yonmei

11:37 pm: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 13
Jules Gibb writes in the Gude Cause songbook that she wrote this song in 1986, to commemorate the opening of the original Pankhurst House as a women's resource: that it was inspired by a woman in her 90s in a local nursing home who had been a suffragette.

( Oh you never knew my Nana, she died four years ago. She lived in that old folks home in Moss Side, you know, I used to go on Sundays, sometimes took the kids, I was always so proud of what she did. )



Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:40 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 18
When I was a little kid, my mum took me and my brother and sister to see the house in Dundee where Mary Slessor was born. Mary Slessor is (still) the only woman who isn't royal to appear on a British banknote: you'll find her on the Clydesdale Bank £10 note. (David Livingstone used to be there: in 1998 he disappeared and Mary Slessor replaced him.)

She was born in 1848: she went to Africa in 1876: she died there on 13th January 1915.

She was a missionary, and the version of her story I remembered from that long ago was that her mother was a mill-worker, her father died when she was young, and she made up her mind to go to Africa. (She was plainly not in the mold of the usual Victorian middle-class missionary, and I concluded that she probably just really wanted to go to Africa, and "being a missionary" was the only way a weaver's daughter could have made it there in those days.)

This was not quite true. Mary Slessor's father was probably an alcoholic: after his death, Mary Slessor's mother (and Mary herself) pulled them into the middle-classes: by the time Mary went to Africa (Calabar, in Nigeria) she was the very model of a respectable middle-class Victorian missionary.

Except she wasn't. One of the stories they still tell about her in Dundee is that when she confronted a gang of young men, who tried to make her flinch - or break her face - by swinging a metal weight at her head: she laid a bet with them that if she didn't flinch, they'd come to the Sunday school she was running. (For fictional accounts of how these Sunday schools were frequently the main source of education for working children who had no other days free*, see Tom Brown At Oxford or The Daisy Chain.) She didn't flinch, and the whole gang came.
*In England and Wales, often the Sunday schools would have been the only source of education for any working class child: in Scotland, up to the age of 12, in principle at least all children could go to school - but of course, you couldn't work in a factory and go to school. (Some mill owners ran schools on their premises for child employees: Mary Slessor worked half time and went to school half time from 12 to 14.)

The whole concept of missionaries is essentially imperial: if you want to read the perspective of a missionary child, Pearl S. Buck's life of her mother, The Missionary, with the perspective of Buck's adult understanding of her childhood memories, is an excellent one. But, given that: what Mary Slessor became famous for among the Calabar was not only her abandonment of a "Western" standard of living (she lived, her contemporaries recorded with disapproval, among the natives and as the natives lived, without shoes or hat, when as George Orwell records, wearing a hat was the key marker of "white blood" in colonial countries): she was known for her support for women and her refusal to accept the practice of abandoning twin babies to die: she adopted them, and became known as "Mother of all peoples". She wasn't known for converting people to Christianity: she got money for her "mission" and spent it on buildings and other improvements for the Efik people's standard of living. When she died, she was given a state funeral.

So maybe my first estimate of her, thirty-odd years ago, wasn't too far off: she was a woman who knew what she wanted to do, and did it.

(Mary Slessor Foundation, Dundee City Council website, Mundus, Mary Slessor on the £10 note)

( Her thoughts reach out to a distant shore As she stood upon the Law, Mary Slessor was her name, A weaver doon at Baxter's Mill. )





Tags: dundee, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:23 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 19
From Revolt on the Clyde by Willie Gallacher (link):

In Govan, Mrs. Barbour, a typical working-class housewife, became the leader of a movement such as had never been seen before, or since for that matter. Street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets - every method was used to bring the women out and organize them for the struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in the windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, hardly a window without one: "We Are Not Paying Increased Rent".
These notices represented a spirit amongst the women that could not be overcome. The factors (agents for the property owners) could not collect the rents. They applied to the courts for eviction warrants. Having obtained these, sheriff's officers were sent to serve them and evict the tenants. But Mrs. Barbour had a team of women who were wonderful. They could smell a sheriff's officer a mile away. At their summons women left their cooking, washing or whatever they were doing. Before they got anywhere near their destination, the officer and his men would be met by an army of furious women who drove them back in a hurried scramble for safety."

The landlords began suing through the small debts court for the right to impound wages to cover unpaid rent. The women organised a demonstration for the day of the trial of several rent strikers, and the factories emptied all across Glasgow as the men went to join it:

"From early morning the women were marching to the centre of the city where the Sheriff's Court is situated. Mrs. Barbour's army was on the march. But even as they marched, mighty reinforcements were coming from the workshops and the yards. From far away Dalmuir in the West, from Parkhead in the East, from Cathcart in the South and Hydepark in the North, the dungareed army of the proletariat invaded the centre of the city. Into the streets around the Sheriff's Court the workers marched from all sides. All the streets were packed. Traffic was completely stopped. Right in front of the court, John Maclean was on a platform addressing the crowd as far as his voice could reach. In other streets near the court others of us were at it. Roar after roar of rage went up as incidents were related of the robbery of mothers and wives whose sons and husbands were at the front. Roar followed roar as we pictured what would happen if we allowed the attack on our wages.
It was obvious to the sheriff that the situation was too desperate to play with. He telephoned London and was put through to the Minister Of Munitions, Mr. Lloyd George. "The workers have left the factories," he said after explaining the nature of the case. "They are threatening to pull down Glasgow. What am I to do?" "Stop the case," he was told, "a Rent Restriction Act will be introduced immediately."
From Glasgow Herald of 1915: "Thanks to the fine stand made by Glasgow women and the determined attitude of the Clyde munitions workers, the Government has introduced a Bill to legalize pre-war rent during the war and for six months thereafter."

Ninety years later, Jean Donnachie and Noreen Real had the same organising flair as Mrs Barbour:

To the politicians, Noreen and Jean said: You've asked us to make these people welcome to our community. We have taken them in and with the next breath you come with a battering ram.' When they, along with other local people, watched a couple of families trying to escape and saw a man jump from his third floor verandah to get away as his door was being battered in, they knew they could not stand by.
"Then Jean and I decided we were going to start doing dawn patrols in the complex," says Noreen.
"We got every asylum seeker in the block to give us their mobile number and their house number and, depending on what block the Home Office van stopped at, someone would run in and tell Jean and she would phone every asylum seeker in that block and get them to come out by the stairs."
The Home Office people always went up in the lifts.
"We would even get people into a neighbour's house because the Home Office did not have the power to go in and we started asking people to leave their fire escape gates open."
They held candlelit vigils during dawn raids and kept 5.30am vigils for months - and won their fight to stop the raids.
Jean was one of those who went to see First Minister Alex Salmond, demanding to know why it took so many years to work out if a family can stay or not.

( In the tenements o' Glesga in the year one nine one five It was one lang bloody struggle tae keep ourselves alive We were coontin' oot the coppers Tae buy wor scraps o' food When the landlords put the rent up Just because they could A' the factories were hummin', There was overtime galore But wages they were driven doon tae subsidise the war Oot came Mrs. Barbour from her wee bit single end She said, I'll organise the lassies if I cannae rouse the men! )




Tags: glasgow, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:47 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 20
Flora Drummond and Chrystal Macmillan - Chrystal and the General. Two Scottish feminists from very different social classes.

Macmillan was one of the first women to take a degree at Edinburgh University. At the time, the Scottish Universities were a constituency that voted for an MP to represent them in Parliament: the legislation said "all persons" who had taken a degree could vote. Macmillan argued that "all persons" must include women: the answer of all the courts who heard her argue the case - all the way to the House of Lords (she was also the first woman to argue a case before the Law Lords, too) was that at the time that legislation became law, only men could take degrees, therefore only men could be allowed to vote in the university elections. Macmillan was also a pacifist and didn't care for Emmeline Pankhurst's "autocratic" way of running the WSPU: she is remembered on various sites about "forgotten Scotland".

Drummond applied to be a postwoman, was turned down because of her height (she was five foot tall) and turned into one of the most ferocious campaigners for the vote: there's a famous photograph of her being arrested after a demonstration in Hyde Park, surrounded by four policemen, all of them much taller than her, all looking a little bit embarrassed, and Flora Drummond looking highly amused at the four big men putting her under arrest. (She used to point out, when talking about why she'd come to London and got involved with the suffragette movement there, that the rule about how tall a postie had to be was inherently discriminatory, since men tend to be taller than women.) She wasn't a pacifist - there's a memorial of her in Hansard for the ages, an MP getting up and snorting about this woman taking munitions girls to France, who had been involved in the publication of a suffragette magazine that printed LIES about MPs. She's supposed to have got her nickname of "General Drummond" on the 1908 march, when - because of her height and also I suspect because if you can, why not? she directed the march riding on a horse.

This song was printed by the London Society for Women's Suffrage for a day of "songs sung at the Albert Hall on Suffrage Saturday, June 13 1908."

( Now everybody's heard about The string of names and a' that Of certain dames who feel in doubt If they should vote and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, their arguments and a' that, We've better on the other side, and mean to win for a' that. )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

12:22 pm: "What does it gain us to keep asking these questions?"
In response to a post on peake's livejournal about this article on Abraham Lincoln: "Was Lincoln Bisexual?" by Gore Vidal

To which my answer is: It helps to remove the imaginary concept many people have that gay people only began to exist in the 20th century.

Technically, of course, in Lincoln's lifetime, the concepts gay, straight, and bisexual hadn't been invented: so if writing about Lincoln's life by his contemporary standards, if he had sex with men when he was young and unmarried, and then married a woman and had children with her, he would not have been identified by his contemporaries as bisexual: that concept didn't exist. Nor did the concept of being gay, or being straight.

But there's a bogstandard meme in conventional history - so prevalent and so powerful that most people who haven't had occasion to think about it aren't even aware it exists, any more than your average oxygen-breather thinks about the composition of air - which is this: everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise.

No one can prove Lincoln was exclusively heterosexual. What evidence there is, suggests he wasn't. The meme that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise is why peake didn't frame his question: "So was he straight? I don't know, and neither does anyone else."

Tags: angry queer, history

11:29 am: Equality in vile places: a meme
ide_cyan notes: Equality in vile places

If women write less and publish less than men, and no quotas dictated the proportion of women here, then the only explanation for equality on a list of Frequently Challenged books is that women's writing is disproportionally suppressed.

Feminism is the longest, most successful, and most peaceful revolution the world has ever seen. We are the only revolutionary movement in recent history that has changed the world for the better without firing a shot. We can be proud of what feminism has accomplished. But it's not over.

Tags: books are what i read, feminism, history

07:39 am: It is NOT 1 January 1980, because if it were I would be 12
Last night my computer crashed. This morning my computer thought that it was New Year's Day, 1980, 23:23. (Which is the time my computer crashed, though not the date.) I first realised this when I switched on and the computer told me that it had automatically updated my clock for Daylight Savings Time (which it would have to, if it were January and I hadn't switched my computer on since the 2nd of October) and would I confirm it was correct.

And I got up and got halfway through to the sitting-room to turn my TV on to check whether it was Daylight Savings Morning, before I could slap myself and point out to myself that it's Friday morning, not Sunday morning, and the clocks never go back on a Thursday night, always on a Saturday.

Then I checked the date and discovered that it was 1980 again, and as I did not want to go through my teens once more, nor to experience another 17 years of Conservative government, I quickly fast-forwarded through time to correct the situation. You should all be very grateful to me, especially if you weren't born yet.

It is now 07:39 on 3 October 2003. Should I be worried about my computer's sudden refusal to recognise reality?

Tags: computer disasters, evil british politics, history

09:31 pm: On nostalgia
I understand the concept "I wish I could visit the past." I wish I could see the old Imperial Summer Palace near Beijing before the British army destroyed it. I wish I could visit Stonehenge before the National Trust put up barbed wire round all the stones. I wish I could see a living dodo.

I don't understand the kind of nostalgia that believes the past was better. ( anti-nostalgia links and rant )

Tags: angry queer, asimov, history, i am an angry feminist