Philobiblon

* The Scandinavian states are often cited as paradises of gender relations. But it seems not all is right in the state of Sweden. A reminder, if one was needed, of the difficulties of changing deep-seated cultural patterns.

* The same might be said about this preview of a book about race in America which argues that the whites are the problem. Is it also true of Britain and Australia? I think you could make a reasonable case.

* Britain is sending homosexual men back to Iran, where they face persecution, maybe even execution. (Except in one case the victim committed suicide first.) Read this excellent post on Musings from Middle England and write to your MP; I have. (Found on Tim Worstall’s Britblog roundup.)

* But when it comes to pure barbarism, it is always hard to beat America. There’s an account on Women’s eNews of woman who had to go to court to enforce her right to an abortion, which of course she had to pay for, and made just in time. But what really struck me was the account further down the story of a woman who spent the last three weeks of her pregnancy chained to a hospital bed, having to call for assistance to have her chains moved when she even wanted to turn over. Now I’ve never been pregnant, and don’t expect to be, but when you see heavily pregnant women they usually look very uncomfortable and shift around regularly trying to find some relief. Just imagine!

Finally, very belatedly, I’ve done a quick update on my website, which has been hopelessly neglected for almost a year in favour of the blog. I guess in my new freelance writing life I’m going to have to do a major revamp soon, but in the meantime I’ve just put up a series of articles on “Thai women and work”, written for the Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women’s foreign correspondent programme for 1995-6, that I stumbled across during my recent move.

There’s Breaking through the barriers, a general overview, Sex work – A Labour issue? and Unemployment, A Looming Danger.

The statistics are not the latest now, but probably as up-to-date as many to be found on the web, and the articles might still be of use to somebody. (I do hate to labour over something that then just sits on a shelf.)

I know a lot more about HTML now than I did when I set up the website in 2001, although I’m still far from expert. I wrote these using a programme called Hotdog, which I got off the front of a computer magazine(!) I’m wondering if anyone can recommend any free or cheap programmes to use, as this now looks awfully clunky?

I’ve explored before the early modern practice of charivaris, or rough music, but was surprised to read of a late 19th-century example, and in London.

It was Guy Fawkes Day, 1876, and small retailers were protesting about the practices of William Whiteley, a former draper who was developing what would be London’s first department store. About noon …

A grotesque and noisy cortege entered the thoroughfare [Westbourne Grove]. At its head was a vehicle, in which a gigantic Guy was propped up … vested in the conventional frock coat of a draper… Conspicuous on the figure was a label with the words ‘Live and Let Live’ … In one hand of the figure a piece of beef bore the label “5 1/2 d” and in the other was a handkerchief, with the ticket “2 1/2 d. all-linen”. (Quoted in Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Erika Diane Rappaport, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 16)

So this might be the man you could ultimately blame for Wal-Mart. “He became known as the “Universal Provider” – a merchant who claimed to sell anything to anybody. By combining dissimilar goods in one business and offering cut-price goods for cash only.” (p. 17) He was consequently, local shopkeepers complained, putting them out of business.

Thus the debate over Wal-Mart, Tesco and their ilk of our time has echoes in late Victorian London. And there are others.

In 1872 Whiteley had applied for a liquor licence for wine in his new refreshment room. But this could mean LADIES drinking spirits in PUBLIC! The otherwise general liberal editor of the local paper complained: “… sherry and silks, or port and piques, need not of necessity go together when ladies go ‘shopping’.” (p. 30)

Today the debate in England and Wales is over the extension of liquor licence hours, which is producing a similar moralistic backlash.

Some complained that the provision of abundant goods in opulent settings encouraged consumption. Even the provision of “rest rooms” encouraged “excessive shopping” that produced a “wild and reckless period …. things are done in a financial way that would make the angels weep … The afternoon’s excitement has … all the attractions of a delightful dream, with the slight dash of an orgy, leaving a lingering pleasure even over repentance”. (p. 38) Today’s debate is over-consumption of credit, and also, of course, plain over-consumption.

And finally, for those who complain about the pavement jaywalkers of Oxford Street, there’s the consolation to know that once “two young servants were fined for driving their perambulators abreast… The magistrate asked them: ‘How are the people to pass if you girls are gaping after soldiers and policemen?’ (p. 44)

History

The man behind the mail-order bride slur, John Brogden, has been forced to resign. (And I was pleased to see that Anne Summers, one of the grandes dames of Australian feminism, agrees with me.)

On another subject altogether, has anyone else been having problems logging into Blogger? I keep having to have two or three goes at it, both at work and home, getting error messages indicating “cookies are not enabled”. Anyone know of a solution? And yes, my cookies are perfectly available and I believe tasty, thank you.

