It's Thanksgiving, for my friends in the USA*, and it's International Men's Day.
And it occured to me that one can be very thankful for IMD, if only because it provides a useful and necessary riposte every 8th March to the blokes who come out from the woodwork to moan gripe and whinge Y No International MENZ Day? ('19 November, bozo'.)
It is ( ( Read more... )

In this instance, become Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire for many years - even if she had to struggle to get equal pay - and compose music that was, in her lifetime, acclaimed by her peers.
Louise Farrenc.
Good article here on the problems for female composers (in C19th and at other periods) and the factors facilitating Farrenc's ( Read more... )

This guy, in fact, is on the coelocanth list for being a living fossil:
A Tory MP has bombarded the government's equalities watchdog with a series of extraordinary letters about race and sex discrimination, in a one-man campaign against "political correctness".:
In the latest of 19 letters sent since April 2008, and likely to dismay equal rights ( Read more... )

Women's refuges told they must admit men: Councils say charities could lose funding under new gender equality laws:
Fiona Mactaggart, the former Home Office minister, said some refuge services had lost grants or contracts in what she said was an "unintended consequence" of changes in equality law ( Read more... )

Something of a theme here on race and deracination:

A Premier League footballer confronted by police officers as he looked in a jeweller's shop window suggested yesterday he was targeted because he was black. Seems altogether plausible to me.

Jeevan Vasagar finds food for thought in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's mixture of recipes and memoir - which she ( Read more... )

Via a mailing list I'm on, information on this new book:
Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature Edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel, foreword by Jack Zipes:
Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to ( Read more... )

The Representation of the People Act, 6 Feb 1918. And eighty years since they got it on the same terms as men.

From today's Observer:

40 years on from the equal pay struggles of 1968 - still not there 120 years after the TUC passed an equal pay resolution in the aftermath of the Matchgirls' Strike.

Persistence of the Double Standard, let me show ( Read more... )

A crocodile is for life, not just for Christmas: tally of dangerous wildlife kept in garden sheds and spare rooms across the country.

Epic journeys:
[F]emale greater horseshoe bat flew more than 100 miles from Gloucestershire to a bat colony in Dorset in under three months. The rare bat is sedentary and rarely flies far from its roost.
A British ( Read more... )

On this day in 1928: passing of the Equal Franchise Bill.

And my glad whistling of 'March of the Women' comes to an abrupt halt when I read this: After learning about the tricks that trainers use on wild animals, Amy Sutherland decided to try the same techniques on her husband - with dramatic results. Creepy, or what?

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In other news: Why bother ( Read more... )