Philobiblon

A final belated report from Green Party conference last week. I chaired the session on “Benefit cuts: how the poorest and most vulnerable will suffer the most”, organised by Green Party national disability spokesperson Alan Wheatley, with speakers Claire Glasman, from Winvisible, Kim Sparrow from Single Mothers’ Self-Defence and Sarah Bukasa from the All-Africa Women’s Group, so I didn’t get time to write a lot of notes, but a few points that were particularly striking…

* We were told that Job Centres have been given strict rules on sanctioning – each week they have to sanction 6% of recipients of jobseekers’ allowance, and with 50 completely cut their benefit.

* One third of all adults who are on the autistic spectrum are living without income, from employment or benefits, of any kind.

* Private, for-profit providers are being paid £62,000 for each long-term unemployed person they are able to get into work, irrespective of how long-term or appropriate that work is.

* People fleeing domestic violence have just one month to try to get their life back on track, then they are on job seekers’ allowance, and expected to meet all of its rules about applications etc, on £62 a week, when they may have been left with no household goods, furniture, housing etc…

* The worst (legally) paid people in the country are carers, who must be looking after people who need at least 35 hours of care a week (and it is often much, much more) for the princely sum of £53.90 a week.

* 37% of people applying for employment support allowance, the replacement for incapacity benefit, drop out before their assessment before the private supplier ATOS is completed. No research has been conducted on what happens to them. Undoubtedly some have recovered, but anecdotal evidence suggests many have been so horrified/damaged/frightened by the experience that they are simply not getting benefits to which they should be entitled, but instead are, in the words of campaigners “begging, shoplifting, or living with their families with no income”.

Yes, it is the political conference season, but before I get into all of that, something different – an interview by Cath Redfern on The F Word with blogger/writer Zoe Margolis, on her new book about her experience of being a reluctant celebrity.

But back to those politics – for the Green Party conference I’ve only got to point to one post, Jim’s pretty well comprehensive blog roundup. Although he did write it before I’d had the chance to record our excellent fringe with a speaker from the English Collective of Prostitutes and a Manchester street worker, so I’m going to take the host’s privilege to point to that post now.

Ongoing now is of course what an independent observer would consider a fascinating if uncomfortable conference, that of the Lib Dems. Jonathan on Liberal England, sometime host of this roundup, is, I’m surprised to find, in New York, but he’s got some thoughts on Labour’s claim to be scooping up Lib Dem members. (And before conference blogging MP Lynne Featherstone followed through the unlamented end of ID cards.)

There’s a promise you might want to note about the universal postal service, on Caron’s Musings, and David blogging at Disgruntled Radical has thoughts on the emergency motion process, and a plea for the Trident motion.

More no doubt on next week’s roundup…

Looking back, Brian Barder has been reading the chapter on Kosovo in Tony Blair’s autobiography. He says “not to allow the perversely distorted and self-serving account offered by Mr Blair to become the accepted wisdom.” There are lessons for the future. And looking forward Jeff on Better Nation wonders what “Labour leader Ed Milliband” would mean for Scotland.

You might have also noted that a religious leader, and head of a minor little statelet, has been visiting Britain this week. Onionbagblog has an eyewitness account, with copious pics, of a little covered part of the visit. Stroppyblog has been “taking a pop at the Pope” (and those who can’t understand why he’s an issue). While Cruella is questioning the BBC’s news priorities.

Back to women’s issues, fairy godfather of the roundup, Tim Worstall, offers his views on maternity pay mandated by the European Union. Regular readers of this blog are likely to be well aware of my likely reaction – but that’s one of the pleasures of this roundup – everyone’s welcome (and if you want to nominate something you read this week the email address is britblog AT gmail DOT com.)

And All that Chas, who I suspect might have a good debate with Tim, has been watching The Wright Stuff (which I gather from Google is a TV show, although curiously the website doesn’t seem to say which channel) and getting (I’d judge rightly) very, very annoyed.

For more great blogging like that, Cath Elliott has compiled The Missing List, a great collection of feminist bloggers who somehow always seem to get left of lists of political blogs.

