Ever since I was young – from age five or six – I noticed how almost all of the certified heroes of society – their bronze forms on sturdy stone blocks – were male. Yet what I had failed to notice, until I read Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, was how many female figures there are in public spaces. Yet almost none show “real women” (although of course there was some anonymous women to act as the – male – sculptor’s model, and often muse). Instead they are allegories: Victory, Justice, Charity and all of their sisters.

Warner says: “Although the absence of female symbols and a preponderance of male in a society frequently indicates a corresponding depreciation of women as a group and as individuals, the presence of female symbolism does not guarantee the opposite, as we can see from classical Athenian culture, with its subtly psychologized pantheon of goddesses and its secluded, unenfranchised women; or contemporary Catholic culture, with its pervasive and loving celebration of the Madonna coexisting alongside deep anxieties and disapproval of female emancipation.

“But a symbolized female presence both gives and takes value and meaning in relation to actual women, and contains the potential for affirmation not only of women themselves but of the general good they might represent and in which as half of humanity they are deeply implicated.” (p. xx)

I’m not so positive, but her exploration of the use and abuse of the female symbol is absolutely fascinating and her subversive exploration of the world of traditional myth truly enlightening.

I can’t in one post do justice to it all, but a few snippets.

* King Cecrops was asked to act as an arbiter between the quarrelling Olympian gods. Poseidon and Athena were vying for control of Athens, and having consulted an oracle he advised that every Athenian should vote for their preference. The result came out Athena’s way, because all of the women voted for her and they outnumbered the men.

In revenge, the other gods decreed that women should lose the right to vote, and were no longer to be known by their own name, but instead as “daughter of ….” or “wife of …”. He is also given credit for ruling that children should be understood as offspring of their fathers, creating the institution of marriage. Quoting Pierre Vidal-Naquet: “In Greek eyes, Crecops’ role here is that of a culture-hero, [who] brought the Athenians out of savagery into civilisation”. (p. 120)

Interesting how far the story of the pre-existing matriarchy goes back.

* There was a theory in Victorian times that the Odyssey was written by a women, because its approach was seen as unlike the “military ethic” of the Iliad.(p. 101.)

*Athena’s virginity ensures that Zeus can’t be overthrown, since only her son could do that. She did have a “child”, but one that was half-snake, because a would-be rapist ejaculated on her leg. (p.123). And we think moderns are mixed up about sexuality!

*Nike was the goddess of success, the embodiment of Athena in this form, without personal characteristics, but a separate cult for her developed in Hellenic times. (p. 128) She survived too into Christian times, as the Goddess Victory (with swanlike wings like Nike.)

“She appears in the emblem Sylvia Pankhurst designed in 1908 for Votes for Women, the weekly journal of the Women’s Social and Political Union, as a suffragette angel in green and purple and white, blowing a trumpet with the bannerette ‘Freedom’.” (p. 143) Haven’t seen that in any shoe adverts lately, however.

Anyway, this is a wonderful, complex, challenging but “un-put-downable” book. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Nominations are now open for the 2005 Bloggies, which are THE awards among the many, I’m reliably informed.

Here’s a good chance to answer that: where are all the female bloggers? question.

As Feministe says (now there’s a good nomination): “And don’t you forget about me. You know, because female bloggers don’t know how to promote themselves.”

Yes I nominated myself for “best new”. (You’re allow to do that so long as you nominate at least three others as well – I plundered my blogroll and almost got to 20 nominations.)

Once you’ve done that, if the name Blinky Bill means anything to you, don’t miss Barista’s post, which includes The Magic Pudding for dessert.

Otherwise, on the subject of female authors (Dorothy Wall for Blinky), did you know today was the day that Fanny Burney, the “Mother of English fiction”, died? (In 1840.) Thanks to Today in Literature. (This link will only work for a couple of days.)

And for those in any stage of a PhD, Claire is asking you to nominate how you plan to celebrate finishing … a chance to exercise those pleasant fantasies, and procrastinate for a few minutes.

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griffin, originally uploaded by natalieben.

Lots of bloggers are now compiling their “Best Books of 2004”. I don’t think I can manage that – just finding them all would take ages, and judging them, well… see you some time in 2006.

But I am going to put up a couple of posts on my most interesting surprising, “whow” books of 2004, one of which was The Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor, 2000, Princeton University Press.

Above is page 44, showing a reconstruction of the skeleton of a Protoceratops, a dinosaur that lived in what is now the Gobi desert. Below is a Scythian “griffin”, placed into the same stance.

This very clear example is used to introduce the idea that the account of griffins was transmitted initially orally, by the Scythian nomads who found these skeletons, quite often whole, and sometimes with nests of eggs, in the desert, then written down by the Greeks.

But furthermore the Greeks and Romans encountered fossils for themselves and their texts “contain some of the world’s oldest written descriptions of fossil finds, many of them first hand. Writers like Herodotus, Pausanias and Aelian tell us what they and their contemporaries thought, said, and did when they came upon bones of startling magnitude.” (p. 52)

Mayor suggests that these discoveries – still being made in many parts of the Classical lands – provided the grounds for “myths” about enormous ancient heroes and great monsters.

