Barney Google was a cartoon, so let’s talk about cartoons.

Speech balloons[1]—which we tend to identify with comic strips, comic books, and their like—first appeared in Mayan inscriptions dating back to 600 A.D.

They began to feature widely in political cartoons in the United States during the 18^th century.  Benjamin Franklin made use of them.

The term itself ‘cartoon’ was originally used in fine arts to refer to studies made by artists in preparation for a painting, or for templates drawn and used to link the various parts of a fresco.  The modern use of cartoon, to refer to a simplified, exaggerated, humorous drawing, originates with the satirical British magazine Punch in 1843.  Punch applied the term ironically to one of its satirical drawings, as a way of poking fun at the pretentiousness of the characters it was satirizing.

After Punch, the irony entirely faded, and cartoon assumed its popular meaning.  When you use the term today, only fine art specialists are likely to imagine Michelangelo rather than Charles Schultz or Garry Trudeau.

Cartoons, whether so-called, have been around for a long time.  The human mind drifts naturally to abstraction.  Language, for instance, is impossible without it, and music is almost entirely abstract.  Comic art, as a kind of blend of abstract art and theatre, might be a natural development of our species.

But unlike music, for instance, comic art is fully human, requiring a human mind to decipher, and a cartoon is likely as abstruse and inexplicable to other species as the printed word.  Would ape or dog or dolphin recognize either themselves or us in the quasi-logical abstraction of the comic page?

Still, cartoons as we experience them today are not precisely as they have always been. They grew into their current expression over time.  Daily comic strips didn’t appear until early in the twentieth century.  Until 1907, with Mutt and Jeff—the first syndicated comic strip—daily cartoons didn’t have much other than regional impact.  Before then, humorous cartoon drawings tended to be single-panelled, less sophisticated and less economical than the form later became.

Among the earliest cartoon panels was Hogan’s Alley[2] by Richard F. Outcault, featuring a number of low class kids, and most notably the Yellow Kid.  The Yellow Kid was bald—suggesting that his head had been shaved to combat lice, a common fate for inner city children in New York at the close of nineteenth century America, which is when and where the Yellow Kid flourished.

The Kid made his newspaper debut in 1895 dressed in a long nightshirt.  The nightshirt soon assumed its iconic yellow in the coloured Sunday funnies, which the Kid began to be featured in later in 1895.   Unlike other characters in Hogan’s Alley, the Yellow Kid’s dialogue was always printed out on his shirt.

At one time there were versions of the Yellow Kid appearing simultaneously in two Big Apple newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal American.  Because of this association, these newspapers became known as the Yellow Kid newspapers.

The papers were also known for practicing a particular kind journalism, a sensational style which initially was referenced as “yellow kid journalism”, and later, simply as yellow journalism.  Yellow journalism still exists, the term long divorced from any reminders of inner city alleys, or kids with dialogue on their yellow nightshirts.

Yellow journalism never had anything to do with the Yellow Kid, anyway.  It’s just that inner city kids aren’t always careful about who they allow into their social circles.

To return to 1907, and to Mutt and Jeff, the seminal newspaper comic strip.  They were the creation of cartoonist Bud Fisher.  Mutt was tall and gangly.  Jeff was short and he dressed characteristically in top hat and tails, with trousers either checked or striped.  Both characters possessed moustaches, which in the case of Jeff connected to his sideburns in a turn-of-the-century manner.

Mutt at first appeared without his iconic partner.  The strip was called “A. Mutt,” and Mutt was a racetrack sport.  He was joined by Jeff some five months later, and as “Mutt and Jeff” the strip remained in syndication until 1982, a respectable 75 year run.

I remember reading the strip as a kid, although no daily newspaper I had access to featured it more recently than the mid-1960s.

Mutt and Jeff established the daily comic strip.  Barney Google followed somewhat later, in 1919, by which time the genre was already a newspaper institution.

Barney Google took his name from “The Goo-Goo Song” (1900), and from a children’s book called “The Google Book” (1913).  But the character as drawn by Billy DeBeck bore a strong resemblance to Jeff of the Mutt and Jeff strip.  Barney, too, was short, moustached, dressed in top hat and tails, and wore light-coloured checked trousers.  Even the racetrack connection is there.  Just like Mutt, Barney is the sporting type, fond of racetracks, and of boxing too.

Distinguishing Barney from Jeff, however, is his large eyes.  These eyes—which look almost ordinary in a cartoon today, but which were rather more unusual in their time—were considered remarkable enough to form the subject matter of a popular song.  Released in 1923 and sung by Billy Jones and Ernest Hare, the song had the refrain “Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes.”  Part of the melody much later featured in Rice-a-Roni commercials as the jingle, “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.”  If you know the jingle, simply exchange “Barney Google,” etc., for “Rice-a-Roni,” and sing it out, partner.

