Apparently - I think this may have been reported before? 'Albanian Sworn Virgins' are a dying breed: With More Freedom, Young Women in Albania Shun Tradition. One also rather hopes that it is not just that they can go to the big city and get jobs outside the pressures of a patriarchal family system, but that it no longer pertains that the area is ( Read more... )

I keep meaning to mention this: I think I may have posted at some time about my friend who wrote a well-received book on what happened to the children of British women by black US GIs after the war (not an edifying story on the side of either government: the US Army authorities would not give per for interracial marriages to take place; British ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Do You Dream of Terra-Two, which sort of answered some of the Huh? thoughts I'd had in the early stages, but I wasn't sure it was bringing a lot new to the mix.
Megan Whalen Turner, Return of the Thief (was anyone else getting slight I, Claudius vibes from the narrator in the early parts?) - very good, though perhaps I should ( Read more... )

Has been rather the theme of this week, one way and another.
It pretty much began, sometime Sunday night/Monday morning, as I went downstairs in the dark and my foot skidded off a stair, jarring my knee. Which was very ouchy all the following day, and still a bit twingey, though it survived yoga.
I was due for a routine mammogram on Tuesday: ( Read more... )

If somebody was born in 1881, and did not qualify in medicine until 1929 (and as the first woman was admitted to Bristol Medical School in 1891, I don't think she was the first woman medical graduate therefrom: also, would it have been an MD degree rather than the standard MS BS? enquiring minds, etc) she cannot by any stretch of the imagination be ( Read more... )

Dept of of, gender and sexuality, ORL B MOAR COMPLYK8D: Guillaume Gallienne was different from his three athletic brothers - he liked to dance and dress up as a woman. His mother treated him like a girl and told him he was gay. The thing is, he was actually heterosexual
Dept of, there are reasons for this: Home is where the greatest accident risk ( Read more... )

Having ventured into the slimepits of Comment is Free, though purely to correct a factual error.

But my dr rdrz will already be aware that anybody who claims somebody was the first whatever, or the first since some distant precursor, when that is just their ignorant presupposition (or somebody try to big themselves up as more epoch-making than ( Read more... )

(Early July, I think.)

( Litfic )

Currently reading a novel about a nurse who trains at the (Not) London Hospital in the East End of London, sometime during the interwar period. I.e., the same hospital that featured in the TV docudrama Casualty 1907.

About which I fulminated that they might have the medical details spot on, but the social ambience was RONG, RONG, RONG, far too ( Read more... )

( Read more... )