Monthly Archives: June 2008

Feminism

Seems there’s a new social category for me

Most of the Google hits seem to be within the past year, so I guess the term “freemale” is a fairly recent coining, referring to, quoting The Telegraph, “women are chosing to live a single life rather than share their money and time”.

It is out in force today, with British Office of National Statistic figures indicating that the percentage of women aged between 25 and 44 living along has now reached 8 per cent, double the figure of 20 years ago. “the ONS report cited recent research which showed that two-thirds of freemales feel that they can enjoy a happy and fulfilled life without a partner.” (Well yeah, I’ve been doing that for nearly all of the past 20 years, and looks like a good idea to me.)

Taking a more rounded view is Jane Shilling in The Times – who looks back to the post-WWI “spinsters”, and how they pioneered news ways of single female life.

Environmental politics

Good and bad news

A reminder of just how bad the world situation regarding water is:

“The glaciers on the Himalayas are retreating, and they are the sponge that holds the water back in the rainy season. We’re facing the risk of extreme run-off, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it,” he said.
“A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia – the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze – where 3bn people live. That’s almost half the world’s population,” he said.

But the British government has belated shown some (small) sign of urgency on renewables in providing the ground (or rather the sea) for many new windfarms.

Blogging/IT

Britblog Roundup No 172

Welcome to the Britblog roundup – the all-singing all-dancing, but only with a minimum of performing animals, weekly show – as nominated by you – the great British blog reader (all you need to do is email britblog AT gmail DOT com with your own or another excellent post). Don’t be shy!

Turning the usual pattern on its head, I decided to start with the arts this week.. if you can call Hollywood art. (If you really only want the politics, skip down a couple of screens.)

Two takes on this week’s Indiana blockbuster: A Very Public Sociologist gets first billing with a lively headline: Indiana Jones and Sub Cold War Hogwash. Swiss Tony’s a little more charitable: “somewhere along the line, Lucas and Spielberg forgot the ingredients that made Indiana Jones so charming in the first place”.

And staying with entertainment – no, sorry, I refuse to call it sport – a lively piece of live blogging of the Monaco Grand Prix: start at the bottom if you fancy chronological order.

Heading for the bookshelves, for a meatier pastime, The 3Rs reads some shocking facts about Lauren van der Post – who sounds like a hideous individual. And I’m going to use the host’s privilege here to point you to one of mine – my new second-favourite historical detective, Nell Bray, suffragette.

And the classiest bit of culture here by far – a Classical-style windmill in Warwickshire, built in 1632.

Moving into the important public announcement category, I have to start with Weggis’s account of men’s problems. Given the weaker sex’s early death rate, and low level of attendance at doctors’ surgeries, the more honest discussion of such matters, the better.

And equally important, the NHS blog doctor’s warning about the statin police. “Statins are the most “successful” medication ever made provided that you accept that the criterion of success is the level of sales.”

You might also put into this class, well I have, a unique and informative take on the Pennbury eco-town from Toby Savage.

That seems to lead nicely into the environment, broadly defined.

On Onemanblogs, a paen of praise to the suburban weekend, but Edward on One Mor Cup of Coffee has found you can’t stay anonymous in a village for long.

And on Blog of Funk, how children discover the facts of life – or at least olives, while Stroppyblog explores how the social environment – women, smoking, how shocking and uinfeminine – has stuck around from the 1920s onwards.

In the blog environment, when is a safe space safe – or to put it another way, how do you manage the comments? But however you manage it, Ruscombe Green concludes IT does not reduce bureaucracy.

And digging down to Australia, on Conserve England, an exploration on how Europeans brought biological cleansing to Australia. But there is some good news at the end…

Then on to politics, for those who wouldn’t think it was a Britblog roundup without it…

I’m going to start with The Daily (Maybe)’s very personal take on knife crime – “the question is not how we get the young to accept the society we live in now – but how we empower ourselves to create a society where everyone genuinely is a valued member of the community.”

The Magistrate is also offering a unique perspective – gazing through his crystal ball – to the outcome of a new law to criminalise clairvoyants. But what does it mean for vicars?

And a nicely blood-pressure raising post next: Mr Eudeniges’ take on converting parliamentary expenses into straight payments – “Perhaps they don’t realise, when they sound off about feral media and whining bloggers, that it is they who must bear the lion’s share of blame for the catastrophic breakdown in trust between government and governed.”

Then on to the really important – the course of an individual’s life: on Informed Comment Juan Cole has the inside story of the likely deportation of Yezza Orwellian, who has been the victim of the arrest of the student student Rizwaan Sabir – all of this caused by the dowloading of a document from a US government website.

Following on the politicians and expenses line, this might be seen as a bit of my local interest, being from the London Borough of Camden, but it was nominated: on Theo’s blog a council leader is language lessons at public expense. Also in Camden, Suz Blog was commenting on the Camden Green Fair – where the political parties were all allowed to attend, after the Lib Dem “cake stall” was exposed. (And yes, you might have heard my less than dulcet tones there this afternoon in the “big debate”.)

And then on to equality issues: nominators are by tradition anonymous, but I will say that it was a Lib Dem who nominated this post Justin has a question Lynne Featherstone hasn’t answered: why did a female, local candidate get dumped in Henley?

