feminist blogs

The London Library copy of Before I Go…Reflections on my life and times, by the late Guardian women’s editor Mary Stott, was last borrowed in 1998, and only a couple of times before that.

It’s a pity for her 1985 memoirs have much to offer the reader of today, and have many reminders that many of the issues with which we’re wrestling politically – from voting systems to maternity leave – have been the subject of furious debate for decades.

Born in 1917, she’s something of a bridge between the First Wave feminists and the Second Wave, which she viewed from a place of mature professional power and influence (one of the few women in that position at that time) with some understandable bemusement. By modern standards she’s unsound on the subject of “Ms”, she hated it, and rather unsound on homosexual rights, but given the world she grew up in, she’s humane, commonsensical and remarkably clear-sighted, while being self-effacing and alost frustratingly humble.

She’s much to say on feminism that still has powerful resonance today, for example:

“The spate of books on women’s subjects in the last few years has been extraordinary. Too many, in my view, have been inaccessible to me, who left my grammar school at 17, and to the girls who leave their comprehensives at 16 – not to mention many others in between. I think it is time to concentrate more attention on the writing, on the simple, comprehensible exposition of ideas rather than on the bibliography.”

She’s also interesting as a defector from Labour to be a founding member of the SDP in 1981, and a member of its executive in 1982, a self-identified political neophyte:

“…it takes a very strong and politically idealistic spirit to survive bickering over procedural hassles. Procedure has to be sorted out, but perhaps the political novices, ‘the nice people’, the ‘wets’ have a role in indicating, now and then, when we can summon courage to tackle the technicians, that ‘ends’ are really what matter and what keep enthusiasm alive, and, even, that means can corrupt ends. Sometimes I fear that the more ‘political’ one becomes, the more one is likely to lose sight of the goal that made one join a party in the first place.”

Today, as the conservative government talks much of Big Society, while also slashing funding for the institutions that might support it, she reports on the president of the National Council of Women, Helen Waldsax, asking “that the government should ‘acknowledge in some constructive form the public service given by so many voluntary organisations to this country’ and warned that unless this was done, many organisations would have to function at half strength, or even disappear, which would mean the loss of ‘the source of supply of many specialist skills’. She added, ‘a very important democratic principle is at stake here’. But there has been no sign that Prime Minister Thatcher, who so heartily approves, she says the voluntary principle, has taken any notice.”

But perhaps the most pervasive sense one gets from this book is the modestly and self-deprecation of a woman who was obviously powerful and exceptional. It’s a reminder of how women were taught to be – and must never allowed to be again.

Article first published on Blogcritics.

Nina Power, if placed in a classification of feminists, would clearly fall within the socialist/Marxist camp, seeing the oppression of women arising chiefly from the economic base. But this is a sophisticated, nuanced form of this analysis, that is sensitive to the developments of the superstructure, as well as the base, of the past couple of decades.

Her One-Dimensional Woman is only about 50 actual pages of text, almost more pamphlet than book, but there’s a lot packed in, not all of it making an obviously coherent whole.

The title comes from Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man, who is “fully immersed in the promissary world of liberal democracy and consumerism, and yet ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls”. For women today, Power says, “what looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles”.

She begins with a brief exploration of the Sarah Palin phenomenon, which is something of an outlier, if a topical one. The conclusion: “She turns maternity into a war-weapon, inexperience into a populist virtue and feminism into something that even the Christian Right could approve of.” Power makes the point that if we allow the term “feminist” to be captured by such women, progressive women concerned about basic rights from access to abortion onwards will have to disown it – it is worth defending.

In a similar vein is the chapter on the attempt to justify the Iraq war, and particularly the Afghan war, by the claim that its purpose (so historically nonsensical) is to free the local women. The answer to this is easier, really, just listen to the local women, who are very clearly saying “get out”.

Then Power gets into the meat of her argument, that the workforce has indeed been feminised: “work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past… Alternatively, we could turn this around and talk about the labourization of women – the way in which females are cast as worker first and only secondarily as mother or wife, or any other identity position not linked wiith economic productivity.”

Much of this has affected both sexes. So Power says: “The demand to be a ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking’, ‘selling yourself,’ in effect, to become a kind of walking CV is felt keenly.” But for women this plays on older stereotypes to particularly focus on their looks, their clothes, their body, which bleeds into woman as consumer, and the claim that any consumer purchase – from lipstick to chocolate, is feminist indulgence, because you’re worth it.

