I’m back! I’m back! Thank you for the stellar work last week Saxey.
Today I’ve got a Feminist Friday full of articles about being a woman and being tough, in various ways. I hope that you enjoy it.
When this article starts, it looks like it’s going to be about Mad Max, and then it opens out to be about many things that are not Mad Max. It is, in part, a history of toughness as a feminine quality, rather than one that’s borrowed from masculine qualities.
And Britomart, arrayed in armor and furnished with a magic spear, fights her way through the book like a man might do. She is described as being “full of amiable grace / with manly terrour mixed therewithal.” She’s appealing, but intimidating, specifically in the manner of a man. But Britomart, when she rides out in armor, is not cross-dressing, passing for male, or even inhabiting a genderless space. She is interacting with her female identity—with love and fidelity, which are women’s qualities to Spenser but also human concerns—in a way that’s entirely different from the perfect lover or the damsel in distress.
Perhaps you have not yet seen the exciting story of the woman who gave birth in the woods then lived there for three days, fighting bees. There is no pullquote that can do full justice to this:
Alexandra has handed me the keys of Feminist Friday this week, so I'm driving (with care) to the geeky side.
I'll be dressing outlandishly at a SciFi convention this summer. Cons are increasingly encouraging/enforcing decent behaviour towards attendees, and particularly cosplayers. Here's a report (with many lovely photos) from New York Comic Con.
“My favorite character in the history of creation has to be Ursula the Sea Witch," says Tom Catt, who was playing Poison Ivy. "She’s fabulous, she’s ferocious, she’s over-the-top, she’s theatrical … Every time I dress up as Ursula, I get a big sense of pride."
One flavour of cosplay involves dressing as a girled-up version of Doctor Who (so many lovely photos).
The companions are, definitionally, sidekicks. And femme Doctor cosplayers are very aware of this.
"I do want to get my fellow fans thinking… I want them to say, 'A female Doctor???!? Whaaat?' and then think about why that sounds so ridiculous, even inside their heads."
While Dr Who has (again) regenerated into a chap, Ms Marvel has been reinvented as a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager. One writer breaks down why Kamala Khan rocks her world:
Kamala uses a burkini as the basis of her costume. I have no point about the synthesis of Islam and immigrant life to make here, that shit is just straight up hilarious.
I will be away for the next two weeks! I am thrilled to announce that Cecily will be taking the editorial reins during this time, excited to see what she does with the place.
Given my upcoming holiday I planned do a feature on saints from the places I am going to. This plan went a bit awry, but in a way I hope you will find interesting.
We start in Italy, with Catherine of Genoa, noted female mystic whose marriage started off so bad that she apparently prayed to be ill so that she wouldn't have to talk to her husband - much like those wishes for a broken leg (that doesn't hurt? is that a thing? etc) in times of work stress. This prayer was not answered but she had a conversion experience and devoted herself to mystical works and
unselfish service to the sick in a hospital at Genoa, in which her husband joined her after he, too, had been converted. He later became a Franciscan tertiary, but she joined no religious order. Her husband's spending had ruined them financially. He and Catherine decided to live in the Pammatone, a large hospital in Genoa, and to dedicate themselves to works of charity there. She eventually became manager and treasurer of the hospital.
Catherine of Genoa is also featured in The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago:
an icon of feminist art, which represents 1,038 women in history—39 women are represented by place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests. This monumental work of art is comprised of a triangular table divided by three wings, each 48 feet long
Which in turn led me to Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and women's rights activist:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
I bet you didn’t know that what you wanted in your life was a history of tampons. This is so interesting you guys.
“What’s happened is instead of genuine advancements in terms of new products, the industry has put its research efforts into just beefing up the existing products and creating a need for additional products,” said Karen Houppert, a writer and author of The Curse, a book about the sanitary protection industry. “It’s an effort to repackage the old as new and continue to alarm women about the prospect of anyone knowing that they bleed. That’s their stock and trade.”
Enjoy also this analysis of periods classic, Carrie:
While men in the ’70s felt threatened by the unprecedented numbers of women standing up for themselves and attempting such radical social changes as being recognized as equal under the law, women themselves must have felt some anxiety that the obstacles to fully realizing themselves might be too big to conquer. The story therefore resonates with men in terms of the fear of (metaphorical) castration prompted by changing gender roles, and with women in terms of the fear that no matter how powerful we become, social forces are still so aligned against us that fighting back might destroy not just the patriarchy but ourselves.
Two amazing women for you all today. We start with Ingeborg Rapoport, who this week was awarded a science PhD denied to her by Nazis. This included her boning up on the last eightyish years of research into diphtheria to defend a thesis written in 1938:
"It was about the principle," she said. "I didn't want to defend my thesis for my own sake. After all, at the age of 102 all of this wasn't exactly easy for me. I did it for the victims.”
I had to check that I’d not already featured Edith Stein, who being a woman and saint and a doctor of philosopher is pretty squarely in the Feminist Friday wheelhouse. She wrote and understood some incredibly difficult philosophy, and ran afoul of the Nazi regime in a series of increasingly awful ways. I enjoyed this beautiful quotation about kindness and love from her:
As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor's soul must break all precept. All that we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in itself, because God is love.
Isn't TV great? It gets its own Feminist Friday today.
