I am in New York! This information is not relevant to today’s Fem Friday, which looks at the first women to do things, specifically writing books.
Long time subscribers will know that I am a fan of the writings of Mother Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English. This interesting article talks about the life of an anchorite, who chose to live permanently shut up in a room attached to a church. Perhaps not a life any of us would choose, but this article casts a lot of light on the influence they had:
although they had just two or three small windows letting a sliver of the outside world into their chambers, anchorites were influential. They could give counsel from the wisdom they accrued in their contemplative lives, and in this way, have an outsized impact on the places and communities they lived in.
From the first book written by a woman at all, let’s get a little more specialist; the first person to write a grammar of Old English was also a woman, and a woman of habits counter to the then mainstream:
the Middle Ages were generally considered barbarous and unworthy of study in an age which was under the sway of Neo-Classicism and the faraway splendours of ancient Greece and Rome. Few men studied medieval history or literature, and even fewer women had the opportunity to learn the languages necessary to access medieval primary sources. However, when Elizabeth moved to London to live as her brother’s housekeeper in 1702, she gained a degree of relative freedom and was able to apply herself to learning Old English.
Aphra Behn was not the first woman to write a fiction play or a novel, but Wikipedia characterises her as “one of” the first and I am not one to make the perfect the enemy of the good enough:
she was appointed an intelligence gatherer for the king, who was, at least, to pay for her trip to Antwerp as his spy. But Charles did not respond to Behn's requests for money for her trip home, so in December 1666 she was forced to borrow for her passage back to England. Charles continued to refuse payment, and in 1668 Behn was thrown into debtor's prison. The circumstances of her release are unknown, but in 1670 her first play, The Forc'd Marriage (published, 1671), was produced in London, and Behn, having vowed never to depend on anyone else for money again, became one of the period's foremost playwrights.
Let’s talk about Tsai Ing-Wen! She is Taiwan’s first female president, she supports marriage equality and she owns two cats. I can’t find any evidence online that she actually said this:
…but it still serves as jumping off point for today’s Fem Friday. If you want to know more about this cool woman, here is an article to enjoy:
“I sense that politics certainly doesn’t come naturally to her […] She very much enjoys sitting down with a glass of red wine, and reading a book and spending quality time with her cats.” […] In an interview with Time magazine in 2015, Tsai recalled how, as the youngest daughter, she was required to spend her idle hours caring for her entrepreneur father. “I was not considered a kid that would be successful in my career,” she said.
Next, we turn to Simona Kossak, a woman who actually did buy a pig. She lived in the wilds of Poland and, as well as living with a large boar and a semi trained crow, she hand raised a pack of deer:
I crossed the border that divides the human world from that of the animals. If there was a glass that divided us from humans, a wall impossible to knock down, then the animals would not care about me. We are deer, she is human, what do we care for her? If they did warn me (…), it meant one thing and one thing only: you are a member of our pack, we don’t want you to get hurt. I honestly admit, I relived this event for many days, and in fact today, when I think about it, there is sense of warmth around my heart. It proves how one can befriend the world of wild animals.
As you perhaps know, I am fascinated by Self Sufficiency, the hilariously self-aggrandising book on country life written by John Seymour and beautifully illustrated by his wife, Sally. Always an illustrator, she taught herself to draw with her left hand after a stroke in 2004, as well as facing various critter based challenges throughout her life:
In 1988 she went to Australia where she battled the elements, snakes, spiders and white ants and built up a smallholding on her own. She also established herself as an artist of some importance in a new country.
I present a treasure trove of articles about medical breakthroughs by women!
This was inspired by the below article, which contains many elements that I like; an enthusiastic autodidact, women helping one another, and several disasters averted at the eleventh hour. The persistence of this woman in exploring every possible avenue to explain her and her family’s condition, and in getting over some quite tricky systemic hurdles to do so, is truly inspiring. You might have seen this article around and not read it; if this is the case, I strongly encourage you to read it! It will tell you everything you need to know about how an Iowa writing instructor came set the research agenda of a molecular biology lab.