On this, Power gets particularly strong: “Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamante phone cover.” (Here she’s being, I think on balance unfairly, strongly critical of Jessica Valenti.)

But perhaps the most original part of this text is the exploration of pornography, on which Power argues for historical perspectives. As she briefly alludes to, it is well worth remembering that pronographic images were used as a form of political communication during and around both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, but “the ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this”.

Power argues, however, that before WWII, porn lacked the mechanistic, highly specialised characteristics of today, in older forms, particularly French films, “sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville”. The performers, she says, genuinely appear to be having fun, and the “plot” not infrequently runs around men’s difficulty in “performing”. Very different she says, from sex that is clearly work in contemporary porn.

So there’s a lot here, but ultimately what it fails to do is really provide a road-map, a way forward. Power has entirely justifiable criticism of what is being presented to us today as “feminism”. But she doesn’t really tell us what her own looks like.

What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)

From this point, Songe-Moller moves on to the rather better-known misogyny of Socrates and Plato. Even where there’s apparent equal opportunities in Republic: “Socrates demonstrates the basic insignificance of sexual difference by means of a simple illustration. He maintains that the difference between the one who gives birth and the one who ‘begets’ us as trivial as the difference between long and short hair…but the way in which he presents his arguments is likely to lieave us in doubt as to whether his subject really is equality of opportunity, or whether here as well the real concern is the negation of the feminine… the male guardians are characterized as the best citizens (politai), the female guardians are described as quite simply the best women (gynaikes)… the ‘best women’ means – paradoxically – the women that have most successfully overcome the fact that they belong to their sex. Thus what we find in Book V of the Republic is not a proposal for equal empowerment of the sexes, as is often claimed, but rather an attempt to cultivate masculine qualities within the ruling class.” (p. 91)

More, of course, there’s the homoeroticism. On this, Songe-Moller goes to Phaedrus, saying: “The text clearly suggests that the desire for sensual beauty is a necessary precusor to the desire for the true Beaty, that is, for the form of Beauty itself, which lies beyond all form of sensuality… the love between a man and a woman has its ‘natural’ conclusion in coitus and does not in itself point to anything beyond the purely physical … this purpose can only be served by unconsummated physical love, which Plato’s text represents as an ideal of homosexual relationships.”(pp.93-4)

Songe-Moller moves on then to consider two “modern” views of Plato, that of Irigaray and Foucault, in which the book to some degree betrays its origins as individual essays, although the overall flow of the arguments remains clear.

She goes to Irigaray’s interpretation of the cave myth, from Book VII of Republic. It has men living in a cavern open to the light along its width, but fettered so they can only see the back wall, and so placed that they see manipulated puppets appearing as shadows against the wall. “The sole purpose of the wall in Plato’s myth is – as with the female – reproduction, although the way it performs this job leaves much to be desired…due to its material properties, the wall is an unsuitable medium for the reproduction of pictures… insufficiently virginal, or alternatively: it is not sufficiently frigid. It does not repulse and transit the masculine rays of light that are thrown at it, but rather receives and absorbs them, so that no more than shadows remain.” (p. 124)

“…I shall only mention the reference Julia Kristeva makes in her Histoires d’amour to Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates describes how the soul in love – that is the philosopher’s soul – grows warm, swells up, and sprouts great wings, in due course it raises itself in its desire to fly towards its beautiful lover, and together with him towards Beauty itself. The phallic connotation is clear, and Kristeva laconically remarks that, when we consider Plato’s description of the soul’s erection, it is not so difficult to understand why the Church Fathers hesitated in attributing souls to women.” (p. 127)

Perhaps the most exciting, and frustrating passage in the book refers to the possibility that there was an alternative thought system available, if probably now unrecoverable:
“In his exposition of what he refers to in the poem as the ‘opinions of mortals’, opinions that apparently contain ‘no true belief’, Parmenides seems to describe a world in which the two sexes are equal in status. Unfortunately most of that part of the poem that deals with this theme has been lost, but the surviving verses still convey a sense that in Parmenides’ day, that is in the 5th century BCE, there were the rudiments of an attitude that presupposed no hierarchical order among the sexes.” (p. 51)

But “the Greek political theory of the classical period – with Plato and Aristotle as its foremost representatives – built on the legacy of identity theory….the concept of the equality of opposites was unable to gain any significant influence is subsequent philosophy….much philosophy has been permeated by what we can call a one-sex model: in reality there exists only one sex, the man, who constitutes the norm of all human life. Within this model, the specifically female could only be defined negatively.”

It all makes me want to add another book to those I’d like to write – call it about No 12 – an alternative history that sees the alternative, non-hierarchical, view win out among the Greeks, and the whole course of human thought thus changed. (Or perhaps a time-travel history, in which we go back and wipe out the odd key philosopher on the “wrong” side, just to help the cause…)

I very seldom watch television. I confess that I don’t own a television – I got rid of it when I worked out that the licence was costing me about the same price per hour as a cinema ticket, given my viewing habits.

I do, very occasionally however, look at iPlayer, as I happened to do tonight. When I do watch television, it’s usually history programmes, which means, more or less, BBC Four.

So tonight I scrolled down its offerings, and was astonished.

There is a very good documentary on Denman College (the Women’s Institute college) with some heartrending stories about its attendees lives circumscribed by gender norms, and Clare Balding biking the Cotswalds, which sounds jolly.

Other than that, there is, I can list as I go back to it…
* A bloke presenting a programme on whales
* A bloke running a museum
* A male comedian on video games
* A bloke talking about medieval history
* A comedy cartoon show crediting four blokes
* A bloke walking through Norman history
* A bloke looking at the history of games
* A bloke talking about a male poet
* A bloke performing at Glastonbury
* Medieval blokes trying to steal jewels
* A bloke talking about medieval sex
* A bloke talking about the Arthurian legend
* A drama about a bloke who wants to sell phones
* A bloke talking about Beowulf
* A quiz featuring Archers fans with a female presenter (sort of yeah)
* Three blokes following the trail of Hannibal the Great
* A documentary about lots of British pop blokes and Lulu
* A bloke talking about food and Italian opera
* (Yeah) A drama about a woman who wants to set up a snack bar
* Two blokes talking about how to play chess
* (Yeah) A woman talking about the Anglo-Saxons
* A bloke talking about biotechnology
* A bloke fictional detective

So if this is the men’s channel, which is the women’s?

Or maybe this is just chance. Will it be all women next week?

Just back from a weekend of canvassing and leafletting in Norwich, where they’re having a huge byelection (in every ward) as a result of the mess over the on-off unitary status.

(As a workmate said, I really do know how to live…)

But seriously, it’s always delightful to see the smoothly oiled machine of the Norwich Green Party in action. I didn’t match my previous record (10.5 hours canvassing in one day), but between a solid stretch of canvassing on Saturday and a swath of leafletting today feel like it was well worth the effort.

And as always, the doorstep was delightful. I think the highlight was the discussion with an absolutely on-the-ball 96-year-old. She says she’s a Lib Dem, and the subtext was she felt she was too old to change now, but she’s happy her son has decided to vote Green for the first time this time. She said many interesting things, but what really struck me was her thoughts on the environment. “I’ve never seen the world in such a mess. I think you [the Greens] are going to be proved right.”

But meeting a 92-year-old voter (and her, in her words, “toyboy” husband – late 80s…) was also wonderful. They’ve read the literature, and both decided to vote Green for the first time. Would that all voters took such an interest…

And on the leafletting score, was pleased to ensure the “singing plasterer” had his Norwich Green News. I had my hands full so didn’t take a pic, but see he’s also tickled the fancy of others.

From A Woman’s Berlin by Despina Stratigakos

The first women’s bank opened in 1910 in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, as a co-op credit union managed by and for women.

The founders initially envisioned its clientele as single independent women. Its appeal proved much broader, however, and membership grew to include women of all civil and social classes.

Unfortunately it collapsed during war, in part because of pressure from establishment. The rightwing press accused it of dismantling the German family by giving women economic independence as clients didnt need their father’s or husband’s consent to open an account. It was also unconventional because it took jewellry and furniture as collateral, which was often the only wealth that women had. (pp 12-15)

I was leafletting yesterday in some local tower blocks. I was last there canvassing in April, just after a major restoration was completed, and they were really looking quite good. Although my fellow canvasser found the wholly internal staircases, and the level of deprivation of some of the residents depressing, I was asked into a couple of flats for a chat and found them lovely inside – well-lit and airy, and was feeling quite positive about the future of the blocks.