The Barney Google song appeared on an Edison cylinder, Thomas Edison’s cylindrical answer to the 78 rpm disc.  Barney Google himself moved from newsprint to live action shorts (1920s) to animated cartoons (1930s) to feature films (1940s), and continued to feature in film until the 1960s, by which time he was sharing top-of-the-bill credits with another character, a hillbilly moonshiner from the Carolina mountains called Snuffy Smith.

Snuffy Smith wasn’t in the original strip, in fact was not introduced until 1934, but he became so popular that eventually he effectively edged out Barney.  Snuffy Smith made use of hillbilly humour, a peculiarly American brand of humour (with cousins in other cultures) which flourishes today in a watered down style (and Snuffy Smith is still around.)   Hillbilly humour—like its cousin blackface or minstrel humour—characteristically depended heavily on unflattering stereotypes.

Just as minstrel humour deals in stereotypes about African-Americans, the stereotypes in hillbilly humour concern rural backwoods Whites.  You know.  Real People.

Considering that sober fact, the hillbilly stereotypes presented in Barney Google (yes, even after accounting for comic exaggeration) begin to look crude.  Stuffy Smith is a shiftless, chicken-stealing moonshiner, with characteristic hat and patched clothes, much of the time in trouble with the law, federal and local.  This is crude by today’s standards, but it was mainstream to ridicule the rural poor in those days.  And a lot of other folk as well.

Humour is like that, of course, poking and jabbing at people, existing much of the time on the borderline of aggression.  When we see apes bare their teeth like humans do when they smile, this is a sign of appeasement, showing that the teeth are not open for biting.  Similarly, when humans engage in humour, they bare their teeth to distinguish what might be barbed humour from a real aggression.

Honest, I didn’t really mean it.

And when we laugh out loud, the teeth parted, the humour no longer tempered by the primal locked-teeth gesture of appeasement, then another tactic applies.  We don’t maintain eye contact when we belly laugh, because with parted teeth and aggressive humour, eye contact becomes an aggressive act.

You’ve heard the term, “laughing in your face.”

(I’m not laughing with you, Simple Sam.  I’m laughing at you.)

Hillbilly humour in the Barney Google strip was of the laughing-at-you type.

Of course it wasn’t as if some of these rural folk didn’t take it all in good fun.  Aficionados of old time rural American music might remember Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, a hillbilly string band if there ever was one, with a name denoting a good-humoured spirit of self-mockery.  Then there’s Uncle Dave Macon & His Fruit Jar Drinkers (not to be confused with the Fruit Jar Guzzlers, another group.)  Dave Macon was an early feature on the Grand Ole Opry when it was still just a radio show.  The performers on that early show were marketed as hillbillies.  An entertainer like Grandpa Jones (who was featured on the Opry starting in 1946) developed a hillbilly persona and used it his entire career.  Some people might remember him as the cartoonish yokel from the television show Hee-Haw.

But while hardly central to the issues involved, laughing-at-you type of humour often accompanies real oppression.

Minstrel humour accompanied the oppression of African-Americans in social practice.

Anti-woman humour accompanied the oppression of women.

Anti-Jewish humour accompanied the oppression of Jews.

And hillbilly humour?  In the 1930s, hundreds of poor rural whites were sterilized in the name of eugenics.  People seriously believed that hillbillies were inferior.

Ouch.  That’s not so harmless anymore.

There is a dark side to humour.  Some people laugh.  Others oppress.  Sometimes the target of the jest becomes the target of the oppressor.

So when people laugh at you, remember their bared teeth.

But let’s stop neglecting Barney.

In the late 1930s, the American mathematician Edward Kasner was writing a book about mathematics.   In order to make a simple point about infinity, he created a couple of really big numbers.

The first number was a one followed by a hundred zeroes.  It was a number easily described mathematically (1 x 10¹⁰⁰).

Written out longhand it looks like this:

But it didn’t have a name.

Kasner consulted his nephew Milton, then nine years old, who was a fan of Barney Google.  Milton suggested Google as the name for the number.  Kasner accepted this suggestion, but changed the spelling to googol.

Barney Google had entered a new level of abstraction.

————————————————-

We’ll return to the second of these two large numbers, and the point about infinity in part two.  Because this is clearly To be continued.…

And, over time, a large number of visual and conceptual resources have been developed in the language of the cartoon, resources which were hardly thought of when that first cartoonist roped his characters’ words with a line-drawn lariat.

Words have turned concrete, for instance.  They explode and crumble.  The ultra-camp Batman and Robin television series of the ‘60s hauled the BANG! and POW! into the comic book’s live action incarnation, accepting comic book sound effects as things in themselves, independent of the bang and pow they were allegedly intended to convey.  And, for another example, a post-modern schlep on a comic page is mashed into the corner of his panel by a surfeit of his own dialogue.  The way comic art communicates speech and sound is capable of being a sophisticated game and dance.

But at first there were just speech balloons, and—much of the time—speech balloons are still enough.

