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.

The Bryant and May “match girls” strike of 1888 is one of those carefully selected events from which women pop into mainstream history; being a a nice balance for the suffragettes certainly helps.

But another talk today put flesh on the bones in more ways than one, suggesting that the strikers were considerably older than the 12 to 15 that is generally suggested. Certainly this picture of the elected organisers doesn’t suggest young teenagers.

The talk covered the life of Sarah Chapman, one of these organisers, and the highest-paid worker involved in the strike (40s in the week before it started – CORRECTION, this should be 40 pence – see comments)). She is listed as a “booker”, although apparently no one knows now exactly what that meant.

A huge amount of research has managed to almost entirely map out her life, and those of her relatives. She remained active in the trade union movement until 1891, when at the age of 29 she married. Yet despite probably two decades of working in a job that must have been in today’s terms at least semi-skilled, no occupation is given on her marriage certificate. (Her husband, Charles Harry Dearman, is listed as a cabinetmaker.)

It’s a good example of how so many women who were nothing of the sort end up listed as “housewife”.

An excellent account, and some 1,200 documents relating to the strike, can be found at the TUC library.

… doesn’t mean Special Branch is not following you.

A character shown in a new light at the seminar today was Nancy Cunard, of whom I was vaguely aware as a rebellious socialite. She was, however, I learnt, much more than that, being a writer, scholar and significant political campaigner, as this account indicates. Also here and an image of her by Man Ray here. (The biography by Anne Chisholm is apparently the one to read if you want to know more.)

A scholar studying the recently declassified files told us that while she was often dismissed as being paranoid for complaining about the police following her, in fact they were, very closely. The file only ends with her death in a French hospital in 1965.

Some of the PC Plods must have been seriously out of their depth in the job, however. There was a lovely letter from a local police station reporting the arrival of a letting agent from her flat (called out by neighbours’ complaints that “lots of Negros” were going into it). The agent was charmed by her, seems to have accepted her explanation of political work, but immediately rushed down to the police station to hand over the “communist” pamphlets she had given him. A PC was waiting for Special Branch to collect them.

General discussion at the seminar today produced a fascinating snippet; until at least the early 1970s “unaccompanied women” were not allowed into Wimpy’s restaurants (a British burger chain) late at night. (Differing opinions suggested the cut-off was either 11pm or midnight.) This restriction was actually printed on the menu.

So, a former nurse recounted, she and a colleague, in full uniform, were supposed to stand outside to eat their meal, at least until the staff took pity on them, although they had to eat fast, before the shift changed.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that we have come a long way.

I’ve been distracted (from various things I’d been planning to do) over the last couple of days by the arrival of several fiction purchases. I don’t read much fiction these days – I find it just doesn’t grab me the way facts do – but I have been building my Dorothy L Sayers collection, adding this time Busman’s Honeymoon.

Sayers writes beautifully, intelligently, yet in no way pretentiously, sketching out her characters in a few deft strokes. You do have to feel that she was wasted on detective fiction, even though her efforts go far beyond the usual run of the genre. (I still have to read her Dante, as I suspect I promised to do about three months ago – one of these days.)

My favourite is Gaudy Night, a wonderful exploration of the difficulties the women of the Twenties faced in trying to carve out a place for themselves in the male world of academia, and the professions more generally, particularly in fighting their own conditioning.

But Busman’s Honeymoon comes a close second in the favourites’ list; its start, with a selection of “diary” items from different people about the same event, the wedding of Sir Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, is laugh-out-loud funny.

As with all of the books it is a wonderful portrait of the time, as was confirmed by a matchup of fiction and non-fiction today.

I spent most of the day at the London Archive Users Forum/Women’s Library conference, which had a real mix of papers, including one on the “child development experts”, a profession that developed in the first half of this century. At least I think that was what the paper was about; I only got to hear half of it due to the massive traffic jams caused by the Lord Mayor’s Show – an annual irritating attempt to create total chaos across the City.

Anyway, whinge over: in Busman’s Honeymoon, the Duchess, Peter’s mother, an apparently scatterbrained woman who uses a fluttery manner as cover for a penetrating brain, reports on this trend. She writes: “Wonder whether Mussolini’s mother spanked him too much or too little – you can never know, these psychological days. Can distinctly remember spanking Peter, but it doesn’t seem to have warped him much, so psychologists very likely all wrong.”

How right she was: the talk today started on the later Victoria, early Edwardian approach, in which mothers were supposed to ensure that their children, particularly the boys of course, were fearless to the point of stupidity, so they could serve the empire. Any sign of fear in the children, nightmares etc, all the things we’d now regard as a normal part of development, were seen as a failure of mothers.

The paper then discussed the approach in the late 1940s and 1950s to “schoolphobia”, invented in 1924 and much discussed post-War. It was a middle-class disease; working-class kids were just truants – not much has changed there then.

It was not, however, perceived to be a disease of children; no of course the mothers were to blame – they were around too much and too close their children. To deal with the problem, so the experts said, it wasn’t even necessary to see the children, you just had to treat the mothers.
(Busman’s Honeymoon quote, p. 33, 1941, Ninth Impression, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London.)

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aplha2, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I didn’t think it would reproduce, but for a picture taken from a near 100-year-old photo, printed in a newspaper, then scanned 15 years later, Amy’s boat hasn’t come up too badly. The story’s here.