Because when I hear somebody is putting out a book about neglected awesome heroines, my reaction is usually a deep groan and a murmur of 'Rosalind Franklin - Lise Meitner - Ada Lovelace - Mary Anning - ' all those usual suspects whom I have heard only too often described as heroines hidden from history. 'Hidden' in some unusual meaning of that word ( Read more... )

Have been given to think, by a post in my dwcircle, on the historical lacunae in feminism.

Not that this is a new issue, and investigating the lost or forgotten or just overlooked and neglected histories of women and their thought has been around through many iterations of feminism/proto-feminism.

It strikes me that there's something arrogant and ( Read more... )

The ODNB Life of the Day spotlights another of the wonderful right-thinking yet weird eccentrics who populate Our Island Story:
Pomeroy [née Legge], Florence Wallace, Viscountess Harberton (1843/4-1911):
Eccentric, self-confident, dedicated, and rich, Lady Harberton spent years wearing odd clothes and setting up societies doomed to failure. Yet ( Read more... )

Okay, I am all for a whacking big article celebrating Virago Modern Classics, because, clearly, an important phenomenon in bringing to attention a critical mass of books by women and a female literary tradition.

So, yay for them.

Except, I certainly already knew about quite a lot of the writers they were reprinting, they were not (for me) shiny new ( Read more... )

Some while ago I posted a link to an article by Margaret Drabble about Amber Blanco White with some comments by myself. She was the original of Ann Veronica in Wells's novel of that name, but in fact married someone else after getting pregnant by him. Anyway, as Drabble points out in this article, she went on to have an interesting, useful and ( Read more... )

Yet another nail in the coffin of that depressingly undead historimyth that early C19th women of the middle/upper classes were totally about the private sphere, embroidery, and maybe a little gentle novel-writing, probably under pseudonyms such as 'A Gentlewoman of Quality' or 'The Author of [some other book]'. I give you Harriet Grote, today's ( Read more... )

In this case, I feel that I ought to be reading up for my Wiscon panels (either checking back over my shelves for useful examples, or scurrying round checking out New and Good and Recommendable). However, what has been my major reading over the past week was Susan Pedersen's Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004), which I have been ( Read more... )

Do you ever have those weeks (or other periods of time) into which someone seems to have snuck an extra day or so without you noticing? Or those days where someone has subtly extended the duration of the hours and the minutes?

This is such a week for me.

No idea why.

***

For general information: A Future for the Past: [Sir Flinders] Petrie's ( Read more... )

Coming around again - nothing new under the sun - perpetual cycles: the intensity of concern we have now about childhood, and the remedies and solutions we propose, have a remarkable similarity to those in play at the beginning of the 20th century.

Josephine Butler gets her due - I don't think of her as forgotten, and I think that side of it can be ( Read more... )

However, am feeling distinctly better than I did earlier in the week. Even if I have missed 2 or 3 things I wish I hadn't, especially the book launch at the Foundling Museum.

At least being at home with nothing else pressing to do meant that, although installing security software upgrade when prompted yesterday re renewal was a longwinded bore, it ( Read more... )