[2] Hogan’s Alley, to follow another twist and turn of association, is also the name given for the heart of Vancouver’s former African-Canadian neighbourhood.  It was named after the comic strip I discuss above.  The neighbourhood (which no longer exists as such) began slightly off Main Street, right where the Georgia Viaduct touches down on the Main Street side.  The construction of this viaduct, and the intended construction of a freeway to downtown Vancouver (aborted eventually because of citizen’s protests) resulted in the destruction of Hogan’s Alley.  In a personal note, the viaduct passes right through what would have been the room my father and I occupied in the winter of ’64-65.  I lived hard by Hogan’s Alley (the actual alley must have been behind the very building I was living in) but, I confess, I didn’t even notice.  Hogan’s Alley was where it was because it was both humble and near the railroad station.  In Canada, just as south of the border, men of African descent were favoured as railway porters.  When I lived down in that neighbourhood, my father was working for the railroad, but not as a porter.

It has almost become a new blood sport to bait the BBC for its perceived failings. Left and right, Christian and atheist, lovers of Terry Wogan and those of Chris Evans, it seems hardly anyone is content with the organisation we were once happy to call ‘Auntie’.

And ten minutes hate is no different. Except that, being particularly sensitive to historical revisionism, I count expunging the records of some of this country’s most radical writers to be amongst the Beeb’s greatest misdeeds. Half-comatose on the sofa this Yuletide, unable to muster even the energy required to battle with an Aged Relative for the remote control, it was my misfortune to watch some truly insipid programming. My disappointment was made much the greater because of a betrayal of works which should leap as boldly from the screen as they did from the page before they had the choice meats of their stories reduced to a spam sandwich of an adaptation.

"Miss Matty, I'd like time off on Sundays and the right to vote, ta very much." "The impudence! I'll have you shot!"

At first glance, Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford would not, I am sure, strike you as being hot-beds of radical thought. In fact, I am certain that you saw them in the schedules and thought ‘oh no, another bloody historical drama of no significance to me in my 21st century battle to keep the wolf from the door, the central heating bills paid and the snow from blocking the driveway’. But you would be wrong, dear reader, you would be very wrong.

The writer of Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell, was no romance writer. She counted amongst her friends some of the most important thinkers of her day and was herself no slouch in the brains department. Her books were not set in some sleepy, picturesque hamlet but in the North West of England, at that time the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, home to ‘dark, satanic mills’ and the people who manned the machinery within them. She was no passive observer of the rich-poor divide but passionate in her support for education and other means to bridge that gap and outspoken in her fears for the future if it was not reduced.

John Barton, trade unionist and Chartist father of Mary, is a typical Gaskell character; mourning his wife and son he first forbids his daughter from working in a factory and is eventually reduced to extreme action by the poverty and inequality surrounding him. Barbara Cartland territory, it ain’t. Instead her tales are firmly rooted in the city where troops once fired on peaceful protesters, where a local girl founded the first Suffragette society and where conditions prompted two Germans to write books that would change the course of history.

Because, before it gave us evil football franchises and the near-nightly hysteria of Corrie:

Manchester changed the world’s politics: from vegetarianism to feminism to trade unionism to communism, every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station… was fostered brawling in Manchester’s streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls

That eulogy from ‘Pies and Prejudice’, Stuart Maconie’s excellent tribute to all things Northern.

Admittedly, Cranford is set a little distance away from the belch and smoke of the factories and mills, but not too far: it is based on Knutsford in Cheshire, where Gaskell grew up. Cranford is an adept skewering of the attitudes of those who are not as close to the top of society as they would like to be and just a few slips or financial missteps away from the bottom. The ladies of Cranford would sooner die than admit to poverty and work hard at maintaining their values of ‘elegant economy’. However, to think of them as the idle rich would be a mistake. The mills of ‘Drumble’, the Manchester stand-in, loom on the horizon ‘distant but only twenty miles on a railroad’.

By contrast, although Flora Thompson, writer of Lark Rise to Candleford, did set her stories in a sleepy, picturesque hamlet, she was no writer of cosy, bucolic romances either. Writing from a perspective of 40 years after the events she was recording allowed her tales to demonstrate the seismic changes to a rural life previously anchored by the same seasonal events throughout generations. Mechanisation, better communication and urban expansion were to alter the countryside of Thompson’s childhood beyond the imagining of most of its inhabitants.

These changes were faithfully recorded and the stories shaped by Thompson’s background because, unlike many of the rural chroniclers, she was a member of the working class. Her father was a labourer in possession of thwarted dreams of becoming a sculptor and an interest in radical politics which occasionally made him unpopular with the neighbours. Some of her first stories and poems were printed in the socialist Daily Citizen. Instead of going off into service like so many of her peers, she began working for the local postmistress, a career woman with some daring ideas by the standards of the time, who would lend the young Flora ‘On the Origin of Species’ by that other higher thinker, Darwin.

