Philobiblon

“I was recently at an academic talk where a brief fight broke out between professors over the number of Holy Prepuces (The Greatest Genital Relic Ever Sold) littering medieval Europe–that is, how many churches claimed to have the bit of foreskin that Jesus had cut off during his circumcision.”

What better introduction could there be to Carnivaleque No XII, now up on Alun’s eponymous blog.

Well there might be a better one:

“The history of all times, and of today especially teaches that … women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.”

Yep, it is a special themed edition for Women’s History Month, so even if you don’t consider yourself a historian, or even a history reader, I reckon you’ll find something of interest.

(And thanks to Alun for giving me a prominent place…)

Just been reading a couple of brilliant posts that I’ve got to share:

The most interesting male feminist blogger on the web (that I know of), Hugo Schywzer, has a great post about the reality of the pressure of sexual double-standards on students’ lives as first-generation immigrants in America:

It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity. She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21. Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.
…Here’s where it gets interesting. A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to “wait” until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!

And of course that same pressure on women’s viriginity is being applied across American society.

And that is happening at the same time as access to birth control and abortion is being restricted, indeed when the government is trying to take control of women’s bodies. (Heo Cwaeth is – and good on her – determined to fight; in that posts she powerfully draws together a number of events to find that the US government has declared war on women.)

I am now dedicated to learning how to fight in myriad ways, and you can bet your bottom dollar that any attempted rapist will be short at least one dangling participle at the end of the exchange. I encourage you to do the same. I have volunteered my home in a blue state as a safe haven for my already enslaved sisters in South Dakota, and soon to be enslaved sisters in other red states. I encourage those of you who can to do the same. We have been told for millenia that emotion is bad, only reason is accepted. We have then been presented with “reason” that is merely the systematized emotion of others. Let the pharisees call their hate “reason,” it’s time for us to act. I ask you, what’s more reasonable than responding to the very real threat of physical violence than learning how to inflict injuries of your own? What’s more reasonable than opening up your home and your life to runaway slaves?

That leaves me thinking about what the fundamentalists are doing to America, and if they really get it. Yes, they are trying to take utter control of women’s bodies (and minds) and turn them into Stepford wives. And they think that will produce some sort of Fifties Brady Bunch idyll.

But what is it going to do to the economics of America, or at least these states? If you force women (and men) not to have sex outside marriage (for fear of pregnancy, if nothing else, having restricted and often ended access to birth control) they will, inevitably, marry young.

And that will stop them getting education, stop them participating to their full capacity in the workplace, in short cost them vast amounts of money. To consider a British study:

A 24-year-old mid-skilled woman giving birth would, she found, earn a staggering £560,000 less at today’s prices over her lifetime than a childless counterpart. Giving birth at 28 would only cost £165,000.

Now of course that is a loss to the individual woman, but it is also a loss to society.

This isn’t the 1950s. To compete economically, to maintain a “developed” lifestyle, you need a highly educated, flexible workforce operating to its full intellectual and creative potential. If you greatly restrict the contribution of half of them – and as we know from the Third World, when you restrict the education of women you tend to cut the educational attainment of their children – you are going to be very ill-equipped to compete.

The American “red” states, where the fundamentalists wield real power, might be sending themselves back to the Fifties in more ways than one. They might in effect be, by choice “under-developing” themselves, taking themselves back to poverty and “Third World” economic status.

Wonder what the right-wing extreme capitalist types with whom they are politically aligned make of that?

UPDATE: Moving this to a third continent, to demonstrate what having babies does to the income and employment prospects of women, read Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony (who is in Australia).

My 19th-century blogger Frances Williams Wynn is today reporting on accounts of the madness of King George from one of his physicians, Sir Henry Halford . She’s displaying a critical mind and a fine turn of phrase:

Sir Henry is apt to be the hero of his own stories, and to boast a degree of intimacy and confidence which I am sometimes inclined to doubt. The history of the change on the subject of the Catholic question is very curious, but I own I feel it rather difficult to believe that Sir Henry was admitted into a secret so closely kept.

