An American women’s magazine called Glamour has made Mukhtaran Bibi, a Pakistani rape victim who has become a campaigner for women’s safety, one of its “Women of the Year”. Of course Mukhtaran Bibi deserves to be celebrated for her bravery, but ….

If you turn this around the other way, she is being used to sell more copies of Glamour. Now possibly this is a positive publication that doesn’t urge women to spend more money than they can afford on possibly toxic cosmetics, to buy clothing made by sweated labour, and encourages women to live full, happy lives the way THEY want to live them, but somehow I doubt it.

Mukhtaran, also known as Mukhtar Mai, shot to prominence three years ago for her court testimony against neighbours who gang-raped her on the orders of a council of elders. The rape sparked international outrage and a legal saga that is now before Pakistan’s supreme court, where 13 men could face the death penalty. US media and civil rights groups have showered Mukhtaran, who is barely literate, with plaudits since she arrived from Lahore last week.

One things I love about old history books – by old I suppose roughly pre-WWII, is that they embrace anecdote with enthusiasm. Modern scholars are trained to treat them with distant suspicion, but they do really help history come alive.

So some snippets from The Growth of Stuart London, Norman G. Brett-James, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, London 1935.

“Canon Westlake discovered that the lane that led towards the Gatehouse prison was called Thieving Lane some 35 years before the prison was built, and ‘may therefore be taken to attest the character of the inhabitants rather than the nature of the traffic”, always thought to be the origin of the name. p. 129 (This is the Rev H.F. Westlake, author of St Margaret’s 1914)

The Blair government’s drinking problems are nothing new: “An Act of Parliament of I James I, cap. 9, imposed on Churchwardens the duty of going “abroade on Sabbath Dayes according to the antient usuage … to visite the public Tiplinge houses and keep good order in ye Parish”. It was pointed out that the ‘ancient true and principall use of Innes Alehouse and Victuallinge House was for the Receipte Reliefe and Lodging of wayfaring people travellinge from place to place … and not meant for entertainment and harbouringe of lewde and idle people to spend and consume theire Money and their type in lewde and drunken manner.” (p. 133)

In the 1638-9 census of foreigners, the 838 reported in Westminster were mostly “painters, picture-drawers, lymners, engravers, musicians and silver workers”. (p. 141)

Nothing like a spot of illegal building: “In January 1664 there was a petition from the inhabitants of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the King … to demolish ‘severale wooden houses or shedds,” which had been erected by Thomas Newton under colour of a licence to his later father William Newton. These were employed by him for ‘puppet playes, dancing on the ropes, mountebanks and other such like uses, whereby multitudes of loose disorderly people are daylie drawne together”. (p. 158) (It is still a haven for the street drinkers of London.)

Piccadily was originally “the way to Reading”. The first person building there was Robert Baker, a tailor in the Strand, in 1612. The name came from the words pickadil, pekadel, pekadivela, meaning a collar, hem or skirt – either because of his trade, or because this was the “end of town”. His widow, Mary, had trouble in 1627, because waste from the by now multiple houses was polluting the Whitehall palace water supply. She was hauled before the Star Chamber and the houses ordered demolished. She instead offered to build a conduit to carry the water, but Indigo Jones, Surveyor-General, reported on 27 Jane 1639 that the work had not been done to his satisfaction. She got a fine of £1,000 – probably not paid – and the houses weren’t pulled down; they were still standing in 1651, by then numbering 11. (pp. 180-81)

Coming up in the world: The old Devonian seadog William Burroughs, second in command to Cadiz in 1587 and a ship’s commander against the Armada the following year. “In 1589 we find him furnishing Frobisher’s fleet in the tiny docks of Ratcliffe, and in the same year he married Lady Patricia Wentworth, widow of the Lord of the Manor.” (p. 193)

Roughly where the Heal’s furniture store on Tottenham Court Road is now was Capper’s Farm, inherited by two unmarried daughters “who have left traditions of spiteful conduct behind them; one who delighted in cutting the strings of boys who were flying their kites, and the other who confiscated the clothes of boys found bathing in their ponds”. (Anyone hear the other side of this as an ASBO?)

The farm survived, behind the shops, until 1913. (Probably, I’d guess as a dairy – there was also one off Leather Lane until about the same time.) (p. 403-4)

Two reasons to celebrate.

First, the immediate: History Carnival No 19 is now up on (A)musings of a Grad Student. And a lovely crop it is too (And I’m not just saying that ’cause I did quite well on the links – thanks!)

I was particularly taken with the application of one of my academic heros, Bourdieu, to the understanding of the history of sexuality. Warning, however, the post is theory-rich.

If you’d prefer a nice “we’lll all be murdered in our beds” crime scare, the host provides this one – except unfortunately for the Daily Mail ’tis from the 17th century.

And finally, while it is too late in the night for me to apply my mind to the French, just check out the gorgeous illustrations in a post on Christine de Pizan.

The second reason, the announcement of the first annual Cliopatra History Blogging Awards.

“Final selections will made by panels of history bloggers and announced in conjunction with the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January.
Categories: Best Group Blog; Best Individual Blog; Best Newcomer; Best Post; Best Series of Posts; Best Writing.”

And yes, I have a role in a couple of the judging panels – looking forward to finding some exciting new blogs; unfortunately I don’t think an airfare to the conference is included in the judges’ fees.