For the characters of these two unconventional writers to be reduced to bonnets, forelock-tugging and ‘yes ma’am’-ing for a sleepy, Sunday audience is a travesty. The firebrands on the page are now simple creatures, homespun and happy with their allotted status in life. Perhaps the powers-that-be are hoping that a little of it will rub off on any potential modern day troublemakers? The nineteenth century saw a deluge of ideas in politics, science and literature alongside improvements in education, health and living standards. Ordinary people fought for, and gained, lasting social reforms that we enjoy the benefit of today, perhaps less valued as we don’t recall the manner of their winning. It is a shame and we are left all the poorer for this two dimensional view of life in that vibrant and radical time.

If you tolerate this, then your children will be next!

Sometimes, when you sit down and look at what is going on around you, you can’t help but think the world is heading down the spout at a faster rate than you first thought.  That pisses me off.  We’re allegedly the most intelligent species on the planet yet we dream up concepts such as religion, money and politics to complicate every single decision and action we carry out on a daily basis.

But it doesn’t just stop there.  There’s large portions of society who are so grumpy, fed up and annoyed at their own upbringing or existence, they feel the need to justify it by making everyone else miserable.  No, not traffic wardens but killjoys.  They don’t know where to get off.

The very worst kind are those who are completely devoid of all sense of humour or social interaction and feel life is one big checklist they have to tick off every day and everything else is just a burden or hinderance to them.  The ones who feel we have to live in accordance to their existence otherwise you aren’t living at all.

This is where I take aim and fire at ‘PinkStinks’.  Quite possibly one of the most petty, pointless and pathetic campaigns I have ever encountered.  According to these Pankhurst wannabes, selling pink toys to girls ranks them out of ever getting a good job later on in life.  Essentially ladies, if you’ve played with a pink wendy house, My Little Pony or whatever else, you only aspire to be a WAG, Katie Price or a pop star.  You are obsessed with these types of people according to Emma and Abi Moore who set up this ‘campaign’.

Looking through the website defies belief.  The Early Learning Centre is apparently the root of all evils, and they seek to back up their barmy idea with research such as ‘Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children For Profit’.  They go as far as to tell parents who their daughters should see as role models.  So parents: In order for your daughter to grow up to be successful you must stifle their childhood and ability to think for themselves.  Deprive them of all individual choice, and thrust upon them a CD by Kellilicious, a Meryl Streep film (hmm, last I remember Mamma Mia! wasn’t a ‘must see’ for feminists) and point them in the direction of June Sarpong’s blog.  Otherwise THEY WILL FAIL IN LIFE.

Yep, if you don’t follow Pink Stinks life rules, your daughter is going to be orange, wear velour, want a pony and shag footballers.

Bullshit.

Are they seriously trying to convince us that every successful woman everywhere on the planet has only achieved what they have by shunning a colour and depriving themselves of a normal childhood?  Is there stats to back this claim up?  Oh wait I’ve found a PDF on there explaining all, silly me (too many blue toys as a child has made me stupid LIKE A BOY).

• “73% of girls use the internet every day” – Last time I checked, the internet wasn’t pink nor was it split into Boys Only and Girls Only sections.
• “The average child in the US,UK and Australia watches 20,000 – 40,000 TV ads a year” – And? If that has an adverse affect on channelling girls off towards liking ‘fairies’ and ‘princesses’ then why are boys being channelled off presumably to like robots, guns and footballs not being fussed over with a ‘Blue Stinks’ campaign?
• “70% of 3 year olds recognise the McDonald’s sign but 50% don’t know their own surname” – 70% of all 3 year olds aren’t girls, McDonald’s is not aimed specifically towards one gender, so what is your point?
• The average 10 year old recognises 400 brands – Which brands? I’m guessing generic ones like ‘Pepsi’ ‘Burger King’ etc, ones that don’t single out one gender for fear of alienating the other and losing potential revenue.
• Men’s weeklies have on average 70 pictures of women per issue, with around a third posing topless – Mute point.  Your argument is over kids here.  I’ve never seen a 5 year old boy ‘read’ Nuts or Zoo, nor should they.  Key words in this stat is ‘MEN’ and ‘WOMEN’ – adults, not children.

And it goes on and on.  My parents were laid back when I was a kid.  They’ve always been laid back.  They allowed me to make my own choices regarding what toys I wanted, what books I read, what music I liked etc.  They recognised that as a human being I’m an individual and should mould myself as such.  Same with my sister.  Did I dress all in blue as a result of what I saw on TV and she in pink?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Did we have differing tastes in what toys, books and music we liked?  Definitely.  Not only are we individual, but genetically in terms of male and female we are completely different.

Pink Stinks completely overlooks any form of science within it’s site.  Y’know, facts like how androgens in the womb develop ‘male’ brains and estrogens leads to the development of ‘female’ brains. (http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-homens.html)

Overlooking things like how neuroscience has scientifically proven that there are differences between males and females in terms of thought, mannerisms, emotions and other things that develop through the course of someones life and steer them to think or behave in certain ways.  Science.  There’s a billion web pages on the net that back this up.  Not a pink A La Carte Kitchen or a Blue Transformer in sight.

Throwing random stats that can be applied to all children, or completely disregard children and take fire at men and women instead who have already forged their path through childhood and puberty (where lo, more changes occur in males and females in very different ways!) means absolutely zilch if you want to back a ridiculous campaign about boycotting a colour.

3000 people apparently support Pink Stinks. 3000 out of a planet of billions.  3000 to my mind BLINKERED people who think something as trivial as the colour of toys or clothes determines how their child is going to turn out later on in life.  The fact that is has got the backing of a Labour minister means ZERO.  Labour bods would back a lame horse in a race if it guarantees them a vote or two.  Girls who I went to school with who funnily enough liked all things Pink Stinks hates have gone on to do well for themselves.  Not one to my mind has grown to idolise or imitate Katie Price or Victoria Beckham or think their children should.  I also think they’d be pretty offended if someone told them the only reason they’d made a success of their life was because they hadn’t bought a particular toy as a child.

This is a stab at feminism that has gone completely wrong and just looks like something dreamed up on a whim.  It started out as a Facebook campaign for Christ’s sake.  That website in its very nature murders brain cells due to how pathetic it is with its pointless apps, games and so on and so forth.  Anyone can start a campaign on there for anything, and I just think this one started to believe its own hype and it has snowballed into a poorly researched, badly conveyed idea.

When women in South Africa are being dragged from their homes and raped to ‘re-educate’ them following them coming out as lesbians, and not to mention the numerous customs in various cultures around the world which put women as the inferior race rather than equal race, arguing the toss over a colour and how it affects the outcome on a person’s life is not only trivial, but completely and utterly pathetic and insignificant.  Oh and childish.

Pink Stinks – The Suffragettes you most definitely are not.

*UPDATE* Check out Lindsey’s post regarding the ridiculousness of Pink Stink at her  ThinkCherry Blog.

We have a bit of a mystery here in the Herbarium and were wondering if anybody out there can help us?

Many of you may have heard of a lady called Lydia Ernestine Becker (1827-1890).  She was born in Manchester and became a famous suffragette. She is best remembered for founding and publishing the Women’s Suffrage Journal between 1870 and 1890.  However,  most people don’t  know that Becker was also a botanist and astronomer: in 1862 she was awarded a gold medal by the Horticultural Society of South Kensington, and in 1864 she published a small volume entitled Botany for Novices.

In the Herbarium we have some specimens that have been stamped  ’Ex herb J Lydia Becker’ which denotes that they once belonged to the herbarium of J Lydia Becker.  The accession number (Kk398) indicates that the specimens came to the Manchester Museum from a collection belonging to Henry Hyde, donated in 1909.

What we are trying to find out is why there is a ‘J’ prefixing the Lydia Becker?  The dates and localities of when and where the specimens were collected fit in with them being collected by Lydia Ernestine Becker but why the ‘J’?

Also, does anybody know anymore about the British Botanical Competition, 1864, which is printed on the labels?

Finally, Henry Hyde.  Does anyone know anything about him?  On page 267 of the Whitelegge obituary in an earlier post, it states that Whitelegge had advanced Botany lessons from a Mr H Hyde from Manchester – my guess it is the same man.

Any help, suggestions or clues gratefully recieved…

Ah, the 1920’s…the decade of bathtub gin, the model T, speakeasies, flappers and gangsters.  Referred to as the Roaring Twenties and The Jazz Age, it was a period of American prosperity and optimism.  A time of great social upheaval and change…the most explosive decade of the century.  Women were granted the right to vote, but Prohibition cast its shadow over the decade and inspired the rise of organized crime.  The decade was a time of great advancements as America became more urban and more commercially driven until the market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression.

Join us here at Boundary Bay Brewery for a rip-roaring party on Saturday, December 5th as we relive the 20’s/30’s and celebrate the End of Prohibition! This is a family friendly event that starts around noon and lasts all day.

Costumes are not only welcome, but encouraged! Dress up in 1920’s/30’s period costume and join us as we re-enact prohibition.

In the evening, we’re going to shut down the taps, stage a protest, and then let the beer flow once again.  But that’s not all!  We’ve got good times planned all day for you…FREE horse drawn wagon rides from 1-4 pm, live music from 5-9 pm and costume contests with prizes for best dressed.  And, don’t forget to get your portraits taken by professional photographer, Jon Brunk to memorialize your flapper dress and pearls or zoot suit and tommy gun!

Need costume ideas?  Come as a speakeasy owner/bartender, a factory worker or a moonshine runner.  How about a gangster, a flapper or a protestor?  You could be a Suffragette, model Depression era clothing or just cobble together something that reminds you of the 20’s and/or 30’s.  Think zoot suits, pinstripes, wing tips and martinis.  Feathers, beaded fringe, evening dresses and long pearl necklaces.  Cigarette holders, finger waves in your hair and pinstripe suits.

