Just putting these out there

[oursin]

I just went 'WOW' and grinned when I read this - Constancia Romilly and Benjamin Treuhaft, letter to The Guardian

We’re saddened to hear of the death of our cousin Max Mosley (Obituary, 24 May). Although we are from different branches of the infamous Mitford sisters, we have admired Max for his fight against invasion of privacy. Our mother, Jessica Mitford, would have cheered him on for his victorious trouncing of the avaricious and conscienceless Rupert Murdoch.

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In more distressing news, it wasn't just nuns in Ireland doing this sort of thing: Hundreds of UK women demand formal apology for forced adoptions. Government urged to say sorry to mothers coerced into giving up babies in 1950s, 60s and 70s:

Many of the women were unmarried teenagers when they became pregnant, and gave birth in church-run “mother and baby homes” in the UK. An estimated quarter of a million women were coerced into having babies adopted during the period. In recent years, some have said they were made to feel shame and guilt. Three years ago, Jill Killington told the Observer: “I was never asked whether I wanted to go ahead with the adoption. It was a fait accompli.”

The UK’s forced adoption scandal was state-sanctioned abuse

[T]he long history of shame being weaponised against women in the name of organised religion is really only half the explanation for cruelty meted out not in some secretive Magdalene laundry, but to women giving birth inside British NHS hospitals, who were singled out as different from other mothers. It was effectively state-sanctioned abuse and in a week when much of the country is understandably preoccupied instead with a much more recent failure of the state, it carries urgent lessons.

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This raises interesting questions - I think it would possibly gain for engagement with other eras of similar 'backlash'/invisibility' and what was going on under the radar as far as feminism was concerned: The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade.

On the shorthand labels we fall back on when trying to understand the past, I think I'd have a few arguments about where Houlbrook has placed some of the emphases in this revisionist view of the 20s (well, not revisionist to a lot of historians of interwar Britain, perhaps) and I'd put other things in (e.g. Sid sez Bye! with the advent of the national network of free confidential VD clinics), but still worth reading.

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The Real Life Heroines of the Early Gothic - okay, I'm glad to see Barbauld among them, though I think more could be said about the radicalism of her writing rather than the weirdness of her husband. But I don't think Mary Robinson got that £5000 by blackmailing the Regent (could you even blackmail Prinny???) - I think that was the appropriate settlement paid to a discarded mistress.

Comments

[oracne]

Thanks for the links!

[nnozomi]

Constancia Romilly and Benjamin Treuhaft, letter to The Guardian
That's delightful, and boy do they ever come by that tone honestly. (I wonder if Constancia Romilly's ever going to write an autobiography? That would be worth reading. Although she's probably had more than enough of being read about.)

[kore]

Aww, I got kind of fond of Max Mosley through reading Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed -- his comments about his background were fascinating, and Hacked Off was pretty great even if he didn't give them money.

Great links yes!

[anna_wing]

That letter pulled no punches! And Max Mosley was obviously a...remarkable individual by any standard.