Good afternoon,

Today’s Fem Friday is about where we find joy and how we build it for ourselves.

You might remember that The Underground Girls Of Kabul was one of Fem Friday’s books of the year for 2015 – here is another story of a (in this case Pakistani rather than Afghan) girl passing as a boy, in this case to get amazingly good at squash:

“I know that the higher I go, the greater the risk will be,” says Maria. “But I am from the Wazir tribe and we never give up. I have a very strong faith: if death is going to come – it can come on the road, it can come in bed or it can come from the Taliban – at least I know that I can do this.”

http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/activism-2/girl-unbound/

It’s been a while since I featured a long article about Old Hollywood, so I hope you’ll enjoy this one about director Dorothy Arzner. She started directing in the late 1920s and is still Hollywood’s most prolific female film director. I love this quotation about the montages female characters got in the movies of the period:

Arzner argued that the [puritanical Motion Picture Production] Code did force female characters to the centre of the frame: In the Hollywood “women’s film,” they could live wildly, go crazy, abandon their families, even if they had to be destroyed or redeemed by the time credits rolled. Jeanine Basinger’s book A Woman’s View describes the “bliss montage” that interrupts many of these movies: “The leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side … [The Bliss Montage] is a woman’s small piece of action, her marginal territory of joy.”

http://hazlitt.net/feature/efficient-system-exploitation

I also just generally love a montage, so if you have a particular favourite please let me know so I can also watch and enjoy it. Bonus points if it involves tidying.

Have a great weekend!

Alex.