A whole episode essentially at reader request! Thank you, friend and subscriber. Suggestions and submissions are always welcome. This week is all about the women of the frozen north, because it’s cold and dark outside and wow the research for this made me exceptionally pleased to be in a country that is not that northern, in an age of widespread central heating.
Did you know that Margaret Atwood wrote a series of poems based on the diaries of Susanna Moodie, an early immigrant to Canada? I’ve only skimmed the diaries so far but it sounds – as one might expect – like a hard life, shading into ghastly. Nevertheless:
Atwood traces the change — the growth and development — in Moodie’s response to the land. She moves from her initial alienation to her attitude at the end where, as Atwood explains in the Afterword, “Susanne Moodie has finally turned herself inside out, and has become the spirit of the land she once hated.”
Tove Jansson! She was great, so are her happy Moomin creations, and so, it seems, was her mother:
We learn that her mother, a clergyman’s daughter and the model for Moominmamma, was a crack shot and a horse rider who, before getting married, reportedly performed in a circus attended by Swedish royalty. The whole Hammarsten side of the family, it seems, somehow a fusion of scientists, thrill-seekers, and storytellers, left a strong impression.
I am sure you that you, like me, are busy making your 2015 reading plans. If the book list episode of several weeks ago did not meet all of your needs, how about this list of Russian women authors – including one from Siberia (it does not get much colder than that)
Nina Gorlanova born in 1947, grew up in the Siberian city of Perm where she lives still and where most of her stories and novels are set. By returning to one and the same place, she creates a somewhat fantastic world populated with curious characters and possessing its own mythology. The life in her invented Perm is squalid but merry, risky but indestructible.
Enjoy this subscriber submission on Dr Frances Oldham Kelsey, who demonstrated integrity and basic stubbornness for the good of many:
Dr. Frances Kelsey took her stand against thalidomide during her first month at the Food and Drug Administration, on her first assignment. The task was supposed to be a straightforward review of a sleeping pill already widely used in Europe, but Kelsey was concerned by some data suggesting dangerous side effects in patients who took the drug repeatedly. While she continued to withhold approval, the manufacturers tried everything they could to get around her judgement.
As a counterpoint, this article is about the dangers of inventing heroes.
“In well-intentioned pastiches of the past, scientific women emerge as cardboard cutouts – the selfless helpmate, the source of inspiration, the dedicated assistant who sacrifices everything for the sake of her man and the cause of science. On the other hand, over-compensation – glorifying women as lone pioneers, as unrecognized geniuses – also has its drawbacks.”
There is much to enjoy in this Shonda Rhimes speech, what I would like to call attention to is the fact that she uses the phrase awesome vagina in an awards acceptance speech.
As a nod to my work Christmas party today, I present a list (and a list within a list) of books for your use in Secret Santa lists, Amazon wish lists – or to buy for your family and friends!
One of the many lovely things about this time of year is the articles that people write about what they have been reading in the year. Here's a piece that also talks about rereading, which is a big part of my and probably most people’s reading that is often missed in lists like these:
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite book of the year because I sometimes think I only have favorite books, full stop, and they are books I’ve been reading and re-reading for years with a really high level of guilt about it.
On which topic, here’s a book that was out this year that one of my friends is already rereading. It is on my Christmas list and if you like reading (1) about grief, (2) about birds of prey or (3) award winning books by women, it sounds like it’s one for you:
H Is For Hawk: “It is very extraordinary because some people call it a wildlife book but of course it is much more than that. It’s a memoir of mourning, a history of falconry, and has this wonderful special vocabulary of falconry. […] Helen describes the process of training a hawk so vividly, you are right there with her. At one point she talks about holding the hawk Mabel and says she can feel her heart had synchronised its beating with the heart of the terrified hawk. It is wonderful.”
Finally, here is a book aimed so squarely at me it makes me feel a bit queasy, like the highly specific Netflix microgenres:
Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective: The analysis richly illustrates how women are invited to embrace not only the stereotypical idea of bridal femininity but also a consumptive way of experiencing it. Through examination of brides' accounts of their 'big days', the book observes the imprints of the popular gender imagery on their self-portraits and self-narratives
For those of you who enjoyed the Wonder Woman article of a couple of weeks ago, Margaret Sanger also gets a namecheck in this article about the Pill. Quite the pullquote here, too:
The judge declared, in one of those moments when the niceties of official speech are yanked away to reveal raw animus, that “women did not have the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
You want to contribute to conversations about late-night feedings and tummy time, but every time you start a sentence with, “The same thing happened with my cat,” all you get are eye-rolls from your mommy friends. What to do? Well, the only person who needs to know that your cat isn’t actually your child is you. Here are the five best ways to participate in conversations while being totally ambiguous about whether you have a cat or a human child.
I hope that you used to watch Clarissa Explains It All, because it was a wonderful show. Here is an interview with its creator; I enjoyed when he talked about trying to make a show that any age or gender could enjoy, because I and my father still have in jokes that come straight from this show.
The thing about Clarissa is that she never lost. If Clarissa wasn’t winning the way she wanted to, she redefined what winning was.
Here’s an article on the roles women tend to assume in companies, which I enjoyed as a reminder to look more closely at who’s making the rules, who’s enforcing the rules, who gets to break them and who has to keep them. The “enforcement via empathy” part of this rang very true for me, although I’d not noticed it as a pattern before – my own job often involves making people feel happy about doing what I want them to do, but I’d thought of that as a characteristic, rather than a category, of work.
Maybe the answer isn’t in distinguishing the work one does from support work, but in learning from it and advocating for it.