But the accounts of the relationship with the Prince Regent, and about telling the King about Princess Amelia’s will (her jewels left to a handsome attendant), ring true.

All-in-all an interesting near-contemporary account, I’d suggest.

In the 13th century, the Buckerel family was one of the powers of the City of London, members of the Pepperers’ Gild, which later became the Grocers’ Livery Company.

“The elder Stephen was royal Chamberlain of London and King’s Butler at Henry II’s coronation banquet. Two years later he bought the lease of the Exchanges for three years for about 4,000 marks (£15m at present day values), and became Master of the Exchange.
… they produced the first woman known to have played a major role in City affairs in her own right. When Isabella Buckerel, wife of Stephen the younger, was widowed, she managed all her business and property affairs herself. … holding property in the City alone which encompassed most of the Drapery, the Rpoert, the Saddlery, and the Poultry in Chepe and Walbrook and 20 other city parishes as well. She also played a behind-the-scenes part in City politics, and most of the residents of the Ward must have been dependent on her to some degree.”

The Ward of Cripplegate in the City of London, Caroline Gordon and Wilfrid Dewhirst, Cripplegate Ward Club, 1985, p. 22

Typically, there appears to be nothing about her on the web.

Any recommendations for sources on the (to use anachronistic terms) production, marketing, administrative, management practices of printers in London at the end of the 16th century? (No, I’m not asking much …)

I’m trying, perhaps hopelessly, to create a chronology for four pamphlets published in 1594 – none of which unfortunately were entered in the register of the Company of Stationers … (in case you were wondering.)

As a reward, I offer in return a link to an article from Harvard Magazine arguing for the study of neo-Latin writers of the (broadly) early modern period. Which makes me think of Women Latin Poets – a book I’m promoting every way I can, since I think anyone interested in early modern women writers (or medieval, or later) should read.

British Asian men are going to India, marrying women for their dowries, then abandoning them. Or sometimes they are, they say “forced into marriage by their parents” (just how do you do this to a 30-year-old man?), then get cold feet. Either way, it is the women who are left in limbo.

But in China, there are now labour shortages in the South, where skilled workers, particularly young women, are demanding a minimum wage of £50 a month, or more. Interesting that they have the same social pattern as here – no shortage of university educated starter-workers, but a real shortage of technical training. From what I know of Chinese culture – think Confucianism and all that — the pressure towards book learning and away from anything involving getting your hands dirty is going to be even stronger than in the West. Time to invest in any plumbing that is “plug and play”, I think.

I’ve got a copy of the classic about an English village, Akenfield (almost unavoidable given the number you see in second-hand bookshops), but now there’s a sequel. And it actually doesn’t sound too bad:

“Steve Coghill, who lectures at nearby Otley Agricultural College, adds to this, pointing out that a lessening emphasis on “production, production” also has its rewards. “We are now seeing a return to managing the land in a more biodiverse way,” he says. “We have larger headlands. We have beetle banks that encourage predators to come in and knock out the pests rather than spraying them with phosphorous compounds every 10 minutes. Also new technology like companion planting. These old wives’ tales are turning out to be true.”

Well there are worse bits too, so for some uncomplicated indulgence, the Guardian news blog ran a “send in your dog pic” competition. I can only imagine they got flooded, but the results are rather good, and showing just how international its audience is becoming, many are from outside the UK.

Finally, back to the Britain of old, Matthew Parris has his usual insightful column, this time taking a fresh look (really!) at the Profumo scandal. (Profumo died this week.) But what really surprised me was this:

“Surely all men patronise whores,” protested a Tory minister, Lord Lambton, as he fell nearly a decade later.

That was 1973 ….
Although it seems from a BBC report that he was a man for whom any excuse would do.