Category Archives: Politics

Feminism

Working on ‘the personal is political’

July 7, 2006 – 10:59 pm

You’ll find me again over on the Guardian’s CommentisFree, presenting an argument for a broad definition of “politics” in the blogosphere, and indeed more broadly. I doubt it will say anything particularly startling to most of my readers, but I’ve already been dueling with the first troll, so if you feel like offering a supportive comment I wouldn’t complain. I have to be in the mood to bother, but then it is fun…!

Permalink | Comment (0)
Environmental politics Science

Water for whom, or what…

July 7, 2006 – 8:39 am

One of those “only in America” stories – “Americans will spend $22bn (£11.9bn) on luxury bathrooms this year“. It is, says one designer, “a mini-living room now”. Except in most living rooms there’s not lots of water being used, water heated usually by non-renewable energy sources.

It fits rather neatly with another story from the Guardian today – a third of the world’s species of amphibians are threatened:

Fifty of the world’s leading conservation experts are calling for an urgent rescue mission to save frogs, newts and other amphibians from extinction. They believe fast action is needed to save the planet’s 5,743 amphibian species after research showing that 32.5% are threatened. Up to 122 amphibian species have become extinct since 1980.

Not a perfect equation, but less water, and money, on bathrooms, and more in natural environments, certainly couldn’t hurt.

Permalink | Comments (2)
Feminism

The horror of forced marriage

July 6, 2006 – 11:35 am

The cases that generally get attention are those in which the women end up dead, or grossly physically injured, but the practice also causes enormous psychological injury.

The girl, from Peterborough, was subjected to moral blackmail by her parents who said they would kill themselves if she did not marry the cousin she had never met.
The judge told the High Court in London: “She was kept in a remote part of Pakistan for many months and, despite begging her parents to be allowed to return to this country, she was subjected to unrelenting pressure, initially from her mother and subsequently by her father, as also from other members of the wider family.”… “She was subject to continued emotional pressure and moral blackmail, applied over many months,” the judge said. “Her will was overborne.”

Rightly, her marriage has been annulled, but that doesn’t mean she is free, for her solicitor told the court:

“I had to meet her in a Jobcentre to get instructions on the case because there was no other way to meet her. I, a white middle-class lawyer could not go to her home to meet her,” she said.
The woman is still living with her brothers who, Ms Hutchinson said, were in control. “She is cowed by her parents. She has to be terribly careful,” the solicitor said.

The woman is now 20, so it is probably too late for social services to intervene, but there must surely be some way of giving her some genuine freedom.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Feminism Politics

One more blow to women’s pensions

July 5, 2006 – 8:21 am

Women have traditionally married men a few years older than them, but it looks like this is one more now mal-adaptive social practice. A report out of Australia makes one of those obvious but important points, when the men retire, they strongly tend to want their wives to retire at the same time, which further reduces (after children, caring responsibilities etc) their pension contributions, and hence final pensions.

The median superannuation balance for women aged over 65 is less than 5 per cent of that saved by men of the same age, according to the study by the Melbourne Institute’s Diana Warren and the Australian Government Office for Women.
“We’re at last seeing that disruptions to work from family and other matters are far more likely to affect women than men,” said Julie Bishop, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women’s Issues.
“Women are more likely to be pressured into early retirement by their partners, doctors and employers than retire from their own decisions.”

Women, however, want the men to stay at work for as long as possible. The cynics will say this is for many but I suspect the desire for personal space has a lot more to do with it – lots of marriages break-up, or get very unhappy, when the couple are forced together on the retirement of one or both.

Permalink | Comment (0)
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)
Environmental politics Science

No such thing as a free lunch

July 4, 2006 – 9:38 pm

I’m immediately suspicious about “miracle cures”, so I’m less than enthused by the idea of sequestering all of that excess greenhouse gas we’re producing underground. “Hey, let’s dump the problem and forget about it” – that was the approached used, to disastrous, expensive, effect, with chemical weapons from World War I, and by far too many industries since then.

So I’m not surprised by a nasty surprise for those testing out the idea of “burying” carbon dioxide:

It’s staying where they put it, but it’s chewing up minerals. The reactions have produced a nasty mix of metals and organic substances in a layer of sandstone 1550 meters down, researchers report this week in Geology. At the same time, the CO2 is dissolving a surprising amount of the mineral that helps keep the gas where it’s put. Nothing is leaking out so far, but the phenomenon will need a closer look before such carbon sequestration can help ameliorate the greenhouse problem, say the researchers.

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »