The introduction to Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape describes the artist as “one of Britain’s greatest painters”. Certainly a couple of his works are among of the nation’s most reproduced. And this exhibition, which traces his entire career, suggests that “one of the most talented” would be a fair label. Overall, however, what is on display is a talent dissipated by the pressures of Victorian life.

The British Museum exhibition traces in detail not just his work, but his curiously modern life. A self-portrait at the age of about 19 shows a soulful young man, far too serious for his age. A Romantic, destined to die young, you would think. Yet his work at this time is conventional, picturesque landscape – one watercolors closely resembling a painting manual’s model. (Echoes of the veteran controversy.)

But soon he was to find a mentor. He credited the artist John Lunnell with his transformation, describing him as “a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art”. A sketchbook from 1824 shows a study of “The Bad Thief”, a powerful, contorted figure menaced by a shark-mouthed Satan.

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I went to a fascinating talk at the Institute for Historical Research this evening by Kathryn Kish Sklar (State University of New York, Binghamton), its title “The Centrality of Feminism in American Political History, 1776-2000”.

Her argument was that women’s, labour and race politics and campaigns interacted, learnt from each other, and were forced by their members and social forces into a shifting array of alliances and oppositions, that all in turn interacted with “mainstream” politics, in ways that no one, or organisation, could always control. So separating out “women’s history” in a ghetto makes little sense.

Some of her examples were lovely. (And bear in mind that I know almost nothing about American history, so this was all new to me.)

*There was Esther De Berdt Reed, who formed the Ladies’ Association of Philadelphia. She was very much an elite woman, and ran a political salon that helped her husband be elected to office. The organisation was formed to raise funds for Washington’s army in 1780 – although the subscription list had its smallest donation from a contributor recorded merely as “Phylis, a coloured woman”.

Reed wanted to donate the money directly to the troops and had a very direct exchange with Washington on the issue, who thought they’d just drink and gamble it away. Reed was forced to yield, so she and her ladies started sewing shirts. But she died soon after from dysentry, which didn’t normally kill healthy adults. Her obituary in the Pennsylvania Gazette concluded that the shirts had killed her. (Although bearing six children in ten years probably hadn’t helped.)

She’d wanted to establish women’s place as fundraisers, but this was publicly disparaged, since they were “just handing over their husband’s money”. But by artisan labour with those shirts, the group received much praise for its revolutionary efforts, and found a place for women in the struggle.

* The anti-slavery movement, at least the more radical wing of it, was so desperate for support that it was happy to enlist female support, and speakers, including the powerful Angelina Grimke. That provoked resistance from the clergy, which led Angelina and her sister Sarah to explicitly say: “whatever it is morally right for a man to do it is right for a woman to do”.

* When Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to the conclusion that the “general portion” of life allowed to women was inadequate she called a convention (Seneca Falls), a natural thing to do since that was both what happened in state politics, and in the Negro Convention Movement. Many more women’s conventions followed. There was often an attempt by the organisers to avoid issues of married women’s property rights and divorce, but they almost alwyas emerged anyway.

* The extension of virtually full white male suffrage from the 1830s to 1860s effectively prevented the formation of a Labour party, as in Britain. The issue of married women’s property rights was seen in association with this – part of the growing hegemony of the white middle class that wanted to protect their daughter’s property and ease its sale and exchange by removing old common law rights.

* The struggle for women’s suffrage involved black and white women mixing in ways that their male compatriots could not – the women had often been educated as teachers – needed during the great westward expansion. (At the 1888 convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union a number of black women represented racially mixed groups.)

The black women, because of this role, were sometimes about to achieve more results for their communities than were the black male leaders such as ministers. The campaigner Frances Harper, who denounced lynching in ways male leaders sometimes did not, or could not, said that women’s suffrage would effectively end it, by getting rid of men with blood on their hands.

* Florence Kelly, founder and long-time president of the National Consumers League, fought for protective labour legislation for women and children, some of which was then extended to male workers in a alliance of an essential middle class movement with working class men.

NOTE: These are my impressions of the talk, not necessarily a detailed exposition of
what Professor Kish Sklar said.

Afterwards in discussion, I asked about the central question with which I keep wrestling – why do the women keep disappearing from history? The professor made a very interesting response I’m going to have to think a lot more about.

She noted that masculinity is a very useful rallying call in American politics, a way that Bush can transcend class politics by playing the all-male cowboy model. I commented how important I think sport is in that – in creating a collective model that is not, by and large, available to women.

