Warming up the old blog

In a repeat of last year, I intend to reactivate the blog while it is Edinburgh festivals time. Anything and everything I go to will be written up and judgement made on the enjoyment or offensiveness factor. Sometimes things are simply not fun without the frisson of a good feeling of righteous offence.

Just to get in the mood, I've included a report on a recent day out in Liverpool where I played tourist on one of the infrequent summer days.

The highlights were a visit to the International Museum of Slavery and the Tate Liverpool. 

John Lennon peace monument, by artist Lauren Voiers

I spent a long time in the International Slavery Museum learning things I should have known already. Liverpool's history is that of prospering because of the slave trade over hundreds of years. I'd not realised how early on Europeans had been enslaving people from West Africa, although I knew about the fight for abolition.

I could not manage to see round the whole museum because it was so horrifying in laying bare the conditions slavers transported people in. I realise that is a bit wimpish, but I do intend to go back sometime and see the rest. More uplifting were displays honouring the many slave uprisings across the Caribbean and America. Often these were instigated or led by women such as Carlotta in Cuba (1843), Solitude in Guadalupe (1802) and Rebecca in Curacao (1795). Of course, the woman we are most aware of is Harriet Tubman.

Slavery is still with us as was outlined in the campaign section of the museum where the display showed the plight of child domestic workers who've been trafficked to work in slave-like conditions in many parts of the world.

However, I'd particularly wanted to see '42', an exhibition by Lee Karen Stow, who photographed women in Sierra Leone. 42 is the average life expectancy of women there and one in 8 dies because of childbirth and complications.  It seems to me quite extraordinary that women in Scotland take it almost for granted they will live through childbirth, while for many women elsewhere in the world, pregnancy is a death sentence.

There is no need to have this rate of maternal mortality anywhere on earth. Those with the power to do something about it, should do it and stop financing wars and other toxic activities. We should all be blazing mad at this female carnage.

Emotionally zonked by the International Slavery Museum, I had lunch before visiting the Tate Liverpool. I wanted to see the gallery curated by Carol Ann Duffy and this did not disappoint. I spent ages there looking at her choice of exhibits from the whole Tate collection.

Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say at Tate Liverpool.

Duffy has written a sonnet specially for the exhibition

Poem

I couldn't see Guinness and not envisage a nun;

a gun, a finger and thumb;

midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk, bone;

or full, a shield a stalker,

or stone. I couldn't see woods

for the names of the trees - sycamore,

yew, birch, beech -

or bees

without imagining music scored

on the air - nor pass a nun

without calling to mind a pint of one

stout, untouched, seen on a bar

at the Angelus.

Women in Politics 3

Winnie Ewing

Ten years ago on 12Th May 1999, the Scottish Parliament met for the first time as a democratically elected body. Dr Winnie Ewing opened the first session with some well-chosen words.

The Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on March 25 1707, is hereby reconvened.

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/history/firstDays/1999firstMeeting.htm

The Scottish Parliament was in abeyance for nearly 300 years until devolution and the Scotland Act 1998 legislated for the Parliament to reconvene. The former parliament was feudal and unrepresentative of the people of Scotland. The current version somewhat better but with room for improvement. In its first sitting there was 39.5% female representation, but that has fallen to 33.3% now. So, although the SNP has always had high profile and very effective women in its ranks, it needs to get serious about recruiting more.

Ewing has been in politics for four decades having been elected as SNP MP for Hamilton in 1967. This spectacular and popular electoral victory is profiled in the BBC Alba documentary on her life. She became even more famous as she took her seat in Europe in 1975 where she was known as Madame Ecosse, presumably because she was there to represent Scottish interests and promote European legislation that would benefit her country.

This is a woman who could employ a pertinent turn of phrase. She is reported as commenting at the time of her Hamilton election victory “stop the world, Scotland wants to get on”.

On taking her seat in the Commons, she noted, “a shiver ran along the Labour front bench looking for a spine to run up.”

The BBC Alba documentary on Winnie Ewing is on YouTube in several parts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaXMT_7wmXs&feature=related

At 79 she is today, returning to Holyrood to see her portrait unveiled as part of the celebration of ten years of devolution. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/nmCentre/news/news-09/pa09-013.htm

Another inspiring role model

Dr Eileen M Galloway 1906-2009

What an inspiring woman and I only get to hear of her because she has died aged almost 103 years.

