feminish

Londoners may half-remember that 6 years ago archaeologists claimed to have found the magnificent grave of a female gladiator in Southwark.

It made a sexy press release and a few news-waves at the time, but was it really true? Was the woman whose body they dug up just off Great Dover Street really one of the Roman Empire’s fearless gladiatrices? This week an excellent article trying to find the answer has become very popular over at digg.

I got clicking and looking and had fun skipping around at gladiatrix.info. I was really struck by the contrast between eroticised images of female gladiators produced now, when gladiatrices are just film characters, computer game icons or porn objects:

…And a contemporary image from Roman times, when gladiatrices were actually tough, real, formidable human beings:

What’s impressive about the Roman image (of ‘Amazon and Achillia’) is that the gladiatrices seem (as far as I can tell) just simply human - they’re not oozing their femaleness, their bums aren’t stupendously oversized, no breasts getting in the way, no tantalisingly skimpy skirts - they’re just fighters.

Perhaps the Romans’ sexy pictures of gladiatrices weren’t carved on stone but painted on scraps of paper or wall and haven’t survived?

Historians don’t have much to go on, but they do know that for Roman commentator Juvenal, a gladiatrix was in fact sexualised, but grotesquely rather than deliciously. He hated to “Hear her grunt and groan as she works at it, parrying, thrusting… Panting and sweating like this.”

Who needs a gladiatrix in Southwark when you’ve got Wimbledon?

quote is from Juvenal, Satire 6.246-267 as cited in Grant, M. Gladiators (1967), p. 34

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:

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).

I HAD A DEEP INTERNAL CONFLICT on Friday, barely 4 hours after leaving the Immanent Grove. Should I dress to go out as the Beloved would like me to dress - out of love, and a delight that I can, now I’m no longer in a monastery? Or should I dress as my mood - modest, simple and cloaked?

I got angry and confused.

I wasn’t frustrated (as I used to be) that I’d ‘got nothing to wear’; or that I was the wrong shape for my clothes; or that it was all just too much decision-making. In fact, it was quite fun to suddenly think about colour and form after a month in retreat. The problem was the Beloved’s preference for the skimpier shirt. I felt subjected, in a way, to his desires - and found I couldn’t dress in freedom, caught as I was between my feelings and his (I was annoyed, as an almost-feminist, that I did in fact want to please him).

It’s true that how I dress is an expression from-myself-to-others; it’s not just a private act, but a way of communicating. What-others-think, and what my Lover thinks, does matter. But how can I express myself independently and honestly and bring my Lover joy, without playing to objectifying male fantasies of the female body?

For now, we’ve agreed that I’ll practice dressing-independence by not asking what he thinks, and he’ll practice non-objectifying by not telling me.

But it’s hard, in a house without mirrors, not to say, ‘Does this top really go with the skirt?’

Anne-Marie (teacher, President of the village’s Sauvegarde et Animation society, mother of four and talented research historian) was knitting the other day a green jacket (with purple buttons) for her granddaughter.

“I never like to not be doing anything”.

She’d just sat us down, had an eye on the television, an ear on our conversation with her husband, and a steady consciousness of the asparagus omlette cooking next door.

There was something timeless about it - and something so undeniably womanly.

My thoughts rolled out like a ball of wool dropped down stairs…

The first was on female multi-tasking: the weaving of survival-work tasks into and around each other that has been happening for centuries… creating a tapestry of daily acts (fire-lighting, feeding, clothwork, gardening), weekly rituals (washing, scrubbing, going to market) and seasonal rhythmns (planting, spring-cleaning, harvesting….). I would like to understand the female predisposition to this (psychological, physiological, cultural), and to deeply recognise the way in which it is hard, useful and creative Work - not just ‘pottering’. (I could start by respecting it in myself…)

And I then began musing on the place of spinning/ weaving/ tapestry/ knitting/ sewing in women’s lives for centuries…. millions of hours spent making and beautifying of cloth. What a waste of time! I thought (not really respecting it as Work).

Some part of me thinks Thank God for H&M.

The H&M revolution (or whatever you want to call it) has created a liberating disrespect for cloth. It’s not what you wear (or who made it) but how you wear it: I can get as much as I want, cheap, and badly-made, to last a few pay-cheques. This didn’t come with the ’70s wave (my Mum’s still got her lovingly hand-sewn mini-dresses from Vogue patterns); and it was barely there in the late 1990s (when buying a top was a big deal) - it’s truly a 21-st Century feminist advance. (-and most likely at the expense of the women, in the Majority World, who are making my polyester 3.99 tops)

I think it’s a big deal that I could live in a London house of five young women and no sewing machine, no spinning wheel, and no knitting needles - and it’s also a big deal that I could find this photo.

Yesterday I covered some old little cardboard boxes with brown paper (I never want to be without brown paper), lined them with leaves and filled them with cherries we’d picked from the very tall tree at La Verie. (I’m a bit disappointed in myself for never wanting to climb to the top of trees - would that make me more of a feminist?). We harvested a lot of cherries - deep dark bright shiny red juicy-sweet globules. Cherries are improbably round.

We then set out with the cherries to try to return the generosity the village has given us. The idea was a simple one: to re-balance things between giving and receiving. We limited ourselves to four boxes to deliver and started at 7pm. We thought it’d take about half an hour to make good our debts.

It was 9.45 by the time we were knocking on door no. 4, starving and exhausted. We had, despite all our best efforts, received a huge pot of homemade jam, an attempted gift of a dozen eggs (”no no no, honestly, it’s fine. yes, I know, we’re vegetarian, but really, it’s fine, we’re fine.”), a bulging bag of freshly cut homegrown asparagus, and the offer of a sizable sitting room table. (Amid conversations about package holidays in Egypt, GM crops in France, Wikipedia, Asbestos, and the cost of leather coverings on dentists’ chairs). Alex, our fourth attempted-receivee, was movingly disheartened that we wouldn’t accept a drink and so, instead, gave us four plastic pegs for the bed (which he’d given us last week).

A lot went on last night which had little to do with supply, demand, need or preference - and a lot to do with hanging out and being unnecessarily good to each other. For all that it was human, it was also economic: despite our British privateness we were woven into tangled and enmeshed obligations and generosities that make the little things happen so the big things can follow.

The whole experience reminded me less of our erstwhile one-time neighbour Jeanette and more of Martha Ballard - diarist midwife of legend in 18thC America (as much a feminist heroine as MW and SdeB, IMO), who ran her farm household of nine children on barter alone (delivering, with unprecedented skillfulness, 800 babies while she was at it).