And even when I look back to my 16th and 17th-century writers, because they were always a minority, and the next generations thought, as we do, that the past was a strange place, the following, male-dominated groups could at least identify in one way with the males who’ve come down to us as the canon.

More unformed thoughts at the moment than a developed thesis …

After the depressing findings about public attitudes to rape, more bad news: a British judge has thrown out a case on the basis that an alleged victim was too drunk to be able to say definitively that she had not consented.

The prosecution in the rape case had said it could not go on after the woman admitted that she could not remember whether she gave consent or not or whether sex had taken place. The jury at Swansea Crown Court was told: “Drunken consent is still consent.”
The judge agreed, instructing the jury to return a verdict of not guilty “even if you don’t agree”.
The drama student was allegedly raped by another student, who was working as a security guard, while she claimed she was unconscious through drink in a corridor outside her flat in a university’s hall of residence.
She told the jury that she had no recollection of events but insisted that she would not have agreed to sex with the man.

Now I wasn’t sitting in court so I can’t comment on the facts of this particular case, but let’s imagine a hypothetical. A woman is huddled outside her room in a drunken stupor and a security guard, a man with at least a moral duty of care, comes along – on duty, (presumably) stone-cold sober

It is obvious the woman is drunk. And that she can’t, in any meaningful sense of the term consent – she is temporarily mentally disabled. (Were she indeed a sufferer of a permanent mental disability, there would surely be no questions that this is a crime.)

If he has sex with her, is that not rape? Or should, at least, a jury be allowed to decide – based on the full details of the case, the demeanour of the witnesses before them, and their own commonsense.

I would have thought so, and I thought the law indicated so. But it seems it is time to work again to reform the law … or maybe the judges.

***

Another time warp – John Kerry, remember him? One of his young speechwriters has set out what he thinks went wrong. The gist is that instead of relying on focus groups, set-up situations and all the tricks of the spin-doctor’s trade, it might be time to pick a good, decent candidate, and let them campaign as their conscience dictates. Interesting thought. Would be nice to think it would work.

My 19th-century blogger, Frances Williams Wynn, is today finding her close study of a collection of European royalty seriously disappointing. She reports:

At Oxford it seemed to me that there was a great want of dignity of manner among the assembled grandees. Even the dandy Alexander seemed to want it; though he was much better than any of his compeers, excepting, perhaps, our own king when he happened to be in good humour, which was not always the case during his visit to Oxford. As to the King of Prussia, he looked as stupid and as vulgar as I believe be really is. When complimented, he never could look otherwise than embarrasse de sa personne, bored to death, and could not even make a tolerably gentleman-like bow.

She’s surprised and rather horrified that the Russian party cannot understand Latin and Greek:

It did not at that time occur to me as possible that these sovereigns might not understand one syllable of the elegant classical orations made in compliment to them. I have since heard from Dr. Crichton—a Scotch physician belonging to the household of the Empress dowager, who accompanied one of her grandsons, the brother of Alexander—that neither this young prince nor any one of a numerous suite, excepting one man, understood a word of Latin or Greek.

The way she writes this makes me wonder if she could. The Latin, perhaps is a distinct possibility, the Greek less so.

It seems Miss Williams Wynn wasn’t the only one less than impressed:

The monarch was invited to Guildhall, at which 700 guests gathered. Italian singers did their best to charm the distinguished guests and the dinner was served on gold plates. Suddenly the Russian Grand Duchess Catherine abruptly asked that the Italians be silent, she detested music! Alexander was hard of hearing and didn’t understand the embarrassed murmurs all around him. Her demand threw the company into great confusion and the monarch couldn’t wait to leave this country that was so proper, cold and stiff.

That a play written in 1920 should still feel entirely fresh and relevant 85 years later is either the sign of a great drama, or of a failure of the human race to progress. In the case of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, both statements are true.

When The Emperor (Paterson Joseph) swaggers muscularly into the Gate Theatre, revealing within seconds the nature of his regime, built entirely on brutality and bombast, recent parallels are obvious. Robert Mugabe sweeps into mind, then Ceascescu, Mobutu … the list could go on and on.

And as America struggles to find “leadership material” in Iraq, O’Neill’s play presents a society entirely corrupted by the exercise of absolute, violent power. There are no heroes here – it is the power of the Emperor’s own conscience that will really get to him.

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