Away from the political world, Sharon on Early Modern Notes has been revelling in the pleasures of Twitter, not just for historians, and Earthwitch has been ruminating on the trouble with perfectionism.

And on the science side, John Hawks isn’t writing from the UK, but I’m going to use this post on the UK debate over cousin marriage as an excuse to point to his excellent blog, a must-read if you’re at all interested in human evolution, and lots of other genetics issues.

For an entirely defensible form of vigilantism, I rather think the Stroud “catch a plonker” campaign, as documented by Ruscombe Green, might catch on.

But we might worry about how the probation service might treat offenders, after reading the excellent newish On Probation blog, by a self-billed “ordinary probation officer”. Also from inside the justice system, The Magistrate explains George Michael’s sentence.

And finally on the lighter side, as the news bulletins say, Richard Osley has an account of north London’s most important sporting encounter last week, the Camden New Journal versus Camden Labour – Alastair Campbell looms large in more ways than one…

If that sounds too hard to stomach, you might enjoy a short visit to Jubilee Market Hall in Covent Garden with Ornamental Passions instead.

That’s all for this week – don’t forget those nominations (britblog AT gmail DOT com) for Matt Wardman next week.

A further belated report from Green Party conference from the fringe on the need to decriminalise all aspects of sex work, which I organised. I was really pleased that in addition to a high numerical turnout, around 50 at the peak, it attracted a number of our elected reps from England and Scotland, and had a very high quality of questions and debate.

Since I was chairing, I didn’t have time to take many notes, but the one issue that I want to highlight was one on which it might be possible to take immediate, achievable action.

It arose from the testimony of “Jenny”, a streetworker from Manchester who is caring for her disabled daughter. She explained how because prostitution offences (prostitution itself is legal in the UK, but many of the essential actions around it are not) show up on the “enhanced” criminal checks, such as those conducted for people wanting to work with children and vulnerable adults, for their entire lives, not lapsing as other offences do.

Given that many of the people being convicted for these offences are women, a significant number would be likely, were the option available to them, to be seeking this career option.

And if this were to be changed, even for women and men who aren’t seeking such a job, it would, in Jenny’s own words “take the stigma away”.

This is something that I hope many people could agree would be a good idea, and which I hope to work on further.
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A belated collection of notes of the excellent Women in Prison panel on Friday night of Green Party conference.

The first speaker was the hugely impressive and powerful Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust.

She explained the rising numbers of women in prison from the fact that sentences have become longer, and more women are going in on remand even though they won’t subsequently be jailed. The rising sentences “seem to be particularly acute with women”.

“What is particularly frustrating everyone knows (it was New Labour policy) that the way solve women’s offending is through education, employment, safer housing, better housing. Yet having said that they cheerily went on and built more capacity for women to go into the prison.”

She identified a “handwringing element” to discussion of prison reform: “we don’t want to keep going over the problems – let’s move on to solutions.”

It doesn’t excuse fact they have hurt or harmed someone else, but helps to understand why they do offend – half of women prisoners have been victims of domestic violence, a third of sexual abuse. “I do feel that at the worst we are punishing women for the experience they are having for being victims.”

Then she came to one of the extremely painful facts of the evening – only 5% of 18,000 children whose mothers are jailed every year end up staying in their own homes.

But she did have a rare piece of good news – government cutbacks will almost certainly reduce the number of prisoners – because keeping people in prison is very expensive.

But the problem is, and this isn’t something you’d want to use to argue for prison, it is also the only place where for many women services they need are available. Women prisoners say: this is the first time I’ve had help with my drug problem, my mental health problems.
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Article first published on Blogcritics

If you ask people to imagine “an artist”, what you’ll probably get is an image of a Renaissance man in a linen smock, or a slightly modernised equivalent. What you’re unlikely to get is an Indian peasant woman in traditional dress perched on a rough country ladder, painting the side of her house.

But browse through the pages of Nurturing Walls: Animal Art by Meena Women and the image in your head might well be changed.

