cooling waters, / send down the cooling rain,” she wrote in “Rainbow Signs.” “Give us, again, the rainbow sign, / give us, again, the rain.”Though Fabio’s books fell out of print, her four spoken-word albums, recorded in the 1970s for Folkways Records, are readily available on iTunes and Spotify. These four albums—Boss Soul (1972), Soul Ain’t, Soul Is (1973), Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues (1976), and Together to the Tune of Coltrane’s “Equinox” (1977)—feature Fabio reading her poems over a rollicking ’70s funk band reminiscent of Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield
My favourite Sylvia Plath poem is Two Campers In Cloud Country, which I’ve had a deep affection for since it showed up in my final practical criticism exam in English and (1) I knew I could make out okay writing about a Plath poem and (2) I read the beautiful line I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. There are no recordings that I know of of her reading that poem so here instead is Sylvia Plath, reading A Birthday Present aloud:
In October of 1962, mere months before her death, Plath recorded herself reading “A Birthday Present,” written the previous month and later included in her beloved poetry collection Ariel. The recording was one of several broadcasts Plath participated in for BBC’s celebrated series “The Poet’s Voice” and survives on The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath
Finally in poetry by women, two of the best things I have read this week have been Ortberg’s renderings of Byron and Yeats. If you ever see something that makes fun of Byron, do not hesitate to send it to me. It is one of the greatest literary genres. You'll notice that there are no recordings, currently, of anyone reading these aloud. If you choose to record either of these, please send me a link to the video or sound file and I will feature it next week. I'm very serious about this.
Good afternoon, or morning for the US! Enjoy this late edition of Fem Friday.
Here is a richly illustrated article on the origins of the insult “fishwife”:
English merchants were “horrified” that Dutch fishwives were “speaking their minds and running businesses” says Buis. Even worse, fishwives were going door to door with their wares and calling out to would-be customers. And who likes a loud, mobile, entrepreneurial lady?
Staying with the nautical theme, OF COURSE there is a Wikipedia list of women pirates. It is admirably detailed, started before 200BC and running up to the present day. I was less than sure about the section heading “Female interaction with pirates in the 18th Century”, but it too is broadly about entrepreneurial women, running alehouses for pirates and fencing stolen goods! So that’s okay.
many women dressed as men during the Golden Age of Piracy, in an effort to take advantage of the many rights, privileges, and freedoms that were exclusive to men.
This Fem Friday is themed around childhood toys and veers from the professionally interesting to the quite personal.
It will not surprise you to learn that Disney makes an enormous amount of money from its princesses; it might surprise you to see how much. This is mainly a piece about branding, but branding that affects many lives and expectations:
Since Walt Disney lumped Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and its other poofy-dressed ladies together under the brand Disney Princess in 2000, the market for all things pink and sparkly has skyrocketed. Princess merchandise—dolls, clothing, games, home décor, toys—is a $5.5 billion enterprise and Disney’s second-most-profitable franchise, after Mickey Mouse. […] That doesn’t even include Frozen, which came out in 2013 and which Disney measures separately.
I also wrote about a loved toy this week, this is probably the most personal thing I have ever written so as soon as I send this email I am going to set my phone to “Do Not Disturb”, buy a new toothbrush and live in a yurt for the next six months or so:
My mother […] did not limit herself to her specific area of collecting, which was (if you are interested) Shelley crested china. She also bought a lot of just… stuff, for me, when I was at university. Sometimes this was stationery and sometimes it was books and — in one case — it was a bookish bear from a series of books I had enjoyed a lot as a child. This bookish bear is Charles, [the subject of this piece]
I had an idea for a theme based on the book I am reading (of which much more later). Then I was delighted to find some really good internet articles around that theme, some of which are actually quite recent.
It was only after that that I remembered that it is Valentine’s day this weekend so of course everyone is writing about love, but it’s too late, I have already written this email now, so please enjoy an uncharacteristically seasonal Fem Friday.
