feminish

It is a bright clear day today, and cold. A different day from the grey, heavy, wet ones that’ve been shrouding us for a while.

It’s the kind of light that shimmers the dew on the grass, shows you the dirt on the floor and catches a very particular angle on the windowpanes, suddenly revealing a mysterious film of dust-grime you can bet your bottom pound sterling wasn’t there yesterday.

As I was sweeping I noticed how short I was. Nothing particularly remarkable, I just noticed that, well, I’m quite close to the floor. Which is obviously a relative thing. Quite literally relative, given that all of mine are over 5ft9.

My first thought was of being the odd one out. My second was that in fact I embody the height of my two grandmothers, and that I’m the only grandchild to do so. I even thought, for perhaps the first time, Thank goodness I’m short: a little more of them is continued, a little less is lost.

Talking of grandmothers, and losing things…

I’ve promised a post on why it matters that, once upon a time several thousand women in Paris embarked on an unprecedented political act of force and power. Does it matter that we have collectively forgotten? And why should we care anyway?

I did a wee bit of arithmetic and reckon that, give or take a few young and old pregnancies, I had approximately 768 great-great-great-great-great-great-great(and great-) grandmothers (assuming 2 generations were alive simultaneously) of adult age in 1789 when thousands of women marched on Versailles and (in a manner of speaking) captured the king.

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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?

I’ve written some brief background words below. You can also see my post: The March of the Women 5 October 1789: Did it make a difference and why should we care?

A narrative account of the events of 5/6 October 1789 in Paris
(using primary sources where possible…)

At 7 o’clock on the morning of the 5th of October 1789 about 2000 women forced the doors of the Town Hall in the heart of Paris.

Furious at the continued scarcity and expense of bread (a dire situation that had hardly improved in the three months since the National Assembly was set up to solve the crisis), they determined to take matters into their own hands. The women seized bread, weapons and cannon from the Town Hall, and began to throw out papers and files to burn:

[Monsieur Maillard, an influential member of the new people’s National Guard,] found some [women] forcing the downstairs doors and others snatching papers in the offices, saying that that was all the city council had done since the revolution began and that they would burn them… he urged them to keep calm, but these women kept saying that the men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they (the women) would do better. While he was in the courtyard, he looked around and saw a large number of men go up, armed with pikes, lances, pitchforks, and other weapons… [They] took all the arms they could find and gave some to the women. He then received word that a number of women had arrived with torches to burn the papers in the building, so he [Maillard] dashed out and flung himself upon them (there were but two) as they approached the City Hall, each bearing a lighted torch; he snatched the torches from their hands, which nearly cost him his life, as they were intent on carrying out their design.
[Taken from the witness statement of Stanislas Maillard, leading member of the National Guard, given to the 1790 Paris commission investigating the October Days 1789]

It wasn’t just the 2000 women at the Hotel de Ville who had been driven to act. In fact, as the French historian G. Rudé describes, women were rallying together all over Paris:

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This is an excerpt from Anne C. Klein Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of Self (1995), p.51

Tibetan language itself is hierarchical, particularly as spoken in centres of power like Lhasa. Most nouns and verbs have honorific forms, usually entirely different in sound and spelling from the non-honorific forms, and these must be used whenever one addresses someone socially, economically or spiritually superior to oneself.

The most widely used word for woman (skyes dman) literally means “low born” and is also the non-honorific word for “wife”. A man might use this term to refer to his own wife, or he might call her chung ma, literally, “little woman”. But he would always use an honorific for the wife of someone of rank greater than his. Other terms are less explicitly offensive. Women are known as those not to be put out (bud med) because a woman is not to be left outside the house at night. Another less common phrase is lus phra ma, “female of slight body”. Other synonyms, also relatively rare in ordinary speech, are gnas byed, “maker of a dwelling” or “maker of stability”; mi mo, “a female person”; and mtshams ldan ma, perhaps a pun, which can be understood either as “one who has a boundary” or “one who has an intermediate space”. Other epithets include ‘dzin ma, “female grasper”, and lan bu can bcas, “one who has long plaits [of hair]”. These terms fall into two main groups, those associated with a womans more ‘essential’ physical characteristics, and others with her community or family position.