Two short essays in the text explain and explore the women’s work, setting out how Mandana painting, as their work is term, is done by women from the Meena tribe in Rajasthan. It explains that the large tribe is concentrated as farmers in the Aravalli Hills, although they have a history as a warrior clan, which when overrun in the 11th century took to the hills as guerrillas, a role they maintained into the 20th century, leading to them being named by the British under the “Habitual Criminals Act” of 1930 as robbers and criminals whose movements needed to be curtailed.

Yet there’s nothing of this surely turbulent history in the images of this tradition, although perhaps a hint in the fact that it’s a temporary art, meant to be painted over again and again, as the chalk on mud fades. (Then again perhaps that’s simply a reflection of art has it has surely been through most of human history – a pleasurable creation to be immediately enjoyed, before we distorted it with the destructive effects of the market. And it gives a hint of how much of human artistic history we’ll never be able to recover through archaeology, except through the most unusual accidents of preservation.)

The style certainly broadly fits within that tradition somewhat patronisingly called “naive”, in that there’s no focus on realism, or the rules of perspective or many rules at all really (except one that’s probably largely practical – the great majority of the images are white chalk on brown walls).

And the skill of the artists, as you’d expect, varies – but the best of it here is truly stunning – captivating in its depiction of a playful love between animal mother and child, innervating in its lithe energy.
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The London Library copy of Before I Go…Reflections on my life and times, by the late Guardian women’s editor Mary Stott, was last borrowed in 1998, and only a couple of times before that.

It’s a pity for her 1985 memoirs have much to offer the reader of today, and have many reminders that many of the issues with which we’re wrestling politically – from voting systems to maternity leave – have been the subject of furious debate for decades.

Born in 1917, she’s something of a bridge between the First Wave feminists and the Second Wave, which she viewed from a place of mature professional power and influence (one of the few women in that position at that time) with some understandable bemusement. By modern standards she’s unsound on the subject of “Ms”, she hated it, and rather unsound on homosexual rights, but given the world she grew up in, she’s humane, commonsensical and remarkably clear-sighted, while being self-effacing and alost frustratingly humble.

She’s much to say on feminism that still has powerful resonance today, for example:

“The spate of books on women’s subjects in the last few years has been extraordinary. Too many, in my view, have been inaccessible to me, who left my grammar school at 17, and to the girls who leave their comprehensives at 16 – not to mention many others in between. I think it is time to concentrate more attention on the writing, on the simple, comprehensible exposition of ideas rather than on the bibliography.”

She’s also interesting as a defector from Labour to be a founding member of the SDP in 1981, and a member of its executive in 1982, a self-identified political neophyte:

“…it takes a very strong and politically idealistic spirit to survive bickering over procedural hassles. Procedure has to be sorted out, but perhaps the political novices, ‘the nice people’, the ‘wets’ have a role in indicating, now and then, when we can summon courage to tackle the technicians, that ‘ends’ are really what matter and what keep enthusiasm alive, and, even, that means can corrupt ends. Sometimes I fear that the more ‘political’ one becomes, the more one is likely to lose sight of the goal that made one join a party in the first place.”

Today, as the conservative government talks much of Big Society, while also slashing funding for the institutions that might support it, she reports on the president of the National Council of Women, Helen Waldsax, asking “that the government should ‘acknowledge in some constructive form the public service given by so many voluntary organisations to this country’ and warned that unless this was done, many organisations would have to function at half strength, or even disappear, which would mean the loss of ‘the source of supply of many specialist skills’. She added, ‘a very important democratic principle is at stake here’. But there has been no sign that Prime Minister Thatcher, who so heartily approves, she says the voluntary principle, has taken any notice.”

But perhaps the most pervasive sense one gets from this book is the modestly and self-deprecation of a woman who was obviously powerful and exceptional. It’s a reminder of how women were taught to be – and must never allowed to be again.

Article first published on Blogcritics.

Nina Power, if placed in a classification of feminists, would clearly fall within the socialist/Marxist camp, seeing the oppression of women arising chiefly from the economic base. But this is a sophisticated, nuanced form of this analysis, that is sensitive to the developments of the superstructure, as well as the base, of the past couple of decades.