This is a lovely article about using technology to experiment with who you are. It’s also about falling in love as a wildly awkward teenager:
AOL appealed to me the way it did to most chubby, frizzy-haired teens who were not technologically inclined, whose crushes always went for their more conventionally attractive friends, and who had recently seen You've Got Mail. I changed the quotes in my AOL Instant Messenger profile almost daily, and fretted over the right combinations of font and color to make my IM voice look as bright and edgy as I wanted to be in real life. I started conversations with acquaintances who made me feel shy in person. I imagined I had inner beauty and wit, and that in chatrooms and AIM was where I could shine until that outer beauty showed up. And slowly, the IRL me started to become more like the me I allowed myself to be online.
It’s ages since I’ve sent anything from Reductress! It’s still great. I laughed out loud, alone and in a meeting room, at this article. You want it in your life:
Double-texting might seem like the worst thing you could ever do to your budding relationship—and it is! You’ve made yourself seem way too thirsty way too soon. But there’s always hope for reclaiming your chill—all you have to do is send one to 12 more texts to fix the fact that you sent one too many texts. Here are the perfect follow-up messages to let him know you know you sent him too many messages.
AND NOW, do you remember how much I wanted to read Reading Bridal Magazines Form A Critical Discursive Perspective? I got some Christmas money and found a discount code and bought it and now that I’m reading it it’s everything I wanted it to be. It’s also making me want to read bridal magazines again. Sharing some key quotations with you now that I’m past the mandatory chapter where the author namedrops Foucault; lots of this is about the drift of weddings towards being branding exercise for the couple in question, as we increasingly come adrift from the sorts of societies in which the main wedding traditions were born:
She goes in quite hard on the “Letter from the Editor” of You And Your Wedding:
The formulation that expressing your own personality is “[o]ne of the best things about being a modern bride” implies that there are many others, of which the reader should probably know. That the expression of one’s own style is accomplished by means of specific commodities is implied […]: “Hearing your guests say ‘That’s just so you!’ is the ultimate compliement to your dress, flowers, service and all other wonderful things that come together to make your big day so special.” Given the editor’s assumptive tone, she takes for granted that readers of You And Your Wedding consider reliance on the commodities enumerated not only obvious but also desired.
Lots of mentions of the “wedding-ideological complex”, which I enjoy as a phrase:
[T]he wider wedding-ideological complex […] reinforces the notion of bridal self-transformation through ‘self-branding’
Everything about the buying of a dress is interesting. By the way, if you are getting married, and are going dress shopping, I’d recommend going alone as your first choice or – if you don’t think you can do that – going with me as your second choice. Just let me know when is good.
The following example comes from an article about choosing the right wedding dress. It includes advice from a life coach:
Once you’ve chosen your look, trust your instinct. “If you lose the courage of conviction about a decision, such as which dress to buy, take a 10-minute timeout to clear your mind, then go back to the shop,” says life coach and hypnotherapist Caroline Carr. […]
Of course, there is nothing controversial about encouraging women to make careful consumer choices. Yet, the fact of by whom the advice is given constructs the purchase of a bridal gown as a practice of self, rather than a mere consumer choice.
This is actually quite a soothing thing to remember and think about:
Consequently, real-life weddings [she here refers to the magazine features about real life weddings] accommodate the paradox of the commodified self, which consists in pursuing individuality among mass-produced commodities and widely available services
The squeamish may want to look away now as move to an article about the women who did this work and its possible dangers. I am kind of squeamish so I’m not thinking too hard about this pullquote, that’s why you’ve got less commentary than you might usually:
College-educated women were recruited for their skills, but not always for their specialties. One woman who had wanted to be an engineer accepted a job as a statistician, which was considered more appropriate for her gender. Unskilled local women were also necessary to the project, and these locals often found themselves applying for work at the very place which had evicted their families.
Watkins was an instrumentalist, not a singer, which made her even more of an oddity. The images of black men playing guitar and black women cradling a microphone long ago became our ubiquitous hieroglyphs of the blues, and even now the image of a black woman playing guitar still registers as something crackling and new. It’s not that Watkins had no one to look to as she was coming up—in the thirties and forties there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie; in the fifties and sixties, Peggy Jones was performing as Lady Bo in Bo Diddley’s band and Odetta was modestly popular on the folk scene. But the path cut before her by these women was faint, and mostly uphill.