19-year-old Jill put on her most serious navy pantsuit, again gathered up her papers, and took them to a neurologist in Des Moines. She asked the neurologist to take a look, hoping that she would help her connect with the Italian team and get in the study. But the neurologist would have none of it. “No, you don’t have that,” Jill recalls the neurologist saying sternly. And then she refused even to look at the papers. It might seem rude that a doctor refused just to hear Jill out and glance at the papers, but, at the time, most doctors believed Emery-Dreifuss only occurred in men. Plus, this was a self-diagnosis of an obscure disease coming from a teenager.
Elisabeth Bing pretty much invented modern childbirth, although I am not sure that her message about the importance of champagne has carried through to this bit of the modern age. From the extremely little that I know if childbirth, it sounds like the least one would deserve.
A young woman instructed by Mrs Bing would arrive at the labour ward perky, decisive, and carrying a bag equipped with [things that are less fun] and a bottle of champagne which, wrote Mrs Bing in “Six Practical Lessons for an Easier Childbirth”, the nurse should be asked to put on ice “when you arrive”.
I missed this when it happened, but if you come to Feminist Friday for breaking news, you will have been disappointed for approximately 71 consecutive weeks. Tu Youyou, woman and first Chinese citizen to win a science based Nobel prize, made a major contribution to antimalarials based on a medicine handbook from the 400s or thereabouts:
she reread a particular recipe, written more than 1,600 years ago in a text titled “Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve.” The directions were to soak one bunch of wormwood in water and then drink the juice. […] But Dr. Tu said she realized that her method of preparation — boiling the wormwood — probably damaged the active ingredient. So she made another preparation using an ether-based solvent, which boils at 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. […]
“We had just cured drug-resistant malaria,” Dr. Tu told New Scientist. “We were very excited.”
Here is the extremely cool Katherine Cheung, whose self-confidence on its own is inspiring:
In 1932, a cousin who was a pilot offered to take her aloft. The experience was so exhilarating that she impulsively signed up for $5-an-hour lessons […] After 12 1/2 hours in the sky, she flew solo for the first time. She earned her license soon afterward, […] becoming the first Chinese American woman to legally pilot a plane. At the time, only about 200, or 1%, of licensed American pilots were women.
And finally, Bessica Raiche, who built an aeroplane in her front room and then flew it:
Raiche’s homemade, Wright Brothers-inspired aircraft was constructed in the living room of her Mineola, N.Y., home using just silk, piano wire and bamboo
If you don’t have time to watch an hour of television show right now, maybe cancel one of your meetings and get right on that. Or you can read this article and summary by the producer, Sue Bourne:
“Lonely” hits a spot of fear in all of us even if we don’t acknowledge it. So a year ago, I set out to find people who were brave enough to admit and talk about how lonely they were. But I wanted to find people whose stories offered hope – either because they’d found a way of dealing with loneliness or because they had something in their lives that, even in a small way, alleviated their loneliness.
This documentary also showed Sara Maitland sitting with her feet up on the sofa WHILE WEARING HIKING BOOTS to subtly demonstrate the benefits of living alone. I liked her a great deal. Enjoy this review of one of her books, The Book Of Silence:
Maitland set out with many questions about the nature of silence and its companion, solitude. The most urgent was posed in reaction to a letter from a respected friend, who argued against silence as “the place of death, of nothingness.” Yet Maitland became convinced that silence was not a “negative condition” but “a positive presence.” So she set out to prove this radical proposition — one that, as it happens, caused alarm and concern among her friends and family. People who spend a great deal of their time quiet and alone are often considered selfish, if not misanthropic, although nothing could be further from the truth. Maitland sets out from a place of loving concern, full of tenderness for the human condition and hope that we might fulfill our best destinies.
I'm not going to lie, I'm really phoning it in today. Hope you're having a good day too.
Jess Zimmerman! She has been featured more than once in Fem Friday and I always like reading her work. Here, she writes about the work that she does and enjoys and - tying in nicely with the Jezebel article from last week - this includes fewer to no Hot Takes:
I am truly, truly weary of Takes, clickbait, Twitter fights, news pegs, #content. Writing Takes doesn’t pay, but proportional to the work involved, writing lovingly-crafted essays pays a lot less
Also in case you don't click on every single link in that article, and in case like me you missed it the first time around, here are 19 ways in which feminists are going to ruin Ghostbusters, all of which are excellent:
Venkwoman: I’m gonna go for broke. I am madly in love with you.
