Category Archives: Feminism

Early modern history Feminism Women's history

How women’s literary work is lost, and, sometimes, saved

July 4, 2006 – 10:55 pm

Writing a poem was a task that anyone with any claim to education could do in the early modern period pretty well as easily as we write an email, and they could be written, almost, anywhere – the bottom of trenchers (plates) being a particular favourite for ephemeral verses. Women might often embroider them, a form that was hardly more lasting, but this lovely example comes from a manuscript of 1603, in which it was recorded for posterity. Its title tells all:

A gentlewoman yt married a yonge Gent who after forsooke whereuppon she tooke hir needle in which she was excelent and worked upon hir Sampler thus

Come give me needle stitchcloth silke and haire,
That I may sitt and sigh and sow and singe,
For perfect collours to discribe the aire
A subtle persinge changinge constant thinge.

No false stitch will I make my hart is true,
Plaine stitche my sampler is for to complaine
Now men have tongues of hony, harts of rue,
True tongues and harts are one, Men makes them twain.

Give me black silk that sable suites my hart
And yet som white though white words do deceive
No greene at all for youth and I must part,
Purple and blew, fast love and faith to weave.
Mayden no more sleepeless ile go to bedd
Take all away, the work works in my hedd.
(pp. 155-6)

A nice variation on washing your troubles away, and that line “tongues of honey, hearts of rue” (rue being of course a bitter herb) is a beautiful one.

This is from an excellent, extremely broadranging anthology, Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (1520-1700), edited by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson. (I’ve made a note to myself to immediately latch on to anything in which Stevenson is involved. As I’ve noted elsewhere, her Women Latin Poets is brilliant.)

So many of these sorts of anthologies just rehash the usual suspects; it is lovely to see lots of new voices here. (It has just fallen open at “Verces made by Mistress Battina Cromwell, wife to Henry Cromwell ers Sir Oliver Cromwell’s sone”.)

It even has poems in Welsh – and translations…

Permalink | Comments (17)
Feminism Travel

Sex v gender – some original thoughts

July 3, 2006 – 10:34 pm

The Women’s Studies Listerv has gone slightly crazy on that old debate of sex as a fixed category versus a social construct. I’ve had that debate probably one too many times (you might guess I’m on the social construct side – although with an added leavening of “there aren’t two distinct categories” anyway – not so you can meaningfully group them.)

But the discussion did point to an interesting podcast, an interview with Deborah Rudacille, author of The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights. And she had some interesting statistics. Biologically speaking, you can look at sex in terms of chromosomes, gonads, genitals, endocrinology (the balance of androgen and estrogen), and gender identity, which she equated with “brain sex”. Group those together and by one or more categories, about 2.2 per cent of live births are “intersex” – unable to be clearly allocated as male or female. As the interviewer rather laboriously calculated, that amounts worldwide to about 120 million people who are neither definitively male or female.

(Two warnings – the volume of the podcast is very loud – about three times as loud as Radio Four, and the interviewer has an irritating voice – but stick with it, it is worth it.)

Permalink | Comment (1)
Feminism

A must-read interview

July 2, 2006 – 9:51 am

Chameleon on Redemption Blues has interviewed Professor Beverley Skeggs, who works at the intersection of feminism and class. There’s a bit of fairly heavy theory at the top, but if that isn’t your thing, do stick with it, for there’s some excellent analysis of British society, e.g.

There is an alliance between social theorists and governments, which is slightly worrying if you think of Clinton and Blair and of the impact of neo-liberalism in this country now. Choice in education? Well, who can choose? Who has the knowledge? Who can move house? All this choice rhetoric is so powerful. I see the power of class working through these different ways in which people put a lot of effort into denying class, the ultimate symbol of the fact that it really does exist. That denial can always be rebutted from so many different directions.

On the ladette phenomenon:

…it’s about the burning out of a very particular sort of Laura Ashley femininity that was no longer appropriate for women who were all going to have to go out and work and who were being taught through Thatcherism, neo-liberalism and individualism that they could be strong.

On the “chav” label:

There’s a woman, Lady Sovereign, who is defined as the chav pop singer. She’s only 16, really good, really clever. She’s like young, white Miss Dynamite with really urban, political songs. She talks about being really hurt by being labelled chav because it was consolidating negative value so that wherever she went, her style of clothing, everybody could read her as having no value. That is the pain: you enter a space and you know you have to prove that you have value without just taking it for granted that people will listen to you, take you seriously and accept you.

There’s also an interesting discussion about the relationship between “different forms” of feminism – can you “do” gay feminism without being gay, etc?

The professor’s current main research interest is, perhaps a little curiously, about reality TV, which she says is all about displaying the “proper emotions” and “respectability”. Not, perhaps, quite what your grandmother meant by “respectability”, but I suppose I see the point.

She’s also done work on understanding the place of hetero women in Manchester’s gay quarter, and I do have to track down “The Toilet Paper”, about the interaction between women in public loos.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Feminism History

Homer, she was brilliant…

July 1, 2006 – 8:51 am

Dr Dalby, whose study, Rediscovering Homer, will be published by W. W. Norton in September, said: “It is possible, even probable, that this poet was a woman. As a working hypothesis, this helps to explain certain features in which these epics are better — more subtle, more complex, more universal — than most others.”

Well, the short answer is of course that we’ll never know. Interesting thought though.

But I was amused by the “official” response:

Anthony Snodgrass, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University, said that the Odyssey could have been written by a woman because it is about “a world at peace in general terms, with domesticity, fidelity . . . endurance and determination rather than aggression”. But he added: “The idea of a woman writing the Iliad and not being bored out of her mind by the endless fighting and killings is a bit more far-fetched.”

… because of course a woman in the Greece of some 3,000 years ago, in a culture of which we know very little, had the same interests as a “proper” middle-class British woman of the 20th century, of a type with which he is acquainted.

Permalink | Comments (3)
Blogging/IT Feminism On other media

Greetings…

June 30, 2006 – 9:25 pm

…to anyone who’s visiting from today’s Guardian article on women bloggers.

Do check it out if you haven’t seen it; and if you read it on the web you won’t have to look at the uncomfortably large (for me anyway) picture in today’s print edition. (There’s a lot to be said for half-column mugshots…)

Permalink | Comments (2)
Feminism Politics Science

God made homosexuality

June 27, 2006 – 10:24 am

The whole nature/nurture business is a complicated one, and when you start to talk about sexuality only gets more so. As a physiology professor said to me once: “You’d like to think your sexual choices were made at a level higher than the hypothalamus.”

But it seems little doubt to me that there is a biological component to sexuality, as appears to be confirmed by a study showing that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay.

The mechanism by which having older biological brothers affects male sexuality remains unknown, but the most popular theory is that it reflects the way a mother’s immune system reacts to carrying lots of male foetuses.
As males have a Y chromosome and females do not, a mother’s body may be more likely to recognise a male foetus than a female one as foreign and generate a strong immune response.
Other research has shown that this response can strengthen with each subsequent male pregnancy. This may affect the way that the brain develops sexually.

I do like the challenge this presents to the religious sorts: if God made everything, doesn’t this mean he made homosexuality?

But it also makes me think about the problem of trying to adjust your sexuality for your politics. I knew a few woman in my university days who decided “to become lesbians” for feminist political reasons. I respect the argument at an abstract level, but I also saw some hideously exploitative relationships result from it – almost as bad as those resulting from women consciously “just experimenting”.

I’m heterosexual. I don’t know why that is, but that is just the way my sexuality goes, quite strongly. But that makes me realise how horrible are attempts to force those otherwise inclined to conform to some form of social norm.

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »