Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

What the Romans did TO us (i.e. women)

April 13, 2006 – 7:57 pm

A recent popular history television series ran along the lines of What the Romans Did For Us – with lists of all the usual “civilising influences” – “concrete, fast food to frescos and lighthouses to loos”.

Yet having just finished Boudicca’s Heirs, by Dorothy Watts, I also know what the Romans did to “us” – if you count the (roughly, very roughly in their case) half of the population that is female as “us”. Watts work is subtitled “Women in Early Britain” and is an up-to-date (2005) account of what the archaeological record reveals (with also notes of how this matches the historical record).

The overwhelming, almost shattering, fact is that while in the preceding Iron Age numbers of men and women were pretty much matched, soon after the Romans arrived there is a suddenly shift in the nation’s graveyards – the number of women drops significantly. The only explanation, Watts concludes, is that the Romans brought with them, with all their “civilising” influences, the previously unknown practice of female infanticide – and female infanticide to the level of the worst of India or China today, that saw up to seven per cent of the women “lost”.

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A women’s story through male eyes

April 13, 2006 – 2:45 pm

The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without. READ MORE

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How the “other half” live

April 13, 2006 – 1:41 pm

Living on a council estate, you get occasional, sometimes shocking, insights, into how the “other half” live. I just had pushed through my door as junk mail a “refinancing offer” from a finance company, offering rates of 15.3 per cent on secured loans on a property, and 8.1 per cent on secured mortgages (both of those would be “average” figures).

Pretty bad, although I suppose fairly par for the course for people with bad credit records, County Court judgements etc. But then reading the fine print, I found that “there will be a fee for mortgage advice … normally 3% of the mortgage balance”. Three percent of what is probably near the total value of a home, for organising the mortgage! (And nothing specifies if this is still applied even if no loan results.)

This is the underbelly, the dark side, of Thatcher’s “right to buy” revolution, and indeed London’s property revolution, on which Anatole Kaletsky is writing today. Some “right to buy” people have done very well out of it, but some have been left with crippling maintenance and general debts, and end up with no equity, and no home.

Kaletsky concludes that London’s property market has largely been decoupled from British economic performance, because the city’s economy is so dependent on the global economy, but that it reconnects through people selling their homes here and moving out to the rest of the UK. Fine if you’ve got enough equity to do it.

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The non-religious Settlement

April 13, 2006 – 11:35 am

Interesting comment piece in the Guardian this morning, which suggests that the post-Civil War settlement between the Church of England and the government and society involve a tacit agreement:

Safe though he was, the nice country vicar in effect inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity. A religion of hospital visiting and flower arranging, with a side offering of heritage conservation, replaced the risk-all faith of a man who asked his adherents to take up their cross and follow him. The nice country vicar represented a very English modus vivendi between the sacred and the secular, with the sacred, in swallowing many of its convictions, paying by far the heaviest price for the deal.
In exchange for a walk-on part during major family occasions and the opportunity to be custodian of the country’s most impressive collection of buildings, the vicar promised discretion in all things pertaining to faith: he agreed to treat God as a private matter. In a country exhausted by wars about religion, the creation of the nonreligious priest was a masterstroke of English inventiveness. And once the priest had been cut off from the source of his fire and reassigned to judge marrows at the village fete, his transformation from figure of fear to figure of fun was complete.

I tend to broadly agree with that, although not with his next step – he wants to restore the fiery religion, I’d like to take this historical progression to its logical conclusion – get rid of the religion altogether, run the church as a community centre and choose a community worker to do the visiting, tea drinker and marrow-judging.

While I’m talking history, if you’re a history blogger, watch out. The UK glorification of terrorism act comes into effect today. Be careful what you write about those Vandals….

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Call for nominations: Carnival of Feminists …

April 13, 2006 – 1:45 am

The next carnival is sweeping up fast, and with a lot of the world celebrating Easter soon, make sure you don’t miss out!

The second call for nominations is up – the suggested (although not compulsory topic) is “Feminism and Challenges – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.” Possible topics including: self-determination in health and mental health care, disability issues, transgender issues, issues of aging, integration of religion and feminist beliefs, economic issues, etc.

They can be sent to ISeeInvisiblePeople AT gmail.com, or submitted via the nomination form.

Please help to spread the word!

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‘Licence to batter’

April 12, 2006 – 10:40 am

Imagine the case: a bloke is down the pub, has a drink or two too many, loses his temper with a man at the next table who is, he thinks, “looking at me funny” and beats the hell out of him. Duly hauled before a magistrate, he says: “Sorry. Really sorry. Didn’t mean any harm. Won’t do it again.” The magistrate says: “That’s all right then. Here’s a slap on the wrist.”

No, I can’t imagine it either. But that is what is proposed, at least for cases of domestic violence, in new draft guidelines.

MEN and women who attack their partners should have the chance to avoid being sent to jail if they appear genuinely sorry for their violence, according to sentencing proposals published yesterday.
Instead, wife-beaters could receive a suspended prison sentence or community order. The proposals also recommend that perpetrators of domestic violence attend courses to tackle their offending, even though it is too early to know if they are effective in curbing violence.
The head of the leading domestic violence charity attacked the draft guidelines. Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said: “It would be a travesty if the Sentencing Guidelines Council proposals on domestic violence come into effect. In short they give men a licence to batter women as long as they are able to put on a remorseful act in front of a judge.”

That fits nicely with an excellent interview with Catharine McKinnon, whose latest book, Are Women Human? has just been published.

She writes: “[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody.”
Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists’ points of view, I ask MacKinnon? “Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren’t even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction.”

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