It's Always More Complicated

How Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18th‑century royal PR strategy (this one was the wife of George II - not the one Prinny tried to divorce - who he asserted to on her deathbed that he would not remarry but only have mistresses thereafter).

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Today’s arguments about disability benefits have been raging for 500 years - well, probably longer, but

One of the clearest examples comes from the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which was England’s first organised welfare system. It required parishes to support people who couldn’t earn a living because of age, illness or impairment. In practice, however, access to assistance was often contested.
Tudor writers spread stories about supposedly fake disabled beggars who tricked the public by covering themselves in artificial sores or pretending to have seizures. At the same time, local officials worried about the cost of supporting people who might need help for years. Claims could be rejected because an applicant was considered of poor moral character or because they were new to the parish.

Three brain myths that need to die:

While brain scientists hem and haw and hedge their bets, many people gravitate towards those who sound more certain—those who offer tidy explanations and definitive answers, whether or not they are true.
The result is that psychology has become home to an unusually persistent collection of zombie myths: ideas that have been debunked repeatedly but which refuse to die. Some of the most tenacious concern the structure and function of the brain itself, including whether we use just 10% of it, whether bigger brains are always better, and whether we harbour remnants of earlier brains within our own, from a reptilian “lizard brain” to the popular idea of an “inner chimp”. These ideas endure because they are neat and memorable, and perhaps because they place humans where we like to think we belong: at the pinnacle of evolution.
But these simple stories about the brain and its evolution are wrong. And, it turns out, the reality is far more interesting.

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Another myth - biographies about scientists do not necessarily inspire the kiddies: Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages:

First, scientific ability was portrayed equally often as fixed and as malleable, a pattern unlikely to support motivation. Second, interest in science was overwhelmingly portrayed as fixed: Most scientists were said to be captivated by science from a young age. Third, scientists in physics, engineering, and computer science were portrayed as more reliant on fixed ability than scientists in other fields. Fourth, biographies of female scientists disproportionately emphasized effort even after adjusting for the obstacles they faced, consistent with stereotypes attributing women’s success to hard work over talent. These findings suggest that well-intentioned efforts to diversify science through role model exposure in children’s science biographies may fall short.

This sort of thing is why I am so sad about the turn the Women's Institute lately took, it is not in their fine tradition: Women and environmental activism: the National Federation of Women’s Institutes

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Apparently Esperanto is Still A Thing: Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive

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Rare jug showing Peterloo Massacre to go on display:

Experts believe the jug was made in the years following the massacre and that it reflected the escalating public anger felt in its aftermath, the People's History Museum said.

Dept, all more complicated: Did the iPhone Cause the Baby Bust?

Despite the overconfident claims of many a podcast bro, big shifts in population trends like birth rates (or life expectancy) usually defy simple explanation. For example we still don’t really know what caused the Baby Boom, which was a big deviation from previous trends towards lower birth rates in the US and around the world.

Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

Dept, slowing it down: How not to use “AI” (workshop), which advances some lovely concepts: I particularly love 'true artisanal high quality scholarly work'.

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Dept, surely this is the premise for a dystopian novel: Men Can Lose Their Y Chromosome With Age, And We Finally Know The Cost:

The human Y chromosome is shrinking.
In the next 5 million years or so, some geneticists think the sex-determining chromosome will vanish completely from our species.
In the meantime, we have a bigger concern at hand.
As some men age, they are losing the Y chromosome in their blood, brain, or immune cells, and that could have serious health effects.
A loss of the Y chromosome has surprising connections to cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, and Alzheimer's.
For decades, researchers have noticed that as some men grow older, certain cells in their bodies begin to lose their Y chromosome.