This is a detailed analysis of women directing episodes of television – as you might guess, the number of women directors are quite low, and the number of not white women directors even lower. What’s interesting to me is the below quotation – the stat “episodes of television directed by women” ignores the concentration around a very small number of women.
“Though it is documented that 12% of episodic television is directed by women, when credits are examined by the name this number does not seem to represent how many different women are directing.” “It appears […] as if only about the same 15 to 20 directors are hired again and again.”
Something I’ve noticed recently while watching opening credits is the huge number of casting directors who are women. I asked this question to a friend and subscriber (hi!) who found this podcast with some interesting conjecture in it, including the career path it requires and whether it's the sort of role that women are socialised into. The discussion of this, in an interview with two casting directors, starts seven minutes in:
Lots of feminist treats for you today. I found the first article and it reminded me how fascinating communal living and non-standard family structures are, and that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Enjoy!
When you read The Feminine Mystique, you imagine Betty Friedan living in a flyover state, in ten square miles of identikit houses with picket fences, dogs, etc. It turns out she and her family actually lived in a forward thinking community in a New York borough. This is an account of the formation and decline of the community from someone else who lived there:
These couples—young, liberal, and creative—formed a kind of quasi-commune, sharing meals, creating a babysitting pool, children running in and out of the shared yards. “I loved the concrete daily life of that community … the politics of it, the bonds we formed with other parents at the nursery school,” Friedan wrote in her memoir Life So Far.
How is it possible that I’ve only just found out about a Women’s Liberation communal living movement that surnamed all of its children Wild? In this article, there is a weird and pointless focus on the fact that one of the children wears high heels as an adult woman, I hope you can see through that to this wonderful pullquote:
In 2003, Shelley married a Tory-supporting civil servant. "Al came to the wedding and, as mother of the bride, spoke. Apparently, she had this massive speech - a feminist rant, actually, but two of my mums got to it first and crossed out loads." Last summer, the couple separated. "I should never have married a Tory," she says.
This article about a building designed to release women from the chains of housework (it never really got off the ground) is interesting, as are Lenin’s opinions on housework:
[C]ommunist values were not the only ideals behind the Narkomfin: women too were set to be emancipated. “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades … chains her to the kitchen”, wrote Lenin in A Great Beginning. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins … against this petty housekeeping.”
"Compared to larger global women's issues, emojis may seem insignificant, but these tiny characters have become the primary language young girls use to express themselves in text messages or on social media" […] That's why they created "femojis," a category of powerhouse feminist women emojis including Beyonce, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Lena Dunham and Ellen DeGeneres.
However, what I'm really interested in is what I imagine to be the hidden meanings in the emoji set itself.
This emoji tells us that it is okay to ask for help and that whatever we are doing will be better with a friend or, if you have one, identical twin.
This emoji is a reminder to try hard and never to be embarrassed to do our best work or to show our best work.
If you are ever worried that you are not the best, do not worry, you are the best. PS this one is called the “princess emoji”. Travesty. She is a queen.
This emoji reminds us that we do not have to take ourselves too seriously. It is a breaded prawn.
This week’s Feminist Friday is brought to you in association with Julia Holmes, who has been doing the research on interesting women in the early days of Hollywood.
Josephine Baker was:
The first black woman to star in a major motion picture
More firsts! Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American movie star. As one might expect, she found Hollywood in the 1920s racist, keen to stereotype, and set in the habit of casting non-Chinese actors to play Chinese characters. She took her skills and beautiful face to the stage and to Europe. This included learning to sing operas in German. If I had to learn to sing operas in German in order to progress, I would hit a career roadblock soon and hard.
She also became more outspoken in her advocacy for Chinese American causes and for better film roles. In a 1933 interview for Film Weekly entitled "I Protest", Wong criticized the negative stereotyping in Daughter of the Dragon, saying, "Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain – murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?"
Eve Arnold, pioneering celebrity photographer, was taking photos until she was 85. I am always inspired when people keep doing their jobs, because they love their jobs. Enjoy the slideshow, which includes Josephine Baker:
[I]n 1951, she applied for an associate job at Magnum Photos' new New York office. “I had no illusion or hope that they would consider me for membership, but I was desperate,” she later said. Magnum did hire her: She and Inge Morath, who was hired around the same time, were the first two women to join the photo cooperative.
Instead of doing an incredibly difficult and unpleasant task I am writing Feminist Friday HA I WIN.
I’m always sad when the first time I hear about someone great is via their obituary. Here is an obituary of Sabeen Mahmud, who did indeed sound like someone great:
If you were afraid, she’d say, you’d get nothing done: especially not in army-ridden, intolerant Pakistan, where so much was never to be questioned or discussed, and certainly not by women.
In a violent change of topic, I’m not over reading articles about weddings! This one is about the television show “Four Weddings” and has an interesting ROI analysis towards the end.
But mainly, the bride is supposed to care, whether it’s about organizing dinner for everyone or individually wrapping 200 tissue envelopes “for your tears of joy.”
This emoji is a reminder to try hard and never to be embarrassed to do our best work or to show our best work.
If you are ever worried that you are not the best, do not worry, you are the best. PS this one is called the “princess emoji”. Travesty. She is a queen.
This emoji reminds us that we do not have to take ourselves too seriously. It is a breaded prawn.