Light blogging today, due in part to inertia induced by horribly sore muscles. The message for next season is that I must do more preparation for wicketkeeping. But I have added a nice range of new bloggers to my blogroll: please check them out.

Two stories on opposite sides of the world are a reminder that an awful lot of stereotypes about women, and men, haven’t changed at all.

An Australian state Opposition leader has got into trouble for calling the premier’s wife a mail-order bride. (She happens to be from Malaysia – actually highly unlikely to be a source of women using paid online marriage arrangement services, since it is far too wealthy.) It left me wondering why “mail-order bride” should be considered, as it undoubtedly is, a nasty term of abuse?

Perhaps the suggestion is that anyone who is a “mail-order bride” is little better than a prostitute (an uncomfortably obvious exposure of the traditional economics of marriage) and anyone who marries them can’t get a “proper” woman – a slur on his manhood indeed. I wonder, if you called such women “economic refugees”, would they get better treated?

Then in France, that home of supposedly sophisticated relations between the sexes, the Interior Minister, and possible future President, Nicolas Sarkozy is, according to The Telegraph considering divorcing his wife Cécilia, since while the French public apparently has no problem with male politicians having several simultaneous relationships, one of their wives doing the same thing is considered a reflection on her husband’s virility.

Why even, if this were true, should virility have anything to do with political ability? Is there some hint here into the reasons why women candidates can find selection committees, if often not voters, so resistant to their campaigns?

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On another side of stereotypes, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spike column reports that the second and fourth most common Australian web searches for men are Ned Kelly and Slim Dusty (an old-style country music singer, now dead). Funny how one of the most urbanised societies on earth clings to its foundation myths.

Shane Warne (cricketer) and John Howard (current, dreadful Prime Minister) were first and third, for the record.

Well the “sweat it out” theory seems to have made my cold neither better nor worse: thoroughly unscientific conclusion – it doesn’t work.

Well today I tested out, possibly to destruction, the theory of “sweating out” a cold. Having been down with a rotten one for a couple of days, I really wasn’t fancying a scheduled cricket game, but since I knew we were already two short I didn’t think I really could pull out – nine is almost a team; eight really isn’t.

So I trotted along, and wasn’t altogether surprised to be asked to keep wicket. Well, I told myself, at least I won’t have to run – just leap up and down and around hundreds of times ….

But in cricketing terms it worked quite well. I was pretty chuffed with how I kept, to one serious quickie and a couple of sometimes wayward medium pacers.

And then happily I didn’t (quite) have to bat as we astonishingly – with the help of a magnificent century – managed to successfully chase a total of 251 in 32 overs.

And I didn’t even get a lot of bruises …

It was only the third time I’ve kept since taking it up again after an 18-year hiatus, and I think I have to thank cycling for the fact that I survived the experience – without the underlying level of fitness it has given me I would never have made it.

And feeling rotten might have even helped in an odd way – it took some of the pressure off feeling like I have to succeed amid an otherwise all-male team.

But as for the sweating-out theory, we’ll see. I’m off to bed for a long sleep … I may be some time.

Where are all the female bloggers? Here, in my weekly “top ten” collection.

Starting on the serious side, Pandora’s Blog offers a reasoned defence of experimentation on animals in the light of the closing, under the pressure of sometimes-criminal protests, of a guinea pig farm in England this week. I fear, however, this is not a subject on which some people are amenable to reason.

Et. al is horrified that pupils are being issued with E-books as textbooks. “The pleasures of the library must be learned,” she argues.

The D Spot provides pithy anecdotes about life in New York, including its so-not-tactful ladies who shop. Kat on Ratblog, meanwhile, has been encountering some not-so-tactful men in her lab. My first degree was agricultural science and her post reminds me of the lecturer who used to intersperse slides of naked women in between those of cow uteri, “just to liven things up”.

Shorty PJs is musing on the place her occasional journal plays in her writing life, which sould seem to be a tortuous one, judging by the accompanying picture. (I don’t know where she gets the illustrations from, but they are brilliant.) Becky’s Journal’s author meanwhile, has turned her hand to poetry for the first time ever, and it was published on Salon. (Regular poets out there are not allowed to turn green with envy – read it and you’ll see she deserved it.)

Still on the literary side, but very much at the cutting edge, Jill/txt is musing on the possibilities unleashed by the release of the source code of the early 3d first-person shooter Quake. The idea, as I understand it in my largely “old literature” mind, is to turn it into a three-dimensional narrative. I’m interested in this because it seems to me there must someday pretty soon be a real breakthrough in the nature of popular fiction into a new form exploiting all of the possibilities of the web. But it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

Broken Clay Journal, meanwhile, is cleaning out her wardrobe and finding lots of black skirts. I guess most of us have a fashion “tic” like that – mine’s black jackets.