Once upon a time I shared a rickety east-London house with five twenty-something lasses. We were each broke, in debt and buried by bookshelves (old stacked-up empty wine-boxes from City merchants) twice the size of our wardrobes (cheap hanging rails from the fashion market). It felt oddly voyeuristic to browse the others’ books… I knew that mine were a catalogue of hopes (things I wanted to know), guilts (things I wished I knew already) and dreamlands I wanted to escape into. A bit like an underwear draw, really.

I remember vividly the white-spined snoopy comics packing-out the front room, the silver-blue oxford classics stacked along the dresser, and the postmodern Introducing… series brimming out of the bathroom fireplace. But I browsed and thumbed only hesitantly and sheepishly.

What luck, then, that there’s such things as Book Memes. And that friends, if you ask them nicely, can be persuaded to divulge the deepest secrets of their bookworlds. Because it’s one thing to see the creased and worn silver-blue spines, but quite another to know what they’ve meant.

This, then, is the first guest book meme. From the Princess of Pub Quizzes (she can petition me for another name anytime)…..

One book that changed your life

My usual answer to this question is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which I read when I was 16 and which moved me deeply with its poetic meditation on aestheticism and the continued need for engagement with the mess of life. However, it would be, I suppose, a dull meme if Hesse swept the board so I offer instead Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which I came across at around the same time and read in the space of a single train journey. It’s a difficult thing to classify - it’s at once fiction, history and philosophy - but it felt as though I was less reading it than it was reading me - stripping away all of my assumptions about reality and humanity and forcing me to re-evaluate everything around me. I sincerely felt as I finished it that I had become a different and, I hoped, more sensitive person. It stays with me fifteen years on as an increasingly nebulous sense memory, since I’m scared to revisit it, but an immensely precious one nonetheless.

One book you have read more than once

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read this; it’s the ultimate comfort book for me and I’ll often pick it up to read a few pages when

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One is not born a woman, but rather one becomes one.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

How can one become a woman if one wasn’t a woman all along?

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

The belief that “one is a woman” is almost as absurd and obscurantist as the belief that “one is a man”.

Julia Kristeva, Woman Can Never Be Defined (1980)

… one can do nothing other than preach freedom, and freedom again, and we must overturn every barrier, smash every artificial bottleneck, for it is wiser to trust in the voices of desire that rise in the human bosom, even when they express themselves in untoward ways, than in pre-conceived and falsified theories. Whatever brings splendour and joy to a woman is the right way for her, however crooked her path may seem, and in the end the goal is to guide to maturity the woman within, in other words to reveal her most secret gift of life.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) The Humanity of Woman: an outline of a problem, France 1899. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer in A History of Women in the West Vol. IV.

We’ve temporarily decamped from our damp, draughty, dilapidated four (almost) square walls to the creature comforts of a windowed, insulated and plumbed-in home.

Already I’m missing the mice, with whom I have declared peaceful co-existence since the noble field-mouse Balthazar accidentally drowned himself one night in our wash-tub. The guilt runs deep.

It’s strange to see my book pages un-crinkle as they un-dampen, and stranger still to have airport. There was something faintly and reassuringly magical about the internet when it was a mere occasional gift from the Gods who, when the mood took them, broke through the usual “no carrier detected/ modem has unexpectedly hung-up” status-quo to squeeze, at snail-like speed, the entire World Wide Web down my phone line.

And it’s odd to not have to risk life and limb to descend the collapsed outside steps to go for a wee in a makeshift outdoor washroom, and a bizarre surprise to have hot washing water that hasn’t been slowly heated by the sun all morning.

