Five womanly links (original) (raw)

'Why are there no women great artists?' - okay, we know, do we not, my dearios, that there are great women artists? - but there might be more. One of the reasons why there are not as many as there might be could be that they felt they had Other Priorities (not necessarily Being A Muse). I was already apprised of the not necessarily softer side of activists Barbara Bodichon and Sylvia Pankhurst, but I had no idea about Josephine Butler, though possibly one might categorise her as 'talented amateur water-colourist'.

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I gave a groan of familiarity on reading this:

For Women’s History Month, it has become traditional to rifle through the great names of the past, pluck out a few that strike the imagination and have the appropriate gender marker, and dust them off for a new audience.

The Trowelblazers project, however, suggests:

Stories of pioneering women in the “digging” sciences have been skewed toward those who were White, wealthy, and networked. The TrowelBlazers project aims to reset our imagination—and our future.

Right on sisters, excavate those lesser-known pioneers!

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Women as mothers of invention: Seven female patent pioneers you should know:

[A] quick caveat. Earlier patents may exist for some of the inventions given in this list but the following women are widely considered the inventor of their ‘thing’ because it worked (earlier versions didn't in some cases), or it was popular, or it is recognisable to the form as it exists today, and so on. It is also worth saying that there are many other female innovators and inventors we could have mentioned. Not all acquired patents, some weren’t given credit, many were trapped by the conditions of their time.

And in some cases doubtless husband/other male relative or associate took the credit...

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I found it a little Point Thahr Misst in this piece about Virginia Woolf and her relevance to today, that the writer has not encountered, or perhaps not taken on board, Woolf's pertinent critical observation on the subjects that are deemed Important rather than Trivial Subjects for fiction to deal with (men on a battlefield vs women in a drawing room).

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This Writer Is Tweeting Everything Sylvia Plath Ever Ate - apparently she was quite the foodie. Might we anticipate the Plath Cookery Book? (I'm sure there are other writers, quite apart from the obvious food writers like David, Fisher, Colwin, who resisted the narrative of birdlike appetite and disdain for the pleasures of the table - Lessing springs to mind.)

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