Assorted linkerie
This put a different spin on Lonely Goatherd for me: Old Irish goats return to County Dublin to protect hills from wildfires: Jeuken, 31, had an edge: she ran her own herd on her family farm, earning the nickname “the goat lady”. Last year she graduated as a veterinary nurse. She spent a few weeks at Mulranny getting to know the Old Irish goats, and letting them get to know her, before their move to Dublin. Trust is key. Unlike sheep, which can be driven forward, goats will only follow, so the herder must walk ahead, said Jeuken. “They’re a bit sexist: they respond better to females than males.”
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
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Former colleague on amazing things you can discover from the stuff you might usually discard: Archive Treasures: Travel and travails - musicians on the road in 1950: One of the joys of the Britten Pears archive is the light it sheds on everyday practicalities, the nuts and bolts of Britten and Pears’ life and careers together. The financial papers in the collection are a rich source for this: as self-employed men Britten and Pears had to keep evidence of purchases and earnings in case their annual tax returns were audited, and the receipts that they retained for this purpose flesh out their lives in remarkable detail.
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Those receipts reveal another of the fascinations of this documentation: peeling back the little sticker on the bill that notes that it was settled up by Pears, we see that the occupants of Room 51 are given as Messrs Britten and Pears. Presumably this was a twin room rather than a double, but nonetheless this is an indication of how their travelling as professional partners allowed them to share a room as personal partners also.
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Women's stories: what do we miss by focusing on the successful pioneers? The Forgotten Life of Annie Reay Barker, M.D: Annie Reay Barker (1851-1945) was a medical pioneer who was amongst the first women to qualify as a doctor in the late nineteenth century. Unlike other medical women of her time, Barker did not attract notable attention or publicity, therefore little has been written about her personal and professional life. Following a successful, yet tragically short-lived, career at the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Women, Barker was committed to Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water with a diagnosis of ‘Chronic Mania’. Barker’s story sheds new light on the pressures placed on early women doctors to succeed, as well as the troubled internal dynamics of this pioneering group of women.
And an even grimmer tale:
Brutally Suppressed in Her Lifetime, Gertrude Beasley Is Finally on Our Bookshelves: A searingly feminist 1925 memoir of life in small-town Texas rises from the dustbin of patriarchy. For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley’s 1925 memoir My First Thirty Years has been more a legend than a book. Although it was published to a favorable review in the New Yorker and high praise from both preeminent American literary critic H. L. Mencken (“the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash”) and British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell (“truthful, which is illegal”), the book was quickly banned in the U.S. and Britain and remained almost unobtainable for decades. The tangled history of My First Thirty Years, and Beasley’s horrific personal fate, are case studies in society’s merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths.
Her work at least is preserved, and acknowleged under her name, but very little is known about her life: Amateur botanist Margaret Rebecca Dickinson painted the wildflowers she collected in the English countryside: In her will, MRD left… 'my botanical collection of dried plants and my paintings of them my collection of seaweeds and my paintings of fungi to the Hancock Museum Newcastle upon Tyne as well as any other articles of mine of scientific interest which the Committee of the Museum may choose to accept'.
I did know about this researcher, but I would, wouldn't I: Why We Should Recognize Dr. Katharine Bement Davis Alongside Dr. Alfred Kinsey as a Pioneering Sex Researcher: Davis’s pathbreaking study of female sexuality and her founding membership in the nation’s first committee for the study of sex made her a pioneering sexologist, but her desire to “put sex on the scientific map” also caused her to lose her job-and ultimately led to her erasure from the official annals of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gender discrimination, as well as disagreement over the aims of the organization, also played an important role in Davis’s downfall, as her male colleagues, who had long resented her leadership, used Davis’s most innovative ideas against her.
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And the formerly immensely famous women who just slip out of history...: Joanna Baillie's contemporaries placed her above all women poets except Sappho. According to Harriet Martineau she had 'enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and … been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare'.... But even when Martineau met her, in the 1830s, that fame seemed to belong to a bygone era. There were no revivals of her plays in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; and yet, as psychological studies, her tragedies would seem very suited to the intimacy of television or film. Twentieth-century scholars have recognized her importance as an innovator on the stage and as a dramatic theorist, and revisionary critics and literary historians of the Romantic period concerned to reassess the place of women writers are acknowledging her significance.
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