My recent short piece on the the Byzantine composer Kassia has drawn some info on a female composer much closer to our own time, Rebecca Clarke, who still encountered many of the same obstacles of discrimination.
And attempts to recover her story have been hampered – although apparently no longer – by the modern laws of copyright – so crazy that this should persist after a person’s death.
… as recorded by Alexander Ostrovsky in Moscow in 1849 and performed today by the Arcola Theatre.
The censor complained “All the characters in the play – the merchant, his daughter, the lawyer, the clerk and the matchmaker – are first-rate villains. The dialogue is filthy. The entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class.”
And at its best, a lot of fun.
One of those usual questions raised by misogynists. A Harvard study has the facts and figures (PDF), in short, they don’t start playing…
ABSTRACT—Only 1% of the world’s chess grandmasters are women. This underrepresentation is unlikely to be caused by discrimination, because chess ratings objectively reflect competitive results. Using data on the ratings of more than 250,000 tournament players over 13 years, we investigated several potential explanations for the male domination of elite chess. We found that (a) the ratings of men are higher on average than those of women, but no more variable; (b) matched boys and girls improve and drop out at equal rates, but boys begin chess competition in greater numbers and at higher performance levels than girls; and (c) in locales where at least 50% of the new young players are girls, their initial ratings are not lower than those of boys. We conclude that the greater number of men at the highest levels in chess can be explained by the greater number of boys who enter chess at the lowest levels.
Seems clear enough – I spent a brief period as the “great white hope” of the North Rocks chess club when as a 13-year-old I drew with a visiting master playing multiple boards (pure fluke I’m sure). But it was only because I was a very odd adolescent girl that I was there in the first place.
(Thanks Tony for the link!)
It has just been brought to my attention that one of my posts on Comment is Free, about the hideous crimes against women in the Congo, has been nominated for thread of the year.
Should you feel inclined to give the post your vote — which I hope might help to give the issue more publicity — you can do so here. (I’m up against Polly Toynbee, so the competition is tough…)
Green readers (and others) might also feel like backing Peter Tatchell for Blogger of the Year.
(You can only vote once. Voting closes midday Friday British time.)
A woman is abused and physically beaten for sitting in the “wrong” section of the bus – no not a tale from history, but a tale from the now and the here – in what is alleged to be an advanced, Western-style democracy – Israel.
Once again, religion has a great deal to answer for in failing to give women the most basic respect and freedom.
For the first time I had a tooth pulled out this afternoon – a curiously basic process involving a pair of pliers and a dentist tugging and twisting for five minutes or so. That hasn’t changed much, but boy was I glad for the anaesthetic that still makes me feel as though I haven’t got a bottom jaw.
Not an experience I would have cared for 100 years or so – but one of course that I would have been far more likely to have to endure more often.
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