Ninety years since women got the vote in the UK...

[oursin]

The Representation of the People Act, 6 Feb 1918. And eighty years since they got it on the same terms as men.

From today's Observer:

40 years on from the equal pay struggles of 1968 - still not there 120 years after the TUC passed an equal pay resolution in the aftermath of the Matchgirls' Strike.

Persistence of the Double Standard, let me show you it:

Male writers are allowed to record the most intimate or mundane details of their lives without being defined by them and yet when women do the same, we tear them to pieces.

BBC accused of sexism on news flagship.

Why can't we stop the spread of degrading adverts for sex? The number of strip clubs has doubled in the last four years, an unforeseen byproduct of liberal licensing laws.

A bit more cheering:

Inside the world of UK Muslim women - Na'ima B Robert comments on a 'refreshing' survey.

DNA explodes Greek myth about women: British researchers have unearthed evidence that proves Helen was much more than a chattel - information possibly already well-known to classicists?

I am so not going to link to interview with Katie Roiphe: it still sounds to me as though in her forthcoming book on people trying to have radical relationships in the early 20th (oh, Virago, what are you thinking of?) she confuses the desire for a man who doesn't require propping up all the time or expects his female partner to interrupt what she's doing to make the tea, who may even be capable of being leant on during trying times and crises, and is generally there with support and protection as and when needed, with a desire for 'male dominance'. Though I will link instead to a piece that reminds us about the banality of being 'shocking' (scroll down).

***

In entirely other business, does anyone know why zandra_x has deleted her lj?

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Just reading that Greek DNA analysis article makes me grind my teeth: I don't know much about DNA reconstruction but I do know shoddy science reporting when I see it. A single example does not any conclusive cultural determiner make! If the genes say "they might be cousins or they might be siblings" then facial similarity does not definitively say they are siblings! Being forced to re-evaluate one wrong assumption does not mean sending all assumptions ass-over-teakettle, especially when you're phrasing your assumptions in a reductive, simplistic way in the first place.

Humph.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I suspect the archaeologists may well be grinding their teeth over how it's reported! - I always find this when journos start wittering over 'discoveries' that have been 'lost in the archives' - only because they have never tried looking for them using things like publicly accessible catalogues.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Of course, in the ancient world, it was utterly unknown for siblings or closely-related people in positions of power to marry, so the woman's status is obviously due to her birth position and not to marriage to a high-status male. Obviously!

Why, to extrapolate only a teensy bit more, ancient Eurasia was certainly a paradise of matriarchy, based on these findings!

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about the classics really, but that article on Mycenae does rather suggest that "ancient Greece" was a cultural monolith. What was happening in 16th century BC Mycenae hasn't much to do with what was going on in, say, 5th-century BC Athens.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

That did strike me - that it's talking about a period in which Much Change Happened and even different city-states had different customs.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Given the amount of space taken up by the house of Atreus in Freud's index it seems awfully naive of the journalists (like yourself, I suspect the actual scientists will be teeth-grinding - they're that team at Manchester University who've been doing pioneering work in this area since I was at school, and they've never struck me as the facile sort) to assume that just because someone had the DNA to be someone's sister that didn't mean her burial honours couldn't be down to her being that somebody's wife.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Hai mi name is PHAROAH OF EGYPT!!

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

//chokes on tea

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Yeurgh!

1) One-cell mDNA samples are not infallible.

2) As already noted, if DNA analysis doesn't tell you two people are siblings and not cousins, then neither does a face reconstruction.

3) Cousins marry. For that matter, also as noted, so do siblings.

4) Most screamworthy -- even assuming the woman was the man's sister and not his wife, a rich burial doesn't mean she had worth "in and of herself" -- much less that she had power. It doesn't say that her worth was not that of chattel. (Or maybe her father loved her, and was rich, and didn't spare any expense for her burial even though she was just a girl.)

Sorry, I don't know squat about Mycenean history, but I had to get that off my chest :-)

[ironed_orchid]

I want DNA to prove that Helen was the daughter of Zeus.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Swan DNA???

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was yelling back at the TV this morning, when CNN referred to the Catholic Church as "the last bastion of the glass ceiing". Because it's so good to know women aren't being help back by gender assumptions anywhere else in the world.