I was interested in this article because its title - "can you be a waitress and a feminist" - pits two important laws against one another:
Betteridge's law, stating that the answer to any question posed in a headline is always "no"
The as yet unnamed law that states that the answer to the question "can you be a feminist and [be a noun|do a verb]" is always "yes"
Underlying it all is the clichéd belief that how you behave in Vegas “stays in Vegas” — that it’s not a true reflection of your character, and bears no real consequences. This combination not only encourages people to indulge in aggressive behavior, but also distorts sexual harassment into something far less severe, even innocent.
Not the most consistent ethical position in this week’s Feminist Friday.
Another piece on women in tech, but the message – that being a woman with a job shouldn’t have to mean being the most inspirational person in your field – translates everywhere.
You shouldn’t have to be pretty or nice or really anything besides interested in tech to go into this industry. […] I’m left with this nagging feeling that the only women we value are the ones who can be everything at once. That we’re only worthy if we can destroy the curve in the algorithms class and write beautiful lines of code while painting our nails. Otherwise, if we’re just okay programmers, or if we’re socially awkward, we don’t matter.
OKAY NOW LET’S HAVE WALL TO WALL INSPIRATIONAL WORK LADIES
Not often that I feature lawyers here, but I always love to read that big corporations are not unassailable.
She’s filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of truck drivers, waiters, delivery men, cable installers, call center workers, and exotic dancers. FedEx and Starbucks are among companies that have paid out millions of dollars for misclassifying workers and misallocating workers’ tips, respectively, as a result of suits she’s filed.
Lydia Davis is learning Norwegian from an extremely difficult novel while also translating that novel. If you have not read her fiction, you would enjoy it! I did not realise quite how impressive a linguist she is:
“Yes, ‘young’ and ‘old’, I knew that was what ‘ung’ and ‘gammel’ meant. I could tell what followed was a whole list of opposites of the same order. So I could easily figure out the other words: ‘rich’ and ‘poor,’ ‘sickness’ and ‘health’. You see how you are suddenly able to unlock so many words, just by studying the pattern? Take the words beginning with ‘Hv.’ I guessed they were used in questions: ‘hva’ meaning ‘what’, ‘hvorfor’ meaning ‘why’. But it took me a long time to figure out ‘hvis’ was ‘if.’ I had to start by assuming it was a word of the same class and then test all the different possibilities.”
So when you find a pattern, do you check with other sources to see if you’re right?
“No, no, never! Then it wouldn’t be the same. I want to figure it out myself. I think of learning a language as a riddle.”
Here is your occasional reminder to enjoy the best Hark A Vagrant comic, about some of the many problems Mary Shelley had:
She had a difficult life and still made the time to write an enduring classic and invent a genre:
[T[he need to support her surviving child and limits on her support from her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, made writing a practical need rather than a personal indulgence. […]The immense popularity of Frankenstein had been increased even more by several stage productions: Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein, which Shelley herself saw, was one of six different versions in 1823 alone. As she wrote to Leigh Hunt on 9 September, after seeing the drama: "lo and behold! I found myself famous." The title pages of all of her later novels carry the phrase "by the author of 'Frankenstein.'"
Archival footage is always great and here is some of Emmeline Pankhurst and other suffragettes. Twenty seconds in the narrator says a monstrous regiment of women who threatened the very heart of the British Establishment, a wonderful sentence fragment.
Lots of my favourite things in today’s episode, all round the theme of marriage.
This article about the fluidity of gender, who can marry whom, and where status is derived in Igbo communities is extremely touching. It also reminds me of the article on literacy from episode #20 – these options are open to, and needed by, uneducated women in most cases:
In Lokpanta and certain other Igbo communities, gender, particularly female gender, is not fixed. It is a cultural construct that can be transcended. In Osumenyi, where I come from, a woman who is menopausal can apply for privileges only accorded to men. She can be initiated into certain groups meant for men only, and when she dies, she can be given male funeral rites.
I was very excited to find a) that Mary Anne Disraeli was a hoarder and b) that someone has gone through her massive pile of stuff and written a book about it. If you know of other hoarders in history, let me know. Anyway, Disraeli married her for her money, and then they made love work:
Examining her papers after her death in 1872, Disraeli was astonished: “She does not appear to have destroyed a single scrap I ever wrote to her.” Until Daisy Hay took on the task, no one had mined them for her sake rather than his.
Did you have star charts as a child? I did and it explains many, many of my adult behaviours. Here’s a short story from The Toast offshoot The Butter. It starts slow and I’d recommend sticking with it:
I hope you are enjoying your Friday! Enjoy some links, on a theme you can perhaps guess.
Verso are republishing The Dialectic Of Sex, which is exciting. Here's a profile of Shulamith Firestone, including a story of her funeral, at which her sister laid a smackdown on her brother:
He lamented Shulamith’s “tragic” failure to make a “good marriage” and have children “who would be devoted to her.” When Tirzah’s turn came to give a eulogy, she addressed Ezra. ‘Excuse me, but with all due respect, Shulie was a model for Jewish women and girls everywhere, for women and girls everywhere. She had children—she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.’