My Lady of Quality’s diary entry today is actually a copy of a letter from Ms Wilmot, written from the home of the Russian Princess Dashkow. (Who is, probably expressed in something closer to the original Russian, “Princess Ekaterina Dashkova”.)

The Princess had spent considerable time in Britain, arriving first in 1770:

“Her interest in the country was enhanced by the fact that two of her brothers, first Alexander and then Semion Vorontsov, were both Russian ambassadors in London. She travelled from London through South England to Bath and Bristol and then back through Oxford, which was described in her article The Travels of a Russian Noblewoman Around Some English Provinces. This was published in 1775. … Her Edinburgh salon and meetings with William Robertson, David Hume, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith were described in her Memoirs.”

And it turns out she is one of the most prominent women in Russian history, (yes shame on me for not knowing) and there was recently an exhibition dedicated entirely to her.

Yekaterina Dashkova comes through as Russia’s first female manager of the first order. The documents speak of the appalling state the Academy of Sciences was in after Razumovsky – ramshackle buildings, destitute academicians who, not unlike their counterparts today, went unpaid for years. It turned out that the princess was capable not only of poring over the works by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, but also had enough financial acumen to let all the empty basements as storerooms, solicit patrons’ help in instituting scholarships, and simply keep the books of so enormous an establishment as the Academy of Sciences. Among the items on display there is also Princess Dashkova’s chief producer oeuvre – the six-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language compiled within a mere 11 years (cf. the 50 years Italians spent on a similar job)

As usual, however, it was her looks rather than her brains that some men were concerned about. Diderot wrote in his diary that she was “not beautiful at all; she is too short; her forehead is big and high, her cheeks are swollen, the eyes are neither large nor small, the nose is flat and lips are full; she has no waist; the princess has no grace and no nobility…”

And surprise, surprise, history, and the gossipy editor of Miss Frances Williams Wynn’s papers, were more interested in linking her to the sexual slurs around Catherine the Great. “She was popularly supposed to have been entrusted with the momentous duty of subjecting the empress’s male favourites to a kind of competitive examination or qualifying test; whence her name of l’eprouveuse, which was also given to another lady who succeeded her.”

The Princess’s translated memoirs were republished in 1995, reviewed here. Also on the web there’s a letter about one of her visits to Voltaire.

I try to often celebrate women’s achievements on this blog, but today am moved to celebrate another female success – this time an equine one.

Makybe Diva, a seven-year-old mare, has just won her third Melbourne Cup in succession – a feat never accomplished before. If you’re not Australian, it is hard to explain just what this means – this is a combination of fottball’s European Cup and the American World Series in terms of its impact on the country – they say the country stops for the Cup, and that’s very nearly true.

When I lived in Oz a flutter on the Cup was the one bet a year that I’d place – just for interest, and I always backed the mares (and did quite well out of it – albeit that serious horseracing types would tell me it was a silly strategy). Unfortunately I stopped the habit a few years ago!

Mares tend to be retired young – since the number of progeny is far more limited than stallions’ – it is great that Maybe Diva has been allowed to recognise her full potential. And for those who like the compare human and animal athletic abilities to justify claims about men’s “superiority”, it is an interesting lesson. And she’s even being compared to Phar Lap.

Feeling tired and sentimental, so I almost shed a tear over The Happy Feminist’s paen of praise to her mother. (Excellent blog on many topics, BTW.) Her mother made one huge, enormously brave step, then otherwise fulfilled all of the gender norms.

And of course it left me thinking of my Mum, and how different she was.

Mum, when I was a small child kept the house spotless – and even ironed our underpants, something I finally talked her out of doing when I was in my early teens – but absolutely hated doing it. She did it because she thought she had too.

And she was a dreadful cook, a job she also hated. In my memory – although I’m sure this wasn’t actually true – every meal consisted of cheap steak fried to the consistency of leather, lumpy mashed potatoes and frozen corn and peas. It is no wonder Kraft macaroni cheese was my favourite meal.)

What Mum would really have liked to do – at least in my early youth – was drive racing cars. She once, famously, beat a famous Australian racing driver in a hill climb, and I suspect given the opportunity she could have been very good. Of course, however, that wasn’t going to happen – indeed I can’t even think of a female racing driver today.

And what she gave me, above all, were two things:

1. A determination to do my own thing. She hadn’t been able to escape to independence, but she wanted to ensure I had every opportunity to do so. (She was probably five years too young. The middle Sixties in Australian suburbia were still “the Fifties” in cultural terms, and a young woman with little education striking out on her own would have been almost unimaginable – and economicly probably extremely difficult, if not impossible.)

2. She refused to put any burdens on me; to make any claims on me. She consciously and explicitly didn’t demand payment for the sacrifices that she’d made for me. Mum thought emotional blackmail was a hideous thing. (An awareness of this issue makes me wonder about these career women who “give it all up for the children” – so beloved by the media. What will they ask of their kids in return?)

P.S. I was reminded in writing this post of a lovely blog I found via Tim Worstall’s Britblog roundup this week. Super Woman’s Super Blog is written by a manager of a newsagency in “in a desolate seaside town” in the UK. And, reading between the lines, she was the total driving force in it raising more than £1,000 for charity.

It reminds me too of Mum’s work in various school Mothers’ Clubs. Their members did all the work for fetes, tuckshop rotas and similar, but when it came to visiting dignitaries etc, the males who headed the Parents & Citizens Association would be trotted out to collect the glory.