A quote a day for Women's History Month: 31st March

[T]he wound is healed, the secret told, the riddle becomes plain, the reconciliation is made between man and what surrounds him. Each happening depends on the other. But if it was for all time, the flowers might go on blooming but the spirit would wither. It would be sad beyond all telling if the finding of the Grail were to happen once for all. Because then it could not happen again for anyone.

Naomi Mitchison, To The Chapel Perilous (1955)

Finishing up the month with my beloved Naomi Mitchison, and possibly my favourite of her works, although it's really impossible to choose. My short bio-critical study of her is still available from Aqueduct Press, and she does seem to be garnering, finally, some degree of scholarly attention. I will concede that such a prolific writer in such varied genres, and dedicated social activist in so many diverse fields, is something of a daunting prospect. Also, it continues less than easy to obtain most of her works, though kudos to Kennedy and Boyd for the Naomi Mitchison Library and Naomi Mitchison - Essays and Journalism series bringing some of her works back into print and collecting her scattered essays and journalism.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 30th March

I much prefer being as I am now. I have a much larger capacity for everything. I see a lot more and care a lot less about things like people and whether they like me.

M F K Fisher, From the Journals of M F K Fisher, entry for 3 July 1940.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 28th March

These two women care for each other more than they care for any man. They are bound together by a curious feeling about men, a sort of muffled contempt, a mixture of mild antagonism and irritated sympathy, and they have an obscure stifled feeling of impatience with an instinct in themselves which draws them to men.

Mary Borden, Flamingo (1927) 

I see that someone has now, quite recently (2009) produced a biography of Borden, further details on this website here. Borden sounds like a fascinating character, but I'm not sure her novels have lasted very well, on the basis of the ones I've read.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 27th March

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St Vincent Millay, 'Dirge Without Music', from The Buck in the Snow (1928)

In memoriam for that wonderful writer Diana Wynne Jones, who died yesterday.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 26th March

Too many folks might convert to feminist thought if they knew firsthand the powerful and passionate positive transformation it would create in every area of their sexual lives. It is better for patriarchy to try and make us believe that the only real sex available to feminist women who like men must be negotiated using the same old patriarchal modes of seduction that are perpetually unsatisfying to all women.

bell hooks, 'Talking sex: beyond the patriarchal phallic imaginary' in Outlaw Culture: resisting representations (1994)

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 25th March

[I]t would be strange... if they had not, in the course of ages, acquired a measure of that mental dexterity and rapid skill which, in any other business, would be dubbed mechanical, but in a woman's business of obtaining and managing a lord and master is commonly described as intuitive.

Cicely Hamilton, 'Intuition', published in Time and Tide, 16 Sep 1927, reprinted in Dale Spender, Time and Tide Wait for No Man (1984)

Hamilton is probably these days best known for her 1909 polemic, Marriage As a Trade, but in her day, alongside her suffrage activism (including the lyrics to March of the Women even if Ethel Smyth actually copyrighted them) she wrote plays, novels, works on war, and travel books. One of her short suffrage plays ('How the Vote was Won', co-authored with Christopher St John) was produced last year at a fringe theatre in London and was still extremely entertaining. She was active in the birth control movement between the wars and also a supporter of abortion law reform, and is yet another example of someone who really doesn't fit in to categorisations of 'New' and 'Old' feminism at that period but was both involved with egalitarian campaigns and those addressing women's specific needs. (I am not sure that anyone, except possibly Eleanor Rathbone, who pretty much invented the concept of 'New' feminism around her concerns for Family Allowances, etc, really fits at all neatly in that simplistic division.)

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 24th March

'The trouble is,' said Selena, with a certain wistfulness, 'that you and I, Julia, have been brought up in an era of emancipation and enlightenment, and we have got into the habit of treating men as if they were normal, responsible grown-up people.'

Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989)

I thought this somehow went rather aptly with yesterday's quotation, though so many decades later: but at least in a rather different tone.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 23rd March

The sexual relation is a matter upon which average man--and we emphasise the average--is unfit to reason; the finer shades of thought seem invisible to him: in his view a woman is just a woman, the object of whose life should be to subject herself to his will: he can see no good in one who repudiates this position.

Margaret Dalham, Mere Man (1911)

It seems impossible to find out much more about Dalham besides her authorship of this work, at least without a lot of detailed research in the records of suffrage and social purity organisations in the early C20th. However, on the basis of this work she can be identified as one of the several feminist polemicists attacking the existing relations of gender and sexuality of the pre-Great War era, though a good deal less well-known than Cicely Hamilton or Christabel Pankhurst or even Louise Martindale; or, of course, Rebecca West, who summed up their case admirably in one short sentence: 'Men are terribly poor stuff'.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 22nd March

It was a pleasant side of Mrs Tebben's character that although her own books were described, by those who read them, as important, she was entirely modest about what she had done and never dreamt of demanding elbow-room or solitude for herself, although she accepted their necessity for her husband.

Angela Thirkell, August Folly (1936)

I do tend to find Thirkell both compulsively readable and in many ways exasperating. She creates female characters of considerable awesomeness and outstanding competence (alongside maddeningly vague, but, we are given to believe, utterly charming, ditzes) but on the position of women seems to be right there with Mrs Garth in Middlemarch in insisting upon female subordination, the greater significance of the man's career and interests, etc. Also, in the wartime and postwar volumes of her Barsetshire Chronicles, there is altogether too much about how Nice People Like Her Characters are being ground under the iron heel of socialism and the rising tide of uppity lower orders.

However, this vignette of a serious scholarly economist (whose works appear to be approved of even by misogynistic old dons) writing her books very much in a manner like unto that for which Jane Austen is reputed does, I think, at least suggest a recognition of some of the difficulties women doing other things than the domestic laboured under (though as I recall Mrs Tebben does get badly marked  down for domestic incompetence).

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 21st March

I can only observe that in a changing world the oddest individual arrangements do seem to work, and to be compatible with loyalty, and suggest that, as the success of marriage appears more and more to depend, as we become more and more civilised and self-conscious, upon the fitting together of the personalities of individuals, we should more and more aim to be tolerant of the arrangements adopted, whether they seem to Puritans immoral, to feminists degrading, or to rationalists irrational, and not to interfere with them, or even to take public cognisance of them, more than we can possibly help.

Margaret Cole, Marriage: Past and Present (1938)

Cole was very much part of the Mitchisons' circle and shared, at least in theory, their views on open marriage.  I have no idea whether the detective novels she co-wrote with her husband remain readable.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 20th March

'Tell me, Wyndham, what makes you think I'm any better at sewing buttons on than you are?'
'Well, you're a woman. More practice.'
'You could start practising now. Then you wouldn't have to take women to bed with you in order to get your buttons sewn on. I'll give you a lesson.'

Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year (1964)

One would like to think that this sort of exchange is very much of its time and could not happen in the C21st, but I wonder...

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 19th March

Then there was the book, The Anxiety of Influence.... The book came out at the same time that a lot of us were energetically rejoicing in the rediscovery and reprinting of earlier women writers, the rich inheritance that had been withheld from all writers by the macho literary canon. While these guys were over there being paranoid about influence, we were over here celebrating it.

Ursula K Le Guin, 'The Wilderness Within' (1998) reprinted in Cheek by Jowl: talks and essays on how & why fantasy matters (2009)

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 18th March

[N]o doubt about it, ideas about what women can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has changed. Male behaviour, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists.

Susan Sontag, 'A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?' (1999), in Where the Stress Falls: essays (2003)

Which is a useful apercu that things do change and attitudes alter and the alteration diffuses beyond the original protesters against things as they were.

