Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Astell, Cavendish, Behn, Philips: Women fighting political, scientific and literary exclusion

October 1, 2011 – 10:04 pm

A shorter version of this article was first published on Blogcritics.

A holiday (finally!) and the chance to read a few books on subjects I’m interested in that have no practical use whatsoever. First up was Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, edited by Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman.

I understand that a collection of loosely linked academic essays in a monograph is not everyone’s idea of holiday reading, but ranging through Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips and Eliza Haywood, it covers a range of 17th and 18th-century women on which I’d like to know more. And this is an interesting period in women’s history – as women try (albeit unsuccessfully) to resist the exclusion from the public sphere that was one of the chief characteristics of the Enlightenment (indeed Jo Wallwork argues here in her Margaret Cavendish paper was a central part of its project) and which was to continue for a couple of centuries more.

As you’d expect from a range of academic papers they range widely in jargon-intensity, interest to the general reader and my favourites might not be yours.

But I did particularly take to Jacqueline Broad’s account of Mary Astell’s political spat with Charles Davenant, an uncritical proponent of Machiavelli as a political adviser. Broad shows how Astell (who while she was one of the early proponents of what has been seen as a women’s university is also a Tory and a religious enthusiast with whom I have little natural sympathy) showed that Davenant had managed to uncritically give Queen Anne entirely contradictory advice on the subject of how the ruler should manage faction.

She also skewered him very successfully on Broad’s account on inconsistency in his view of Elizabeth I – Davenant both says that Elizabeth “had a Mind above her Sex”, and that “For the Good Government of a free country, such as this Kingdom, no more Skill, no more Policies are requisite than what may be comprehended by a Woman, as was seen in the Instance of Queen Elizabeth” (p. 18). In contrast, Astell says that prudence, “the capacity to discern between good and bad in one’s practical deliberations” is a chief political virtue, and for Queen Anne “there’s nothing either Wise, or Good, or Great that is above Her Sex”. (p. 21)

I also enjoyed Wallwork’s discussion of the well documented visit by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, to the Royal Society. The modern author uses this as a way of exploring the way in which the men of the Royal Society used the exclusion of women from their space as a way of defining what they weren’t, as well as what they were. (Not a lot has changed in modern science…women were only admitted to the Royal Society in 1945 under threat of legal action.)
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Named for eugenicist – why is did the UKCMRI become the Francis Crick institute?

September 24, 2011 – 6:27 pm

The UKCMRI research lab, the monstrous carbuncle  being built behind the British Library, has been highly controversial, and extremely unpopular in the local area.

So when it came to its final naming, you might have thought that the developing consortium might have given some thought to choosing an inoffensive name for it – perhaps even a name that acknowledged some of the past faults of science, such as its failure to recognise women’s contribution, the Rosalind Franklin Institute, for example.

Well that’s if you hadn’t already encountered their patronising attitude to the local area and the arrogant, all-male leadership.

So what did they chose – the name of a eugenicist  who’s described even by the Wellcome Trust, consortium member, as “controversial”.

Eugenics: This was Crick in 1962…

I want to concentrate on one particular issue: do people have the right to have children at all? It would not be very difficult, as we gathered from Dr. Pincus, for a government to put something into our food so that nobody could have children. Then possibly – and this is hypothetical – they could provide another chemical that would reverse the effect of the first, and only people licensed to bear children would be given this second chemical. This isn’t so wild that we need not discuss it. Is it the general feeling that people do have the right to have children? This is taken for granted because it is part of Christian ethics, but in terms of humanist ethics I do not see why people should have the right to have children. I think that if we can get across to people the idea that their children are not entirely their own business and that it is not a private matter, it would be an enormous step forward.

(quoted in Science in the Third Reich, German Historical Perspectives/XII, ed Margit Szollosi-Janze, p. 234)

This is also the man who accepted the joint Nobel Prize with James Watson for the discovery of DNA when many today would claim that should have been, at the very least, shared with Rosalind Franklin.