Dr Galloway was born a few years after the Wright brothers managed their historic flight and lived to see the space age reach its half century. In this video to commemorate fifty years since Sputnik was launched, Eileen Galloway describes the concern that the space age would herald an age of weapons of mass destruction in space. This is less likely owing to the ongoing efforts by Dr Galloway in opposing the use of space for military purposes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9l2eCxalvg

Her NASA obituary states that:
Galloway worked for several decades with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and was instrumental in creating the International Institute of Space Law, which serves as the forum for legal scholars and others from around the world in studying and debating the legal issues associated with the exploration and utilization of space.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/history/features/galloway_obit.html

Her role in setting up NASA deserves the widest recognition. Her work is an inspiration for women who want to work in this field as well as those of us who want this planet to get serious about colonising our solar system. (Am I reading too much science fiction again?)

Women and Politics 2

Dave protecting his Tory clones from infiltration by non-white, non-males.

This wasn’t in my original plan to write about women politicians, but I’m not about to resist commenting on the Times quaint half-hearted moan about Call Me Dave and his lack of ladies.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6182399.ece

Dave, it turns out, had made some encouraging noises about increasing the number of women candidates for the next Westminster election. He had some vague plans about one in three ministers being female sometime after his lot win at Westminster. Judging by the picture above, he's not been successful to date.

Tory ladies have previous. I suspect many non-rightwing inclined voters will mostly recall the various exploits of Maggie and then Edwina. Then there is Anne. Even though I cannot imagine holding any views in common, I always found Anne Widdicome an interesting and colourful political personality. More recently there was Caroline and her childcare, with which I have some understanding. One of the seven demands of the Women's Liberation Movement is free accessible 24 hour childcare and even though this may not have been part of Ms Spellman's motives for paying her assistant for providing childcare, at least she did not expect this to be on tap by the woman. Childcare, whoever the mother is, is always a difficulty and it should always be paid for, whatever job the mother is employed in. I'd much prefer to subsidise childcare over second homes and other 'expenses'.

In this country, the estimable Annabel Goldie is usually in fine form leading the Tory contingent in Holyrood, but otherwise, there’s not an overwhelming womanly presence in the prospective Tory ranks and little hope of increasing numbers in the short term. Mostly their problem is the same as faced by aspirational women in all parties: the boys shout louder, the collaboratrices pull the rug from under their sisters and few if any have a clue about the importance of 50:50 representation. Instead, the pale, male and stale whine on about positive discrimination as though they didn’t operate this themselves.

The selection procedures in most parties do not mean that we get people who are picked on their merit, but are more likely to produce the time-honoured numbers of mediocre white males who are chosen via the old school tie, shared football/sports affiliation or the correct funny handshake or whatever other ‘fair’ route into power for the lads is employed. And no one can seriously argue that we have anything other than the calibre of politicos that we deserve in this democratic deficit culture.

We're not convinced by this tokenism, Dave!

At the Flicks

I took my mother and daughter to see a programme entitled Britain at Bay, Peace & War 1937-1949 this afternoon.
http://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/mediatheque_britainatbay.html

This is archive material from the British Film Institute, which is touring the UK courtesy of the Independent Cinema Office. The site above has a link to the dates and venues as well as information about the eight films in this programme.

All eight films had something to recommend them and I can’t think of a better birthday treat for my mother and an education for my daughter (and me!).
Around the Village Green Directed by Evelyn Spice & Marion Grierson had the best line; an old codger was resisting change in the manner of old codgers everywhere and of all era’s:

"I haven't got a bath but I've got a river down the bottom of the garden so I can have a good bath when I want one."

There is more info on these directors at the link below.http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/594220/index.html

The best film was Spare Time, which looked at the range of activities that families, and workers in some heavy industries got up to in their spare time. Absolutely wonderful footage of a Kazoo Jazz Band with some happy children swinging to well-known tunes.

After the final film, the old chap behind us began to tell us he remembered this period as he had enlisted in the navy in 1940. He talked about the earliest air raids which came as the German planes swept up the river Forth trying to bomb the Forth Bridge. Of course this all led to an outpouring of reminiscences by my mother about the war years which as a small child she lived through.

Entirely predictably, daughter and I had opposite reactions to some aspects. She stated how she felt that everyone in the films looked so smart in their flowered dresses and coats and little hats. While my thoughts had been about the impracticality of factory and farm work in flowered dresses, to say nothing of the young women enthusiastically filling sand bags dressed in their Sunday best the week WW2 was declared. I count all my blessings that I can wear practical clothes without comment, which it took a war and women drafted into all kinds of work to establish as sensible.

Sig Other would have appreciated Sam Goes Shopping as it was narrated by one of his hero’s – Stanley Holloway*. This is an amusing film, which was really an advert for the Co-op.

The 8 short films take the viewer on an emotional roller-coaster from the build up to war and into the first days and weeks of what must have been devastating to people barely recovered from the war to end all wars. If you get a chance to see this touring programme take it.

* Stanley Holloway the comic narrator, and if I have had to listen to Sig Other spout, er declaim this over breakfast, then you can at least have a quick look over it. Imagine a thick Yorkshire, or possibly Lancashire accent (is there a difference?) http://homepage.ntlworld.com/michaelanthony.keating/Stanley_Holloway/The_Lion_and_Albert/the_lion_and_albert.html

Glamour

At the creative group this week we made a collage by flicking through a selection of magazines and tearing out pictures that meant something to us in some way. Then glued them onto white backing paper. When these were complete we did what the tutor calls 'show and tell'. This is about briefly explaining what and why you've created with your collage. And the group members can offer their perceptions on your exhibit.

I found myself in minimalist mood using straight edged pics cut out of one glamorous women's magazine of the type I'd only read in the hairdresser's. This seemed to tap into some unconscious desire for glamour which I can't say I was previously aware of. Anyone who knows how I present myself in day to day life would not use that as a description!

The curious outcome of doing spontaneous acts of creativity is that you find insights rising up from the unconscious. So, I have pinned up my collage, no doubt inviting dubious comments from my daughter when she sees it, but I'm quite happy with it and anticipate more inner discoveries.

Someone asked me what glamour meant to me and I could only think of exotic travel and some limited ideas of glamour located in the power-dressing glossy world of Dynasty and Dallas from the 80's. I think I need to find a C21 version for my next decade. Although, by some ghastly synchronicity, when I engine-searched 'shoulder pads' I find the damn things are returning just like a bad recession. Who knew that my unconscious mind had tapped into the zeitgeist of the fashion world?

Unexpectedly, the Daily Mail had an interesting comment recycling fashions and the need for women to reassert themselves periodically, in society.

"Whenever women have felt the need to assert themselves, the width of their shoulders has increased exponentially."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-443101/The-return-shoulder-pad.html

While this week the Telegraph contrasts what celebs are dressed up in with fashion advice for the rest of us.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/4601936/80s-revival-shoulder-pads-are-a-key-trend-for-springsummer-09.html


Then again, I'd look as cheerless as this if I was starving myself for a career walking around in sticky out shoulders.

Wee Abused Scottish Beasties

You’ll have noticed the very public row between the SSPCA and the RSPCA over the latter’s alleged appropriation of donations from people residing in Scotland and the lack of awareness that they do not work here.

In terms of fairness, and at times in the charitable sector all is fair in money and fundraising, I think the SSPCA have a valid point when they complain that the RSPCA fail to make it abundantly clear that they do not rescue animals in Scotland, therefore any money raised in Scotland is not spent here. This takes away funds which donors might have expected to go towards helping abused Scottish animals.

I have some, if not conflicting thoughts about this, then a degree of disquiet. I suffer from a knee-jerk reaction of amazed distaste when I hear of people leaving enormous legacies to animal charities. In my view there are other more pressing causes which do not parade cuddly mutts/bunnies/goldfish to wring the heartstrings of the soppy, therefore otherwise deserving causes fail to attract the money they need to provide services which are not popular or are completely misunderstood. For example, lots of agencies seeking to help adult women are hideously underfunded, but crucially, the ethical ones do not try to raise money by trotting out ‘victims’. They know that this is demeaning to women who have suffered whatever problem their service is needed for and is ultimately counter-productive, as there is a perception that over-use of ‘victims’ leads to potential donor-fatigue.

Some well known children’s charities have spent years and an advertising budget possibly well in excess of the total available to ethical women’s charities in portraying helpless children at the mercy of known adults. Sadly there can be an unhelpful patriarchal message in there which encourages mother-blaming. That is contrary to a sound feminist analysis of the nuclear family and the coping strategies employed by many struggling mothers.

And that brings me to another aspect of my disquiet which is that given these large charities are using similar advertising strategies to the RSPCA, and there is frequently a separate but similar Scottish version, are they also poaching funds that people in Scotland are assuming are going to help Scottish children?

Some of the articles reporting on the SSPCA/RSPCA issue are trying to recommend that these Scottish agencies join their English/Welsh counterparts in an exercise to maximise their efforts. This as usual displays ignorance of the separate English/Welsh legal system and the completely different social/welfare structures in those two nations from the Scottish systems.

So, parts of my political world-view are negotiating some kind of reaction to this with other parts of my political world-view. I think this is a peculiar personal form of intersectionality. Damn, nothing is straightforward, is it?

Typically, the Guardian finds the most bizarre commentator to do a comment is free piece on this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/animalwelfare-animals

The comments below this article are priceless! But they demonstrate another issue which is that many people have no concept of how charitable agencies operate and complain about misuse of donations. Sigh, such dimwittedness and possibly from the same mindset that would be all for unrestrained capitalism.