Come re-enact history with us.  Join the protests.  Raise your voice.  Demand your right to beer!

It all began in 1914 – one of the greatest wars in history, triggered off by a few angry people.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was visiting Sarajevo in Bosnia when he and his wife were ambushed by a few young Serbian men. They were a part of a group called Young Bosnia, a group filled with people who hated Austria’s oppressiveness. Fueled by anger, four of them set out to ambush and assassinate the Archduke and his wife and succeeded. The person who pulled the trigger was a young man called Gavrilo Princip. Little did he know that by doing so, he had just started one of the greatest wars in history – known as, the First World War.

A Great War monument.

But how could a war as humongous as the First World War just happen? How could, all of a sudden, one of the greatest bloodsheds in history suddenly begin? The answer is, they don’t just suddenly begin. The First World War is a product of a great build up of tension over a long period of time. When young Gavrilo Princip pulled the trigger, he was actually lighting the fuse of a great bomb that held immense tension between the main countries involved in the war.

Tensions had been running high long before the war between Germany, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The main reasons were colonies (such as the Balkans) and the build up of armies. Eventually, the war was broken up into two sides, one was the Triple Entente, which was comprised of France, Britain and Russia, the other side was called the Dual Alliance, which encompassed Germany and Austria-Hungary.

With all the tension going around, it was hard to believe that war didn’t happen sooner – but there was a forced and strained peace in an effort to delay the war as long as possible for no one wanted to be the one to start it all off.

Despite the forced peace, everyone was secretly getting ready for a war and forming a battle plan. The most controversial of all was the Germans’ Schlieffen Plan. The plot was to station a small army in the east to detain Russia, while the rest of Germany’s forces would smash through Belgium, overcome and defeat France and Britain and consequently knock them out of the competition.

A famous war time poster in Britain.

However, their plan failed when they underestimated Russia and France’s strength and they were defeated twice. The war deteriorated to a War of Attrition – as both sides were forced into a stalemate, and both were in the same position and were reduced to cold hard murder as the last chance of winning, as neither had an advantage over the other.

The Great War eventually came to an end, and though the Triple Entente won, really, both sides lost, as many lives were taken, and many nations scarred.

The Great War, though now it is more commonly called the First World War or World War I, had a great impact on the world. For example, in Britain before the war, working class men could not vote. But when the war hit, the government saw these men risking their lives everyday for their country, and felt that that was unfair to them and started to pass a new law saying that working class men could now vote. Women, or more specifically, the Suffragists and Suffragettes, had been campaigning for women to get this very thing for a long time – the right to vote. They saw their chance, and started campaigning hard, and succeeded.

It is likely that women may have never gotten the vote, and have never been able to get the same jobs as men and so on because when the war hit, many young men left their countries to fight in a foreign land, leaving many jobs crucial to the war empty. Women saw their chance, and successfully got the vote in 1918.

A year after women won full voting rights, these women joined in the St. Patrick's Day Parade on Fifth Avenue on March 27, 1921.

The Great War was over and the countries were slowly recovering, but the war left a lot of tensions, for although the war had ended, most of the reason was because the stalemate was costing too much to maintain. Thus, no one was really happy, and even after all the carnage, it seemed that another war was inevitable. This unfortunately leads us to another scarring, tragic and equally horrific war: World War II.

Road to Amelia Bloomer's Grave

I picked up the habit in childhood of visiting famous people’s graves. Later as I grew more interested in Wilder, my mother starting saying that every vacation we ended up in a cemetery looking for dead Wilders (I pointed out that sometimes it was dead Ingalls, etc., but she remained unconvinced.

During my class in Council Bluffs this summer we got to stop at the Fairview Cemetery. Although I hadn’t done enough pre-work for this trip (really I didn’t, I literally just found out something I should have known about Tabor before I went this week – I’ll share soon), but there was a sign that said Amelia Bloomer was buried somewhere inside. I knew Amelia Bloomer was just one of the leading suffragettes that lived in Iowa, but I hadn’t realized she was buried in Council Bluffs. With no further help from any special sign or the map posted near the gate, I set off to find her. It was quite a hunt, but finally I located the Amelia Bloomer stone.
In case you find yourself in Council Bluffs, here is how to find it yourself. Enter Fairview Cemetery at the entrance with the sign bearing her name. Follow up the road until it splits, forming a pointed island between the two roads (the island is shown in the first photo above). Amelia’s

Amelia Bloomer's Grave

stone is about three rows into this island. It’s a white pillar stone with a flat historic marker stone in front of it. Her husband is on the opposite side of the tall white stone. Happy hunting!