I miss the neighbours yapping at their dog and the warm yellow glow of the evening sun as it sets behind the cliffs and Mirandole.

I miss it because living there is stark and brutal. The only soft thing’s the bed and the rest is clear and bare. Not clean, mind, and not ordered, but immediate. It’s not wadded by insulation nor lined by carpets and wallpaper. Wallpaper seems only to plaster my brain with a repetitive and stultified imitation of reality; a crude and mind-numbing alternative to hand-brushed paint strokes or the complex grains of wood.

And I find myself thinking,

Is wallpaper women’s fault?

The Patterner suggests that it’s a product of rationalism or industrialisation. The fault of “all the people who think straight lines are a good idea despite the fact they don’t exist in nature, crystals excepted”.

But I’m not so much worried about the straight lines as the dulling comfort of it. Of course there’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper where it is, quite literally, maddening:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

But what I think troubles me is what women have been trying to do wallpapering their homes for the last 300 years (at least). The historians tell us that in the 1700s they were trying to “emulate damask, velvet and needlework”; that in the 1800s they wanted stripes “reminiscent of a military campaign”; and that in Britain they wanted simple, repetitive motifs “to accommodate the ancestral portraits”.

Given that I’m not a fan of women’s devotion to expensive cloth, nor of wars, nor even the Brits’ attachment to primogeniture, you’d think my case was over. But my objection is much deeper than that.

I don’t want there to be a feminine interior a woman must be proud of or judged by. Nor do I want an interior so demanding it requires a stay-at-home partner to “keep up form”. But most of all, I don’t want an interior that dulls and cushions me from the gritty reality of life.

I want to look up from my computer and see wood that was once a living tree, stretching out its branches to the rain. Or see brush-strokes lazily, delicately or slap-dashily painted to the wall - by me, by my lover, or an un-known hand. I want to know: this is the wall. This is the boundary of this warm, dry inside space. I don’t want to think: there’s a pink flower, again. Not least because after a while I don’t see the flower any more - my mind switches off, stops registering: it is dulled, it thinks it knows what is there.

But in fact, if I had a wall to look at, I’d see much more in the wall than I’ll ever see in these damn pink flowers that keep tricking my perspective. I’d see the stone that makes the wall, and perhaps the men that, once upon a time, spent many many days putting the stone there. I’d see the ways in which the wall hasn’t always been here, and the ways in which the wall won’t be here forever. How will this house look when it has crumbled? And when will that time come? Will humans be here to bear witness, or shall it just be the beautiful red-black bugs, crawling through the rocks and ivy, utterly oblivious to the fact that their immense mountain-world was once a house, with a first floor, floorboards, a table, a computer and, God bless our souls, pink flowery wallpaper.

A sneak preview of the latest edition of BUST magazine - “For girls with something to get off their chests” - slipped into my inbox yesterday.

My eyes were swiftly drawn to three words:

The Long Blondes

Now it’s a long time since on a grey winter morning, Kate and I were walking across a muddy Suffolk park to History class. I can’t remember on what basis, but one of the blokes had just said that of course I was a feminist. It had never occurred to me I might be: I was just doing my thing my way. Sure, I knew I wouldn’t take any nonsense… but what’s so special about that?

But I took the words to heart. “Am I? What if I am?” And then I hear Kate, picking her way through the damp grass in heels: “Of course you are, Tash. So what?!”

Now our Kate has become the “icily glamorous”, vintage-chic, “fabulous frontwoman” of the aforementioned Long Blondes (a three-girl, two-bloke Sheffield punk quintet). She’s “slipped, along with her four bandmates, between the glossy sheets of Vogue”, her ‘glamorous punk’ look has been featured in the Guardian style pages and she was recently voted one of the coolest people in the world by NME Magazine.

