Whilst an exceptionally fun song, it is really just anti-Eleanor of Aquitaine propaganda and not historically accurate. Eleanor gets into Fem Friday for being a queen of two different countries (consecutively – not concurrently) and the power behind more than two thrones. At the age of 67 or so (after 16 years in prison!) she travelled to Austria and back to get her kidnapped son back to England. I can’t imagine what this would have been like 1189. I have been to Austria on the train at that felt like it took a long time.
Speaking of power behind thrones, I don’t have a fun song for you about Sorghaghtani Beki but knowing about her is the best thing I got out of an internet spat about the Most Powerful Woman Ever. She was born in the same year Eleanor of Aquitaine died and had 4 sons who ruled an enormous chunk of the world under her influence:
Sorghaghtani wielded great authority at home. Mongol women had far more rights than in many other cultures at the time, especially since the men were often away and they were the ones responsible for the home. Although she herself was illiterate, she recognized the value of literacy in running such a far-flung empire. Each of her sons (one of whom was Khubla Kahn!) learned a different language for different regions.
Whenever I take architecture as my topic it’s a stressful Friday morning because it usually takes me between two and five tries to spell “architecture” correctly. I am not sure which cees have aitches and which do not. No matter, because in this week’s Fem Friday we celebrate women who do not need to worry about spelling architecture because they can actually do it.
We start in South London, with a landmark that is near to my heart and not only designed by a woman, Kate Macintosh, but designed when she was 26 years old. I always like to see this building on the skyline and it sounds pretty great to live in as well:
Macintosh devised a ziggurat-style scheme which ensured that two thirds of the flats had views in both directions and all had views to the north. The varied height of the blocks, rising to twelve storeys at their central peak, made sure that every flat received sunlight even in deepest midwinter.
We then move to Washington DC, and my favourite war memorial there. If you have not seen the Vietnam War Memorial, I strongly encourage you to have a look – especially if you can see it in person – it’s one of the most moving places I have visited. This was also designed by a woman, Maya Lin, and designed when she was very young – 21, and still in college. She writes about her thought process in the below article:
This apolitical approach became the essential aim of my design; I did not want to civilize war by glorifying it or by forgetting the sacrifices involved. The price of human life in war should always be clearly remembered. […] But on a personal level, I wanted to focus on the nature of accepting and coming to terms with a loved one’s death. Simple as it may seem, I remember feeling that accepting a person’s death is the first step in being able to overcome that loss.
I hope you were not expecting actual celebrity gossip because I don’t have any. What I do have is Morgan Parker! who writes poetry about and in the voices of celebrities:
We decided, over a craps table in Atlantic City, to do a collaborative project inspired by Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s collaboration with “Telephone” and “Video Phone.” I’d start with a poem in Beyoncé’s voice, and he, a white male, would start with Gaga, and then we’d switch. We never switched. Each of us had trouble inhabiting the new voices. So much of writing about pop culture demands that you consider your relationship to it and your own personhood.
Still on the topic of Beyoncé, this Tumblr that takes photos of Beyoncé and makes colour palettes out of them is visually compelling for very obvious reasons. I hope it will also provide useful inspiration for your next graph:
This is an excellent interview with long time feminist Gloria Steinem. Really most of this could have been a pullquote so you will enjoy reading the whole thing:
In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen. And sometimes that can be almost as difficult. This is the phenomenon of the woman who's asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, "I don't know. What do you want to see?" It's a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, "This is what I want."
The above interview promotes Gloria Steinem’s memoir, My Life On The Road, and in following the “on the road” rabbit hole I found out about a book that is about a road trip, AND it’s an oral history, AND it’s about feminism. Occasionally when researching for Fem Friday I’ll find things that I’m genuinely cross I haven’t heard of before. This is such a time.
It became clear that the value of Girldrive was in the stories—not the analysis. The idea is that once the reader is hit with all these different experiences and opinions, they can start to have their own gender analysis.
We kick off with a lovely talk from Mallory Ortberg, successful internet feminist and entrepreneur, at the XOXO conference. This video lasts 24 minutes, so it is not too long and is a nice thing to watch on a Friday lunchtime:
AMAZING PRIZES for guessing the author discussed below:
It added Platonic metaphysics to the emotional adventure of being English and upper middle-class, and a formula was born.
Just kidding, the prizes are all second hand books from my personal collection and who else would it be but Iris Murdoch. Please enjoy a long article about how her books and ideology played in Soviet Russia:
This week I was reminded, by the following article, of the lovely song that is Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”. This also brought to my attention that there is a Britney Spears/Giorgio Moroder version of “Tom’s Diner”, which I have already listened to many times:
Britney stands in the eye of the storm as Moroder's production rages around her, observing both the diner’s patrons and his garish arrangement. Like Vega before her, she understands that "Tom’s Diner" isn’t a lonely song, nor is it sad. It just asks you to watch, digest, and react.
In case you didn’t see it earlier this year, here’s another re-read of “Tom’s Diner”, this time made entirely of the things you miss by compressing it to MP3. I love this so much because it makes you feel like you are actually in a café, catching sometimes more and sometimes less of other conversations and little sounds:
The accompanying video here is fittingly made from Vega’s music video for “Tom’s Diner,” rebuilt out of the data lost between the uncompressed video and a compressed MP4 file, adding another layer of reclaimed data to the project.
Let’s talk about games! We’ve done chess, now it is time for me to turn to less cerebral games, but – in the case of Mario Kart – one that I am actually good at.
