Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Coverage of the Green Party local election launch

April 12, 2006 – 9:32 am

The BBC goes very straight:

The Green Party hopes to have more than 100 councillors after the local elections in England on 4 May.
The party is calling for good local services within walking distance and protection for local businesses.
The Greens already have 70 council seats including six in Oxford, where they hold the balance of power.
The party’s Caroline Lucas told the BBC they did not expect to win overall control in any council but were hopeful of boosting numbers of councillors….

The politics wonks’ site, ePolitix.com, is into the numbers:

Launching its poll push on Tuesday, the party said it was fielding a total of 1,294 candidates.
There will be a particular focus on London, where 567 of the candidates are standing.
Camden, Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham and Merton are among the London boroughs where the party is hoping to make gains…

The Guardian, meanwhile, takes the anti-Conservative, national politics line:

The Greens are grateful to David Cameron for pushing environmental issues up the political agenda, the MEP Caroline Lucas said yesterday as the party began its local election campaign.
But Ms Lucas, who represents south-east England in the European parliament, added that the Tories had no policies to back up their claims to care for the environment. She believed their leader’s promise to lead a green revolution was a case of “the emperor’s new clothes”, which was bound to backfire.
At the Greens’ press conference in London, Ms Lucas said every time Mr Cameron was asked “to deliver on a specific policy proposal, you see him ducking and diving, slipping and sliding”.
She added: “When people see the lack of substance behind his rhetoric, that can only do us good.”…

I went out for a short canvassing session on the council estate on which I live last night (when the rain stopped). And I was surprised anew at the highly positive response I got. The Labour Party really is in the stink with its traditional supporters.
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I was also pleased to see this morning that Jean Lambert, the other English Green MEP, has taken up the case of the murdered Thai human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit.

MEPs Jean Lambert, from Britain, and Frithjof Schmidt, from Germany, also asked the Council if it had communicated to the Thai government its concern over security threats to Somchai’s wife, Angkhana.
Angkhana has been threatened on several occasions and warned not to pursue her husband’s disappearance, most recently last month.
The issue of allegations of torture by members of the Thai security forces and its effect on Thai-EU relations was also raised by the MEPs.

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Aphra Behn’s tomb…

April 11, 2006 – 3:54 pm

An interesting query from Holly, who’s been contributing to the “really dead women authors meme” about the location of Aphra Behn’s tomb in Westminister Abbey, and why she isn’t in “Poets’ Corner”.

I happen to have sitting beside my bed in my “to read” pile Maureen Duffy’s biography. It says:

“Thrysis [Thomas Sprat, “Birmingham’s old chaplain, who was Dean of Westminster], I believe, was responsible for her burial in Westminster Abbey on April 20th, no doubt backed by Burnet and by those of sufficient wit and position not to mind the odium or satire that accure to them from such an act. She lies in the cloister and not among the ‘trading poets’ in poets’ corner, but with the Bettertons and Anne Bracegirdle.” (p. 294)

So it sounds like she was classed as “theatre” rather than “literature”.

There’s an image of the tomb here.

Can anyone add to this?

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Little reassurance in rape “cautions”

April 11, 2006 – 11:30 am

More emerges on yesterday’s story about offenders being cautioned for rape, none of it reassuring:

RAPISTS who are cautioned are being put on the sex offenders register for a maximum of two years after the Government relaxed registration rules three years ago.
Young rapists go on the register for only a year from the date on which they are cautioned after admitting the sex attack, The Times has learnt. Yet a rapist convicted in the courts and given a jail term of 2½ years is on the register for the rest of his life.

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The NHS might be bad at managing dying, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the private sector nursing homes are even worse. This is something as a society we really, really have to get better at.
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And I won’t give away the ending, but if you want to hear a detailed tale of the death of a mammoth in England about 700,000 years ago, Fascinating Deaths from Radio Four is well worth a listen. (Not a podcast – you can only do it through the computer, and it doesn’t say how long the link will work for, but usually it is at least a week.)
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Australia has new draconian employment laws. One of the effects:

Unions will take legal action after workers were docked four hours’ pay for stopping work for 15 minutes to collect money for the family of an employee killed on a construction site.
The workers were docked for taking unprotected industrial action under the Government’s new workplace legislation.
CFMEU organiser Martin Kingham said about 25 workers stopped for up to 15 minutes last Friday to take up a collection for the family of building worker Christos Binos, 58, who was fatally crushed by a concrete slab in Melbourne last month.

The company says the law gives it no choice, and if it did not dock the pay, it could lose government contracts and be fined itself.