Going back, however, was depressing. The stairs are now covered with a wide range of bodily fluids, spliff butts, beer bottles, etc, and I found that most residents are simply ignoring their door buzzers.

Part of the estate restoration involved expensive installation of an extensive security system – outside gates and door security, but clearly this has failed. (And general report is that it is frequently not working (probably not helped by the thoughtless installation of a gate blocking a major pedestrian and cycle route that used to be used by many and is unsurprisingly now frequently vandalised).

Clearly the lock-it-down approach has failed, and probably only encouraged a fortress, fearful mentality.

So what would help? Well clearly one aspect of the problem here is our society’s massive failure to deal with the problems of drug use (including alcohol) – the “war on drugs” is clearly part of the problem.

And this would surely be a case for a concierge system (installed in an excellent tower block I know not far away). And proper daily cleaning – some of the dried vomit had clearly been there for quite some time – would help to improve the atmosphere.

And no doubt the flats would benefit from community-building efforts – why I wonder is the uninspiring half-dead lawn around the flats not a community garden?

But there is clearly a major problem with these structures: there’s only four flats on each floor, and residents use one of the two lifts, which means they only take a couple of steps from their front door to the exit – they’re highly unlikely to meet their neighbours, and no one (except the odd leafletter like myself) is likely to use the stairs, leaving them as orphan territory, an invitation to illicit use.

The human impact of this all was brought home to me by a young girl, perhaps nine or so. She was with two friends who were knocking on the door of a flat, calling for a friend, as I approached down the stairs. I opened the lobby door to three frightened faces, cowering back. As I left, the fear was explained: “I thought it was the ‘maddie’”, one of them said to the others. Those stairwells are clearly having a real impact on their lives.

My general approach is to try to salvage all buildings – the environmental and social cost of demolition is enormous and usually undercounted. But I do wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without those particular blocks.

Article first published onBlogcritics
There’s an assumption underlying The Plundered Planet that left me astonished at Paul Collier’s hubris, and amazed that the author felt no need, whatsoever, not a jot, to justify it. He spells it out simply: “in all probability the distant future will be very much richer than we are”. I’d love to be able to question him, to ask how he can be so certainty that huge material “progress” – seen at most over only a couple of centuries, in a few small parts of the world – will continue?

It’s a pity, for the author of The Bottom Billion has a lot of interesting things to say in his latest book, which is chiefly concerned with the ways, both philosophical and practical, developing states should exploit their resources – particularly mineral resources. (He’s also concerned about climate change and making decisions for the future about that.) There’s a lot of sense in it, a lot of human concern, and very reasonable concern about the future.

The basic premise that he sets out is that no resources should be exploited unless the decisionmaker can be confident that the resources generated as a result will be more valuable to the future than leaving the original material in the ground. The chief concern here, as in his previous book, is developing states, and particularly with exploring what’s gone wrong in states suffering the “resource curse”, and in the few rare examples, such as Botswana, where it hasn’t applied.

He begins by explaining just how little is actually known about the resources of developing states, particularly in Africa. Collier gives the example of Zambia – the most recent geological surveys date back to the 1950s, and there’s never been a mineral discovery further than 10 miles from a major road. The answer, he suggests, is — setting out the reasons why auctioning or selling something when you can have no real idea of its value — aid projects financing surveys, a pretty radical idea for the aid community to swallow. And then you’ve got the problem of how to sell what you’ve got, when you know it is there…

Collier notes that China is the only source now offering free surveys. In fact he’s very counter-current on China, not viewing the increasingly influential state through rose-coloured glasses, but particularly interested in the way China is purchasing the rights to resource extraction in return for the construction of infrastructure. He says these deals are traditionally hated, since they are wholly opaque, with no idea of real value being recorded. But, having suggested that the vast bulk of revenue from natural resources should be invested for the future, this might be a way to do it.

