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Happy birthday, wildestranger!

Some links for International Women's Day

Because this is a theme I keep banging on about myself: Radical Books: Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983), and it doesn't keep needing to be discovered again from scratch, really.

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Though, even so, maybe we have to think of the different ways in which things were expressed in the past: this is a swingeing riposte to the guy who decided to expose his ignorance on social media by claiming that the clitoris and the female orgasm were inventions of evil modern feminism: On women’s anatomy and the power of paying attention. I did myself wonder about mentioning Isaac Baker Brown, but apart from feeling that possibly the guy was not deserving of the tribute of rational refutation, would one want to draw his attention to the practices of the London Surgical Home in the 1860s?

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How soon they forget - what they forget is how dangerous childbirth used to be (and still can be): Call the midwife! No matter how bad you’ve heard care can be, ‘freebirthing’ is not the answer. The whole thing about making childbirth a beautiful mystical experience only really took off after the advent of antibiotics and blood transfusion and the increase in the statistical likelihood of survival. Indeed, lately noted that while the birth control movement doubtless felt that the Labour Government lately returned to power in 1924 was likely to be a little more sympathetic to its pleas for permitting advice to be given in maternal welfare clinics than the Conservatives, the Ministry of Health report that year on Maternal Mortality was also a factor.

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Women entrepreneurs - Georgian women entrepreneurs - Even if you’ve never heard of Eleanor Coade, you will have almost certainly walked past some of her work in London:

This might sound unusual for an 18th century mother and daughter to embark on a business together but there was a history of entrepreneurial women in the family. Eleanor Senior’s mother was Sarah Enchmarch who ran a successful textile business in Tiverton, Devon.

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Politickal ladies (yes, they existed): Harriet Grote (1792-1878):

Grote developed many of her strategies for activism during the 1830s, when she was central to organising radical politics at Parliament. George was MP for London between 1832 and 1841, and in public emerged as a leader of the disparate, but initially sizeable, band of radicals and reformers in the Commons. Behind the scenes, however, Grote was the chief organising force of what she called the ‘popular party’. While she failed in her ultimate ambition of ‘bring[ing] destruction upon Whigs and Tories’, her innovative methods for influencing national politics were a clear example of unsung nineteenth-century female political leadership and a major challenge to convention at Westminster.

and later became active in the movement for women's rights across a range of campaigns. On women attending debates in the House of Commons: The ladies’ gallery in the temporary House of Commons (1835-1852 while the Houses of Parliament were being rebuilt after the disastrous fire).