And it was also a Lib Dem, a different one, who nominated this post from Liberal Burblings, asking to “Save the Stoke One”.

At the intersection of internet politics and history, The Political Wire has been looking at politics on the web as it used to be. We’ve come a long way…

In the same territory, Jonathan Calder on Liberal England makes a slightly frightening discovery about Allison Pearson, nee Lobbett.

And finally in politics, to the blog of Jersey Senator Stuart Syvret’s Blog, who has a poll on the current regime, and some suggested reasons for the result.

Finally to finish, the uncategorisation collection:

* Meg Pickard offers a very sensible, minimalist new set of commandments

* From the Missy M Missives (writer’s spelling, not mine), dogs for hire – possibly a good idea?

* And it seems there are still some questions about paid-for television show voting. Surely people aren’t still participating in this?

* In old Hampstead Town the police lights are on, but no one is home.

* And still on history, one that made me laugh – the term “medieval parking fines” might just make some sort of sense.

And that concludes this week’s roundup. Next week we’ll be swinging over to Matt Wardman. (Think that’s right – sure someone will correct me if not…)

Do get your nominations in ASAP – the roundup can ultimately only be as wide-ranging and classy as you make it with nominations, and it is always nice to see new bloggers represented in it.

Books

A rival for my literary affections

The dashing detective Phyrne Fisher now has a rival for my literary affections. It was the Women Writers Through the Ages group that introduced me to her rival, Nell Bray, fittingly, since this character's defining characteristic is that she's a suffragette – she works for the Women's Political and Social Union.

In the first book featuring Gillian Linscot's hero that I read, Blood on the Wood, in that role she's sent down to the countryside to collect a valuable painting that has been left to the Union in the will of a rich but politically radical woman. It is nothing more than a slightly embarrassing errand for Nell, until she gets back to London and finds the painting she's been given is a copy.

Returning, Nell has to deal not only with the husband, caught up in a family crisis, but with a group of leftist radicals camping on the farm, among whom is a poor, abused woman who the son of the family has decided to rescue in the Edwardian way, by marriage. Soon, however, there's a body.

We're not talking particularly gory here, or fiendishly complicated plots: Linscot's books, like those of Kerry Greenwood, Phyrne's creator, belong to a growing genre that I'd class as "feminist historical cozy". The women are independent-minded and tough, and they look out for themselves – often with more than a nod towards Dorothy L. Sayer's Harriet Vane.

The focus is chiefly on character rather than plot, on women making their way in a man's world, ignoring convention and coming up trumps. For Nell it is much more so, in Dead Man Riding we go back to the start of her career, when she's a student at Oxford, in the last year of Queen Victoria's reign. Student, but not headed for a degree, for women are not yet allowed such things, and the plot here centres around the adventures of a mixed group of students – shock horror, the university authorities must not find out or the women will be sent down – who go for what is essentially an innocent intellectual trip to the Lake district.

There's also for both heroes a carefully researched background that takes you into the period without every making you feel like you're reading a textbook: the background in <i>Dead Man Riding</i> is the controversy over the Boer War (which has distinct echoes with Iraq); Phyrne strides the landmarks streets of Melbourne or takes to the controls of a Tiger Moth with equal detail.

Yet on balance, I still have to class Phyrne as my favourite, not because of better writing, plot or research (the two authors to my mind are about evenly balanced), but because she lives in an age closer to our own. Phyrne is happily, comfortably sexual and openly defiant of convention – even if I don't share her interest in frocks. The First World War has destroyed the restrictive frame within which the Edwardian Nell must operate. Still, I'll be visiting with Nell again, even if I will be frustrated by the social restrictions that also frustrate her.

Feminism

Women and war

(A largely depressing collection – you have been warned.)

If you’ve ever wondered by women in cultures where “honour killings” occur seem to collude, or at least not resist, their occurrence, here is your answer:

Leila Hussein lived her last few weeks in terror. Moving constantly from safe house to safe house, she dared to stay no longer than four days at each. It was the price she was forced to pay after denouncing and divorcing her husband – the man she witnessed suffocate, stamp on, then stab their young daughter Rand in a brutal ‘honour’ killing for which he has shown no remorse…. Arrangements were well under way to smuggle her to the Jordanian capital, Amman. In fact, she was on her way to meet the person who would help her escape when a car drew up alongside her and two other women who were walking her to a taxi. Five bullets were fired: three of them hit Leila, 41. She died in hospital.

And this situation isn’t just in unstable places like Basra – in Iraqi Kurdistan, the relatively stable, “safe” part, there’s been an explosion of violence against women:

“At least 14 women died in the first 10 days of May alone,” a doctor told AFP in the region’s second largest city of Sulaimaniyah.
“Seven of them took their own lives, the other seven were murdered in still unexplained circumstances” — apparently the victims of “honour” killings.
“Over the same period, we recorded 11 attempted self-immolations. These women were so desperate they set fire to themselves,” the doctor added, asking not to be identified.

But on the positive side, in some parts of the world, we have come a long way – as late as 1978, the British military was debating whether it would be “safe or prudent” for women members to carry guns.

“An army working party was also looking into arming women, and expressed concern that giving guns to women might also be seen as “provocative and indeed offensive”.