“Any prudent Minister of Finance …might justifiably be afraid of being but one voice in favor of spending much of the money on infrastructure. Across the table, the Minister of Defense might argue now was the time to raise army salaries. He might mention that there had been disaffection in the ranks and look meaningfully at the President. The Minister of Education would interject that the teachers unions were fully aware that extra money had flowed into the budget and planning a strike. In short, the Minister of Finance might reasonably fear that the bulk of the money would dribble away on extra recurrent spending. Compared with that outcome, the Chinese deal might look rather attractive. There would be no extra money to carve up at the cabinet table: the offer was for infrastructure. The investment rate out of the implicity revenues would therefore be 100 percent.”

The problem is now – as with internal investment – transparency of the value of what’s offered. The argument runs – and certainly seems to me to have veracity – that capital investments come broadly in two parts – equipment (eg trucks) and structures (eg roads). The former generally have to be imported in developing states so the price paid can, with even very limited scrutiny, judged against world prices, so if wildly inflated by corruption it is obvious. But the structures have to be built in-situ, and in greatly varying conditions, so it is difficult to tell if costs have been hugely inflated by corruption (or indeed simply been underbid by the Chinese). The alternative would be to open the same process to competition – offer the best infrastructure to win the right to the resources. “Instead of accusing the Chinese of plundering Africa, it might have been more effective of the international community to imitate them.”

But how to decide which infrastructure to plump for? That’s also wide open to corruption. (And not only in notable “corrupt” places – as a young journalist in rural Australia locals were always telling me about how the roads outside councillors’ houses were always remarkably smooth.) Collier says that cost-benefit analysis, the traditional route, makes too many demands on the human resources of most developing world bureaucracies; is simply unrealistic. Instead he makes a simple, practical proposal, choosing some successful middle-income country, Malaysia or Botswana for example, as a model, and broadly following its investment model.

He does, however, make one prescription, and in a place where his narrow economist lens starts again to look very limited: that investment should be concentrated in cities, and preferably big cities. “Each time a city doubles in population, the productivity of its workers increases by around 6 percent.” Fine, and probably true, so far as it goes, but if you concentrate investment there, how is the agricultural hinterland going to keep the city fed? (Although again Nigeria provides an example of how things can go badly wrong – in a political carve-up Lagos, its largest city, was left without any oil revenue at all.)

Along the way, one of the fascinations of the book is the many historical and political tales — often horror stories — that he exposes. I’d not previously heard of Nigeria’s “cement armada” – a rush to import the commodity saw a huge queue of shops far exceeding port capacity, which left the state paying huge charges to waiting ships — known as demurrage (and saw shipowners sending any old rust-busket along to cash in). On the same sad state, I didn’t also know that oil accounts for 98% of Nigeria’s oil exports, and around a third of its economy.

And I hadn’t heard of the calculation by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta about the wealth of Africa, combining natural and humanmade assets, which came to the conclusion that over the past three decades, wealth per person declined by 2.8% a year “…the family silver was rapidly being sold to finance consumption… living standards were barely being maintained. But even this was being achieved only by voraciously eating into natural capital.” And I didn’t know that the majority of Africans alive today are too young to vote.

Collier’s also very interesting on fisheries. The world’s annual catch is about $80bn; annual subsidies about $30bn. He’s got an interesting idea for how to protect, and sustainably harvest, the fish of the open oceans. Since these are “the true global domination of mankind”, assign them to the United Nations, to be used to fund the World Food Programme, and similar, non-glamorous parts of agency operations, “global public goods”, that struggle for support.

He’s also got interesting things to sat about developed states: such as on Europe how very little tax revenue is distributed beyond the state that collects it. Contrary to the claims of the Daily Mail and other Eurosceptics: “The pan-European tax rate is merely one percent of income, and virtually all of this is redistributed within the country which has originally paid the taxes.”

A wry black humour also occasionally sneaks through to enliven the text, as in: “In the familiar game of thinking up clever collective names, nobody has ever suggested ‘a modesty of economists’.” And he’s also no captive of the neo-classicists, despite the curiously unthinking optimism. He notes that “since the 1980s the bulk of the profession has persuaded itself of the superiority of private action to public action… [but] the global economic crisis has taken the shine off the magic of the market, although the bulk of the economics profession remains in denial.”

So The Plundered Planet is surprisingly readable overall, and the ideas are interesting. Well worth the time. Just remember that while Collier’s more self-aware than most, he’s still an economist, with some enormous intellectual blindspots (most particularly about agriculture).

