An interesting post over on Blogcritics about Men Who’ve Had “Too Much Breast Milk” drew me into a comment that turned into a post. DeLilah writes:

Men have been coddled and protected in a skewed effort to protect their manhood and ego. I know countless men who are products of this type of rearing – a rearing where in the majority of cases, the custodial parent, dominant parent or primary disciplinarian in the household was the mother. These were strong, resilient, hard-working mothers – who often times were single-handedly raising multiple children. These mothers subconsciously reared their daughters to be clones of themselves (self-sufficient, hardworking, ambitious and determined) and simultaneously raised their sons to be more reliant and expectant than dependent.

I think she’s right about the condition, wrong about the timing and causes. I don’t think single mothers are a cause; I think this goes back at least to the early post-WWII situation, when early marriage – teens or early 20s – suddenly became the norm. (Historically a very unusual situation.)

So virtual children got married. The women were, however, forced to grow up when they had children (often _very_ soon after the marriage) because caring for babies and small children demands responsibility, attention to the needs of others, self-discipline i.e. being grown up.

The men, however, without this pressure, became “extra children” in the family, never really taking responsibility (except _sometimes_ financial, which may bear no relation to personal responsibility). This was certainly the situation I saw growing up in Australian suburbia in the Seventies – it was a standing, somewhat bitter joke among my mother’s friends that they had an extra child – who took no responsibility for anything, from the trivial e.g. picking up their own dirty socks, to the deeply serious, e.g. co-operating in caring for their children and making personal sacrifices (eg giving up watching a football game for the purpose).

They’d married as emotional or actual teenagers, and they’d never grown past that self-centred condition.

There’s a parallel in this in the extended family structures found particularly on the Sub-Continent – at least that’s the area I know something about. Male children are cossetted and protected, never forced to do chores or make any contribution to the family. Women are brought up to be much tougher, both because they are (sadly) less valued, but also because there is an awareness that when they move to their husband’s family’s house they are going to need emotional toughness, self-discipline and general life skills.

One of the theories of a thesis I wrote about the female prime ministers of South Asia (which I am really, really going to post soon), is that this prepared the women of elite families for the often (very) rough and tumble of politics much better than the men were prepared.

So a tougher upbringing is in many ways an advantage. And I think this is undoubtedly a factor in divorce rates. Women, now increasingly if still inadequately – with other economic choices before them, decide they’d be better off without the extra, unchosen “child”.

I bought my godson a goat for Christmas last year – not to run about his suburban Sydney garden, but to help a family in Africa. I hadn’t realised I was buying that year’s fashionable present, as defined by the Guardian. But having had years of exposure to the aid community, it seemed like a better bet than other forms of charitable giving. But, the Guardian is asking, is it?

Livestock restocking projects have been around since at least the famines of the 1970s and early 80s, and what quickly emerges is that successful schemes are nowhere near as simple as turning up, presenting a grateful family with a frisky goat or two and flying home again. “Two-thirds of the 2.3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day and most depend on livestock,” says Heffernan, who in the process of cowriting a manual of best practice studied 85 projects and interviewed representatives from more than 30 NGOs involved in restocking. She found that the road to best practice was strewn with the wreckage of misguided and/or badly run projects, but none the less, gifts of goats, cows or chickens “can have a massive positive impact if you get it right”. Getting it right involves detailed, local, committed investment of time and resources and an almost masochistic appetite for a challenge.

This is an excellent, nuanced report that gives a qualified “yes”, and stresses well the difficulties of aid, which almost inevitably brings together, in the giver and the recipient, two utterly different world views, and sets of skills, experiences and motivations. Matching those up – and seeing the gaps and bridging the misunderstandings – requires great skill and sensitivity.

“One woman says later that she’s grateful the goats came because having to feed them three times a day means she spends less time gossiping at the village well, which means she implicates her neighbours in fewer scandals, and her husband beats her less often. Instead they spend their time discussing how to look after goats and what they will do with the money.”

I bet that wasn’t in the charity’s list of aims and objectives for the project.

An emailed question from a researcher about my Diaries of a Lady of Quality reminded me that I hadn’t posted a block of my research, particularly that drawn from: Wynnstay and the Wynns: A Volume of Varieties (Put Together by the Author of the Gossiping Guide to Wales). The British Library copy has written after that in pencil “Askew Roberts”. Published in Oswestery by Woodall and Venables, 1876, it is also available in a 1998 fascimile edition.

They were a family line who seemed to have specialised in marrying well. In the 16th and 17th century, on the Williams side of the family, there is a long list of marriages to “the daughter and heiress of … ”

Sir Watkin, the fourth baronet and MP for Denbighshire, married on August 6th, 1769, Lady Henrietta Somerset, “fifth daughter of Charles, Fourth Duke of Beaufort. She died after a few months, and he married his second wife Charlotte, daughter of the Right Hon. Geo. Greville, Prime Minister of England and sister to the Marquis of Buckinghamshire on December 21, 1771.

There’s an anecdote about this: “‘How flexible are the affections of some men,’ says Mrs Delany, in recording the event. Sir Watkins Wynn is the happiest of men: and so he was not many months before with Lady Hart.”

When this Sir WW had come of age in April 1770, he had a banquet at Wynnstay said to have been attended by 15,000 guests. He was a man who liked to be centre stage. “Mr Wright in his Caricature History of the Georges records Sir WW’s appearance at Mrs Cornelly’s masquerades where he represented a Druid. In 1773, we are told in Leslie’s Life of Reynolds ‘the jolly Sir Watkin produced great effect (at a masquerade in the Pantheon) by riding in as St David, mounted on a Welsh goat.”

In 1775 he was elected member of the Dilettanti Society (which sounds about right), but he died in 1789 aged only 41, and his mother erected a memorial obelisk in Wynnstay Park.

I think it must have been his father whose address to the electors of Denbighshire was preserved in The Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1742. The gossiping Welshman says: “had he lived in our days he would doubtless have been claimed as a liberal”. His death was caused by a fall from his horse while hunting at Acton in the sumnmer of 1749.

So he wasn’t as tough as his second wife, Frances, “daughter of George Shakerley Esq”, who when a fire broke out at her family home “was saved with difficulty after clinging for some time to a water-pipe outside her window. She survived her husband many years and lived into the present century.” (So my diarist must have known her well.)

And that must be Frances Williams Wynn, my diarist’s, grandfather. It was her brother, the fifth baronet (born 1772), who liked playing at least at being a soldier. “After he came of age he raised a regiment of yeomen, gazetted in 1794 as the ‘Ancient British Fencibles’, and in 1798 assisted in quelling the memorable Irish Rebellion.”

In 1814 he established a regiment of militia “and at its head marched to France, arriving just too late for the battle of Toulouse”. But they didn’t go to Waterloo. (Still this shows why Miss Williams Wynn was so interested in Napoleon.)

But it wasn’t all war – in 1810 “when Lancastrian schools were founded”, he gave a building in Wrexham “sufficiently large enough to educate 500 poor children”, and he also founded a regular agricultural fair. In 1817 he married Lady Henrietta Antonia Clive, and “in autumn 1832 Wynnstay was honoured with a royal visit – Sir Watkin entertained his future queen.”

Then, it is with tragedy that my Miss Williams Wynn enters the picture: “In 1840 he died, driving with his sister from Wynnstay to Nat-y-belan. They were thrown out of a pony carriage and Sir Watkins Wynn was picked up insensible. Erysipelas set in and he never recovered. He was buried in Rhiaton Church and the number of persons at the funeral was estimated by newspapers of the time at 10,000.”

As I’m not reading ahead as I publish the diary, I don’t know if this will be covered by it.

My latest appearance is on the Carnival of Computing v1.0.4. (Love the numbering system). In between lots of posts about Linux, Windows, and lots of other names I don’t even recognise, there’s my review of The Gender Politics of ICT.

Hopefully, that will get the issue out into a new audience.

To visitors from there, welcome! To Andrew, thanks.

After 14 years of civil war, Liberia is having an election – cause enough for celebration, but what could be even more important is that one of the two candidates in the run-off is a woman. This is not the aspect of the story that has received most Western (or at least European) attention, since her opponent is the ex-star footballer George Weah, a man who did not complete his school education and who has no administrative or political experience.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, by contrast, is a Harvard-educated economist, who has considerable high-level UN experience and has previously been a Liberian government minister.

Women’s eNews reports that she would be Africa’s first elected female president.

Now I’m lary of suggestions that women are likely to be more competent and less corrupt than men (it is a very large claim, and assumes some fundamental gender difference I doubt is there – think of Imelda Marcos). And in the corrupt, dangerous world of Liberian politics, no one is entirely “clean”; questions have been asked about the people behind Weah, while Johnson-Sirleaf did briefly back the hideous warlord Charles Taylor.

But given Africa’s enormous governance problems, something different is surely worth a try.
Women, Africa, Liberia

My 19th-century diairist, Frances Williams Wynn, is today getting a an officer of the Marines H.M.S. Northumberland Aug. 5, 1815, taking Napoleon to St Helena.

It has some lovely intimate insights into Napoleon the man:

Napoleon gets very sulky if he is not treated with that deference and respect to which he is accustomed: his own followers treat him with the same respect as if he was still emperor.
Beattie, my captain, was at Acre: Napoleon learnt this in conversation; seemed quite pleased, caught hold of his ear and gave it a good pinch (which is his custom when pleased), and seems to have taken a great liking to him.
…
I have dined three times with Napoleon. I cannot say I think his manners have much of that elegance which might have been expected from a person of his ci-devant rank. He has a particularly disagreeable grunt when he does not understand what you say, and desires a repetition.
He converses freely, but not at table, with the Frenchmen, and takes no more notice of the ladies than if they were a hundred miles off. I have not heard him speak once to Madame Bertrand at table, and seldom elsewhere.

I had some idea that he was always supposed to have been something of a “ladies’ man” – but perhaps not at this stage of his life.

Napoleon, History