What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them: It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines - despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the ( Read more... )

Dr rdrz will doubtless have heard yr hedjog perorate about people being described as 'products of their time' to excuse their noxious opinions, even though a very little research will reveal that, no, those opinions were far from universal, and those held by persons in question may even have been considered pretty much Out There and Not Done by ( Read more... )

The obvious answer, in this case, and in all previous iterations, is (hat-tip to Dame Rebecca): 'Men are poor stuff. Men are terribly poor stuff'.
I came across this week some columnist in some conservative organ* a-woezering about wymmynyz these days, who are not only not getting married -
- and we remark that somebody who thinks that *OMG ( Read more... )

On that 'Let's publish a swathe of books by women who took male pseudonyms under their real names' gesture of 'reclamation -
I'm, like, you know, I think Mary Ann, or Marian, she experimented a lot with her name, might have preferred to have been Lewes rather than Evans? As far as ye patriarchy goes, we think her brother was a far worse ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Liza of Lambeth - everybody is fairly horrible and also pathetic. Plus, I thought it was a cop-out to have Liza die like that, but possibly (like the language issue I mentioned in my earlier post on the topic) Maugham felt having her surviving and having to go on the streets was not publishable?
Elizabeth von Arnim, The ( Read more... )

Intriguing article in Sunday's Observer which tries to get beyond the knee-jerk shock horror that there has been a demand at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) for the philosophy course to be a bit less dead and white - Are Soas students right to ‘decolonise’ their minds from western philosophers? - even if 'male' ( Read more... )

Initially, my heart sort of sank when I read this, because I thought, 'oh, wow, is this Clitoraid reprised?': My ambition is to empower all women to have orgasms.
Which I think is possibly a clickbait headline imposed at a higher editorial level, because Firliana Purwanti really has some sensible things to say from within Indonesian culture (though ( Read more... )

Gratifying to relate, this
forget-me-not panties will help protect the women in your life!
was a hoax. However, less gratifying to relate
Thousands of men from all over the world tried to buy our panties... and they were not alone. Lots of women begged us to make Forget Me Not Boxers ( Read more... )

(White rabbits white rabbits white rabbits)

(Does anyone else know this tradition about what you're suppose to say first thing on the first of the month, or variants?)

***

Thinking over the extraordinary excessiveness of airconditioning in many US interiors (hotels, restaurants, shops, etc): -

Is the Default Person for whom the temperature is ( 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... )