Women's Self Defense with Umbrella
I forgot to mention in my previous Eastercon post the Bartitsu ("The Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes") lecture that we went to. This, it must be said, started slow (and the speaker did a good impression of someone who had been drafted in to talk on the topic at the last minute and was making the best he could from a frantic Google and the discovery of bartitsu.org). However it was interesting to see that Victorian Orientalism also extended to the adoption and adaptation of Eastern Martial Arts nearly a hundred years before the craze resurfaced in the West (experts will now tell me there was a continuous Karate/Judo/Jujitsu/etc tradition in the UK from then onwards). Bartitsu, as a word is a conflation of the surname of Edward William Barton-Wright (who cobbled it together from every Martial Art tradition he could get his hands on, in so far as I could tell) and Jujitsu which was one of its major components.
Most of the talk was an interesting, if not terribly exciting, tour around the Victorian criminal scene, the European components of Bartitsu (specifically Queensbury and pre-Queensbury fist fighting rules) and a discussion of exactly which Jujitsu hold Holmes might have used on Moriarty. Then the topic of women's self defense came up.
The speaker admitted to some qualms about the whole area of self-defense for women, based around the observation that you need a lot of skill to compensate for deficiencies in weight and strength. But he had had a revelation when he looked at Bartitsu:
"Unknown to herself almost every woman carries with her a perfect means of protection from either lunatic or hooligan when she walks abroad or travels, in the shape of that inseparable companion of womanhood-an umbrella or parasol!"
"while she clutches the wrist of her assailant, she thrusts the umbrella with all her force into his neck."
"The rough is not living who can survive a second experience of this nature, and with experience a lady can hold at bay not one but two or three assailants."
The speaker commented that the only unrealistic thing was the conspicuous lack of a large pool of blood.
Like the speaker, I am also resorting to Bartitsu.org and specifically their reproduction of A 1902 article from the Daily Mirror. "... fencing has no practical use, but, when the principles of swordsmanship are applied to the umbrella, the woman who has become mistress of the art will feel a sense of security when travelling or alone that hitherto even the bravest of the fair sex have been strangers to."
This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/2550.html.
Most of the talk was an interesting, if not terribly exciting, tour around the Victorian criminal scene, the European components of Bartitsu (specifically Queensbury and pre-Queensbury fist fighting rules) and a discussion of exactly which Jujitsu hold Holmes might have used on Moriarty. Then the topic of women's self defense came up.
The speaker admitted to some qualms about the whole area of self-defense for women, based around the observation that you need a lot of skill to compensate for deficiencies in weight and strength. But he had had a revelation when he looked at Bartitsu:
"Unknown to herself almost every woman carries with her a perfect means of protection from either lunatic or hooligan when she walks abroad or travels, in the shape of that inseparable companion of womanhood-an umbrella or parasol!"
"while she clutches the wrist of her assailant, she thrusts the umbrella with all her force into his neck."
"The rough is not living who can survive a second experience of this nature, and with experience a lady can hold at bay not one but two or three assailants."
The speaker commented that the only unrealistic thing was the conspicuous lack of a large pool of blood.
Like the speaker, I am also resorting to Bartitsu.org and specifically their reproduction of A 1902 article from the Daily Mirror. "... fencing has no practical use, but, when the principles of swordsmanship are applied to the umbrella, the woman who has become mistress of the art will feel a sense of security when travelling or alone that hitherto even the bravest of the fair sex have been strangers to."
This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/2550.html.