A few things of remark
Are we surprised at this? are we? His fair lady: how George Bernard Shaw’s wife played a vital role in his masterworks. Charlotte’s influence has been downplayed, says a new book on how women are written out of history.
Oh gee, I see, when I go and look at the blurb for the forthcoming book that this relates to, that I had a very minor interaction with the author over one of the other subjects, who was acquainted with somebody I'd worked on... Throughout history, records of high-achieving women have been lost through the pervasive assumption of male dominance. Independently performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands' work, as unpaid and often unacknowledged secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men's domestic domains; even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active 'disremembering' of women's achievements.
Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, best-selling author and academic Ann Oakley interrogates conventions of history and biography writing using the case studies of four women married to well-known men - Charlotte Shaw (nee Payne-Townshend), Mary Booth (nee Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (nee Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair). Asking critical questions about the mechanisms that maintain gender inequality, despite thriving feminist and other equal rights movements, she contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early 20th century.
(An instance where, alas, I fear the invocation of 'throughout history' is justified.)
***
I feel this was a task more worth undertaking than Yet Another Bio of a woman who, although important and interesting, is not forgotten and neglected, and as this review points out, quite recently had a very sound biography done of her. The Case of the Married Woman by Antonia Fraser review - justice delayed.
I was thinking I'd first encountered her in one of Doris Leslie's biographies romancees, but I am now inclined to think it was in David Cecil's biography of Lord Melbourne. Though I think one or other of her poems may have featured in girls' magazines of my extreme youth.
***
Some links about Barbara Hepworth. Several reviews I've seen of this - Barbara Hepworth by Eleanor Clayton - have similar cavils that it's not much about LIFE - to which I wonder whether her main relationships were with the materials she worked with...
See this review of the exhibtion in Wakefield: Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life review - a blockbuster of diminishing returns: Hepworth was famously tactile. Even when she wasn’t working, she always had a hand on something: a pebble, a shell. Tools, she insisted, were “precious extensions of one’s sight and touch”.
Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life is an evocative celebration of Wakefield’s local hero: Barbara Hepworth’s first big homecoming show in Wakefield was not an unqualified success. Writing to the director of the Wakefield City Art Gallery after the opening in 1944, she noted the reaction in the local paper: “I think it is, without any doubt, the worst press notice I’ve had in 16 years.” In 1951, when Hepworth exhibited in the city as part of the Festival of Britain, the Yorkshire Observer ran with the frosty headline: “Wakefield Show of Unusual Sculpture”. Wakefield may have taken a while to warm to its sculptor daughter, but 70 years on, she is firmly entrenched as a local hero, and the sculpture gallery named in her honour is marking its 10th anniversary with a celebration of Hepworth’s life and work.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3242593.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.