feminish

The UK Financial Times has recently published a profile of Ségolène Royal, aspiring Socialist candidate for France’s presidential elections next year.

The article concentrated on the fact that Royal is a woman. This is, perhaps, fair enough - France is yet to have a female President, and France’s first female Prime Minister (Édith Cresson) lasted less than a year. But I was struck by the surprising range of imagery deployed by the journalist - John Thurnhill, the Editor of the FT’s Europe edition (someone I’d expect to represent a pretty mainstream voice in the world of European economic commentary).

Since when is it appropriate and/or accurate to describe, in a respectable publication, a female politician as, variously, a china vase, a queen bee, an agony aunt and a dressage pony?

Consider me outraged:

“I wondered whether Royal was just an elegant vase in which voters were busily arranging the flowers of their dreams”

“As she draped herself across a front-row seat, the photographers swarmed around the queen bee of the Socialist party”

“She does not project the image of a monarchical president so much as that of a sympathetic political agony aunt.”

“It is dusk as she leaves the hall, trotting like a dressage pony, head erect, shoulders back.”

You can read the full text of the article here: FT.com/Arts & weekend

On the 5th October precisely 317 years ago today, several thousand women in Paris embarked on an unprecedented political act of force and power. Their ‘march on Versailles’ through the pouring rain finally compelled France’s beleaguered King to accept the people’s will and submit himself to their armed guard. It was the beginning of the end for the French monarchy, and the start of a Revolution worthy of the name….







What? Really?, was my first reaction when I learned about women’s extraordinary political radicalism in the ‘October Days’ of 1789. How come I’ve never heard of that before?! Such a powerful women-only political protest, wholly unprecedented in our history, with immense ramifications for France, the French Revolution and European democracy - and nobody told me?!

As I mentioned before, pulling together an outline of what happened with nice pix and primary sources was shockingly hard. Where are all the women’s historians on the web? And why do we need women’s historians to do it well anyway? What about the rest of ‘em?!

But I’ve been encouraged by Sandy D. and inspired by the women’s history snippets of Ms Natalie Bennett. And I know well that a 21st Century lass needs, “as a self-conscious, self defining human being a knowledge of her history; a knowledge of women’s rebellions and organised movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished” (Adrienne Rich):

So, I’ve just posted:The March of the Women, 5 October 1789: what happened?, which includes an In-a-nutshell background to the March.

Coming up tomorrow: Women marched, so what? Did it make a difference and why should we care?

A 21st century re-write of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas:

Four Fivers

A donation to Stop the War - in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq, you ask of me: “every little helps”.

A fiver, you say, would do the trick, ‘make a difference’ even, to help your campaign against the bombs and death, the devastation, rape and torture.

Here’s a fiver, spend it freely, however you will, I reply - But I’ll first be giving out another three:

The first I’ll be giving to fund women’s studies at universities, so 21st Century lasses can learn about wars and politics and international relations - not only the war-messes that have been made and continue to be made by men, against women, but about different answers to the problems those war-messes set out to solve.

[Seventy years ago Woolf gave her First Guinea to prevent war to women’s colleges]

The second can fund campaigns to get more women into politics, banks, industry and the army. We now know women debate differently about war and peace on the floor of the Commons; they act against cultures of sexualised aggression in banks, they’re more effective and level-headed as CEO’s, and - I warrant - they rape the war enemy less.

[That’ll change the ‘odour - or shall we call it ‘atmosphere’?-” of public life, as Woolf said when she laid down her Second Guinea for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’]

The third fiver can go to fund feminist activists and writers, online and in print. We’ll discover that we’re not all Melanie Phillipses or Ann Coulters. How many leader-writers on British papers are women? How many political editors? Or regular, run-of-the-mill news journalists, for that matter? That’s a fiver for the f-word, for feministing and for Women in Black.

Not because Woolf was wrong to give her Third Guinea to the anti-war campaign which asked her for one in the first place, but because she was right to say women should make use of “Typewriters and duplicators … these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments” and so “rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors.” Then it’s possible to “speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding.”

“Since we [women] are different,” she said, “our help must be different… we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

That’s why I’m giving a third fiver for feminist bloggers - before my fourth for Stop The War.

[Photos courtesy of ebr1 on Flickr]

Three Guineas is Virginia Woolf’s most controversial and polemical feminist work, written in 1936/7, to the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the muscle-flexing of fascists in Italy and Germany. It takes the form of a letter replying to a request (from a grey-haired old English barrister) for a guinea (21 shillings - about £1.05 in new money) towards a Society for the Justice, Equality and Liberty of all men and women. A donation, he claims, would help to prevent war.

By all means take your guinea, says Woolf (delighting in the fact it’s one she’s earned herself). But first she will give one guinea for women’s colleges and a second for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’, her comprehensive, elaborate and well-defended argument over 190 pages being that the more women there are in positions of power (in politics, science, culture or the church) the less warmongering society will be.

For a full lowdown on Three Guineas (including synopsis, key quotes and a bibliography), see the feminish » Three Guineas Redux: all a girl needs to know

The cover pictured was designed by her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell

Women’s Space/The Margins has a great article on Iraqi women’s blogs, All Iraq Was Kidnapped: Voices of Iraqi Women. It includes this photo of Shia women protesting:

The front woman’s expanse of heaving, black-cloth and the sheer vigour of her body reminded me of this poster for Women’s Day in Germany, 1914 - banned in Berlin at the time for it’s radical illustration of women’s physical political force: