Herstory

In an online discussion group recently, I was told that women did not play “significant” roles in the past. That’s a pretty sweeping statement. It’s also a fairly reductive one. Part of the problem is that the women of previous centuries are often invisible beside their menfolk; the further you go back, the less their voices can be heard.

“ Children pretend to be nurses in the ruins of a bombed London, WWII ”

Wearing a black mask, Misty also performed as “Miss X”.  She was managed by Eddie Suez, of the Philadelphia Suez Rothbard Office, whose logo can be seen at the bottom right of the photo.

This photo was personalized to Louise, who was the mother of popular burlesque comic and emcee, Bucky Conrad.

Current Royal Holloway researcher Emer O'Toole encounters the spirit of former student and suffragette Emily Wilding Davison

If we have a cheap and readily available drug that can prevent and treat the two largest causes of maternal mortality worldwide—postpartum hemorrhage and unsafe abortion—why have we not taken more advantage of it?

Last week’s #Throwback Thursday explored how circuses and carnivals, like P.T. Barnum’s circus, have long been traditions of American and European entertainment as well as a way for women to launch their own careers. Coney Island in New York was the launching place for many a female performer and was the birthplace of the dazzling Princess Rajah’s career as a show-stopping belly dancer and entertainer.

Princess Rajah, or Rose Ferran as she was born, was a headliner on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit in the early 1900s. She made an impressive $1000 per-week as a “cooch dancer” in Coney Island in the 1890s. One of her most popular dances, “The Arabian Chair Dance” (shown below), was recorded in a 1904 film and received rave reviews from the public.

Women struggle to succeed in classical music unless they “go along with the old idea that sex sells”, Dame Jenni Murray has suggested, as she laments the sexist world of orchestras.

Dame Jenni, who will soon conduct the BBC Philharmonic orchestra as part of a Woman’s Hour special, claimed even women who have “made it” in classical music have been subjected to a “pretty tough time”.

“The women who seem to be most welcome are the ones who are prepared to go along with the old idea that sex sells,” she told this week’s Radio Times magazine.

"Look at the way the violinist Nicola Benedetti and trumpeter Alison Balsom are marketed."

Last year, an interview with Benedetti in a tabloid newspaper discussed the likelihood of her “posing for the lads’ mags”, before asserting she looked “fit as a fiddle”.

Balsom, who has been nicknamed the "trumpet crumpet" by some publications, has previously admitted "orchestral brass players can be very macho, with an intimidating group mentality", but said she had grown more confident as she gained musical experience.

Today in 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to vote regardless of their gender, and sent it to the states for ratification.

Throughout history, women have written. But it has only been at the far end of the twentieth century, the tiniest sliver of a second on the great clock of time, that their writing has been seen to be in any way equivalent to that of men...

...But still, women wrote. They wrote because writing was compatible with confinement in domesticity. What they wrote, however, was inevitably marked by the differences imposed upon them. They wrote out of a completely different relationship to power than men enjoyed. They wrote out of exclusion from the places in society where decisions were taken. They wrote out of a narrower view of the world and the things people could do in it.

In her eighties now, Mazumdar has recently written a memoir, entitled ‘Memories of a Rolling Stone’, brought out by Zubaan. To have a woman who was a notable educationist, who anchored the 1974 Report of the Committee on the Status of Women, who is widely seen as the “grandmother of women’s studies in South Asia”, and who remains a feminist/activist/”trouble maker” to this day, set down her recollections of a lifetime spanning eight decades is in itself cause for celebration. So many of her contemporaries have, sadly, passed on leaving their footprints behind, but not their words. In her acknowledgements, Vina-di indicates one of the factors that motivated the work: “I view this book as part of my tribute to the Indian women’s movement to assert the rights they had earned through participating in India’s freedom struggle.”