Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Well done Mr Bush

October 8, 2006 – 12:20 pm

That Iraqi women are now having an extremely tough time is hardly new news, but a piece in the Observer today contains some new tales of horror, and an overall picture of the Talibanisation of the country…

It is not only the religious militias that have turned women’s lives into a living hell – it is, in some measure, the government itself, which has allowed ministries run by religious parties to segregate staff by gender. Some public offices, including ministries, insist on women staff wearing a headscarf at all times. A women’s shelter, set up by Yanar Mohammed’s group, was closed down by the government.
Most serious of all are the death threats women receive for simply working, even in government offices. Zainub – not her real name – works for a ministry in Baghdad. One morning, she said, she arrived at work to find that a letter had been sent to all the women. ‘When I opened up the note it said, “You will die. You will die”.’
The situation has been exacerbated by the undermining of Iraq’s old Family Code, established in 1958, which guaranteed women a large measure of equality in key areas such as divorce and inheritance. The new constitution has allowed the Family Code to be superseded by the power of the clerics and new religious courts, with the result that it is largely discriminatory against women.

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Asbo! Beware the ex-dinner lady, 72

October 8, 2006 – 12:14 pm

… who has been threatened with an Asbo should she set one toe inside her ex-school’s grounds. That’s despite the fact that she escorts several children to school.

No doubt there’s a bit more to this story, but it does demonstrate how these are misused – an Asbo is in effect a threat of jail, hardly appropriate in such a case, not to mention that our jails are now in an emergency state of overcrowding.

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A rare piece of good news

October 7, 2006 – 11:17 pm

… on women’s issues in Australia in reforms to the treatment of victims in sexual assault cases:

The historic reforms will include specially devised sex assault educational courses for court staff including judges, new consent laws and “objective fault” laws, which will require the accused to detail the steps taken to ensure consent was given.
Mr Debus will also change committal procedures to reduce the number of times victims must give evidence and be cross-examined.

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Short, snappy and mostly fun

October 6, 2006 – 11:06 pm

Over on My London Your London a review of a festival of short plays at the Union Theatre. Generally good stuff, and a couple of little gems.

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Elizabeth Alkin: A Civil War heroine, and one tough cookie

October 6, 2006 – 11:04 pm

Reading Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War, as I have been for a long while – but there will be a review soon, I promise, I’ve been put on the trail of Elizabeth Alkin, spy and nurse, c.1600–1655?. From the ONDB (subscription sorry):

Employed from the beginning of the civil war as a spy by the earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, and Thomas Fairfax, in 1645 and 1647 Alkin received payments from the committee for the advancement of money for several ‘discoveries’, including information about the activities of George Mynnes, a Surrey ironmaster who was supplying royalist forces with iron and wire. Increasingly she seems to have concentrated her intelligencing activity on the London news press: in 1648 she was on the trail of Mercurius Melancholicus and the Parliament Kite, and in February 1649 Mercurius Pragmaticus called her an ‘old Bitch’ who could ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army’ (Mercurius Pragmaticus, sig. 2v). …

In June 1649 Alkin was sent to ‘the house of correction’ for ‘great incivilities’ to Sir James Harrington MP, and the following month was involved in a fracas in the Salutation tavern in Holborn with some soldiers who apparently suspected her of being a royalist (Williams, 131–3). A dispute in the same year over her occupation of the house of Stephen Fosett, surgeon to Sir Arthur Aston (governor of Oxford during the first war and responsible, she claimed, for her husband’s death), resulted in a grant of £50 and a house.

She was evidently a woman who could stand up for herself.

The nursing seems to have come later – she was paid by the government after the First Anglo-Dutch War for her care of wounded soldiers, The ONDB says there was a petition requesting that she be buried in the cloisters of Westminister Abbey – it doesn’t say if that was successful – presumably that’s unknown. She’s got quite some coverage in medical history journals, so she must have made some real efforts for the soldiers – indeed it seems she destroyed her own health in the process.

She’s had a whole book written about her – I. MacDonald, Elizabeth Alkin: a Florence Nightingale of the Commonwealth (1935) – have to check it out. Something about that title, however, doesn’t fill me with confidence.

On the web, there’s a review of a book in which she has her own chapter, a House of Commons Journal entry, but not a lot else.

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The veil question…

October 6, 2006 – 5:38 pm

The British mainstream media, the blogosphere, the radio … everywhere seems to be full of the veil debate (eg here and here).

Should you be on another continent, ths short version is that Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, wrote in his local paper that he asked Muslim women who veiled their faces to remove such veils during meetings in his office in the interest of improving communication. (That this column might have had more than a little to do with the Labour leadership struggles I’ll leave to the Kremlinologists to discuss.)

I was chewing over the issue over a very late lunch, and I came to the conclusion that I agree with Straw on this – or at least would entirely defend his right to request of a visitor to his office an action that he thinks will assist the work.

Maybe he had a Hindu yogi visiting who liked to hold consultations while standing on his head. If Straw found this difficult, he could reasonably ask the yogi to sit on a chair. Or indeed, if someone arrived in a bikini and Straw found this uncomfortable, he could ask that visit to wrap up in a beach towel. It is his office, and he can make reasonable requests of visitors.

Of course there is a power imbalance, so he should be very careful of what he asks, but this isn’t unreasonable.

The issues is stewing further since Straw said that he would prefer no women wore the niqab anywhere.

Well, yes. So do I. Of course grown women who have sufficient independence in their life to have the freedom to genuinely make their own choice should be able to choose to wear the niqab if they choose (some very large ifs there), but given that the ideology behind the niqab suggests that women are dangerous, dirty, and do not belong in public spaces, to say that you would prefer them not to be worn anywhere is perfectly reasonable.

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