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Dept of, worries that are not new and go on recurring:

Woezing over the yoof not reading: My Students Can Read, and They Inspire Me

Sleepmaxxing for the early modern insomniac: Sniff Your Way to a Good Night’s Sleep:

We discovered hundreds of recipes for sleeping well within handwritten books of medical care, which show how hard people worked to try and maintain healthy sleep. These treasure troves of household medical knowledge were often compiled, expanded and edited by multiple generations of a single family. They indicate that sixteenth and seventeenth century English households were engaged in pioneering medical experiments relating to sleep on an unprecedented scale. Women and men from many different walks of life went to great lengths to design, test, and adjust recipes that could cause sleep, that could extend or shorten its duration, that could prevent nightmares, or that alleviated joint pain, headaches, and a host of other bodily ailments that regularly interrupted a peaceful night’s sleep.

Dept of, no, earlier than you thought: Henry Gerber founded one of the most groundbreaking efforts in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Surprise, surprise: anti-air-pollution intervention has measurable health benefits: Emergency hospital admissions fell after introduction of London’s T-charge and Ulez, study suggests.

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A celebration of the end of England’s badger cull, despite the loss of nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped unnecessarily; Cattle in England to get tuberculosis vaccine from 2030 as badger cull to end

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Miller helps save watermill for the second time.

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Memories of Spare Rib (I do wonder if the lack of online availability as at time of writing was due to the BL cyberattack and it may be restored?)

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‘The first humble beginnings of an agitation’: the women’s suffrage petition of 7 June 1866

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An Unreliable Archive of Internationalism: The Women's Christian College, Madras: 'the significant, overlooked work of colonised women in shaping the terms of the institution’s commitment to internationalism'.

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From Olympia to Hyde Park: British anti-fascism in the summer of 1934

Things happen over a long term.

Things that look at the time like a failure or even a disaster may be sowing seeds or releasing spores and having an impact that will go on.

Or even have a counter-intuitive impact at the time: okay, The Well of Loneliness got convicted for obscenity in 1928 but 1000s of women realised they were not alone just from reading the reports in the newspapers, and 1000s of them wrote to Radclyffe Hall.

Just because something does not endure does not endure does not mean it had no influence.

Am currently reading book by a friend which makes quite a thing of long-term impact of small obscure organisations of early C20th I worked on.

Was a piece in Guardian Saturday today which doesn't appear to be yet online which was doing the ever-recurrent WO about 'I see no feminists' and I wonder what they expect them to look like and perhaps they are supposing something flashy and dramatic, which can be appropriate at times. But the work is not necessarily drawing attention to itself.

Further thought: I was a bit irked to see this: Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the present day, because the Fleming narrative erases the immense amount of work that Florey, Chain and Heatley had to put in to make pencillin actually viable.

So really, there isn't a lot of point in going diving into the rabbit-hole that's just opened up.

I.e. I am revising my old piece of work for the Fellows' presentations session, and I thought, why not just see if name of author of obscure feminist work cited appears in British Newspaper Archive, which at time I was writing was less in habit of habitually consulting on odd points (did not, I think, have a subscription, for one thing). As otherwise I had no info on her at all.

And, blow me down, she may only have written one book but seems to have committed the odd journalistic opinion piece, and furthermore, is listed as being one of the founders of an organisation set up by Old Suffragettes (or possibly -ists).

Which I find someone has Has Writ A Book About, as one of those women's orgs that have been condescended to by posterity as about the little dears getting together to chat, bless the ladies, and turns out to have been rather more activist in its sphere than one reckoned.

Library to which I have access has copy, but will not let me have online access to ebook for some reason, sigh.

And really, I do have other things to do (thesis to read, book to review, have been solicited to do a podcast, must try and put together a powerpoint for my talk) than dash off down to LSE to look at the archives of the org, right?

Because given the limitations on what it's for, at the moment - however the work in question will develop - it will be a sentence at best, because of time constraints.

Frustration.

(This may get updated over the course of the day)

After struggling to get Zoom link downloaded and operating etc, managed to get into first session I wanted to attend, Foundling Hospital in early C20th, good grief, practices had not changed much in a century had they? Recipe for trauma in mothers, children, and the foster mothers who actually bonded with the children until they were taken away to be eddicated according to their station in life.

