Good morning,

Many thanks to everyone who emailed or messaged last week with expressions of gentle concern that my joining a work ski trip means that I’ve also joined the Tory party or landed aristocracy. As it happens I do think the free market would take care of a lot of your concerns about the deregulation of the badger baiting industry!* Thanks for asking.

Next week I actually am away skiing and the stylish and haunting Saxey will be your editor! I hope you are looking forward to this as much as I am. March 8th will be both Feminist Friday and International Women's Day, in a sort of "supermoon" event.

Today's Fem Fri is about the women of cartography. Side note: there are lots of articles with "top tens" of women mapmakers, but very little in terms of detail on the individual women. If you know of or have written great pieces on women cartographers, let me know! I am by no means done with this topic. Here is such an overview for you to enjoy, and a nice engraved map by Marie Catherine Haussard:

In the 1970s, early in her career as map librarian at the New York Public Library, Alice Hudson started researching women mapmakers throughout history. With few other women in her chosen field, she wondered how many had come before her. “I thought I might find 10,” [… b]ut over the years, as she combed through maps, censuses, newspapers, and tips from colleagues, she was amazed by how many women there were in the early days of mapmaking. By the late ‘90s, she’d found over a thousand names of women who had drawn, published, printed, engraved, sold, or traded maps prior to 1900 alone.

https://www.citylab.com/design/2016/03/women-in-cartography-early-north-america/471609/

Here's a favourite woman mapmaker of mine not mentioned in that article – it's social reformer Florence Kelley, whose prodigious output included "wage maps" of Chicago, like the "poverty maps" of London. They are also beautiful:

A prolific translator and writer of books, journal articles, and pamphlets, her best known work today is Hull House Maps and Papers, published in 1895, and still a classic of sociology and ethnography, and includes spectacular wage and ethnicity maps. [..] A life long advocate for the education for women, for improving working conditions for women and against the exploitation of child workers, Florence Kelley was the daughter of a well known Pennsylvania Congressman and judge, William Darrah Kelley. She grew up in a family of Philadelphia Quakers with long standing commitments to the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage and the education and literacy of women.

http://florencekelley.northwestern.edu/florence/

Finally, here are some maps you would not use on a trip to a city – or to bring social change to that city – but would instead put on your walls and gaze at with joy. I've loved Karen O'Leary's map cuts for almost a decade now, here's how she got started:

My first hand cut map was created during my 5th year architecture thesis as a site map. After college, I was working as a Project Architect in NYC and created a 6 foot x 8 foot piece for myself. It took me 9 months to complete. Once I finished it, I didn’t have the resources to frame it or a place to hang it. I held onto it for a few years and then I eventually put it up on Etsy in 2009, not even knowing what Etsy really was.

https://feastandwest.com/2016/08/04/dream-jobs-karen-oleary/

Have a great weekend!

Alex.

*j/k j/k j/k love you love badgers 🦡🦡🦡