This week I found out that the mother of a dear friend from college has died. She was a consistent inspiration to me – she was awarded a PhD in the history of Maths the same year her oldest child went to university, and then went on to make a significant contribution to research and thinking in her field. Her gentleness and her kindness meant a lot to me at the time my own mother died, and you can see from this obituary that these are characteristics that worked through all aspects of her life and work.
[S]he challenged the view, prevalent among historians, that mathematics somehow progresses only by means of “great and significant works” and “substantial changes” […]: in a gently civilised way, she moves the subject and its image away from a male-dominated, Eurocentric picture to a more inclusive and sophisticated world view.
While we’re on the topic of gentleness (sort of*2), Zuzana Gombošova is 3D printing by growing things:
This controlled system in which our products are slowly grown, as opposed to quickly manufactured, has the potential to change our relationship to an object as nurturing becomes an element of the process.
As a tribute to Dr Stedall’s interest in dissenting religious traditions, have the full text of Margaret Fell’s “Women’s Speaking Justified” (it's great):
There is enmity between women and the Serpent just as there is enmity between the Seed of Woman and the Serpent's Seed. Therefore, if the Seed of Woman is not allowed to speak, the Seed of the Serpent speaks. It is clear that those who speak against the preaching of women are speaking also against her Seed, and they speak out of the malicious enmity of the old Serpent.
Last week was all about words so this week is all about physical strength. I'm also 100% back on my minimal commentary grind and I hope you enjoy these links as much as I did.
An article that has it all, assuming you like at least one of suffragettes, amazons, academic intrigue and comic books:
Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy.
I understand why some people might believe the only way to advance women’s rights is to slaughter every man on the planet, but that sort of radical, explicitly homicidal position, which for all I know is a fundamental aspect of feminism, is exactly what makes me hesitate to call myself a feminist.
I’ve had a frustrating work week in which I feel like I’ve not been heard at all, so here are two women writers who made their voices heard regardless of their circumstances.
Enjoy this obituary of the Iranian poet Simin Behbahani:
The danger, she knew, was in doing the censors’ work for them, by heeding the voice in her mind that had begun to warn her: “don’t write this, they won’t allow it to be published.”
Here’s an article on Mother Julian of Norwich, one of my favourite thinkers and also the first woman to write a book in English. In the mid 1300s she prayed for, and received, a series of visions of God’s love. She then took at least twenty years to write a full exposition of those visions and what they meant, in a time when women weren’t generally considered to be (a) adequate people to receive visions from God or (b) adequate people to write books. Her writing is beautiful – intimate and earthy and almost impossibly full of love.
The long timelines don’t stop at her taking twenty years to fully understand and write her visions. Her influence on mainstream theology began to be felt 500 years later, after a 1901 translation of her work into modern English and (in the intervening years) the advent of mass production. I think about this every time I feel frustrated, like everything is moving too slowly – it always speaks to me about how little ability we have to estimate our long term influence, how little we understand how many lives we can or will touch, and how lightly we can value the gifts that we have been given.
Finally, what could be more feminist than time away from the kitchen? Nothing. Have a recipe for microwave jam sponge, ready in 13 minutes. My mother made this a lot when I was growing up.
Is the reason we know with greater certainty the age of things found in archaeological digs
Had two children in a era with no mat leave and, for want of a better phrase, leaned in like you wouldn’t believe
Is incredible
This is a long article so maybe nice to print for the train home.
The arrangement of the parts to make a whole, and how the properties of the whole are not just the sum of the parts, but profoundly affected by the respective positioning of the parts to form the whole. That was a sort of [interest] that has stayed with me and [transferred] very easily into the political and the social things. So it’s all the back and forth of life—it’s always been navigating around a standing structure and changing them so as to change their properties.
This week a friend (and subscriber! hi) sent me this article about name changes on marriage. It reminded me of a conversation with a colleague about naming traditions where her father was born, in the Congo. It’s more normal than not for a large group of siblings to all have different surnames, because surnames are a thing that is chosen – they’ll speak about the conditions under which a child was born, the day a child was born, or something else to do with that time. These names are often chosen by an aunt or an uncle rather than the parents, because whilst families don’t share the same name, the definition of who is and is not close family is a lot wider. Of course there are a lot of naming traditions in the world, but this one is particularly interesting to think with because right from the start it places all your names as a part of what you are – a lot of family are involved, but it’s the decision on the name and not the name itself that is shared.
I'm way off my "minimal commentary" brief here. Have a lovely day,
Afsaneh Najmabadi points out that images of beauty in Iranian art weren’t based on gender difference in the 18th and 19th centuries. During that time, painters depicted beautiful men and women with joined black eyebrows, big green eyes, and generally similar features. The ideal image of beauty in these paintings was often shown to be a male youth (the amrad), who was depicted with a wispy mustache. Women accentuated their eyebrows and facial hair using mascara and other cosmetic products to more closely resemble the boyish image.
An interview about sculpture and space and permanence from Kara Walker. I got to see this sculpture/installation the last time I went to New York, it was astonishing. In the article, there's a much better pull quote than the one I used. See if you can find it!
"[T]he gist of the piece was that it wouldn't be rebuilt again, that it would never happen again. It was ephemeral. You build these monuments, but they're really castles in the sand. It's like sugar. It evaporates and goes away."
OPEN QUESTION: Do you think that pocket squares for women are or could be a thing? This week I saw a guy from ASOS rocking a pocket square with a blazer and jeans, and really felt like I wanted in. I did a search for this just to be fully informed and the first hit is to a site called MAN REPELLER. Could go either way. Let me know what you think.