Then switched to a different panel and was IRKED by a lit person talking about the Women's Cooperative Guild Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) which they had only just encountered ahem ahem - was republished by I think Virago? Pandora? in 1970s - and women's history has done quite a bit on the WCG since then so JEEZ I was peeved at her assumption that the working women were not agents but the whole thing was being run by the upper/middle class activists who were most visibly involved. And wanted to query whether working women thought it was very useful to have posh laydeez able to put their cases re maternity, child welfare and so on in corridors of power, rather than deferentially curtseying??? (I should like to go back in time and ask my dear Stella Browne about that.)

Also on wymmynz voices not, or at least hard to trace, in the archives, I fancy this person does not know a) Marie Stopes' volume Mother England (1929), extracts of letters she had from women about motherhood and b) based on 1000s of letters surviving and available to researchers. I could, indeed, point to other resources, fume, mutter.

Update Well, there were some later papers I dropped in on and enjoyed (and was able to offer comment/questions on; but I was obliged to point out certain errors in a description of Joanna Russ's The Female Man (really I think if you are going to cite a work you should check details....) (and I suppose Mitchison's work was just outside the remit of what they were talking about, so I was very self-restrained and failed to go on about Naomi.)

The Spanish government has granted citizenship to 170 descendants of volunteers in the International Brigades in recognition of their fight against fascism.

The daughter of a Manchester man who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War has reflected on his "incredible feat of solidarity" as her family is set to become Spanish citizens.

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard fights to preserve Black newspapers.

“We don’t even know all of what we have,” Mr. Nightingale marvels.
The basement is a trove of artifacts, including old editions of Black-owned newspapers that tell the life of Black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles cover slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The archive project, which is part of the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is bringing to life the faces of yesterday by merging them with the digital world of today. This way, the hope is, they won’t be lost ever again.

Disentangling obscured women: One Artist – ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ – Dismembered To Create Two: or The Importance Of Biography:

Googling ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ led me to the ArtUK page for ‘Mary Katharine [sic] Constance Lloyd’, which included birth and death dates and a short biography[i]. It was then only the work of a moment to discover on Ancestry that the woman with the given dates was not a Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd but a Katharine Constance Lloyd. How peculiar, I thought, and looked again at the ArtUK page. It then seemed obvious that the paintings displayed were unlikely to all be by the same hand. Four, including the one described by Birrell in the chapter on ‘Mary’, might be classed as ‘impressionist’, while the others were formal portraits of worthy 20th-century gentlemen, attired in various robes of office.
A little more online research established that there was, indeed, another artist with a similar name, Mary Constance Lloyd, and that a succession of art reference works had carelessly blended their two lives together – to create ’Mary Katharine Constance Lloyd’. I suppose it is a measure of how little importance is attached to the lives of such women artists that in 50 years no author had bothered to research either subject ab initio – but, when compiling a new biographical dictionary or making a footnote reference, had merely copied the – incorrect – information.

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We are always up for some toad-related phenomena around here: Newly identified species of Tanzanian tree toad leapfrog the tadpole stage and give birth to toadlets. How about that.

Reading this, I'm very much reminded of certain sff stories I read - late 60s/early 70s - that were either directly influenced by this research or via the population panic works that riffed off it: review of Lee Alan Dugatkin. Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity. Does this ping reminiscence in anyone else? (I was reading a lot of v misc anthologies etc in early 70s before I found my real niche tastes).

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What Is a 'Lavender Marriage,' Exactly? Feel that there is a longer and (guess what) Moar Complicated history around using conventional marriage to protect less conventional unions, but maybe it's a start towards interrogating the complexities of 'conventional marriages'.

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Sardonic larffter at this: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'

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Not quite what one anticipates from a clergyman's wife? The undercover vagrant who exposed workhouse life - a bit beyond vicarage/manse teaparties, Mothers' Meetings or running the Sunday School!

