Various things (which I will probably have to manually cross-post to LJ, sigh)
National Portrait Gallery to feature more women in its collection: Curators will increase representation of female artists and sitters and seek overlooked stories: yay, I guess? Having been to various exhibitions there on particular groups of women (e.g the Bluestocking circle) and particular artists (Cindy Sherman) either being or making art. A bit miffed - okay, not everybody is entirely au fait with early C20th wymmynz herstry, but Ray Strachey wrote important histories of the suffrage movement: and was secretary to Nancy Astor when she was first woman MP to actually take her seat when she succeeded to her husband's, which (Bulletin of I think I heard this at a conference panel one time) Strachey took on as Her Duty to The Cause, now women were actually in the halls of government.
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It is also gratifying to see that For the First Time Ever, the Rijksmuseum Will Hang Works by Female Dutch Masters in Its Most Prestigious Gallery:
Finally acknowledging women’s considerable contributions to art history, the museum has hung a trio of paintings by Dutch women artists Judith Leyster (c. 1600-1660), Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), and Gesina ter Borch (1633-1690) alongside their better-known male counterparts.
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That visibility has long been denied female artists, who were all-too-often dismissed as amateurs, their accomplishments forgotten after their deaths, and their works frequently misattributed to their husbands, fathers, or male teachers.
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Also women and art-related: Edmonia Lewis, the first professional African-American sculptor: 'Her father was a free African-American and her mother a Chippewa Indian. Orphaned before she was five, Lewis lived with her mother’s nomadic tribe until she was twelve years old'. Later hung out with the arty boho (and at least partly sapphic) ladies' set in Rome.
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Was astronomer Caroline Herschel’s success down to extreme politeness? I think the term you mean is 'the deferential behaviour considered appropriate to her gender and status' (compare/contrast the situation of Ada, Countess of Lovelace). I also have a feeling (from other things I've read about Herschel) that what those diaries might have contained was a record she perhaps didn't want kept of familial tensions - the Herschels back home in Hanover had wanted her to stay there as a domestic drudge, and while William had liberated her from that, it was in service to his ambitions in music and astronomy, and his marriage was particularly difficult for her.
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Amy Levy: A London Poet:
Innovations in public transport offered women greater mobility and independence within the limits of respectability. Levy herself was one of the first to reject the convention that women should travel inside an omnibus, pointing out to her shocked family that she had been accompanied on her initial journey on the top deck by the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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Oscar Wilde.... had noticed a promising volume of poetry, Xantippe, and Other Verse (1881), published while she was a student: ‘The modest little paper-covered book, which contains only thirty pages, was published in Cambridge, and was, we believe, never advertised. Its merit, however, attracted a good deal of attention, and the whole edition was sold out.’2 This volume contains a dramatic monologue, ‘Xantippe’, in which Levy voices the despair and fierce grief of Socrates’ wife, a woman known to history only as a scold. Her Xantippe has entered into marriage with a man she saw as a mentor, and is bitterly disappointed to realise that Socrates wanted a submissive wife and not an equal. When Plato, Socrates and Alcibiades contemptuously dismiss her attempt to contribute to their philosophical conversation, she disfigures the white marble of the idealised Hellenic scene in a maenadic frenzy.... In ancient Athens, Xantippe’s lonely rage turns to icy despair and withdrawal. Levy, in 1880s London, could turn to sympathetic peers. She encountered writers and journalists like Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black and Olive Schreiner at the British Museum, a publicly visible space associated with professional labour,
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An act of resistance that went (perhaps) further than intended: “I wish the old devil was dead”: murder and master-servant relations in the East Midlands.
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A different servant story: a long life of companionship that seemed to end up producing social advancement: From Downstairs to Upstairs: The story of Ellen Lester.
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I was distressed to read this: It has been home to literary legends, psychoanalysts and activists, but now residents at the Mary Feilding Guild home in north London have been told they have to leave at the end of May after it changed ownership. I thought I'd posted about this place before, but can't find it.
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