A quotation a day for Women's History Month: 17th March

Opticians, apparently, are not a litigious class, but they must often have been sorely tempted to protest. In film after film the suggestion has been made that a pair of spectacles will cut down any heroine's love-life. Again and again a plain girl has blossomed into a tearing beauty by the simple device of taking off her glasses. She simply smashes the nasty things, and steps out towards romance without a blink; better-dressed, clearer-skinned, head held high, and sight totally unaffected.

C A Lejeune, 'Come Now, Voyager' (Review of Now, Voyager), 1943, in Chestnuts in her Lap, 1936-1947 (1948)

As a wearer of glasses since the age of 8 and a sufferer from a serious degree of myopia, I greatly appreciate this apercu by Lejeune. She is one of those much neglected female cultural figures who tend to be beneath the radar because they were working in marginalised areas (such as film criticism before it became a serious and respectable endeavour) and often several of them. In spite of the sniffiness of the BFI biographical note her film criticism is well worth reading, and just because it is not ponderous and solemn doesn't mean it's not serious in intent.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 15th March

Emily pushed her hair behind her ears. 'But I'm not sure, Cee, that there is a correct way for people to oppose the system. All these people were produced by the system, all have found their own needs and ways of resisting or opposing it. I agree that some of those ways are extremely undesirable. But who has the right answer, if there is one?'

L Timmel Duchamp, Blood in the Fruit (2008)

This is from the penultimate volume in Duchamp's marvellous Marq'ssan Cycle, which won a Special Honor from the judges of the Tiptree Award 2009 (and now, I see, the entire sequence is available as e-books).

Check out the other wonderful works of feminist science fiction that Duchamp publishes at Aqueduct Press.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 14th March

"Man" always includes "woman" when there is a penalty to be incurred but never includes "woman" when there is a privilege to be conferred.

Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, The Sphere of man in relation to that of Woman in the Constitution, 1907

This work appears to be exceedingly rare: there are a couple of copies listed on Amazon.co.uk at immense prices, and Bookfinder.com doesn't list it under 'Charlotte Stopes' (under which name are included a number of works by her daughter Marie, the famous advocate of birth control. Her reputation as a pioneering feminist scholar has perhaps been occluded by the eminence, or possibly the notoriety, of her daughter.

A quote a day for Women's History Month:13th March

Those who stick their necks out to start social movements tend to be in certain respects atypical. Paradoxically, they are likely to have economic and social privileges that free them from an overwhelming preoccupation with survival, that make them feel less vulnerable and more entitled.... Or conversely, they may already be social outcasts or misfits in one way or another and so feel they have little to lose.... Yet rebellious minorities are really just canaries in the mine. When their complaints speak to widespread, if unadmitted, disappointments and desires, it's amazing how fast ordinary people's desires and the whole social atmosphere can change.

Ellen Willis, Don't Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999)

Ellen Willis (this is a wonderful site with lots of links to her writings) was another of the not recognised as well as she might be feminist polemicists/analysts starting out in the 1970s.

A quote a day for Women's History Month:12th March

Necessity compelled Char to work twelve hours a day some two evenings a week... but on the remaining days, when work was comparatively light and over early in the evening, she did not choose to spoil the picture which she carried always in her mind's eye of the indefatigable and overtaxed Director of the Midland Supply Depot.

E M Delafield, The War Workers (1918)

Because I haven't yet posted anything by Delafield. She's best known probably for Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, but her other novels are well worth reading and ratchet up the acerbic note that is there but dialed down by The Provincial Lady (whom many people take, I suspect, to be a good deal more autobiographical of EMD than other evidence suggests). Some of them, indeed, are positively painful to read - her early novel Consequences is particularly harrowing. Nice appreciation here by Jilly Cooper. There is an EMD appreciation website.

A quote a day for Women's History Month:11th March

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking women only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto (1967)

Because it is, in its way, a classic.

Performing today in the Wellcome Library

Insights session on Women, Health and Healing at 15.00 - 16.00