Disclaimer:
I don’t advocate neglecting abused animals and I personally frown upon kitten-drowning, eating flesh and all such nastiness, I merely prefer to direct my charitable impulses elsewhere.

Women and War

The 22nd January is the 65th anniversary of Operation Shingle. Just as in all grand muck ups by the axis of eejits, more commonly known as the Allies in the conflagration lasting between 1939-45, (and ever since) this was badly executed with deadly results. However, for my purposes here I am not about to provide scholarly scrutiny of this battle or analysis of another Churchillian decision, mostly because that is beyond my competence and my interest. Rather I want to focus on an aspect of that Operation which lead to the Ballad below written in defiance of Nancy Astor’s alleged remarks comparing the troops in Anzio with those preparing for D-Day.


BALLAD OF THE D-DAY DODGERS
(A rumour started in Italy that Lady Astor had referred to the boys of the C.M.F. as D-Day dodgers).

To the tune of Lili Marleen

Once we heard a rumour that we were going home,Back to dear old Blighty—never more to roam.Then someone said: "In France you'll fight!”We said: "No fear—we'll just sit tight!”(The windy D-Day dodgers, way out in Italy).

Dear Lady Astor, you think you know a lot,Standing on a platform and talking tommy-rot.You, England's sweetheart and its pride,We think your mouth's too bleeding wideThat's from your D-Day Dodgers—in far off Italy.
(Extract)

SEUMAS MOR MACEANRUIG
http://www.drinkingsongs.net/html/books-and-manuscripts/1940s/1947ca-ballads-of-world-war-ii-(PB)/1947ca-ballads-of-world-war-ii-by-henderson.htm

Astor’s career is peppered with ill-advised remarks, many of which would not get her selected for parliament (even by the Tories) nowadays. Hers is a story of class, privilege and inegalitarian attitudes, although she managed to fairly equally offend a wide range of people. Her best lines remain quotable, but that does not let her off the hook, even if the following makes me smirk:

“I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.”

I cannot help but empathise with the distress felt by troops in Italy hearing reports of her comments about them “dodging the real war in France”. This got me thinking about women and politics and war.

Some time back, Ms Thatcher engaged in conflict. Whatever the rights, wrongs or otherwise of that South Atlantic yomp, and without accurate recollection of her many proclamations, I remember she made much of ‘the boys’ fighting out there, or even ‘her boys’. Did these individuals give up their lives or suffer ghastly injury to make her the Iron Lady? It takes no guessing to know what many thought of Ms Thatcher: as her portrayal in Spitting Image immortalised her, as the only man in the Cabinet.

And now there is the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni desperately trying to out-hard-line her competitors in the forthcoming election, by her constant justifications for the unspeakable war in Gaza. How horrible!

The question I am circuitously, even tortuously inching towards is whether women politicians are judged differently when they send troops into conflicts, or declare war on other democratically elected countries. And I have no easy answer, because my relatively pacifistic feminism can only analyse from a comparatively simplistic baseline of THERE SHOULD BE NO WAR.

Trying to take it further, it is clear that war for oil or other scarce resources is theft and immoral. Invasion and occupation, which is a hallmark of empires old and new is also inexcusable. And there is enough history around that no one can make any credible argument in favour of that. We now get to hear the stories of indigenous people, even if no one gives them proper apologies for land theft in previous centuries, or seriously tries to alleviate their continued discrimination.

The above goes for whatever gender of politician declares/supports war, so what is different about women leaders and how they are judged? Do women have to prove they are harder than the males when they are in power? Is it this which promotes the received wisdom that ‘women are worse than men in …….’ (add your own example). Is this really just another case of women having to be twice as good/hard/bad/strong as men to be taken seriously? If so, then that is more than enough reason for women in politics to examine the dynamics of the patriarchy and to search their conscience about committing to acts of war.

But what about when it is one’s own country that is invaded and occupied? How then are women who resist to be judged? Are they freedom fighters or terrorists? How do we compare Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in her Noble Laureate resistance with the women freedom fighters in the PKK, or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ of Rosa Luxemburg during the Russian revolution?

Each case is vastly different in time, geography and historical events, but these are women acting for change in their land and for their countrypersons.

I reluctantly conclude that there is no conclusion so leave this for discussion another day, or for anyone who wants to comment, and I meander back to Nancy Astor for a final quote:
“Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.”

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/nancy_astor.htm

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
http://www.dassk.com/index.php

Kurdish women
http://www.feministing.com/archives/007965.html

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.pkk/index.html