So, in about 560BC, the oracle at Delphi told the Spartans they needed to find the bones of the hero Orestes before they could defeat their regional rival, Arcadian Tegea. Herodotus says that by chance a Spartan cavalryman stumbled across, then stole, the bones found in a “huge coffin”, more than 10 foot long, containing bones of a matching size. The suggestion is that these were the remains of a mammoth, found in the 7th-century BC, when the cult of heroes had begun, and given the coffin burial. A century or so later they were rediscovered, and gave the Spartans the confidence to dominate the Peloponnese.

This led to a long-lasting “Panhellenic bone rush”. (p. 111)

But in many cases finders and searchers understood they were looking at animal bones. Mayor argues the famous “Monster of Troy” vase in fact shows a fossil skull eroding from a cliff.
Image here.

This knowledge led the Romans to something approaching a theory of evolution. Lucretius, writing in the 1st century BC, wrote the nature produced “many monsters of manifold forms” and “bigger animals” in ages past, but these gradually died out when they could not find food or reproduce. “everything is transformed by nature and forced into new paths. One thing dwindles … another waxes strong.” (p. 216)

Finally, going far, far further back, it seems humankind always found something special in fossils: Jurassic ammonites were pierced for suspension by Cro-Magnons in France and a Pliocene gastropod was found in the Lascaux Cave in France; it must have come from either the Isle of Wight or Ireland – a treasured item. (p.. 166)

This is a frustratingly badly written and organised book – it cries out for a decent editing job – but it is well worth the irritation for the ideas and knowledge it contains.

This will soon not be an advert-free zone. Inspired in part by Steve Gilliard’s fascinating post, which argues that blogging is the new, kinder, gentler dotcom boom, I’ve signed up for Google’s ad programme and as soon as I’ve got the HTML sorted out you’ll be seeing them, probably as a column down the left of the screen.

Comments welcome: I’d like to know whether you find them annoying, potentially useful or if you just don’t see them. (Certainly when I read newspapers I seldom actually look at an advert.)

I also can’t wait to see what Google is going to match up with some of my posts – I’m planning one on Zoroastrianism soon.

I’ve had a semi-reorganisation of the bookshelves over Christmas. (Soon there’s going to have to be a total sort-out to make more space, but I can probably shove volumes in a few more corners before I have to take that drastic step.)

One of the books for which I was trying to find a place opened at the page about the efforts of Lucy, Countess Baldwin, wife of the British Prime Minister, to increase provision for pain relief in childbirth. (She was also instrumental in the passing of the 1936 Midwives Act, which created a paid national service.)

In 1929 she had set up the Anaesthetics Fund – there were others but this was the biggest (The term then covered both genuine anaesthesia and other forms of pain relief). “She believed pain relief was a democratic right, just like the vote. ‘In Finland, that little progressive nation which was the first in Europe to give the franchise to women,’ she liked to point out, ‘they always give anaesthetics to women in childbirth.”(p.42)

But “the common view, especially of men, observed the Public Health Committee of the London County Council in 1933, was that a woman would be doing ‘something morally wrong’ in evading the pain of labour.”(p. 42) (Such a lovely teaching of the churches – the repayment for “original sin”.) Of course the doctors were also opposed, because they thought that midwives’ administration of drugs was trampling on their territory.

And it wasn’t just men. Even after the Fund had distributed large amounts of equipment, much of it was going unused. In part this was due to problems of lack of training, and the provision that two trained midwives had to be present when it was used, but there was also resistance from women. “A key goal of her campaign was to eradicate the common assumption that women who accepted the benefit of anaesthesia did not care about their children.” (p. 51)

However, by 1936 most voluntary and municipal hospitals, the later largely attended by working-class women, offered pain relief. Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas: “Since chloroform was first administered to Queen Victoria on the birth of Prince Leopold in April 1835, normal maternity cases in the wards have had to wait for 76 years and the advocacy of a Prime Minister’s wife to obtain this relief.” (quoted p. 58)

However, about half of women still gave birth at home, and only about 20 per cent of them were given pain relief. There was still non at all in Scotland.

But by 1946 the public mood had changed. A survey then found the most common reason for dissatisfaction of treatment in labour was lack of pain relief. A survey in 1945 quoted one woman as saying: “Rich people don’t suffer, why should we?” (p. 58)

It only took a generation.

From Ladies of Influence, A. Susan Williams, 2000, Penguin. There’s astonishingly little about Lucy on the Web – yet another sign of how women disappear with astonishing speed from history.

From The Little Professor: copy this list of ten authors, then replace any not in your bookcases with others who are. Replacements in bold.
1. Germaine Greer
2. Peter Ackroyd.
3. Isaac Asimov
4. Margery Allingham
5. Dorothy L Sayers
6. Guy de Maupassant
7. Frances Burney
8. A.S. Byatt
9. Margaret Atwood
10. William Shakespeare