In Our Time this morning is on the subject of 17th-century print. I’ve been half-listening, in between the morning chores, but I do plan to get back to it, since it is downloadable as an MP3 file, at least for a week, or you can listen on the website.

Time to work out how to load MP3s on to my phone …

A piece in the Guardian today suggesting young women are angry about the apparent disappearance of “political feminism”. Great!

I am sitting on a platform at the ICA with Naomi Wolf, and a young woman speaks up from the audience. “Where has our women’s movement gone?” she asks. I am struck by her impatience and the anger that is voiced by other young women in the room. I hear them speak about feeling under attack by our Nuts-and-Loaded culture, which suggests to young women that their only chance of fulfilment and empowerment is through pandering to the so-called ironic fantasies of chortling men.

It is partly a mea culpa by the author, Natasha Walter, although it does make me want to point out the difficulty of getting anything overtly, or even covertly, “feminst” in the mainstream meda – I know because I was there, and I tried. And nearly all of the decisionmakers are males; the few exceptions are woman who have often had to, or felt they had to, be more male than the blokes to get to their positions. Mention the word “feminist” in a news meeting and you’ll get either rolled eyes and comments about “bra-burning”, or, in more politically correct areas, people clearly thinking similarly.

But then a story proving that youth can sort things out for themselves – a New Jersey schoolboy has won the right to wear skirts to school.

At first, Michael Coviello only wanted to bend the uniform code at Hasbrouck Heights High School by donning shorts, which he had started wearing because of a knee injury.
But he was told that district policy prohibited shorts in winter.
He sought a meeting with Joseph Luongo, the school superintendent, and argued that it was unfair that girls were allowed to expose their legs and he was not. The superintendent suggested that if he felt that way, he should dress like a girl. Michael, 17, a drummer in the school band and a member of the golf team, called his bluff and went shopping.

Well indeed; why shouldn’t boys wear skirts?

Probably a long shot, but I’m on the trail of Dame Helen Branch (or possibly Helena/Helenae) who died – in her nineties – on 10 April 1594 and was buried in St Mary Abchurch in London.

A pamphlet was published containing a poem celebrating her virtues. (Infuriatingly short on detail, as such things usually are.) It is titled A Commemoration of the life and death of the Right worshipfull and vertuous Lady Dame Helen Branch, late wife to the Right Worshipfull Knight Sir John Branch, sometime Lord Maior of the famous Cittie of London, &c. and can even be found on the web here.

It is curious that the poem seems to be widely attributed; to Joshua Sylvester, and to John Phillip[s], also here.

Yet the original pamphlet, which I was holding in my hands today, has a closing signature “W. Har.” – and it is hard to see how you can get either of those names from that. The ODNB says it was written by a William Herbart or Herbert, but not the most famous one of those?! Another source says it was a Sir William Harvey.

Her second husband, Sir John Branch, a draper, was mayor 1580-81.

Her first husband had been a John Mynors, who may have been (if he was a fair bit older than her) the John Mynors who in Lincolns Inn in the Trinity Term of 1494 was, with William Fyllyff and Richard Eryington, fined “for not keeping or preparing the moots for two days as they ought, when divers Benchers were prepared to hear the moots”. (These were formal disputations.) He may have some connection with a composer, William Bryd.

Her father was William Nicolson, her mother Joan.

In the back of the pamphlet is what looks to me like contemporary handwriting recording what seems to have been the epitaph on her tomb, mostly in Latin, but with a bit of English. There’s mentioned in that a Robin? Nicolson, also “JOHANNIS DIINORS” and “CVIBERTI BVCKLE”.

I’d be eternally grateful to anyone who can shed any more light on her life; if I get time tomorrow I’ll probably try to transcibe the handwritten bits in the pamphlet (although working from handwritten Latin IS a challenge.) I’d also welcome any suggestions for other directions of research; I’ve got a few threads, but they are pretty thin.

One of those moments that produce disquiet: I was taking Champ out for a walk this morning, wrestling with the rather difficult external security door of the flats.

Two Community Support Officers were walking past. When they saw me they immediately changed direction and walked through the door I had opened into the (secured) lobby of the flats. (They didn’t speak to me, or make any attempt to speak to me, although we were virtually face-to-face.)

