All over the UK papers yesterday was the story “Desperate to be housewives: young women yearn for 1950s role as stay-at-home mums”, this version from The Independent:

They are the generation of women who grew up expecting to have it all. No longer forced to choose between children and a career, they were set to embrace superwomanhood by doing both – while holding down a perfect relationship and keeping a spotless home in their spare time.

But modern woman has taken a reality check. The average 29-year-old now hankers for a return to the lifestyle of a 1950s housewife. The daughters of the “Cosmo” generation of feminists want nothing more than a happy marriage and domestic bliss in the countryside, according to a survey.

Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29 found that 61 per cent believe “domestic goddess” role models who juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are “unhelpful” and “irritating”. More than two-thirds agree that the man should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want to work as hard as their mother’s generation. On average, the women questioned want to “settle down” with their partner by 30 and have their first child a year later….

For suggestions of why this is a bad idea, they might want to consult Purple Pen’s account of the position of her sister, or read The Women’s Room, which made me realise at age 16 why what my instincts told me was right, you always need your independence.

This isn’t usually a medical blog, although I do have an interest in medical matters arising largely from one of the few worthwhile science courses I ever studied – second-year physiology, which involved doing hideous things to pithed toads and anaethetised rats that weren’t going to emerge from their sleep. This made it hard to forget the lesson, even if understanding what is happening when you are in pain is not always a positive thing.

But I got this in an email today and since it doesn’t seem to have got lots of publicity, certainly in the UK, I thought it worth promulgating.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
*Ask the individual to SMILE.
*Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
*Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE
(Coherently) (ie. It is sunny out today)

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call an ambulance immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

There’s more detail here.

In the recent light reading category has been this JK Jerome “popular classic”. I get the impression that every British person read it at school at some time, but it didn’t make it on to the Australian curriculum.

It is in a curious way like reading 1984, because many of the images and ideas have already been encountered elsewhere. As this site suggests, Jerome’s hapless, impractical males falling into endless ultimately harmless scraps can now be seen in every second sitcom. What was perhaps original at the time (1889), now falls curiously flat. But perhaps it was innovative – I can’t think of an earlier set of contra-heroes as these.

I’m afraid my favourite character was the dog, a fox-terrier, who did not appear nearly often enough. But I did enjoy the following scene, which very much reminded me of an incident with my dog Beanie.

“Half-way up the High Street a cat darted out from one of the houses in front of us, and began to trot across the road. Montmorency gave a cry of joy — the cry of a stern warrior who sees his enemy given over to his hands — the sort of cry Cromwell might have uttered when the Scots came down the hill — and flew after his prey.
His victim was a large black Tom. I never saw a larger cat,
nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose.
It was a long, sinewy-looking animal. It had a calm, contented air about it.
Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour ; but the cat did not hurry up—did not seem to have grasped the idea that its life was in danger. It trotted quietly on until its would-be assassin was within a yard of it, and then it turned round and sat down in the middle of the road, and looked at Montmorency with a gentle, inquiring expression, that said; “Yes ! You want me ?”
Montmorency does not lack. pluck,; but there was something about the look of that cat that might have chilled the heart of the boldest dog. He stopped abruptly, and looked back at Tom.
Neither spoke ; but the conversation that one could imagine was clearly as follows :—
THE CAT : “Can I do anything for you ?”
MONTMORENCY : “No—no, thanks.”
THE CAT : “Don’t you mind speakng, if you really want anything, you know.” ^
MONTMORENCY (backing down the High Street) : “Oh, no—not at all—certainly—don’t you trouble. I—I am afraid I’ve made a mistake. I thought I knew you. Sorry I disturbed you.”
THE CAT : “Not at all—quite a pleasure. Sure you don’t
want anything, now ?’
MONTMORENCY (still backing): “Not at all, thanks—not at all —very kind of you. Good morning.”
THE CAT : “Good morning.”
Then the cat rose, and continued his trot; and Montmorency, fitting what he calls his tail carefully into its groove, came back to us, and took up an unimportant position in the rear.
To this day, if you say the word “Cats!” to Montmorency, he will visibly shrink and look up piteously at you, as if to say:
“Please don’t.”
(p. 128, JK Jerome, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1948 edition)

I was also directed to the reading by a recent purchase, To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, which is billed as:
“a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-travelling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome’s singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in–you guessed it–a boat. Jerome will later immortalise Ned’s fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalise Ned’s fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)”

I read a good review of it, but we’ll see …

P.S. Doesn’t it seem odd now the way in older books punctuation marks are all set off by spaces. (I OCRed this and haven’t changed it.) I wonder when, and why, the change occurred? World War II paper shortage perhaps?

