Losses, wins, struggles continue
I'm trying to think if writers ever have/had this problem: What’s in a surname? The female artists lost to history because they got married. Because in the case of writers, they just kept on publishing under the (male/gender neutral or just generally not identifiable to her daytime persona) name whatever their matrimonial or non-matrimonal ups and downs? (At least, after Miss Burney decided to start publishing as Madame D'Arblay.) A new biography of the painter Isabel Rawsthorne highlights how talented women have often missed out on the recognition they deserved.... She married three times and each time her name changed, meaning ‘she just had to start again’.
Though I will concede that the sad tales of those women artists who became the mistress/muse of some Bloke Who Painted With His Todger suggest that that was not necessarily a preferable alternative.
(Possibly men would rather wifey did not publish under married name in case readers suppose there is unflattering depiction of him somewhere in the pages, or maybe he is even the corpse.)
***
After spotting this on Twitter, More war hero statues 'wholly retrograde' move, says UK women's group. Tory MPs’ campaign to honour VC and GC medal holders ‘will increase gender imbalance’ of civic statues, and seeing someone claim that there are only 25 statues of women in the whole UK, I ran and found out, and this (2018, so it may be a very few more by now) Reality Check: How many UK statues are of women?. Claims there are actually 80, once you deduct images that represent Symbolickal Qualities (with or without exposed or lightly-clad bubbies), 38 of which are Royal. Still NotALot. I'm also wondering, how much public sculpture by women is out there, though in my peregrinations I've managed to see a lot of Hepworth and Nevelson, working in non-representational mode.
***
Siiiiiigh: BBC under fire over 'strikingly hostile' interview of Muslim Council of Britain head: Last month, 29-year-old Mohammed, a training and development consultant from Glasgow, became the organisation’s first female leader, as well as its youngest. On 4 February, Mohammed appeared as a guest on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme. In the interview with Emma Barnett, Mohammed was repeatedly asked about the number of female imams in the country. The letter notes: “Despite Mohammed’s repeated claims that religious adjudication was not within the parameters of her role leading a civil society organisation, Barnett asked the question about female imams four times, each time interrupting Mohammed’s answer. “The framing of the interview and clipping up of the ‘female imam’ segment for social media mirrored the style and tone of an accountability interview with a politician, rather than authentically recognising and engaging in what this represented for British Muslim women. Moreover, the false equivalence between imams with rabbis and priests in a religion that has no clergy reflected a basic lack of religious literacy needed for authentic engagement with British Muslim communities.”
***
However, a WIN in a somewhat (perhaps) unexpected place: A court in Delhi has acquitted a journalist of defamation after she accused a former government minister of sexual assault, in a landmark ruling for India’s #MeToo movement: Indian journalist Priya Ramani had faced up to two years in jail for criminal defamation over an article she had written accusing Mobashar Jawed Akbar, a former foreign minister and newspaper editor, of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room during a job interview. Ramani had initially written the article for Vogue in 2017 without naming Akbar, but decided to go public in 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement. Following Ramani’s statement, over 20 other women came forward with allegations against Akbar, ranging from rape and assault to systematically using his senior position to harass young female journalists.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3199396.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.