Category Archives: Feminism

Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

December 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
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Books Feminism Women's history

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

December 24, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

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Feminism Morvan Politics

Why has Saone et Loire never sent a woman to the French parliament?

June 1, 2012 – 1:05 pm

I keep an amateur interest in French politics, particularly in the region that I visit regularly. A story in my local paper, however, made me pay closer attention than usual – the department, I read, has never sent a female representative to parliament.

And while there are supposed to be statutory rules about gender balance of candidates, the conservative UMP is standing no women as main candidates in this month’s elections and only one alternate. (Although they do seem to have one “shared” female lead candidate.) The story above says that they explained they “rely on the experience of the outgoing members to ensure our chances of having elected officials” (these are all my translations, with machine help – I’m not an expert!).

I’m pleased to see that the Greens, when alternates are counted (each post has a main candidate and an alternate standing), have gender balance. Two of the five main candidates are women.

Jérôme Durain, quoted for the Socialists, and identified as a “reformer”, says women “still have difficulties in discussions where the codes are very male”. National Socialist Party policy is for them to have parity – the story doesn’t spell it out, but I’m guessing they haven’t achieved that in this department from the tone.

Oddly the National Front has women as three of its five candidates, despite the fact a rep said it “proposes a traditional vision of the position of women in society”.

The journalist concludes: “if parity is to improve women’s representation in public space, it is not necessarily a guarantee of social progress”.

The paper also ran another story quoting some of the female candidates on their views on the situation.

Isabelle Dechaume (who if I’ve read it right is a joint UMP and Parti radical candidate) says she is always asked how she can hold down a job, look after her children and do politics – but no one asks the men that.

A Socialist candidate, Cécile Untermaier, says women are never allowed to make mistakes, while men are.

A Green, Nicole Eschmann, says that the men stick together and women have to constantly defend their right to equal treatment.

Edith Gueugneau, a Left candidate, says: “Men feel still legitimate while for women more questions arise.”

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Feminism Politics

Speaking at the Decriminalisation Protest for the Sex Worker Open University

October 16, 2011 – 11:44 pm

It may be the only time I’ll ever share a platform with John McDonnell MP (Labour) and Andrew Boff AM (Tory), but was pleased to join them both last week at a decriminalisation protest outside parliament linked to the Sex Worker Open University.

Interesting though that the three of us had a similar message – that the MPs behind us should listen to the evidence for complete decriminalisation of se work (the New Zealand model for short). As I said, that’s what both the Women’s Institute and the Royal College of Nursing had done.

John McDonnell pointed out that sex workers are under attack from trafficking legislation, which was persecuting them and driving them into more dangerous circumstances, when what they want and need is to work is safety.

He noted the advances in recognition of sex workers from the trade union movement (speakers from the South East TUC regional network and Hackney Trades Council were among those later offering solidarity).

Andrew Boff said that people operating legally were being hounded out of business, with the Olympic “clean up” being used as an excuse.

A number of international sex worker speakers offered solidarity with those in the UK, and spoke of the similarities of their problems.

Eva fro Kosovo praised the xtalk programme in London.

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Books Feminism

Afghan women – whatever happened to that cause?

October 10, 2011 – 10:20 pm

Originally published on Blogcritics

With reflections from all and sundry on a decade of war in Afghanistan everywhere just now, there could hardly be a better time to read Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan. The cover quote is from the famed chronicler of Chinese women’s lives Xinran, fittingly, since its author is also a radio producer. Zarghuma Kargar was the presenter of the BBC World Service Afghan Women’s Hour, and this book records some of the stories she heard in producing that programme (including some too controversial to include), and her own.

Most of them, it won’t surprise anyone who knows anything about Afghanistan, are not happy stories.

One that has many echoes is that of Shereenjan, married at the age of about nine as a blood payment after her father killed a man in a quarrel. She’s treated worse than an animal, sleeping in the stable and regularly beaten, but fed only scraps, but she says she was a little lucky in that she wasn’t forced to sleep with the man to whom she’d been married until she had been through puberty. “I think I could have coped with it, though. Someone like me can endure any amount of suffering. Their aim had always been to take revenge on me for the death of their son, and they were very good at it. From the older members of the family down to the very youngest, they would always find some new way to hurt me and take satisfaction for my suffering.”

When Zarghuma speaks to her she’s 40, feeling very old and tired and looking forward to paradise – her only consolation the son she bore through rape at the age of 14. And Zarghuma at the same time is hearing the tale of an 11-year-old relative, an orphan, who’s being given in marriage by her grandfather to settle a dispute. There’s nothing Zarghuma can do but ask that the family try to ensure that Pana is given plenty of food.

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Books Feminism

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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