Today’s arrival in the ebay “irresistable, under £5 with postage” range is Woman in World History, Her Place in the Great Religions, by E.M. White, a female author on whom Google does not help. (Herbert Jenkins, London)

Anyone know anything about her? (I admit a small extra interest because that was my mother’s family name, not that I really think there’s likely to be a connection.)

It is a product of its time, dreadully racist in places by today’s standards, but boasting some pretty solid scholarship, and it is surprisingly evenhanded on the different religions, not even assuming that Christianity will be the one to go forward.

Following on from last night’s post, it reports on the efforts of early 20th-century Muslim reformers, such as “Mr M. S. Mohidin, a magistrate of Madras, who wishes to break down the purdah”. In 1911 he offered a prize of 1,000 rupees “to anyone who could prove from the Koran or the traditions of the prophet that the seculsion of women is authoried; he also brought the matter before the Universal Races Congress of 1911 and spoke of the miseries of the purdah system resulting in ignorance through want of education and lung disease through want of fresh air.” (p. 158)

I was taken by the book’s conclusion:
“The whole history reveals a great growth of the human spirit struggling against material obstacles and its own shortcomings. Through this growth woman has shared in the struggles and failures and successes ; her part has been distinct from yet parallel with man’s. So it will prove in the future, for nothing can frustrate the evolutionary movement nor prevent humanity as a whole from attaining and achieving its purpose. What that purpose may be, and what the religion that will inspire towards it may be, is left to the present and succeeding generations to determine.” (p. 395)

She seems curiously optimistic for an author writing in 1924, but perhaps it is a good message for those of us feeling depressed about the direction of the world now.

Chapati mystery posts on a very brave woman, presumably a local, who tried to use a male disguise to preach at a major mosque in Bahrain.

One hates to think of how she is being treated right now; I think of the few brave women who tried to assert women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia in 1990, who reports at the time suggested were very harshly treated for this relative mild infraction. More on the driving issue here.

See also Amnesty International’s report on the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia here. Bahrain’s probably not as bad, but …

The would-be imam is already being dismissed as “mad”, such an easy label to apply to any woman who tries to fight for her rights in a direct way.

The immediate parallel that springs to mind is Lady Eleanor Davies, the Civil War prophet, who in a religious protest in the cathedral of Lichfield, in which she was accompanied by several other women, sat (shock, horror) on the bishop’s throne, tore down “popish” hangings and threw dirty water over them. It was clearly a political action, but she ended up not in a jail, but in Bedlam.

So many other women, the meaning of whose actions can now never be recovered, must have suffered the same fate. It is surely beholden on us to look very hard for rational driving forces behind actions before accepting others’ diagnoses of “madness”.

There’s little about Lady Eleanor on the net, but there is a short biog here.

Re-reading yesterday’s references to obstacles and magic made me look up above my head to my Ganesh mask (which came from Madras, if I remember correctly).

He has one broken-off tusk, as Ganesh always. The story of why is popular with British Museum visitors.

As I tell it: One day, after his elephant head and body had grown together (that’s another story) he was sitting at the feet of a great sage (Vyasa), who started to tell him a story, which turned out to be the Mahabharata, “The Story of the Wars”. Ganesh sighed and thought: ‘I’m never going to remember all of this; it’s much too long.’ So he broke off his tusk and used the bloody end to write down the story.

That’s why he’s the god of writers – should you be needing any inspiration – as well as the “remover of obstacles”.

More about Ganesh here and a useful-looking glossary here.

Re-emerging from my desk as the paper continues its regular slow churn (interrrupted only occasionally by a nasty explosion of cellulose when a whole pile falls over) is the collection of essays from which I posted last week on women servants.

It tells me that in Cambridgdeshire in the 19th century it was common practice to hang a stone with a hole through it behind the horses in the stables to “keep the fairies from riding the horses at night”. (As recorded from the words of a stable foreman in the 1850s.) (p. 209)

For the protection of humans, in Dorset, a bullock’s heart was hung in the hearth to prevent fairies and witches entering through the chimney. (p. 209)

It is easy to laugh, and I do, just a little – surely the heart must have stunk after a few days, or maybe the smoke preserved it? – but the essay makes the fair point that this was how people came to an understanding of their world with few of the tools that we have available today.

And such beliefs were mixed up with a lot of practical, and even sometimes subversive, information, that did help people navigate obstacles around them.

In the 19th century, and even sometimes today, such beliefs are traced back to pre-Christian religious structures and understandings, but, the essays says, they “were not something rooted in past religious beliefs but that which retained a contemporary function in the lives of the rural poor”. (p.212) So they tend to be highly localised, grown up in response to local conditions.

From B. Bushaway, “‘Tacit, unsuspected but still implicit faith,’ Alternative belief in nineteenth-Century rural England,’ pp. 189- 215, in T. Harris (ed) Popular Culture in England c. 1500-1850, Macmillan, London, 1995, pp. 143-167.

Haven’t got much work done, but have fitted in lots of culture over the weekend.

This included:
1. Seeing The Mandate at the National Theatre, a curious blend of madcap drawing room comedy – people getting locked in chests, sitting on loaded guns, being mistaken for others – with serious political comment. It might have worked when Stalinism was a looming, immediate threat; now I think the tone and the content just don’t hang together with the subject matter. Amusing, but no more. Still did learn that the Cottesloe £10 restricted view seats are well worth sitting in; useful for future reference.

and
2. Reading The Flood, by David Maine, a telling of the story of Noah and the ark in historical fiction. Noah, his sons and their wives each take it in terms to tell the tale (and their own “back stories”) in a delightfully terse, minimalist style. Amazingly feminist and real about the women’s feelings, can it really have been written by a bloke?

Sharon’s extensive post on web resources on African history, here, prompted me to pop down to the African Gallery at the British Museum this morning after my Enlightenment Gallery shift.

I’ve posted previously on some of the metal objects in the gallery, almost invariably made by men, since metal-working is strongly gendered as male.

Pottery, however, is broadly a female occupation, although I learnt today on further exploration that: “[Often] only males, or post-menopausal females are allowed to make artistic representations of the human form, on pain of loss of natural fertility.”

This piece, however, is something of an hermaphrodite, made in Sudan made “in a colonial context where female Mangbetu potters were intermarrying with male Zande potters for the first time”.

From much further south, here’s a Zulu pot from a purely female tradition.

Finally, a gorgeous modern piece , which is at the entrance to the gallery at the moment. It is by the Kenyan-born, British-based Magdalene Odundo – it is wonderfully tactile even to look at; they obviously have to put it behind glass, but it just begs to be stroked.