Her One-Dimensional Woman is only about 50 actual pages of text, almost more pamphlet than book, but there’s a lot packed in, not all of it making an obviously coherent whole.

The title comes from Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man, who is “fully immersed in the promissary world of liberal democracy and consumerism, and yet ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls”. For women today, Power says, “what looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles”.

She begins with a brief exploration of the Sarah Palin phenomenon, which is something of an outlier, if a topical one. The conclusion: “She turns maternity into a war-weapon, inexperience into a populist virtue and feminism into something that even the Christian Right could approve of.” Power makes the point that if we allow the term “feminist” to be captured by such women, progressive women concerned about basic rights from access to abortion onwards will have to disown it – it is worth defending.

In a similar vein is the chapter on the attempt to justify the Iraq war, and particularly the Afghan war, by the claim that its purpose (so historically nonsensical) is to free the local women. The answer to this is easier, really, just listen to the local women, who are very clearly saying “get out”.

Then Power gets into the meat of her argument, that the workforce has indeed been feminised: “work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past… Alternatively, we could turn this around and talk about the labourization of women – the way in which females are cast as worker first and only secondarily as mother or wife, or any other identity position not linked wiith economic productivity.”

Much of this has affected both sexes. So Power says: “The demand to be a ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking’, ‘selling yourself,’ in effect, to become a kind of walking CV is felt keenly.” But for women this plays on older stereotypes to particularly focus on their looks, their clothes, their body, which bleeds into woman as consumer, and the claim that any consumer purchase – from lipstick to chocolate, is feminist indulgence, because you’re worth it.

On this, Power gets particularly strong: “Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamante phone cover.” (Here she’s being, I think on balance unfairly, strongly critical of Jessica Valenti.)

But perhaps the most original part of this text is the exploration of pornography, on which Power argues for historical perspectives. As she briefly alludes to, it is well worth remembering that pronographic images were used as a form of political communication during and around both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, but “the ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this”.

Power argues, however, that before WWII, porn lacked the mechanistic, highly specialised characteristics of today, in older forms, particularly French films, “sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville”. The performers, she says, genuinely appear to be having fun, and the “plot” not infrequently runs around men’s difficulty in “performing”. Very different she says, from sex that is clearly work in contemporary porn.

So there’s a lot here, but ultimately what it fails to do is really provide a road-map, a way forward. Power has entirely justifiable criticism of what is being presented to us today as “feminism”. But she doesn’t really tell us what her own looks like.

What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)
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I very seldom watch television. I confess that I don’t own a television – I got rid of it when I worked out that the licence was costing me about the same price per hour as a cinema ticket, given my viewing habits.

I do, very occasionally however, look at iPlayer, as I happened to do tonight. When I do watch television, it’s usually history programmes, which means, more or less, BBC Four.

So tonight I scrolled down its offerings, and was astonished.

There is a very good documentary on Denman College (the Women’s Institute college) with some heartrending stories about its attendees lives circumscribed by gender norms, and Clare Balding biking the Cotswalds, which sounds jolly.

Other than that, there is, I can list as I go back to it…
* A bloke presenting a programme on whales
* A bloke running a museum
* A male comedian on video games
* A bloke talking about medieval history
* A comedy cartoon show crediting four blokes
* A bloke walking through Norman history
* A bloke looking at the history of games
* A bloke talking about a male poet
* A bloke performing at Glastonbury
* Medieval blokes trying to steal jewels
* A bloke talking about medieval sex
* A bloke talking about the Arthurian legend
* A drama about a bloke who wants to sell phones
* A bloke talking about Beowulf
* A quiz featuring Archers fans with a female presenter (sort of yeah)
* Three blokes following the trail of Hannibal the Great
* A documentary about lots of British pop blokes and Lulu
* A bloke talking about food and Italian opera
* (Yeah) A drama about a woman who wants to set up a snack bar
* Two blokes talking about how to play chess
* (Yeah) A woman talking about the Anglo-Saxons
* A bloke talking about biotechnology
* A bloke fictional detective

So if this is the men’s channel, which is the women’s?