Dana: I don’t believe this. Will you please leave?
Venkwoman: Yes, of course I’ll respect your clearly stated boundaries.
Finally, this as every year, I wrote a review of my reading over the previous year. It's not feminist particularly it's more that I wrote it and I'm a woman and nothing a woman does should ever be criticised. I hope you enjoy it.
I really enjoyed this Jia Tolentino piece about the internet offence machine and where it gets us (a: not far).
As tired as the Jezebel-as-offense-factory expectation is, we still get a constant stream of emails asking why we haven’t stated our outrage at one thing or another, telling us that not taking umbrage will weaken our general stance. Offense masquerades are seen as so politically useful that there’s a whole subgenre of rhetoric centered on offense taken hypothetically. What if this post were written about a woman, we conjecture, in the light of our own self-approval.
Please enjoy also this double bill of links about Lolita, published 60 years ago. This is one of my favourite books and lots of women have said interesting things about it in the last ten days or so. We begin with New Republic’s if not page by page, then section by section look at the book:
“I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics,” says Humbert. Short of putting the relevant sections of Lolita into italics, Nabokov couldn’t do much more to tell us to keep our eyes open as the novel shifts from romance to mystery.
And the women who read Nabokov’s novel in repressive Iran, says Azar Nafisi of Reading Lolita in Tehran, identified too: “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such she becomes a double victim—not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.”
I have the most tremendous respect for people who can write articulately about grief, and Helen MacDonald writes more articulately than anyone else I have read. In case you are unfamiliar with the premise of the book, Helen MacDonald is an accomplished falconer who, after the death of her father, starts training one of the biggest and least predictable birds a person can train, a goshawk. There is an incredible passage about socialising her new goshawk – walking around Cambridge with this enormous bird on her arm – such a resonant image of grief, which you carry around like a physical thing and assume that everyone can see it as clearly as you can feel it. This is my #1 book of the year, and I hope you read it soon so we can talk about it in more detail.
This brilliant and upsetting book is about the Afghan tradition – hitherto unknown in the West and barely discussed in Afghanistan itself – of introducing at least one of a family’s young girls to the world as a young boy. It’s hard to convey how much is covered, and how cohesive it feels as Jenny Nordberg talks about social constructions of gender, the failures of foreign financial aid, Afghan political history and magic. This is a kind and humble book, and since I have read it not a day has gone by in which I did not think about the women in it and hope that they are doing the best they can under their difficult circumstances.
Did you enjoy Lean In but feel like it could have said a lot more about the systemic problems of corporate culture? Maybe you enjoyed Thrive but found it a bit thin on how to actually make time for all of this wonderful sleep. Or maybe you liked both of these books but felt that they focused on the problems of rich, white women to the exclusion of women who are one or neither of those things. Me too! And happily for us, Anne-Marie Slaughter felt the same way!
When it was first published, this book was extremely controversial and the author’s official position boiled down to, “well, if I’d known these people were going to turn out so terrible I certainly wouldn’t have started a book about them, but what can you do?”. It’s true that none of the characters come out of this very well at all, but this is a beautiful book about coming to the end of triumph, however small or petty or mean that triumph is.
This last book is not feminist – not even remotely – but I enjoyed it so much, it's pacy, the writing feels alive and immediate, and it exists as a record of such an interesting point in Western culture that I want you to read it as well. That is why I am recommending Jonathan Franzen’s Purity as my fifth book of the year.
PSYCH! Hahahahahaha I’d never do that. I just wanted to soften the blow of recommending:
This novel takes as its themes trains, sex and murder, and really works through all the possible permutations of that. Sexy trains! Murderous sex! Murderous trains! Sexy murder! I know what your question is, because it was my question too; is there a sexy murderous train? You will need to read it and find out. There will be no spoilers here, even of books from the 19th century.
I’ll give you a clue, though; Emile Zola will not let you down.