Sitting in my hall cupboard, for many a year, is a case of transparencies – slide – yes images taken with real actual film, dating back well over a decade.

It’s been on my to-do list for a very long time, but I’ve taken the chance to start scanning them in – because these days a picture that doesn’t exist digitally might as well not exist at all, really.

They are labelled, and I think, somewhere, there is a key, but at the moment it is all a bit of a mystery (the boxes have got mixed up over time). I’ve done one with pics from Sri Lanka, Cambodia and I think India – I wasn’t really a bad photographer in those days, if a little over-fond of sunsets. (And these are done with a cheap scanner, so the colour and the sharpness are both a bit off – I do think the slides are better.)

Here’s a small selection…

Sri Lanka

If memory serves, this is an elephant sanctuary on the road between Colombo and Candy…

And this is at the main temple at Candy

candy temple

This I think is the Preah Khan Temple at Angkhor Wat in Cambodia (I think they were clearing it from the jungle, so it might look quite different now..

And this is from the mystery collection, the unlabelled ones – I think it is India, and I suspect somewhere near Delhi. Anyone know (it is pretty distinctive!)

Don’t know whether it is worth really trying to do anything with these, but think I will try to find the time to scan the (not a quick process) just because then I can have them to hand, and at the same time revist all those memories.

Sheila Rowbotham is one of the grande dames of British feminism. When I went to a talk by her on this book at Bookmarks, the packed crowd was hanging on her every word. And she was always impressive, even when depressing as she recalled the optimism of the Seventies in contrast to the feelings today: “It seemed things were going too slowly. We thought, ‘why don’t things change quickly?’ We didn’t bargain for the fact that capitalism would go into a completely different phase; we thought welfare-based capitalism would be democratised. We didn’t believe it would be so radically diminished. … We saw women in parliament as a detail, equal pay as a detail, but the details proved to be extremely difficult.”

She added: “We’ve learned now that you can go backwards. In the Seventies we assumed once you made a gain it would stay there. … It is much harder to argue for equality in a situation where equality is not respected.”

I asked her about the current focus on porn/sexualisation among much feminist campaigning, and she responded that “selling things through sex was the route that capitalism took, and was using more and more. I don’t know how you can get that to change.” The “only alternative vision available” at present was the environmental movement she said, for Marxists had found that their assumption that the working class would resist capitalism was wrong. “The challenge is how to change society without extremely moralistic disapproval. Lots of small groups of people have been convinced but it is how to convince the mass of people now watching the World Cup and buying lots of gadgets.”

It’s an historical perspective from one who was there, and has seen a lot. It’s not, however, the subject of the book she was promoting, her new Dreamers of the New Day, which covers from the 1880s to the start of World War I, and is entirely successful in proving that there’s nothing really new under the son. The women she’s writing about lived in a very different world, but between them they thought up pretty well every revolutionary advance that we’re still dreaming about today.

What they wanted was nothing more than the abolition of gender stereotypes, something that today seems very dreamlike indeed. Who could argue with the hopes of Elsie Clews Parson, in 1914 in Journal of a Feminist:
“The day will come when the individual … [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quoota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I fell like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly… It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.”

They also wanted access to birth control and abortion – rights that women are still fighting for today — (while also – generally – rejecting Malthusian and eugenics reasoning around them). Rowbotham recounts how Stella Browne put the case for the legalization of abortion in 1915 in a paper to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, before going on to be a founder member of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936.

The wonderfully long-lived and long campaigning Charlotte Despard was a leader in setting up mother and baby clinics, beginning in Nine Elms in South London. In my local area, St Pancras, under pressure from mothers the Medical Officer for Health opened a school for mothers along with a clinic with health visitors – it was to be a model for many more. In East London, Sylvia Pankhurst and her Federation of Suffragettes bought a pub, The Gunmakers’ Amrs, renaming it the Mothers Arms, providing medicine, milk and nutritious food.

There’s also oh-so-familiar debates about childcare and how much the mother should provide. Rowbotham quotes the Greenwich Village feminist Henrietta Rodman on mothering: “The baby is the great problem of the woman who attempts to carry the responsibilities of wage-earning and citizenship. We must have babies for our own happiness, and we must give them the best of ourselves – not only for their own good, not only for the welfare of society, but for our own self expression … [but] the mother of the past has been so busy with her children that she hasn’t had time to enjoy them…The point is not how long but how intensely a mother does it.”

