Good afternoon feminists,

This marks a year of Feminist Friday! I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. #femfriday started as something that I would send round to my office friends, before it was a tinyletter. I can thoroughly recommend this as a thing to do to jolly your Fridays up at work. Here is what I sent round a year or so ago, and it’s still a good one:

In the Middle Ages the word “spinster” was a compliment. A spinster was someone, usually a woman, who could spin well: a woman who could spin well was financially self-sufficient — it was one of the very few ways that mediaeval women could achieve economic independence. The word was generously applied to all women at the point of marriage as a way of saying they came into the relationship freely, from personal choice, not financial desperation.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/03/how-to-be-alone-school-of-life/

Great article on how stereotypes affect academic performance. Its message is a little too strongly anti-eggs for my taste but there’s nothing to say you can’t knock back a couple omelettes whiles thinking about what a complex, intelligent, talented human being you are. Try this today! You are great and so are eggs.

we know that highlighting identities associated with impaired performance will cause impaired performance, but as a counter to this, research also confirms that thinking about our complex, intelligent, talented, individual human selves before the given tests will partially or completely dissolve this impairment. So theoretically we can sort of “engineer” out any test impairments with a combination of these techniques and perform with a lot more cognitive clarity than an extra scrambled egg for breakfast could give us.

http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male

Speaking of stereotypes, here’s an piece on the “cult of domesticity”. If you would like to read more on this topic, I got a lot out of Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound and you might as well.

Women’s magazines and religious literature were two of the primary ways the cult of domesticity was promulgated; kitsch aimed at wives was a third way the message got across. (The female-centric kitsch we see today—coffee mugs and T-shirts and magnets proclaiming that it’s “wine o’clock!” and “don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee!” are descendants of this way of thinking: Women are still in charge of the home, only now it stresses them out.) Magazines like Ladies’ Companion and Godey’s Lady’s Book established in the public conscience the idea that women ought to care primarily about the care of their homes for the sake of their families.

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/the-21st-century-cult-of-domesticity

Have a nice weekend,

Alex.