Mario Kart is mainly a site where people of all genders can let one another down in frustrating ways. I enjoyed this piece about using gaming analogies in a therapeutic context:
I suggest that we recognise video games as a font for cases where kids have already encountered (and often triumphed over) real-world issues. Mario Kart wasn’t just a thing that those kids knew — it was a place where they felt anger and betrayal. It confronted them with the fact that their friends don’t always support them. For those kids, a reference to Mario Kart was an acknowledgement of these complex experiences.
In contrast to all of this heartache and letdown, it seems that the women’s pinball scene is a delightful and supportive place to hang out in and to learn a new and extremely niche skill:
"A lot of times you just have to talk to people who know more than you," says Vrabel. "That's the biggest thing about playing in tournaments as a new player. I always say, talk to the person you're playing against. There's no defensive 'I'm not going to tell you because then I might not win', because if you don't have the skills to play the game, you shouldn't win. Learning the rules of a new game is very collaborative—it's not about hoarding secrets."
Delay in Fem Friday today due to me doing my job, but don’t worry it’s here now!
I am enormously enjoying the new CHVRCHES album, and also enjoyed this interview with their frontwoman Lauren Mayberry, by Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. One of my favourite things about this is her talking about how she doesn’t know what to do with her limbs on stage. This is a perennial problem for me when I do any talking to large groups of people and I frequently wonder if I can – as Beth Gibbons has – make “my thing” just clinging to a microphone as though it the only thing between me and drowning.
I think I found a more assertive character easier to get into on stage. I never know what to do with my limbs—just always flapping around
Here is pop star of the early 80s, Anita Pointer, talking about her collection of black memorabilia. This is also an interview about her childhood in the American South in the 1950s, being a backing singer in the 1970s, and being in a band in the 1980s. It is all fascinating, and quite a long article so settle in with your sandwich or coffee before you click the link:
It encompasses all representations of black people, from negative to positive. I wish I had focused on one type of thing, but I just bought every piece of black memorabilia I found. […] I’ve found paper stuff like postcards and advertisements. I have a list of slave auctions. I have ceramics and wooden objects. I have potholders, cookie jars, banks, toys, dolls, aprons, hair combs, and hair-grease tins.
Today we turn our attention to women who design their own buildings – not because they have any architectural training, but because they have the money and power to do so and think it could be cool. This attitude of, well, why wouldn’t I create a building? comes from a combination of stubbornness and delight in one’s surroundings that it’s very hard not to admire. Many thanks to friend and subscriber Cecily for links and chats around this topic.
These are ordered from the most to the least supernatural, I assume this is the sort of attention to detail that you appreciate so much about this newsletter.
Sara Losh’s church! It is not clear to any historians how somebody with no architectural training created one of the best and most unusual churches in England, but she did and used her own money to fund it.
Simon Jenkins, in his lovely book England's Thousand Best Churches, calls St. Mary's "one of the most eccentric small churches in England" but thinks it a masterpiece with no clear antecedents, no pattern from which it derives. Its architect was "a single original mind, … an individual genius." That genius was not a professional architect—indeed, lacked any formal architectural training—and was merely the chief landowner in the vicinity of Wreay.
Sarah Winchester’s house! This has been an enduring source of fascination to me since I first heard about it, aged 17. The widow of a gun millionaire designed a house that would surely be the single most terrifying place to be in an earthquake on one of the more well documented faultlines. I suppose all those doors mean there are a lot of doorframes to stand under. There is a lot of appeal in the idea of waking up and deciding that today is a new staircase day.
Sarah Winchester lived at time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture. Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.
Jackie Collins’ mansion! She also designed her own mansion, based in part on a Hockney painting she and her husband liked. She can’t get the painting so she builds a house that looks like the painting. Of course.
The house took three years to build. Her husband died when it was finished. But she made the half-crazy creation of the house sound fun—a good memory. She had drawn sketches of what she wanted, and her husband also contributed: two amateur architects. She had imagined not a house exactly, but a David Hockney swimming pool with house attached. “I’d always wanted the Hockney painting A Bigger Splash,” she explained. “But I could never get it. So I thought the best alternative was to have my own Hockney pool that looked like the painting.”
In our recent time of flat flood crisis, we turned to chess to cheer us up and distract us from our ruined home. Chess might seem like an unlikely topic for a Fem Friday, but when you think about it, most of the Fem Friday topics are pretty unlikely.
Let’s kick off with one of Scotland’s finest archaeological finds, the Lewis Chessmen – and specifically the wonderfully glum Queen from that set:
LOOK AT HER. Look at her horrified little face. Look at how she feels about her husband’s pointless war. “So, it’s against… and you expect me to… and you're quite certain?… what was the, uh, casus belli? Right, like the reason for… Well, yours or his, really. No, absolutely. Sure. I’ll be there. Sure. Yep. Bye. Love you too.”
These little guys are the subject of a new book by Nancy Marie Brown, who puts forth the theory that they were carved by top ivory carver and woman, Margret the Adroit. No pullquote as – since she was from the 13th century and not a saint – we don’t know a lot about Margret other than that she existed. Perhaps this is a reminder that there are many ways for our work to resonate and be recognised, or perhaps it is a reminder to be grateful for the written word.
Back to the game itself rather than a specific set, I found out today about the first women’s chess champion, Vera Menchik:
When in 1929, Menchik entered the Carlsbad, Viennese master Albert Becker ridiculed her entry by proposing that any player whom Menchik defeated in tournament play should be granted membership into the Vera Menchik Club. In the same tournament, Becker himself became the first member of the "club". [Whereupon he was followed by eighteen others. Ha!]
LOOK AT HER. Look at her horrified little face. Look at how she feels about her husband’s pointless war. “So, it’s against… and you expect me to… and you're quite certain?… what was the, uh, casus belli? Right, like the reason for… Well, yours or his, really. No, absolutely. Sure. I’ll be there. Sure. Yep. Bye. Love you too.”