Hullo,

Let's talk about fighting! It seems to come up a bit around here so I clearly like it. Here are women – and groups of women – who learned to fight with the tools available to them. Their bodies and their fiction and their ecstatic visions. Prepare to be delighted.

First up – bodies, and a brilliant new (to me) portmanteau word. SUFFRAJITSU. Ju-jitsu, based on using the other person’s strength against them, was a great martial art for the suffragist movement:

"They wouldn't have expected in those days that women could respond physically to that kind of action, let alone put up effective resistance," says Martin Dixon, chairman of the British Jiu-Jitsu Association. "It was an ideal way for them to handle being grabbed while in a crowd situation."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/magazine-34425615

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun left academia because it was too misogynist and started writing mystery novels as Amanda Cross. One can only assume this allowed her both to make more money and be less frustrated. Not least because she could write all of her former colleagues into her books, including renowned Middle Eastern Studies professor Edward Said, who she depicted being thrown out of a window and then hotly denied it was Edward Said. I refuse to believe this. And for some reason I have a strong desire to see a picture of Edward Said being pitched out of a window, if you draw one please send it to me and I’ll feature it next week if you want.

Even colleagues who insist they've never read an Amanda Cross book ("well, maybe skimmed") still know their criminal geography, confidently pointing out the hallway where the bull terrier Jocasta considers losing her lunch in "Death in a Tenured Position," or the window from which a professor of Middle Eastern studies is tossed, to widespread rejoicing, in "A Trap for Fools." ("No, the victim is not Edward Said," says Heilbrun, with the patience of one who has fielded the question many times.)

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/08/magazine/rage-in-a-tenured-position.html

Finally, ecstatic visions! There will always be space for female mystics in Fem Fri, here’s Anna Trapnell:

In 1654, when Trapnell was in her twenties—the exact year of her birth being unknown—she traveled to Bridewell Palace and sat in ecstatic vigil against the increasingly tyrannical theocracy of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. She spent twelve days in a trance, speaking paradox and poetry, prophecy and prayer, predicting the collapse of the government so many had initially welcomed after monarchical absolutism. Attended by non-conformists, dictating to an amanuensis, Trapnell repeated prayers like “The Voice and Spirit have made a league / Against Cromwel and his men, / Never to leave its witness till / It hath broken all of them.” She was apprehended and put on trial for witchcraft, but against all our presumptions of her era she beat the charge. She was simply too popular, too brilliant, too powerful for the state to end her ministry.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/praying-for-the-awful-grace-of-god

Happy weekend!

Alex.