I’m back! I’m back! Thank you Cecily for your lovely Fem Fridays while I was away.

Do you remember the article on women taking wives in Igbo culture? Here’s something similar, about girls dressed up as boys (for a variety of reasons) in Afghanistan. The only possible reason I’ve not featured this already is that I bought the book and thought I’d write about it after I’d read it. That could be ages. Read it today!

There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/world/asia/21gender.html?_r=1

I read George Sand for the first time on holiday. When her first book came out, there was lots of controversy about whether she was male or female – with the argument running that no woman could write so well, but also, men don’t understand women, so what sort of a person could have written a book like this? In the below excerpt, we see Ms Sand nailing a common female fantasy, a man realising that a woman does not want to listen to him talk any more:

She was also the inspiration for George Eliot calling herself George Eliot! Really a remarkable woman, and also – in a callback to the first link – one who would wear men’s clothing for fun and practicality.

Her literary production is vast. Honoré de Balzac was deemed phenomenally productive: Sand was mocked for her output. There was an implication that such a stream of works was unfeminine in its proportions. She wrote a huge number of novels and plays, a massive two-volume autobiography, stories, essays, and articles. And her letter writing was quite as prolific as that of other writers of the time: her published correspondence comprises twenty-five volumes

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jack-sand.html

There is always time for the Brontës, who pretended to be men, and then gave up on it – for, I assume, the reasons outlined below:

Have a lovely day!

Alex.