Or maybe this is just chance. Will it be all women next week?

Just back from a weekend of canvassing and leafletting in Norwich, where they’re having a huge byelection (in every ward) as a result of the mess over the on-off unitary status.

(As a workmate said, I really do know how to live…)

But seriously, it’s always delightful to see the smoothly oiled machine of the Norwich Green Party in action. I didn’t match my previous record (10.5 hours canvassing in one day), but between a solid stretch of canvassing on Saturday and a swath of leafletting today feel like it was well worth the effort.

And as always, the doorstep was delightful. I think the highlight was the discussion with an absolutely on-the-ball 96-year-old. She says she’s a Lib Dem, and the subtext was she felt she was too old to change now, but she’s happy her son has decided to vote Green for the first time this time. She said many interesting things, but what really struck me was her thoughts on the environment. “I’ve never seen the world in such a mess. I think you [the Greens] are going to be proved right.”

But meeting a 92-year-old voter (and her, in her words, “toyboy” husband – late 80s…) was also wonderful. They’ve read the literature, and both decided to vote Green for the first time. Would that all voters took such an interest…

And on the leafletting score, was pleased to ensure the “singing plasterer” had his Norwich Green News. I had my hands full so didn’t take a pic, but see he’s also tickled the fancy of others.

From A Woman’s Berlin by Despina Stratigakos

The first women’s bank opened in 1910 in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, as a co-op credit union managed by and for women.

The founders initially envisioned its clientele as single independent women. Its appeal proved much broader, however, and membership grew to include women of all civil and social classes.

Unfortunately it collapsed during war, in part because of pressure from establishment. The rightwing press accused it of dismantling the German family by giving women economic independence as clients didnt need their father’s or husband’s consent to open an account. It was also unconventional because it took jewellry and furniture as collateral, which was often the only wealth that women had. (pp 12-15)

I was leafletting yesterday in some local tower blocks. I was last there canvassing in April, just after a major restoration was completed, and they were really looking quite good. Although my fellow canvasser found the wholly internal staircases, and the level of deprivation of some of the residents depressing, I was asked into a couple of flats for a chat and found them lovely inside – well-lit and airy, and was feeling quite positive about the future of the blocks.

Going back, however, was depressing. The stairs are now covered with a wide range of bodily fluids, spliff butts, beer bottles, etc, and I found that most residents are simply ignoring their door buzzers.

Part of the estate restoration involved expensive installation of an extensive security system – outside gates and door security, but clearly this has failed. (And general report is that it is frequently not working (probably not helped by the thoughtless installation of a gate blocking a major pedestrian and cycle route that used to be used by many and is unsurprisingly now frequently vandalised).

Clearly the lock-it-down approach has failed, and probably only encouraged a fortress, fearful mentality.

So what would help? Well clearly one aspect of the problem here is our society’s massive failure to deal with the problems of drug use (including alcohol) – the “war on drugs” is clearly part of the problem.

And this would surely be a case for a concierge system (installed in an excellent tower block I know not far away). And proper daily cleaning – some of the dried vomit had clearly been there for quite some time – would help to improve the atmosphere.

And no doubt the flats would benefit from community-building efforts – why I wonder is the uninspiring half-dead lawn around the flats not a community garden?

But there is clearly a major problem with these structures: there’s only four flats on each floor, and residents use one of the two lifts, which means they only take a couple of steps from their front door to the exit – they’re highly unlikely to meet their neighbours, and no one (except the odd leafletter like myself) is likely to use the stairs, leaving them as orphan territory, an invitation to illicit use.

The human impact of this all was brought home to me by a young girl, perhaps nine or so. She was with two friends who were knocking on the door of a flat, calling for a friend, as I approached down the stairs. I opened the lobby door to three frightened faces, cowering back. As I left, the fear was explained: “I thought it was the ‘maddie’”, one of them said to the others. Those stairwells are clearly having a real impact on their lives.

My general approach is to try to salvage all buildings – the environmental and social cost of demolition is enormous and usually undercounted. But I do wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without those particular blocks.