The Guardian describes Kate Jackson’s lyrics as “spiked with feminist attitude”. The Independent claims Appropriation (By Any Other Name) to be a “sexual politics manifesto” and checks the “contemporary post-feminist vibe” of Weekend Without Make-Up. “After the laddish Britpop revival”, it continues, and with the Long Blondes storming the stage, “2006 ought to see tastes swing towards a more feminine input.”

I immediately remember Ann at Feministing’s post back in July, bemoaning the fact that the female presence on the music scene is reduced only to “sexed-up” single female singers. Punk is just as dominated by blokes as mainstream music, with few all-girl bands - and still fewer girl bands with feminist spike:

…it’s undeniable that great all-woman (and pro-woman) acts have a hard time getting airtime once they’ve been pegged as feminist or political.

Knowing the sharp intelligence, glamarous pizzazz and sheer feminine power of Ms feisty Jackson, I’ve been wondering can we claim the Long Blondes for the feminists?

… And what good would it do if we did?

As Dusted Magazine recently asked,

Are the Long Blondes turning into the feminist answer to Pulp? Appropriation (By Any Other Name) would seem to say so.

Kate herself has said, in an online interview at Crashin’ in, the music world is so distracted by the girls’ presence, that their lyrics and music don’t get the attention or credit they would if they were all male.

And does she think they’re the feminist answer to Pulp?

We’re not a feminist band, but we do play in quite a feminine way.

I’m pretty sure that the force and power of The Long Blondes is in the fun and laughter and control they’re having over femininity. They claim Nico, Nancy Sinatra, Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor as their icons: “Sexy and literate, flippant and heartbreaking all at once”.

They’ll play up fifties woman in their hard-hunted vintage but damn her in their lyrics: Where do you go when you’ve finished work?/ You should have been home an hour ago/ I’ve got your tea laid out like some kind of fifties housewife/ …I don’t like giving you the third degree/ I just want what’s due to me (Weekend Without Make-up).

And Kate will tease and taunt, but she won’t bite: Is she a femme fatale?/ That’s what she wants you to think/ She’ll never lead him astray!/ But it’s the best she can do/ But is she going away? / No, she’ll always be here/ Waiting for you/ Back here on earth (Giddy Stratospheres)

Of course Kate won’t say they’re feminist: they’re not going to be boxed and packaged and appropriated by anyone - neither by feminist friends nor the record-label suitors they’ve held waiting for months on the front doorstep, cash-in-hand contracts wilting like a young man’s roses.

I do want to claim The Long Blondes for feminism, but I don’t want to appropriate them. I want to simply say: Thank God they are up there exercising our widest possible freedoms as women.

It helps us all that they’re dressing as they want, not in the name of profit or trends, but to challenge and provoke our expectations of sexiness, of style, of blonde bimbos and female power. (That’s why sex siren Kate will, on occasion, shroud herself in the clothes and horn-rimmed glasses of a 50-something 1970s librarian.) It’s important that the Long Blondes can (and do) tease, joke and laugh at sexual power-games, in full knowledge that they’re as much victims as voyeurs. They’re not trapped in the gender framework but surfing it and toying with it.

What really matters, and what ultimately makes them a great thing for 21st century lasses, is that they’re doing their thing with force, femininity and - above all - talent. They’re delighting in being girls and they’re enjoying the ride.

I’m trying to write a post about French women’s critical role in the French Revolution.

In particular, I want to tell you all the story of the seven thousand women who, on one rainy day in October 1789, rallied together and marched (pulling two huge cannon, empty of ammunition) to Versailles palace to demand bread from the king and his return to the heart of the capital. They succeeded and, while thousands were encamped within and without the palace overnight, the King finally agreed to the crucial revolutionary document: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and conceded to return with his family under guard to Paris.

I’ve been trying to write a simple narrative account: the kind that I wish I’d been taught at secondary school; the kind I wish made it into historical documentaries on BBC2 of a weekday evening.

But the thing about history, or the thing about women determinedly writing women’s history, is we make things complicated. And our readers are particularly harsh. Suddenly there are lots of questions:

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