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After the Dorries amendment – where next for the pro-choice movement?

September 22, 2011 – 11:01 pm

Spent this evening at a powerful and thought-provoking Pro-Choice Public Meeting organised by Voice for Choice. Here are some of my notes..

Dr Patricia Lohr, BPAS medical director, who first trained and worked in America, said of that experience with regard to the sometimes deadly attacks on doctors who perform abortions:  “I realised you had to accept the risk and then ignore it. … I even had patients who could not understand how I could do this work.”

Of working in the UK in comparison, she said:  “We are extremely fortunate to work in a space where is debate but not violence, and instead of focusing on making abortion available can focus on providing best posssible abortion servcies.”

She said abortions should be provided: “as early as possible and as late as necessary”.

Dr Evan Harris, BMA Ethics Committee, former Liberal Democrat MP

He said we were seeing US tactics coming over here and even more so US money.

He said of the recent Nadine Dorries amendment (on which I spoke at an Abortion Rights press conference) that it wasn’t a total victory for the pro-choice side, but as a total defeat for the anti-abortion movement. It was disappointing that the medical profession, particularly the Royal College, had not been louder in its defence of the professional standards they established and supported.

Being, he said, “deliberately a little provocative”, he added: “From 1997 to 2010 we wasted the first properly prochoice majority we ever had.  We still have a 1967 Act, which good as it was at the time, still means (paternalistically) women still have to get the permission of two doctors to have a treatment which is in patent’s own interests; that a  procedure that could be safely and appropriately done by nurses stil has to be done by doctors. Abortions are not allowed to be done in the primary care setting, even thought  politicians have been trying to make more local provisions and move out of hospital many other procedures. Early medical abortion has to be done in a clinic and hospital. when it would be a better service if women were able to take at least second dose at home. The government says we need a British trial when many other countries have found this approach safe and effective – as if there is something in the British air that makes abortions different here, but they stopped only British trial half way through saying that it was illegal.”
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Owen Jones’s Chavs, a true must-read

August 7, 2011 – 5:33 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

You couldn’t open a British newspaper last month without seeing a columnist referring to Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. Influential it certainly has been, and now that I’ve laid my hands on a copy, it isn’t hard to see why.

First, it serves as a solid primer of the economic dispossession of the past 30 years that has seen working class communities, particularly in traditional manufacturing areas robbed of most of the things that make life living – robbed of decently paid, steady jobs, robbed of the chance to see their children and grandchildren living near them through a lack of housing, and robbed most particularly of hope – of their long-maintained communal aspiration to see the lives of everyone in the community improve together. There’s one figure here that really should be trumpeted from the rooftops: “Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today’s it’s only a little over half.” (p. 157)

And the fact from one survey found that four out of ten middle-income workers felt their occupation had a lower status than their father’s, while only 29 per cent felt it was higher. “Lower middle class” workers, clerical and administrative workers and supervisors, now have lower incomes, and lower status, than the skilled working class of one generation before. (p. 159) Yet, Jones quotes the New Economics Foundation study that found the real value of many lowly-paid occupations is high, while many high-paid cost us a great deal.

This is Jones’s summary of the Thatcher government: “For the first time in generations, it was a blatant government aim to shovel as much money in the direction of the rich as possible.In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 pre cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. … the reality of this part of Thatcher’s class war is that it shifted tax burden from the rich to everyone else.” And while in 1979 the average rate of tex was 31.1 per cent, by 1996 that had risen to 37.7 per cent – while the rich kept so much more. (p. 63)

And this book is also good on both the economic and human sides of the huge shift in the British economy from manufacturing to service industries, particularly retailing, which is now the second-biggest employer in the country, with nearly three million people, more than one in 10 workers, nearly two-thirds of them women, employed in shops, a threefold increase since 1980, and half earn less than £7 an hour, while since 2007 25% have seen their pay slashed, a third had their hours cut and a fifth lost benefits.

Yet, as Jones points out, the “Chavtown” website (no, I’ not going to link to it) defines working in a shop as one sign of “chavdom”, even though working in shops was not so long ago considered quite a genteel, middle-class occupation. He follows the life and story of Mary Cunnningham, the now 55-year-old daughter of a miner, who has spent her career in supermarkets. She says: “When I started, you could have a little bit of time with a customer, and get to know your customer, you had your regulars that came to you because you had that little bit of rapport with them. Now it’s get on with the job, you have to have targets… you’re supposed to get through so many customers per hour.” And Mary notes how workers are vulnerable to bullying from managers, and customers. (p. 143)

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Touching on conservatives and greens

August 6, 2011 – 12:04 pm

Made a quick whip through Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism, a chance encounter at the London Library that left me intrigued by its “green” chapter.

It is very explicitly a book about “small c” conservatism – excluding and rejecting all traces of neoliberal economic theory, so a long way from a lot of what we encounter in practical politics.

There’s a couple of things O’Hara identifies as key to this conservatism – one is that knowledge and data, particularly that on which governments make decisions, are limited and uncertain. “Massive government spending based on little or no idea of whether it would do any good: a scandal? [referring to recent stiumulus spending] Possibly, but goverments rarely understand the effects of their actions.This is a dramatic example, but a common type of deficit in knowledge.” (p. 24)

The second is what he calls the change principle “because the current state of society is typically undervalued, and because the effects of innovations cannot be known fully in advance, then social change (a) must always risk destroying beneficial institutions and norms and, (b) cannot be guaranteed to achieve the aims for which it was implemented. It therefore follows that societies should be risk-averse with respect to social change and the burden of proof placed on the innovator, not his or her opponents. It also follows that change, when it does come, should ideally be (a) experimental (b) reversible where possible and (c) rigorously evaluated before the next incremental step.” (p. 88)

Do how does this play out in the environment? Proving that conservatives can have a sense of humour, O’Hara first offers this: “Temperamentally, environmentalists and conservatives are miles apart; while the Tory sups champagne at White’s the green annoys nothing so much as creating a new type of compost. They move in different circles and have different enemies (often each other). Yet I shall argue… that, both philosophicaly and programtically, conservatism is the best-placed ideology for defending our environment.” (p. 273)
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The must-read feminist book of the summer – it lives up to the hype

August 1, 2011 – 10:27 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

If you move in feminist circles, there’s really no choice this summer – you have to read Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman: otherwise, you won’t be able to keep up with the conversations. And it’s not hard to see why it has made a splash – it covers all of the usual issues: body image, harassment, and the general difficulties of being a female teenager in an in-your-face, often laugh-out-loud funny, manner – how an all-women friendship group is likely to talk down the pub just before closing time.

And broadly I’d agree with the hype – if you’ve got a 15-year-old daughter, or know one, I’d want to make sure she read it. Given the nature of 15-year-olds, you probably can’t just give it to her – hide it on the back row of the top shelf of books beside The Joy of Sex; she’s sure to find it. Although if she’s already read Puberty Blues she’s going to recognise the genre.

There were bits of the book that really left me thinking yes, you’ve nailed it – really exposed something not much recognised. Particularly on eating disorders. “Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. You get all the temporary release of drinking, fucking or taking drugs, but without – and I think this is the important bit – ever being left in a state where you can’t remain responsible and cogent. In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs, the Valium of the working classes – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old – something that isn’t an option if you’re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk , or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch. Over-eating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions.” (p. 117)

She’s also very solid and sensible on plastic surgery – even “good” plastic surgery, that makes the operee look just amazingly well-preserved for their age (“women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the wold”) is still not defensible (p. 294); and abortion and the need for honestness and openness (she’s had an abortion, and a miscarriage, and says there’s a similarity in both – her body or her mind “had decided this baby was not to be” – p. 277) and the fact that women still find it hard to say they don’t want to have children (because of social reactions), even though many don’t want to, and those who have had will, when honest, admit that they regret it. And on the ludicrousness of the continuing existence of high heels.
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