Are We There Yet meanwhile, provides Reasons to ride your bike. Not a new post, but as you may have noticed, it is one of my areas of interest.

The Daily Blog with Kelley Bell, who might have some links with the Mary Daly school of feminism, is trying to start a debate on The Da Vinci Code, saying she finds it attacks the “wicked step mother and seeks to put men and women back on equal footing”. I can’t in all honesty see it myself, but read the post and make up your own mind.

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Last week’s is here if you missed it.

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I’ve now made a collection of 200 female bloggers: I’ve already collected the first hundred together, and I’ll soon put up a collected list of the past ten weeks.

I’m going to take it easy for the next couple of weeks – Femmes Fatales will continue, but mostly revisiting some of the old favourites. I’ll probably pick up the hunt for new bloggers after that. Nominations of new blogs to include are still, however, highly welcome.

A fascinating collection of posts on the 18th-century email list has been exploring historic inks. It’s a reminder of how much more complicated everyday living was in the past; how much you had to know about all sorts of things that now happen invisibly, off stage.

I once intended to learn Chinese painting – might even get back to it one of these days, since I love the results – so I have got a lovely stone palettes and ink sticks, which just have to be ground with water.

But in the West these don’t seem to have developed; instead you started from scratch. There are some recipes here. (And if you are wondering about the seemingly essential “gallnuts” they are: “A nutlike swelling produced on an oak or other tree by certain parasitic wasps.”)

But the results, it seems, from the The ink corrosion website – which deals in detail with “major threat to our cultural heritage” – were not always ideal.

This left me musing about modern inks: pen and computer. How durable are they? But then again as librarians often warn, electronic records are certainly worse.

* Women’s eNews today has a commentary on the lack of visibility of prominent women in the media. I found it hopelessly naive and US-centric, but it did remind me I’d been meaning to point to Pratie Place’s post on the Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. If you were going to write a book on “great women of the modern world” she’d be near the top of the list.

* Research into the death of Christopher Marlowe that looks somewhat better founded than such reports usually are.

* Two Australian journalists face jail for refusing to reveal a source. This was not some issue of “national security”, but a wrangle over veterans’ pensions that embarrassed the government. So sad to think that little more than a decade ago Australia was one of the world’s leaders in human rights. It is getting more like the “Land of the Not-Free” every day – which of course suits John Howard just fine. Still, I suppose it is at least not yet AS bad ….

* Alabama’s use of the death penalty sounds like something out of the 19th century:

All 19 of Alabama’s appellate court judges are white, as are 41 of its 42 elected District Attorneys. Odds are 1 in 3 that your jury will be all white as well. …Though black people account for only 26% of Alabama’s population overall, nearly 63% of its prisoners are black. Of the 23 people executed in Alabama between 1975 and 2001, 70% were black.

So much for the right to life.
(Via Pen-Elayne.)

I’ve been planning it, then drawing back from it, getting excited, then getting cold feet, but I finally handed in my resignation at work yesterday. So soon (well probably in three months – that’s the contract period) I’ll be out on Grub Street, trying to earn a crust with whatever ideas for stories I can dream up (and, hopefully, some time soon, a book contract!)

Wish me luck – I’ll need it.

(The image above is from a Punch cartoon – my source simply dates it as “Victorian”. The text underneath says: Old-fashioned Party (with old-fashioned predjudices). “Ah! Very clever I dare say. But I see it’s written by a lady, and I want a book that my daughters may read. Give me something else!”)

Fearless prediction of the day: Sir Ian Blair, Chief of the Metropolitan Police (London), won’t be in his post in a month. That follows his astonishing inept handling of the aftermath of the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

It probably won’t be the disgraceully hysterical policing that led to the shooting down of an innocent man by police that does for him – though it should. The inquiry will be dragged out long enough, and the water muddied enough (where did those CCTV tapes go?) that the media will have him out before then for his personal actions. (This post* does an excellent job of outlining what went wrong, so I won’t go over this ground again.)

But the man who keeps questioning why “so much fuss” is being made over the police shooting rather than the criminal bombings (Excuse me – you’re the state and you killed one of your own citizens for no reason at all) and who makes an unbelievable joke of his response when told – he says 24 hours after the shooting on learning of the mistake he thought “Houston, we have a problem” – is sure to keep making so many errors that the politicians already emerging like football chairmen to express “total confidence in the manager” will soon be changing their tune.

There’s only one thing I’m worried about. I’m agreeing with Tim Hames. That’s never happened before.

* Found on Britblog Roundup No 27, in which yours truly also has a humble part.