I didn’t challenge them at the time; it was one of those things that happen in an instant, but having thought about it I don’t think they have the right to walk straight into private property without permission. Shouldn’t they need, like presumably the police, a search warrant?

Living in central London, I see huge numbers of these CSOs – they seem to spend their time strolling the streets doing nothing in particular, and it can surely only be a matter of time before there is some scandal over criminal behaviour by them. We all know there are plenty of crooked police; there will surely be burglars (or worse) who think a CSO uniform would come in right handy.

And of course there are the civil liberties implications …

A bit of research shows: “A constable has no general right of entry into private property except to prevent a breach of the peace and to prevent the commission of an offence which he believes to be imminent or likely to be committed.”

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the lobby of a block of flats is private property, albeit communal private property. The more I think about this, actually, I think I’m going to query this … I’ll report what I find (if of course I can find someone responsible.)

UPDATE: 26/1 Well I did get a response on my voicemail this morning, and it seems that they do have permission from the council housing department to enter the block, and there is a purpose for it; someone has complained that youths are smoking cannabis in the stairwells. In which case it is fair enough, although I still found their manner a little odd.

The mainstream media is of course calling her “King Tut’s grandmother”, but Amenhotep III’s queen, whose statue has just been found in Egypt, was more important in her own right than as the relative of that very minor figure. (Tutankhamen’s tomb survived unrobbed surely at least in part because he was so insignificant.)

The dig team says:

The statue’Â’s back pillar was unearthed first and led [the expedition’Â’s director, Betsy] Bryan to believe briefly that it dated from a far later period, since an inscription there was clearly made in the 21st Dynasty, about 1000 B.C.E., for a very powerful queen Henuttawy.
“The statue, however, when it was removed, revealed itself as a queen of Amenhotep III, whose name appears repeatedly on the statue’s crown,” Bryan said. She said she theorizes that perhaps this statue is of the great Queen Tiy, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of the so-called heretic king Akhenaten, who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV but later changed his name because of his rejection of the god Amen in favor of the sun disk Aten.
“Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia in hopes that she would intercede with her son on behalf of the foreign interests,” Bryan said. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”

When you think about it, it seems unlikely that Hatshepsut would be the only woman who ever tried to rule Egypt in her own right.

You can watch Tiy emerging from the ground here. (This is a great ongoing diary of the dig, a day by day account, highly pictorial.)

(Via Alun’s blog (which used to be called Archaeoastronomy).)

In other discoveries, the “world’s smallest vertebrate” (well that we know of) has been found in a Sumatran peat swamp.

The newly discovered species, Paedocypris progenetica, is a member of the carp family … The female … from head to tail measures 7.9mm (0.3in) when fully mature. …
The male, reaching a typical 1cm in length, is an extraordinary creature. Its over-sized dorsal fins are beefed up with hard pads of skin and a hook that can be forced forward by powerful muscles in a grasping action. Until scientists can retrieve live samples to observe, they can only speculate on the fins’ purpose.”

Of course, however, like just about everything else on the extraordinary zoo that is the island, its future is far from assured. “”I hope we’ll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely,” said Dr Britz.”

When I started to learn about feminism, and the fight for abortion rights, in the mid-1980s, the Western world at least thought that accounts of women swallowing noxious chemicals, or introducing them into their uterus in an attempt to end a pregnancy, was merely a nasty historical lesson, a cautionary tale.

Yet it is not just that this is now threatening to return, but in America, it has already returned:

Jen (not her real name) is administrator of a women’s health clinic in the South that provides abortions. She has noted with alarm the recent rise in illegal abortion in her community. For some of the women she sees — after their initial attempts at abortion fail — whether Roe v. Wade is technically still the law of the land is beside the point. The combination of the procedure’s cost, the numerous regulations that her state imposes and the stigma surrounding abortion is leading a growing number of women to choose self-abortion or an untrained practitioner over legal abortion.
…A doctor from the hospital … contacted her. He asked for her help in setting up a special ward for the treatment of illegal abortions when Roe is overturned, because he knows the caseload will mushroom then. “He didn’t say ‘if’ — he said ‘when,'” Jen said. “Chills ran down my spine.”

And mine. There’s the inevitable hideous human suffering, so clearly epitomised by the coathangar, but there’s also the thought of the return of the fear of pregnancy that has haunted women for millennia. Will freedom be so quickly snuffed out?