Monthly Archives: October 2006

Early modern history Women's history

Elizabeth Alkin: A Civil War heroine, and one tough cookie

October 6, 2006 – 11:04 pm

Reading Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War, as I have been for a long while – but there will be a review soon, I promise, I’ve been put on the trail of Elizabeth Alkin, spy and nurse, c.1600–1655?. From the ONDB (subscription sorry):

Employed from the beginning of the civil war as a spy by the earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, and Thomas Fairfax, in 1645 and 1647 Alkin received payments from the committee for the advancement of money for several ‘discoveries’, including information about the activities of George Mynnes, a Surrey ironmaster who was supplying royalist forces with iron and wire. Increasingly she seems to have concentrated her intelligencing activity on the London news press: in 1648 she was on the trail of Mercurius Melancholicus and the Parliament Kite, and in February 1649 Mercurius Pragmaticus called her an ‘old Bitch’ who could ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army’ (Mercurius Pragmaticus, sig. 2v). …

In June 1649 Alkin was sent to ‘the house of correction’ for ‘great incivilities’ to Sir James Harrington MP, and the following month was involved in a fracas in the Salutation tavern in Holborn with some soldiers who apparently suspected her of being a royalist (Williams, 131–3). A dispute in the same year over her occupation of the house of Stephen Fosett, surgeon to Sir Arthur Aston (governor of Oxford during the first war and responsible, she claimed, for her husband’s death), resulted in a grant of £50 and a house.

She was evidently a woman who could stand up for herself.

The nursing seems to have come later – she was paid by the government after the First Anglo-Dutch War for her care of wounded soldiers, The ONDB says there was a petition requesting that she be buried in the cloisters of Westminister Abbey – it doesn’t say if that was successful – presumably that’s unknown. She’s got quite some coverage in medical history journals, so she must have made some real efforts for the soldiers – indeed it seems she destroyed her own health in the process.

She’s had a whole book written about her – I. MacDonald, Elizabeth Alkin: a Florence Nightingale of the Commonwealth (1935) – have to check it out. Something about that title, however, doesn’t fill me with confidence.

On the web, there’s a review of a book in which she has her own chapter, a House of Commons Journal entry, but not a lot else.

Permalink | Comments (8)
Feminism Politics

The veil question…

October 6, 2006 – 5:38 pm

The British mainstream media, the blogosphere, the radio … everywhere seems to be full of the veil debate (eg here and here).

Should you be on another continent, ths short version is that Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, wrote in his local paper that he asked Muslim women who veiled their faces to remove such veils during meetings in his office in the interest of improving communication. (That this column might have had more than a little to do with the Labour leadership struggles I’ll leave to the Kremlinologists to discuss.)

I was chewing over the issue over a very late lunch, and I came to the conclusion that I agree with Straw on this – or at least would entirely defend his right to request of a visitor to his office an action that he thinks will assist the work.

Maybe he had a Hindu yogi visiting who liked to hold consultations while standing on his head. If Straw found this difficult, he could reasonably ask the yogi to sit on a chair. Or indeed, if someone arrived in a bikini and Straw found this uncomfortable, he could ask that visit to wrap up in a beach towel. It is his office, and he can make reasonable requests of visitors.

Of course there is a power imbalance, so he should be very careful of what he asks, but this isn’t unreasonable.

The issues is stewing further since Straw said that he would prefer no women wore the niqab anywhere.

Well, yes. So do I. Of course grown women who have sufficient independence in their life to have the freedom to genuinely make their own choice should be able to choose to wear the niqab if they choose (some very large ifs there), but given that the ideology behind the niqab suggests that women are dangerous, dirty, and do not belong in public spaces, to say that you would prefer them not to be worn anywhere is perfectly reasonable.

Permalink | Comments (11)
Books

The sex of flowers?

October 6, 2006 – 12:03 am

The first figures have come out of searches on Google Books, and they make for curious reading. No 1 on this particular “best-seller” list is Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers, Peter K. Endress.

I can only conclude that the sex organs of plants have proved, if accidentally, to hold considerable fascination.

As for Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot, Brad Graham,Kathy McGowan, perhaps there are lots of would-be Mars explorers out there?

Permalink | Comment (1)
Environmental politics

The revenge of an old land

October 5, 2006 – 9:43 pm

Twenty years ago now, when I was studying agriculture at university, there was just dawning an awareness that much of the arable farming in Australia, and particularly the irrigation farming, was unsustainable. Ancient soils were having unprecedented quantities of water poured on them, and the rising water table was bringing millennia of salt to the surface; trees were still being felled, destroying the land’s capacity to retain moisture (and soil) in Queensland, at the start of the great Murray-Darling system that is Australia’s only great river and on which the entire city of Adelaide depends for water. (And there were even government subsidies for felling these trees, at least until a few years ago – any Australian readers know if there still are?)

Yet still the fantasy continues. A story in tomorrow’s SMH (time difference) starts by excitedly saying record prices are being offered for Australian rice. Then, and only then, does it say that many farmer’s water allocation has been cut to zero due to the acute shortage, so very few of them will be getting these “record” prices.

On September 19, the federal commodities forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, slashed its rice crop forecast to less than 40 per cent of last year’s 1.05 million tonnes.
The next day, the NSW Department of Primary Industries went further, estimating the area of rice-growing land would be 20 to 30 per cent of last year’s.
“This is an incredible climatic event, the worst drought in recorded history, and we’ve got the joy of living through it,” said the president of the Ricegrowers Association of Australia, Laurie Arthur. “There’s not going to be more than a quarter of last year’s production.”

Even if you ignore the strong possibility that the greenhouse effect is starting to have transformative effects on climate (a largish “if”), Australia still, astonishingly doesn’t get the fact that “drought” (by definition supposedly an extraordinary event) is a normal part of the Australian climate.

I’m reminded of an expert I interviewed many years ago who said the only sustainable “farming” in Australia would be to turn nearly all of it over to the kangaroos and harvest the meat from them. Except that won’t go a long way towards feeding 20 million people.

Permalink | Comment (1)
History

Medieval Muslim philosophy

October 5, 2006 – 10:22 am

Particularly interesting In Our Time this morning on the 12th-century Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who lived in a time of an interllectual flowering of Western Islam (he was born in Cordoba) and was important in the transmission of Aristotle to the Latin-speaking world.

Definitely worth a listen – available in podcast or for listening on your computer.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Politics

Tory conniptions

October 5, 2006 – 10:15 am

You wouldn’t want to take Davd Cameron’s soft, cuddly Tory party at face value – I know some of the people behind him, who are definitely neither soft nor cuddly, and definitely very pro-American – but he certain has convinced some members of the own party and some of its natural supporters.

Anatole Kaletsky is horrified by his apparent tax-and-tax approach (the cynic in me thinks that Cameron’s spin docs will be very, very happy about this piece, in their desperate struggle for the “middle ground”) and you can see the Telegraph visibly gulping as it writes the headline Cameron kills Tory taboos on gays and single parents.

Interesting times in politics, when the Tories are definitely positioning themselves to the left of Labour on many issues. Then again that’s the only bit of the middle ground left, so far to the right is Tony Blair.

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »