Wednesday found the British Library absolutely chokka this afternoon
What I Read
Finished The Reinvention of Humanity which was very good: clearly the author thought these people were doing important work around race and culture that we needed to be reminded of and was still of value, but he did not glide over the unexamined attitudes around race and sex that they still retained. But as far as saying people from, oh, the 20s-30s-40s were 'of their period' in having noxious racist and eugenicist attitudes, no, there were other people 'of their period' who were contesting that. Even if some of their research methodology is not along what we would now consider entirely the best ethical practice lines... And boy, Edward Sapir does not come over as anything but a creepy loathsome old sexist (it certainly reads as if he wanted Margaret Mead to be his MidLife Renewal Babe and have his baybeez and presumably do all those things that go in the acknowledgements as 'to my wife, who' and when she was not having it was toxically misogynist all over her and her work).
Rachel Wood, Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping (2019). I was rather disappointed in this, which was heavy with theory and possibly over-use of the term 'neo-liberal', and a really small sample size (and given that Wood was doing participant-observer stuff, think we might have had more about her, ahem). I was hoping for something just a bit more like Lynn Comella's Vibrator Nation, only looking at the rather different UK history of marketing sex toys.
Was also a bit underwhelmed by Catherine Clay, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (2018). I liked her British Women Writers 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (2006), but this struck me as a bit dry by contrast - doing different things, okay, and possibly trying to cram in rather a lot of things about the way Time and Tide was positioning itself over the interwar period. I felt somehow the personalities and relationships got a bit lost.
On the go
Still London Clubland on the e-reader - I'm not sure that it's yet told me anything terribly new and startling about Victorian men's clubs, but I'm still not that far into it.
Up next
Possibly I should take a break and read something a bit lighter and fluffier? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3025565.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.