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Beauty and fashion as a cultural construct

April 10, 2006 – 11:59 pm


This is a postcard postmarked in Bristol at 10pm on April 11, 1907, labelled “Miss Edna May”. That anyone could have considered that hat a flattering or attractive piece of fashion is beyond me…

I think this must be the actress who was born Edna May Nutter (can see why she dropped the surname…) although the photographer (or perhaps retoucher) has done a good job in this pic in hiding her “horse face”. (Who says the past was genteel?)

The message on the back, sent to a Miss E.M. Ingles of 71 Marle Hill Pde, Cheltenham, is equally blunt: “Dear Eva, Just a postcard to help you on. Can you let know by Sunday morn. the name of the Sec.y of the Education Cmm.ttee for Cheltenham. That means I want a letter. Yours etc. Percy.”

The tone is definitely exasperated and blunt. You have to wonder why it mattered…

UPDATE: Thanks to Penny, who in the comments pointed out that I had the wrong actress Edna May.

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A caution for rape. Rape?

April 10, 2006 – 12:14 pm

The Times is reporting today that in the last year for which figures are available (2004) 40 offenders (who admitted the offence) were cautioned for rape, i.e. they got a bit of a talking to down at the police station, and that was that.

It is one of those stories to which the first reaction is horror, but listening to various explanations this morning (very young offenders for whom psychiatric treatment has been arranged and even younger victims, or crimes that occurred decades ago) I suppose there may be cases where it is appropriate – at least it puts the attackers on the sex offenders’ register, which helps to protect others. And it may save victims giving evidence in court – although of course that just highlights what an ordeal that still is.
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Of course many women around the world get even less protection – attempts are now being made to save the life of an Iranian woman, Nazanin:

Amnesty International has said the woman was 17 when she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005.
Now 18, Nazanin was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging.
Amnesty International and human rights workers said they had been unable to contact her family, and did not know whether legal appeals were scheduled.

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An interesting comment piece in the Guardian not so much for its contents – a fairly standard debate about “the Enlightenment”, what it was and what it is today, but the fact that it is structured pretty well entirely as a reaction to Guardian blog material.

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Add your five early women authors to this cumulative meme…

April 9, 2006 – 9:42 pm

A brilliant idea, which I just found on Heo Cwaeth. This is a collection of pre-1800 women authors. You take the existing list, and add five of your own.

So, the existing list (taken straight from Heo Cwaeth, who describes it as “the really dead women authors meme“. She also links to many of the texts, but I’m still defrosting after a very cold, wet afternoon of canvassing, so I’ll send you back to her for those):
Bardiac’s Starter five:
Behn, Aphra – Oroonoko
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) – The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich – Revelations of Divine Love
Locke, Anne (aka Ane Lok, etc) – A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France – The Lais of Marie de France

Dr. Virago adds:
The Paston Women – The Paston Letters
Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe
Anonymous – The Floure and the Leafe(Her reasoning for this is on her blog)
Lady Mary Wroth – Poems

La Lecturess adds:
Anne Askew – The Examinations of Anne Askew
Mary Sidney – Psalms
Anne Finch – Poems
Katherine Phillips – Poems
Teresa of Avila – Life

Amanda adds:
Bradstreet, Anne: collected poems
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Lanyer, Aemilia: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania

Medieval Woman adds:
Trotula – The Diseases of Women
Female Troubador Poets:- La Comtessa de Dia – “A chantar m’er” & other Trobairitz poetry excerpted.
Hrostvitha of Gandersheim (c.930-c.1002) – Plays Gallicanus & Dulcitius (My note: She wrote a few more plays and poems listed on this post here.)

Heo Cwaeth adds:
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Scivias and Liber Divinorum Operum (plus a whole bunch of other stuff I plan to address later in a MWIA post)
Rachel Speght (1597 – Some time after 1621) Mouzell for Melastomus and Mortalities Memorandum
Anna Comnena (1093-1153) The Alexiad
Frau Ava (1060-1127) First named German poetess. “Johannes,” “Leben Jesu,” “Antichrist,” “Das Jüngste Gericht” (That’s in MHG)
Dhuoda (9th century, inexact dates) Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for Her Son (at Sunshine for Women) and a dual-language version from Cambridge UP

And my additions:
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (A lady in waiting to the Japanese empress c. 965AD) Favourite extracts here and here.
Eliza Haywood The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless (1751) (and much else)
Chen Tong, Tan Ze and Qian Yi, authors of The Peony Pavilion: Commentary Edition by Wu Wushan’s Three Wives (1694) They were his successive wives, by the way…
Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter, lately written in meeter by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573)
Elizabeth Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715).

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