Joanna Koerten’s Scissor-Cut Works Were Compared to Michelangelo: And then, snip by snip, she was cut out of the frame of Renaissance art history: Oil painting, along with sculpture, was seen as the true medium of “high art.” Anything else smacked of kitsch or handicraft. Yet the professional world of oil painting, with its strict, exclusionary ( Read more... )

This comes top because, wow, triumph of commonsense, how is it that this can be? National Trust report on slavery links did not break charity law, regulator says. The National Trust did not breach charity law by publishing a report that found itself at the centre of a “culture war” after it made links between its country house properties and the UK ( Read more... )

Magdalene College Cambridge has discovered a treasure trove of women’s intellectual history (I am always narked at claims of 'Ahead of Her Time' when obviously she was very much part of it): and I will describe this as 'lost in the patriarchal stacks of an institution which did not admit women until 1988': The college was the last to accept female ( Read more... )

I can quite see that a lot of 'itsajoke!!!' is merely a feeble cover for something that is not funny at all.
I also observe that there are people who do things for their own amusement and that of others that is cruel and unusual to somebody somewhere.
So, I was thinking, but are there not jokes which are simply harmlessly entertaining? e.g. the ( Read more... )

I was not previously aware of the expression 'al desko' - is this because I am now out of the workplace, or because somebody made it up yesterday morning?
Anyway, as a well-known misanthrope, I feel I would run like hell did I find myself in this workplace culture - 'his team all have lunch - and afternoon ice-cream breaks - together at the cafe ( Read more... )

Recognising the lady-persons...
I was about to post, it does not say much for your crying up of women writers who should have blue plaques when you can't even get the titles of their books right, but I see that this has now been corrected:
This article was amended on 2 November 2018 to include the correct title of Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent ( Read more... )

Thoughts which probably don't particularly cohere brought to you by reading an article by someone researching the history of 70s feminism (nope, still no mermaids singing to me... perhaps I should roll my trousers a bit more) and improving the cataloguing of a collection of correspondence at work.

The researcher mentions that a number of the ( Read more... )

Riffing off this and other discussion of the question I've seen hither and yon, is it not the case (she perpends) that when anybody says 'no members of X group are writing in Y category' (or, 'why is there no Y category writing by X group' or 'why can't X group write Y category' or other similar formulations), they are either displaying their ( Read more... )

Yay:

First woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. And are we entirely surprised to hear that Ostrom was working in a branch outside the financial mainstream? Pretty much par for the course where women are concerned:
She also faced the hurdles common to most women of her generation entering the sciences - she was discouraged from taking a ( Read more... )

Have just been cataloguing papers of a fairly distinguished biological scientist who turned out (and this is not mentioned in any entries in the standard works of reference) to have been brought up in the Exclusive Brethren: and did not leave until past the age of 50.

I'm guessing this had to do with responsibilities towards ageing parents who ( Read more... )