Hope y’all had a good weekend and didn’t stuff your face too much with Halloween sweeties as much as I did ;(

To round off the weekend, you could  do a lot worse than listen to some absolute gems from the BBC on the history of the UK suffragette movement, including an interview with the iconic Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter and interviews with some of the veterans from the historic campaign to grant women the right to vote.

It’s fantastic stuff, the sort of thing the Beeb do so well (the Radio 4 Darwin series by Melyvn Bragg earlier this year is one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time), and something to remember when we go to the polls in this country at some point next year …

Hope y’all had a good weekend and didn’t stuff your face too much with Halloween sweeties as much as I did ;(

To round off the weekend, you could  do a lot worse than listen to some absolute gems from the BBC on the history of the UK suffragette movement, including an interview with the iconic Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter and interviews with some of the veterans from the historic campaign to grant women the right to vote.

It’s fantastic stuff, the sort of thing the Beeb do so well (the Radio 4 Darwin series by Melyvn Bragg earlier this year is one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time), and something to remember when we go to the polls in this country at some point next year …

This morning, reading about the Suffragettes , I found the following information:

In March 1907, a 16-year-old Huddersfield weaver named Dora Thewlis was arrested.  The sensational photograph of the arrest was later turned into a picture postcard – wouldn’t this be a nice one for my collection.     

And I like the cover picture from a 1974 issue of The Radio Times of 3 of the Suffragettes in later life.

And here’s another old postcard that I read about today.

  This is from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.  Written in 1922.  And the accompanying blurb is to be found here.

From the brilliant superlambanana to the Magic Roundabout, Britain’s cities are stuffed with weird and wonderful creations. Click here to take a peak as I have a look at some of the most iconic sculptures in the UK.

What do you reckon of the superlambanana? Is the Angel of the North a cultural wonder, or just a great towering piece of rubbish? I love it. But what’s your take? Read on and let me know.

The piece was originally intended for Substance magazine. Substance is a current affairs title for young people that I helped produce.  But we couldn’t fit any more copy in the issue.

So readers of this blog get to see it first in another blog exclusive.

Any woman who wanted to see Hillary Clinton become the President might have had a suffragette as a relative.  I did.  My great grandmother on my mother’s side was one.  Here is a picture from that era.  Click on the picture and you can read an article that it is linked to that is very interesting, too.

Hmm…it wasn’t easy for those old time suffragettes.  Nope.

You can see what the patriarchy thought in the image below this one –  Well?

A lot of us who voted in this election wanted to see Hillary break the final glass ceiling.  It was incredibly hard to see her go through some of the things the press did to her, and incredibly hard to see what happened to Palin too.

Both of these women have careers in POLITICS.

But look what happened.  Neither were shown respect, were they?

So, American feminists who grew up in the generation just under Hillary’s are pretty upset about this whole deal and nobody has really said much about that yet.  Both Clinton and Palin made feminist history in 2008.  American women from my generation expect to see tremendous accomplishments by women.  My gen is pretty famous for having gone to college and worked and gotten advanced degrees and so forth.  It was in a way a legacy our mothers handed us.  That we would be, and could be more.

My gen wanted equality in the workplace?  So…

Hillary Clinton was a symbolic figure to us.  That was the ultimate glass ceiling.

Today is Hillary Clinton’s birthday and The Confluence has a great tribute up for her!

It was an incredible moment for me as a woman to vote for her in the California Primary.  One woman voting for another — almost a suffragette legacy — you could say.  I had tears in my eyes that day.  But then, I watched the aftermath.  As a Democratic Woman, I can no longer support my old political party.  The women leaders in my party obviously did not care about Hillary.  So?  That left Cynthia McKinney –who would have been fine by me assuming the Green Party could have won.  McCain was quite shrewd by choosing Palin.  Her ideology bothered me somewhat as a Democrat, but, it would have been an advance politically for women.

We watch what the “wives” accomplish, in my generation.  A first editorial has come out about that here.

American women have very high standards in this generation.  It is a highly educated generation where women wanted to make a big difference.  A friend of mine who comments here, Song, has had many conversations with me about “Democratic” women.  She has said we are a very educated bunch.  That’s true.  We had “sisters” ahead of us in the 60’s who were paving the way for inroads in male dominated fields.  What I could appreciate about Sarah Palin was that she, as a woman, was a governor — and she did it herself.  So?

Palin and I were both in college in the 80’s — 15 scant years after Hillary’s gen had made such giant inroads.  I took Women’s History as an elective in my University.  It was just one class — one quarter, in the UC system — but, what I learned was about the various “feminist” women from the suffragettes forward…it’s interesting to see in this article that it has really been only 25 years — since Ferraro in 1984?  Here is an excerpt:

In 1974, there were no women in the United States Senate, no women on the Supreme Court, no women in the Cabinet, no women in such elected positions as governor or mayor of any large city in the United States, no women heading any major corporations in the United States.