One more link
If you – like me – like reading other people’s books of the year, I have one more treat for you. Katie Coyle’s “Year In Reading” for The Millions has a lot more about H Is For Hawk, and is beautiful and a punch in the gut:
To say I’ve been miserable this year is both overstatement and understatement — because I have many good days, more good days than bad ones, and yet when the bad ones arrive they can sometimes seem so dark as to be almost unendurable. To endure them, I read. I read Edith Wharton, detective novels, memoirs by chefs.
Long term subscribers of Fem Friday will doubtless remember the days when I would not bother with bourgeois conventions like “themes” to tie these emails together and would instead just throw a bunch of links at you, all vaguely related to feminism or women or a woman. If you are such a subscriber, this will be a trip down memory lane and if you joined us more recently, you get to experience those heady days as though for the first time.
For those of you based in London, I recommend Ann Veronica Janssens’ lovely installation, yellowbluepink, at the Wellcome Collection:
“While neuroscience is great about telling us about the relationship between brain activity and some cognitive function, it hasn’t yet come up with an explanation of how the activity of neurons can give rise to the experience of colour, as we enter into this installation. And yet without really knowing how or why, we are all experts in that personal experience. And Ann Veronica’s beautiful installation reminds of the richness of our interaction with the world.”
There is a long queue for yellowbluepink but it is worth it. Plus, you can take a book and get loads of reading done – I took Kate Bolick’s Spinster and not only read loads of it but also had ample time to do a series of disconsolate tweets on how terrible it is. Remember that LA Review of Books essay about it that I sent round a couple of months ago? Every word of it was true except it doesn’t fully convey how self indulgent her writing is.
Now, as promised, a violent topic shift! Sometimes friends send me links that make me think, oh, that’s so Fem Friday. On that note, I’d like to share this interview about an oral history of Walatta Petra; seventeenth century nun and saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. Note also that this pullquote also features hippos, and I love hippos
a woman who was born to an adoring father, lost three children in infancy, left her abusive husband, started a movement, defeated a wicked king, faced enraged hippos and lions, avoided lustful jailors, founded seven religious communities, routed male religious leaders, gathered many men and women around her, and guided her flock subject to no man, being the outright head of her community and even appointing abbots, who followed her orders.
Maybe another one for your Christmas lists! Speaking of which – would you be interested in my books of the year? If yes I’ll do that next week and we can return to themes.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a conference. It was mostly about email marketing but my favourite thing about it was finding out that the woman who won the long jump (and three other gold medals!) at the 1948 Olympics was three months pregnant at the time. I introduce to you Fanny Blankers-Koen:
she qualified to return to the Olympics, leaving her children behind in Amsterdam. “I got very many bad letters,” she recalled, “people writing that I must stay home with my children.” The British team manager, Jack Crump, took one look at Blankers-Koen and said she was “too old to make the grade.” Few knew it at the time, but she was already three months pregnant and training only twice a week in the summer leading up to competition.
Pregnant, dismissed, doing the bare minimum, and still a champion – please enjoy this strong draught of womanspiration:
On a less chipper but not less important note, I enjoyed this article by Olympic swimmer Leisel Jones about her experience of depression. Other things to note; altitude training sounds pretty horrible, and so does her former fiancé. She has a book out too so if you enjoy this article you could put that on your Christmas list.
"I just dug so deep in that last 50 metres, I kinda forgot to breathe." This is true, in part. But I'm not wobbly and faint and feeling sick to my core just because I am short of breath. If I ate a decent meal once in a while; if I didn't have boyfriend dramas; if I was nicer to myself occasionally; then maybe I wouldn't be laid out on the tiles for the world to see, hoping the TV cameras don't get a shot of my swimming-tog wedgie.
…but it still serves as jumping off point for today’s Fem Friday. If you want to know more about this cool woman, here is an article to enjoy:
I crossed the border that divides the human world from that of the animals. If there was a glass that divided us from humans, a wall impossible to knock down, then the animals would not care about me. We are deer, she is human, what do we care for her? If they did warn me (…), it meant one thing and one thing only: you are a member of our pack, we don’t want you to get hurt. I honestly admit, I relived this event for many days, and in fact today, when I think about it, there is sense of warmth around my heart. It proves how one can befriend the world of wild animals. 
In 1988 she went to Australia where she battled the elements, snakes, spiders and white ants and built up a smallholding on her own. She also established herself as an artist of some importance in a new country.
