It's Always More Complicated

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.

***

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).

***

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'.

***

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

***

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!

***

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).

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

I find the work this project is doing on matrimonial law very exciting, and also how they are digging way beyond the big scandalous divorce cases to the quotidien: The Most Radical Legislation of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Wherefore She Prays for an Order for the Protection of her Earnings and Property’ (though I'm now wondering what happened in 1893, perhaps that is an episode Still to Come).

***

This is almost a reverse case: a woman scientist who was forced to conceal that she was married in order to keep on working: The secret life of Miss Ruby Payne-Scott:

Until the amendment of the Public Service Act in November 1966, women employed in the Australian Public Service were required to resign upon marriage. Married women were obliged to accept temporary positions with poor career prospects and no entitlements. Like countless other women, the scientist hid her marriage. When her six-year secret was finally exposed in 1950, she was forced to retire as a permanent staffer and was reinstated on a temporary basis. Never one to mince words, Ruby told the CSIRO:

Personally I feel no legal or moral obligation to have taken any other action than I have in making my marriage known… the present procedure with regard to married women… seems to go far beyond the simple statement in the Act … [it] is ridiculous and can lead to ridiculous results.

***

A different perspective on declining population and who it is who are not having children (wo wo deth of civ etc etc): Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them: 'Men’s role in declining birth rates is often overlooked, says Vincent Straub, who studies men’s health and fertility at the University of Oxford'.

***

Some recent offerings from the Cambridge Population History People: To the manor bound: Serfdom in Europe; What kept the rich and the poor apart in industrial Manchester?

***

This one should probably have featured in my post earlier this week: ‘An Absurd Rage for Public Speaking’: An Abolitionist Fair Orator in the London Debating Societies, 1788–1791

***

Actually, duckie, I think the term here would be 'kept woman', and your friends actually pick up on that: I’m a ‘trad wife’ in a happy marriage. How can I get my friends to accept me for who I am?. Is this spooky or what?

One night I ended up at a party with people I didn’t know and someone slipped something in my drink and I lost all memory until the next morning when I woke up on the sofa in a strange man’s apartment. He had rescued me and taken me to his place. I didn’t leave his flat for three months, except to be taken out to dinner and sent off to a gym to get back in shape.

I mean, it's Texas and all, even if Austin is not typical (or it wasn't when I was there, decades ago):

Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read: The Story of PEN:

explores the history of PEN and its continuing relevance as an international organization focused on freedom of expression. Using the archive of both English PEN and PEN International at the Harry Ransom Center, this exhibition follows the founding of the organization of P.E.N. (poets, essayists, and novelists) as a dining club in London in 1921, its fight against the Nazi book burning campaigns in the 1930s, and its present status as the world's foremost association of writers, operating in more than 90 countries. This exhibition spotlights creators like Radclyffe Hall, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood alongside the everyday people who promote freedom of expression.

How unlike the pusillanimity reported of an exhibit at the National Archives Museum in DC: The National Archives Museum Is Under Fire for Allegedly Scrubbing Difficult Historical Events:

The National Archives Museum, under the leadership of U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, has allegedly modified planned and existing exhibits involving subjects like the government’s treatment of Native Americans and the history of birth control medication in favor of more anodyne subjects, according to numerous anonymous staffers speaking to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.
....
Some modifications touched on some of the most hot-button subjects of our day. Shogan reportedly ordered that employees remove information about contraceptive medicine from a section on patents and replace it with a patent for the bump stock, a controversial device that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire at higher rates of speed and was employed in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas which killed 58 people, making it the most deadly mass shooting in American history. Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese Americans in WWII internment camps, according to staff, were cut for being “too negative and controversial.”

This actually makes me fume a bit: it's all very well waxing nostalgic over these relics, many of which will presumably vanish into private collections: A haul of 8,000 items from 150 shipwrecks – including the Titanic and Henry the VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose – is to be auctioned after the closure of a Cornish museum, but this is what happens when people go 'let's do the show right here' 'let's us start doing a collection on some topic without talking to existing collecting institutions which have, you know, robust ongoing support for maintaining collections'. (Okay, I have had some bitter experience of this kind of thing with archives, though that tends to be Enthusiast in University Department, god forbid they should have liaised at any point with an archivist or special collections librarian.)

***

One's opinion on the aesthetic and indeed horticultural value of torturing bushes into '100 living sculptures in the grounds, the variety of unusual shapes rang[ing] from chess pieces and birds to trees trimmed to look like Homer Simpson, Darth Vader and Queen Elizabeth I', but if you're going to invest yourself in that sort of thing, yay for keeping it up since 1674, what what what.

***

(This link did not work for me in Firefox chiz chiz but does in Opera): This 18th-Century Painting Could Rewrite Black History in Britain: New research brings to light the life of James Cumberlidge, a servant who became a trumpeter for King George III. This goes rather well with Britain’s first black voter was in 1749, 25 years earlier than thought, and ran a pub.

***

Also on looking differently at the marginalised in history: Disabled People’s Activism in Victorian Britain.

***

I think this is probably already fairly well known? the dubious findings of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment: Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment.

***

This might actually be a valid and useful purpose for AI, as anyone who has wrestled with secretary hand will at least be prepared to give some consideration to: Reading English Secretary Hand with AI: the Egerton Model.