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Changes in wedding practice: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Wedding Days:

After the Reformation, Anglican canon law required that marriages took place in the morning, during divine service, in the parish of either the bride or groom – three features which typically elude modern weddings, which usually take place in the afternoon, in a special ceremony, and are far less likely (even if a religious wedding) to take place within a couple’s home parish. The centrality of divine service is the starkest difference, as it ensured that, unlike in modern weddings, marriages were public events at which the whole congregation ought to be present. They might even have occurred alongside other weddings or church ceremonies such as baptisms. A study of London weddings in the late 1570s found that, unsurprisingly given the canonical requirements, Sunday was the most popular days for weddings, accounting for c.44 percent of marriages taking place in Southwark and Bishopsgate. (By contrast, Sunday accounted for just 5.9 percent of marriages in 2022).

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Dorothy Allison Authored a New Kind of Queer Lit (or brought new perspectives into the literature of class?) I should dig out my copies of her works.

This is a very niche thing, for Forest-fans: Suspected criminal gangs are leaving pigeon racers bereft after a spate of thefts in aviaries across the country - this is actually happening in Belgium but as I recall in The Thuggery Affair there is a mention of Peter's bestie Selby having a Belgian ?grandfather who is a pigeon-fancier who has communicated assorted pigeon-lore to him:

Pigeon racing, once described as the horse racing of the poor, took root in the coal-mining region around Liège in 19th-century Belgium, reaching its heyday after the second world war, with about 200,000 fanciers in 1950. These days interest in the time-consuming hobby has waned. At the same time animal welfare activists and ethicists have criticised the sport for the stress imposed on birds kept in baskets before races and losses of pigeons in gruelling long-distance competitions. The Belgian Pigeon Federation says it requires its members to make the wellbeing of their animals a priority. For many fanciers, the sport is about more than competition – it’s about the companionship of the birds, the pursuit of breeding champions, and the thrill of the race.

It is lovely to see Tanith Lee getting appreciation: The Essential Tanith Lee: 'The eclectic, prolific author wrote more than 90 novels — primarily fantasy and science fiction, but also horror, erotica, mysteries and historical fiction. If you’ve never read her work, here’s where to start'. But I still have a bit of the same cavil that I had when a while ago people were bigging up Le Guin, that the focus is more on earlier works and the 'late-style' doesn't get much of a look in. Still, she did write a helluva a lot in a vast range of genres, I guess some principle of selection has to be applied.

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It's a bit annoying to see a headline Fashion and Feminism Have Always Co-Existed and discover that 'always' means since Gloria Steinem was a young thing. I suppose one cannot expect these people to have read Rebecca West's The Strange Necessity (1928) or considered the longer history of feminism and dress, sigh.

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This woman sounds fascinating - not one story but several? tell me again about meek oppressed submissive Victorian women - Helen Macfarlane is now known to have been the first translator of the Communist Manifesto into English. One totally wants to know more about this incident:

But Macfarlane’s involvement with Chartism and the radical London milieu in which Harney, Marx and Engels moved was shortlived. In 1851, after a disastrous New Year’s Eve party, Macfarlane broke with Harney and left Chartism and its connections behind. According to letter Marx sent to Engels a short time later, this was because Harney’s wife Mary Cameron, herself from a radical working-class family of weavers in Scotland, had insulted her. The truth, and the cause of the dispute, will never be known.

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More from Cambpop: Still living with Mum and Dad: historical patterns of young people living with their parents over historical time: suggests that with decline of children going out into service living with parents until marriage became more common during later C19th.

Something I hate: Unkindness.

Something I love: Unions.

Somewhere I have been: USA.

Somewhere I would like to go: Urbino, World Heritage Site notable for its remarkable historical legacy of Renaissance culture.

Someone I know: Una, who is on here, or used to be, under another name.

Favourite movie: You know, I cannot think of a favourite movie - very few movies at all - beginning with U - I don't much care for Umbrellas of Cherbourg and anyway that's only the translation of its original title.

Anyone who wants a letter, ask away.