Guys

Have you started watching Gentleman Jack on the BBC and apparently also HBO? It is great so far. The clothes are terrific, people are broadly kind to one another, and I laughed out loud several times during the first episode. This is what I want from television.

Really though one of the chief delights of the whole piece is how competent Anne Lister is. It's very soothing to see her striding around, knowing what she wants and what she needs to do next to achieve it. So please enjoy a Feminist Friday which is all about competent Yorkshirewomen.

Obviously managing land wasn't the only thing Anne Lister was good at, here's a guide to how to flirt more like her which I imagine will be extremely useful to you as the weekend approaches:

From the minute they meet, Anne Lister’s agenda is clear — not only because she tells us as much, with entries in her diary and knowing glances toward the audience — but because she’s just so good at what they used to call “making love.” By the second time the two women meet, Anne is pulling out all the stops [… cut here for extremely minor spoilers for Sunday's BBC ep]

https://www.autostraddle.com/gentleman-jacks-guide-to-flirting-with-ladies-of-fortune/

Here is another Yorkshirewoman who was good at management, it's St Hilda of Whitby. Founding figure in Anglo-Saxon Christianity, she was the abbess of several convents and the founding abbess of Whitby convent. There is a legend about her that her faith turned snakes to stone, it turns out these were most likely ammonites but here's how the enterprising early modern tourist industry got around this:

So strong was the belief, that the town arms of Whitby—three ammonites on a shield—once represented these shells with snakes' heads. An old Whitby copper token of "Flower Gate," dated 1667, also shows them as coiled snakes with heads. The fact that ammonites were never found with snakes' heads was, of course, always more or less of a stumbling-block, though the workmen and others frequently got over the difficulty by making and fixing heads to the ammonites on their own account.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Folk-Lore/Volume_16/The_Whitby_Snake-Ammonite_Myth

Moving on from managers but keeping with the themes of fossils (stick with this), how about the modernist sculptures of Barbara Hepworth! She is from Yorkshire and you can see many of her works in public places in London. I'm always happy when I do so, here is a guide to where to go to see some of the best of them (might be some nice ideas here for the bank holiday weekend btw):

On Hampstead Heath, something of the totemic phenomena of the Cornish landscape has been enshrined among the rhododendron bushes beside Kenwood House. Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean (meaning 'heavenly stone') is carved from a limestone block rich with fossils. The sculpture's outline is humanoid, but the viewer is invited to look through and beyond the sculpture by cavities that pierce right through the block, framing shifting perspectives of the gardens.

https://www.artuk.org/about/blog/best-of-barbara-hepworth-in-london/page/2/view_as/grid

Have a lovely weekend,

A xx.