The deadline for guaranteed consideration for the 5th Carnival of Feminists, which will be on Scribbling Woman is tomorrow night (the 17th). Nominate early, nominate often ….!
And if you could help to spread the word that would be most appreciated.
Nominations should be sent to jones at unbsj dot ca
Ten new (to me) female bloggers, ten top posts, on my way to 400. It answers the question: where are all the female bloggers?
First the stunning Within/Without, on which Neha posts about working with street girls in Bombay. Also check out the post below about a child welfare official who employed am 11-year-old maid!
On Conversations with Dina, a report from the Global Voices Summit and Rebecca posts her impressions of the Les Blogs conference.
Tokyo Girl provides a deadpan but highly illuminating account of gender/national differences revealed at a Swedish housewarming party. Staying on the national customs side, on Frizzy Logic an explanation of a German Christmas tradition.
Then, on the British media, Sashinka reports back from a taping of Have I Got News for You.
Turning personal, on This, That and the Mother Thing, Anita is blogging day by day about dealing with a miscarriage.
Less seriously, Masked Mom suggests taking those dog days of February and adding them to December, while on Little Red Boat, Christmas looms as a menacing wave.
On This Too, Jean meditates on order and disorder, while (at the top as I write), Natalie on Augustine’s Blog wonders if God would have chosen to be self-published.
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You can find the last edition of Femmes Fatales here.
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Nominations (including self-nominations) for Femmes Fatales are also hugely welcome – I’ll probably get to you eventually anyway, but why not hurry along the process?
“I loved his willy. I really loved his willy.” This is not the sort of audience reaction you expect to hear outside a staging of an ancient Greek play, but the new show at the Arcola Theatre is Aristophanes, and Lysistrata, and a Lysistrata far closer in intent to the original than the po-faced American translation (Douglass Parker’s) sitting on my shelf in which the introduction proclaims the play is about “Love Achieved”.
Of course it is not about love, but sex, and women exercising the power of their bodies to achieve the highest of goals, peace. So the four-foot-long flourescent tubes rising, and rising, and rising, from the groins of the magistrate, the Spartan amassador and Kinesias are entirely explicit in their meaning, and the actors, and the text, have no problems with that.
To an ancient Greek audience this was ludicrous fooling, but today it has a more serious meaning. The young women in the audience were cheering on Lysistrata (a powerful performance by Tanya Moodie) all of the way, as she dominated the play, and the men – this is girl power for the Naughties, and a far more admirable model than that offered by the Spice Girls in the 1990s. READ MORE
There’s a curious conundrum at the heart of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. The institution collects people, as recorded by art. So as you walk around the rooms, are you looking at historic individuals, or at paintings?
These are certainly not “the best” paintings in British history; they can (by definition at least) be found next door in the National Gallery. (The strong presence of Sir Peter Lely here, and his total absence in the rooms overlooking Leicester Square demonstrate that.) Yet these are not (mostly) a photographic record, rather an image that is a blend of what the artist saw and (usually) what the sitter wanted him to see.
Yet somehow, these two sides of the galleries do come together. When I pick out my “favourite women of the NPG” I am looking at the paintings – these are the faces that through which I can find something of the woman behind them, and I like what I find. A little research reveals, however, that they were also great characters, with real achievements to their credit. Somehow you can identify, even from a flattering, fashionable portrait, those who were more than a vapid aristocrat or a lucky courtesan.
This listing is by date, which also conveniently makes a trail through the gallery, starting at the top floor and working down. It is entirely personal – by all means add your own favourites in the comments.
Mary Neville, Lady Dacre (1524-c.1576), painted by Hans Eworth, probably early in the reign of Elizabeth I, after she had succeeded in having the family title restored to her son, after her husband had been executed. Statuesque might be the polite adjective for Lady Dacre; she’s painted with one double chin, which probably meant she had several. Her lush auburn hair is tightly combed behind a lavishly pearled, black velvet head-dress. She looks stern and formidable, but satisfied, like a woman who has achieved her life’s work. A short biography. (Gallery 2) READ MORE
“After a dinner party two intellectuals kept taking it in turns to escort the other home in accordance with the rules of etiquette. The result: neither of them ever got to bedâ€
It seems being nasty about “elitists” has a long history. This is from a collection of historic jokes, found via History Carnival No 22, now up on Frog in a Well. As usual it is a wonderful collection, from how Harry Potter tapped into the medieval (which reminds me about how I got a story about astralabes and a sentence of medieval English into The Times)to a fascinating history of swimming in the early modern world.
Check it out!
A fascinating account of how films and TV are in love with the idea of the calculating “Black Widow”. But a majority of women who kill their partners are long-term victims of abuse. It seems, however, that the US legal system doesn’t take this into account:
Women who are charged with the murder of their partners have the least extensive criminal records of any group of convicted offenders. Yet the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that the average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners ranges from two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced to an average of 15 years. In states ranging from Florida to South Carolina, many are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.
How are the men getting such lenient sentences? I suspect they’re probably using “provocation” defences – such as they believed the woman was having an affair, or was “nagging” him – as has been the the case in the UK.
What sort of hang-over of “women as property” is the former? And as for the latter, well there is a simple – non-criminal – solution: leave!
Finally, at least British law is trying to make this fairer – and perhaps protect more women.
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