Having been tied up with other things, I haven’t managed to put together an appropriate post for International Women’s Day, but then there’s so many great ones out there I hardly need to.

So choose your reasons to say thanks to a feminist

or, check out some women’s history links, or a selection of quotes.
(My favourite was Soujourner’s Aint I a woman?. )

or, read the web edition of a book covering the History of International Women’s Day.
(Hat-tip to Thoughts of an Average Woman.)

LATE ADDITION: Detrimental postulation has an excellent commemorative post on Alexandra Kollontai, the “the Bolshevik feminist writer, politician, activist and diplomat”. Don’t miss it, even though the poster is a bloke.

On that note I thought I should check my blogroll. There are as I write 183 blogs on it, of which about 60 are clearly written by women, about 80 by men, and the rest either joint blogs or written in a way that the gender of the blogger is not obvious. (I haven’t gone hunting around to work it out if this is the case.)

That statistic surprised me a little, since I would have thought women would predominate, since my interests do have a distinctly feminist slant. But I think where the tilt towards men comes is bloggers about some of the obscure countries in which I have an interest, and also from people in interesting workplaces. (I don’t have a female nurse or female doctor’s blog for example – anyone know any good ones?)

So come on you women in farflung parts of the world and in interesting jobs – blog away!

Quick question: does anyone know why my Sitemeter “By Referrals” sections is just one long lists of “unknowns”? Is there a button you have to press somewhere there or on the Blogger to make the feature work?

(I’ve been enjoying so many other people’s posts on “weird Google searchs that brought people here” I’d like to see for myself on my site.)

All help gratefully received!

I’ve never really got into the Mona Lisa; its iconic status seems so much a matter of historical accident rather than any reflections on its merits, and trying to actually see it in the Louvre is such a scramble that it hardly seems worth the effort.

But I was fascinated to learn that, at least on one account, we’ve been looking at the wrong aspect of the painting. In “Poses and passions: Mona Lisa’s ‘closely folded’ hands’,” Zirka Z. Filipczak dismisses the smile in the few paragraphs, saying that it is a reference to the name of her husband, Giacondo, which means “jocund, merry, glad, joyous”. (p. 70) “The faintness of her smile would not have puzzled contemporaries. No respectable adult smiled broadly as to display teeth, that would simultaneously reveal one’s vulgarity.”

What is interesting, the article argues, is the position of the hands, which broadly follow the conventions of the time in having hands crossed over the abdomen. e.g. Decor puellarum, a handbook for maidens published in 1461: “Whether you are standing still or walking, you right hand must always rest upon your left, in front of you, on the level of your girdle.” (Quoted page 72) In paintings, however, fingers are seldom shown intertwined, for that was a sign of grief.(p. 86)

Leonardo wasn’t precise about the right on left, but he did believe: “Women must be represented in modest attitudes, their legs close together, their arms closely folded.” (p. 73)

That this convention made it across Europe is shown by Haec Vir: or The Womanish Man, 1620: “Because I stand not with my hand on my belly … am I therefore barbarous or shamelesse?” The error lay, she says, not in behaviour, but “in the fashion, in the custom”. (p. 73)

The most favoured pose for men in paintings, by contrast, with elbows projecting outward, which “proclaimed a man to be physically vigorous and to possess bravery, the virtue and feeling deemed as essential for men as chastity was for women”. (p. 83)

Of course it got more complicated than that – a woman might be shown “elbows out” if she practices a “masculine” profession or was being depicted as a virago, while men sometimes were shown with hands folded when they were scholars or clerics, or trying to show they did not engage in manual work. (p. 85)

And Mona is more sophisticated and does deserve at least some of her fame: “”The decorum of modesty … incapacitated a complying woman’s activity; her gestures as we;; as her walk, talk and glance. Constraint is hardly the overall effect of the Mona Lisa, however. … The pose stands for restraint, whereas the forms, especially the smooth rhythms and softened full surfaces, suggest only ease. In earlier portraits women’s hands joined in a stiffer, tighter way to confirm their modesty, but Mona Lisa’s come together with the apparent effortlessness … her body seems gently animated because the head turns more than the torso and the eyes more than the head. By 1500 this type of implied mobility had become part of the Italian portrait tradition for men, but it was still novel for a woman.” (p. 87)

I can feel a trip to the National Gallery coming on …

(From Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, Paster, Owe and Floyd-Wilson, Uni of Penn. Press, 2004)