Project Diane from Digital Undivided aims to work against the "I would support black women founders, but there aren't any!" line. It's still in early stages so there's not a searchable dataset yet, alas:
Margery Kempe, fifteenth century mystic and unreliable autobiographer describes an argument between her and her husband after two months of celibacy. I can only find this in middle English but it is well worth the effort:
"Margery, if her come a man wyth a swerd and wold smyte of myn hed les than I schulde comown kendly wyth yow as I have do befor, seyth me trewth of yowr consciens - for ye sey ye wyl not lye - whether wold ye suffyr myn hed to be smet of er ellys suffyr me to medele wyth yow agen as I dede sumtyme?"
"Alas, ser," sche seyd, "why meve ye this mater and have we ben chast this eight wekys?"
"For I wyl wete the trewth of yowr hert."
And than sche seyd wyth gret sorwe, "Forsothe I had levar se yow be slayn than we schuld turne agen to owyr unclennesse."
Blackheart is still my favourite LP of the year so far, you will probably want to listen to it in Spotify but here it is in YouTube also. Please enjoy the contrast between this pullquote and the Kassia story.
I’m […] intrigued and impressed at the maneuvering behind the woman matching the Billie Jean idea. She’s making it. It’s a feminist take on who people call the hoes and video girls of the world or whatever they may be – by the end of the record I’ve become her.
This week's Feminist Friday is all about food, because I found a recipe that I'm really excited to try, and that sent me down a rabbit hole of links about food and gender. Enjoy, and do let me know if you try this incredible looking mac and cheese. There is a lot of guff before the actual recipe, so I suggest ctrl+f "shredded" to get you there faster:
A history of Jell-O advertising in, obviously, America. The phrase "Jell-O salad" is mentioned and just sort of left there, this recipe will not appear in Feminist Friday any time soon.
A recurring theme in Jell-O’s advertising campaign can be termed, at best, aggressive patriotism, and at worst, ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In one of its early advertisements [..] The illustration [..] functions to class the gelatin by presenting Jell-O in dainty glass dishes on a silver tray, framed by toile wallpaper and dignified candlesticks.
Please enjoy the "Betty Crocker Story", and note how The Feminine Mystique is dealt with. In case you do not remember, Betty Friedan spends an entire chapter slamming Betty Crocker's advertising in all but name, somthing that Crocker, B proudly reappropriates here:
Yesterday I finished Helen Macdonald’s amazing H Is For Hawk, which I highly recommend to everyone. As a tribute today’s Feminist Friday is all about the ways women exist in and picture the world.
Here’s an interview from this very week where Helen Macdonald talks more about her book:
Growing up I used to love those books about nature that were written in that wonderful expert tone. They would say: This is the natural world, and this is what’s in it, and this is what it means. I wanted to write a book with more than that one voice, and to play with genres. As the book progresses, all those different styles of writing crash up against each other. I think grief shatters narratives, and that’s what I was trying to do.
These amazing statement necklaces from Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick tell a story about air quality in Sheffield (note bonfire night!). This is the best data visualisation/materialisation I have seen this year.
By running their fingers over each necklace, the wearer can literally feel how the air quality in Sheffield went up and down over the course of each week. Dangerous particulate levels have the potential to hurt/prick the finger of the wearer.
Just reading this pullquote who will tell you that this story is to me as catnip is to a particularly impressionable cat. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
By the time Day was twenty-four, she’d been arrested outside the White House while demanding the vote for women and sent to jail for a month; worked as an assistant managing editor at The Masses, a left-wing monthly that was shut down after opposing the draft and the First World War; got arrested during the raid of an Industrial Workers of the World flophouse and mistakenly been charged with prostitution; worked as a library clerk, a restaurant cashier, an artist’s model, a nurse; had an illegal abortion; got married and sought a divorce; moved to Europe and lived on the island of Capri for six months; interviewed Leon Trotsky; and decided to write a novel. After selling the film rights to her first book, she bought a beach house on Staten Island and had a daughter with a common-law husband. And then Dorothy Day did something so radical that few of her radical friends could comprehend it. She became a Catholic. She took a vow of poverty. And she devoted the rest of her life to the practice of a new kind of American Catholicism—one that was uncompromising in its service to the homeless, its opposition to state power, its resistance to all forms of violence and war.
Perhaps you feel like I've not featured clothes or suits or androgyny recently enough. I certainly feel that way, so let me reassure you that that editorial policy has not changed with this link to an interview to a woman tailor in New York:
One of the reasons I switched was because by the end of my schooling I found all of my inspiration was menswear—a tuxedo jacket, a suit—I was looking more towards menswear pieces from 1800s than what women were wearing. I really like the structure of things, and I like that it’s not so simple; it’s more of an architectural piece.
Speaking of the 1800s, let me recommend the tremendous website findagrave.com, on which I have spent a week wandering around Brompton Cemetery in my imagination. The internet does not have a lot on this woman (she wrote a book which now retails for $233 on Amazon):
But it does have this long and gripping essay on her vigorously socially climbing daughter, who married an English peer whom she did not love when she figured out she was never going to marry Tennessee Williams:
“Oh, Peter’s in the bin again,” Van Horne remembers her saying. “He loves it. He’s learned to make ashtrays. Other people had messy marriages. She didn’t. She had an unfortunate husband who was a little mad.”
The findagrave portion of today was intended to be a muted celebration of women who are not famous, and then it turned into celebrity gossip of the 1950s, so that goes to show how the best laid plans gang aft agly. I hope your Friday similarly takes you in a fun and unexpected direction,
Enjoy the long weekend, if you have a long weekend,