Labour throws out a hint that it plans to change the law of royal succession, to end the extraordinary sexism that puts any male in one family above any female, but then within a week, despite some public support wimps out on the plan.
I am of course a republican, but that the monarchy should be quite so sexist is a further disgrace.
An historic first: This is, I believe, the first time that a national newspaper has advocated voting Green:
The traditional beneficiaries of protest voting – the Liberal Democrats – have failed to make an impact in the campaign. Their candidate, Brian Paddick, is undoubtedly a decent man, but he has been out of his depth as a politician. There is a stronger case to be made for casting ‘first preference’ votes for Siân Berry, the Green candidate. The party has already used its toehold on the London Assembly to wring green concessions worth millions of pounds out of the mayoral budget. A respectable score for Ms Berry, an intelligent and articulate advocate of her cause, would send a clear signal to whoever wins the mayoralty that London cares about environmental policy. It would also deprive the British National Party of fourth place, a small but notable step towards the mainstream.
I’ve been reading in the odd spare moment The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion After the Black Death, Katherine L French, Uni of Penn Press, 2008. It is delightfully lively for a serious academic text; there is a thesis and theory, but the book wears this lightly and recovers from church records and accounts snippets that give an insight into the lives of women in this difficult age.
In post-plague England as many as a third of women never married, and there was a preoccupation with controlling independent and mobile women, French finds. Studies on women and religion in this period have tended to focus on nuns and the elite, but at the local level churchgoing, and church activities, played a central role in women’s lives. Parochial activities were designed to promote lay support for the parish, but in their frequent gender segregation, women adapting their housekeeping roles and behaviours in the service of the parish, which fostered collective action and expanded their opportunities.
There’s not of course in this era the sort of spiritual diaries that start to occur, from relatively modest places on the social scale, after the Reformation, so French has to find hints, suggestions and draw conclusions from rather drier records. But her conclusions were, to this reader, solid.
So, she says, when in Tintinhull Somerset in 1449 and again in 1452, when the group of women who would have been paid six pennies for laundering the church linens declined payment, chosing instead to donate their labour, they were expressing not just devotion, but probably also drawing considerable satisfaction for doing so. (That would probably have been something like a week’s wages.) When in Bassingbourne, Cambridgeshire, the parish produced a St Margaret’s play to raise money for a new statue of St George, many women donated their brewing and baking labour for the refreshments.
read more
Why is it that Radio Four seems to think that you want to hear the sound of a dentist’s drill coming out of your radio? I’ve heard dramas featuring such on at least three separate occasions recently.
Please, if you want me to listen to drama (and I confess I’m not a fan, and I _really_ can’t stand The Archers), please turn off the drills!
There are many ways to arrange a Carnival of Feminists, and since we’re not getting seriously into middle age, in carnival editions at least, it is hard to find a new one, but in the Carnival of Feminists No 58, Hops has created a delightful method of arrangement (with help from her 13-year-old sister).
As always there are some wonderful posts, including an interesting reaction to the burqa and and an interesting example of a “joke” about gendered language.
But don’t waste time over here – do go over there and check it out!
And should you be in Sheffield tomorrow for Fem 08 – sorry you need to have booked already since it is entirely sold out with, I’m told, a huge waiting list – do look me up and if you’re interested in hosting the carnival let me know. I’m chairing a session on grassroots feminist media, with speakers Jess McCabe from The F Word, which hosted Carnival 35, Gill Court and Charlotte Cooper from Subtext, and Red Chidgey from the Feminist Activist Forum.
(And you don’t have to be British, or in Sheffield, to volunteer to host the carnival – I’m looking for hosts from every corner of the globe. You can be a new blogger, or a veteran, or somewhere inbetween. And if you consider yourself feminist I probably will too. Don’t be shy!)
A great tale in the Telegraph about three “young housewives”, who 50 years ago decided on a jaunt right across Europe, and up the Himalayas.
Five months later the women returned to England and resumed their lives as diligent wives. They packed their adventure away, along with the maps, and these intrepid explorers were largely forgotten. There is no mention of them in the 1979 book Zanskar, the Hidden Kingdom, by the French explorer Michel Peissel, nor in many later books on the area.
(Zanskar is now in Jammu and Kashmir.)
And their adventure was forgotten, and probablyten would have remained so, had not a diligent film maker uncovered their film record “the only visual record of Zanskar before 1975… When Salter tracked down the women he found the film in a box on top of Davies’s wardrobe”.
You can’t but feel that had they been men, they would have made a great fuss and today been something like travel David Attenboroughs….
About