Housework, then as now, was another cause for fervent debate. It was in 1913 that the American socialist Jospehine Conger-Kaneteko, demanded, as women would again do in the Sixties and Seventies, wages for housework. She insisted that women’s household labour was ensuring their husbands could be efficient employees, and employers should be forced to recognise this. More radically still, in 1920, Crystal Eastman asked: “How can we change the nature of man so that he will honourably share the work and responsibility and thus make the home-making enterprise a song instead of a burden?” Rearing sons to do housework was her answer, Rowbotham reports.

And the problems of clothing were a cause for great debate. Rowbotham quotes Charlotte Perkins Wilman on the distinctive female dress was meant to ensure “we should never forget sex”. But, our author says, women in desexualised clothing were very deliberately trying to colonise new spaces, even in the face of ridicule: “Critics sneared at the plain shirtwaisters and ties worn by Russian-Jewish immigrant working class new women who sat in cafes debating marriage, the family and working conditions. One hostile observer in the 1890s derided the “atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’, denouncing the ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women for whom ‘The time of night means nothing until way into the small hours.’”

It wasn’t only women who were acting bravely and thinking originally. Rowbotham tells the tale of the Comstock laws in America, passed in 1873, which banned the distribution of “obscene” literature through the mail. Among those caught, and jailed, as a result was Moses Harman (father of campaigner Lillian), once for writing about women’s right to resist rape in marriage. He was jailed again for publishing articles by birth control advocate Dora Forster, who argued that the worst kind of prostitution was in conventional marriages, where women were taught to use their bodies for economic and social advantage.

Rowbotham has found some wonderful examples of debates and encounters on issues still being played out today, perhaps more notably on prostitution:

“When the future campaigner against lead contamination, Alive Hamilton, braved a brothel in Toledo to rescue a prostitute, she found, instead of the victim she had expected, ‘a woman of mature years, handsome, dignified, entirely mistress of herself’ in a house that was ‘luxurious but vulgarly ugly’. The meeting was an occasion for mutual incomprehension. The young idealistic reformer heard the calculating voice of a tradeswoman. ‘…I spend my time persuading men to spend money on what they don’t really want.’ For her part the prostitute was appalled by Hamilton’s altruistic settlement life in the Chicago slums: “That is not the sort of thing I could possibly do,” she observed with disgust…. From 1910 the upper-middle-class Bostonian Fanny Quincy Howe regularly corresponded with a Jewish prostitute and morphine addict, Maimie Pinzer, who told Howe she regarded divorce as ‘a lot of follishness and a marriage ceremony the worst lot of cant I ever heard.’”

I’d defy any reader not to learn surprising new things from Dreamers of the New Day: the most prominent snippet for me was the origins of the word “ecology” – it was “oekology” originally, coined by Ellen Swallow Richards, the first female graduate of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, where she was later a lecturer. In her 1882 The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, she presented housework as a science, and she regarded work in the home as the basis for a much broader responsibility outside it. The world was everyone’s house, she declared, and it required good housekeeping, and that meant a science of the environment, for which she found the word.

All of this original, and often still radical, thinking was done despite its originators living in a world with the most ridiculous (to our eyes) restrictions. Rowbotham explains that women in the 1880s and 1890s were attending in Oxford and Cambridge University Extension lectures, and even being allowed to fully enrol in the newer provincial universities. But at Owens College Manchester, the female students were barred from the library: they had to send their maids to collect books. And the anarchists Rose Witcop and Guy Aldred were charged and convicted with distributing obscene literature for Family Limitation a straight practical text on birth control, with their lawyer explaining that this was probably because a diagram that showed a pessary being placed in a vagina. The obscenity was that the finger might not be the woman’s own, a thought that came as a total surprise to the female publisher.

Dreamers of the New Day could be criticised, perhaps, for not taking us forward, for simply reporting the past, but Rowbotham is, after all, primarily a historian, and this book is wonderfully original and delightful to read – and it recovers for new readers wonderful women of the past who deserve to be remembered. Perhaps your favourite will Mrs Grundy who in Shipley, Yorkshire, fought for women’s access to the Turkish baths at the same price as the men. She’s certainly one of mine.