The first female president of The University of Iowa would not be appointed for another 21 years, and female faculty members were few and far between. But a group of those women-most of whom had not yet earned the security of a tenured position-decided it was time for change and began working to make it happen.

They were convinced that students should be presented with a greater depth of information about a segment of the population that the academic world-and society as a whole-had long ignored. Their “radical” plan was to include the work of women in a college curriculum.

“It is difficult to understand in the 1990s how beleaguered and strange the idea of women’s studies was in the early- to mid-1970s,” says Florence Boos, a professor of English who was among the first women on campus to support the idea.

That class I took was one of the first of its kind — and women like these on the faculty — and faculties across the nation had set that up.  Chances are, their grandmothers or great grandmothers were like mine?  Suffragettes.
Here is the Wikipedia on women in the 80’s — at the time I was getting my BA.

Women in the 1980s

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all supported the ERA, but in 1980, Ronald Reagan was the first President elected who did not. However, Reagan committed himself to achieving women’s equality in other ways (i.e. rewriting specific laws and appointing commissions to make the laws equal and eliminate discrimination). Reagan also set a record in appointed women to high political offices. In 1980s society radical changes were already visible. Unlike before, women were now very visible in law, politics, business, the medical field, finance and other formerly male dominated jobs. Before the movement the equality of the sexes was widely held as a radical concept. It now was considered a basic American ideal. The popular image of women was now a type of “Superwoman” who could “have it all”. In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nominated for Vice President by a major party (the Democratic Party). That decade, women became Fortune 500 CEOs, presidents, and chairmen for the first time. The media also, beginning in the ’70s with shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, portrayed women in powerful, independent, and diverse roles. The role of women would continue to change and advance in the 1990s and the new millennium (see below).

The tail end baby boom woman who grew up in the era above?  Well, considering that milieu depicted — we do expect a lot.

Anyway, one good thing seems to have come out of all of this and that is this website!

Center for American Women and Politics

I feel glad just looking at that page, and seeing those faces.  My guess is that they come from my gen?  Umm, hmm.

Not one of us could believe our eyes in 2008.  Not when it came to the treatment of the two women who were in the public eye the most.

Trends over Time for Women Candidates (1944-2008)

That page above shows you what has happened since 1944?  That would have been my mother’s generation.  So, perhaps you can understand why Hillary Clinton was so symbolic to so many of us.

Happy Birthday, Hillary Clinton.

I have had a flurry of emails from fellow electoral reformers debating how to respond to Gordon Brown’s proposal to have a referendum on the Alternative Vote system. As Nancy Platts and I said on Wednesday evening  electoral reform is a feminist issue as it will result in better representation for women. Regular attenders of Labour Party events will have seen Cath Arakelian (pictured). Cath is Labour’s candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green, and she regularly wears a sash, suffragette style. This is her take on the current situation:

“Each year before conference I ask myself what would the Pankhursts be fighting for? For the first three days of conference I wore my suffragette sash with Vote for a Change written on them. I am certainly happy to go as far as chaining myself to railings, hiding in a House of Commons broom cupboard, although I don’t think I would throw myself under a horse! Electoral Reform and Proportional Representation are for me feminist issues. Fair voting, fair representation and fair chances for women go together.  

“I’m a woman PPC in a so-called “unwinnable”.  Women candidates are even given advice to stand in unwinnables, or as I call them, “zombie” seats “for the practice” or to build their confidence as novice candidates.  Unlike me perhaps, many women who come to the idea of standing for Parliament are already ready and often hugely experienced. They do not need the practice.

Standing as a woman in an “unwinnable” is a way of fobbing women off with lesser opportunities. Rather than building confidence, the experience of having only minimum campaigning support from the Party, and all local activists including the candidate, having to work off their own patch, can seriously undermine self-esteem and lead to burn out or disillusion.

 I believe a Proportional Representation system – where every candidate will count and quality will be essential to the Party,  will enable more women candidates of quality to emerge and be successful.

 I think we should enlist political women of note to head up a campaign and women’s organisations – Fawcett, Labour Women’s Network,  etc. Together we should campaign for the referendum to be on the same day as the General Election. 

And that this should be a referendum asking the question 

 Do you want a system of Proportional Representation which will 

(a) mean you will still know who your MP is, and

 (b) will give each party a share of MPs equal to the share of the total votes cast across the country? Yes or No

 I think this means Alternative Vote Plus. We need to campaign openly for Proportional Representation versus First Past The Post.”

On a return trip to Queen Street this week, to retrieve the inevitable forgotton piece of curatorial kit, I couldn’t resist taking one last look at the room that had been my office for the last seven years.

© RCAHMS (Chrystal Collection). Licensor http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

My old spot was situated on the mezzanine floor at the west end of the building – just out of view in the old RCAHMS photograph – and further along into what is now Findlay Court and which, latterly, I had shared with our Online Curator.  The absence of both, endless boxes and sets of twenty-year old index cabinets of reference archive material, only served to emphasise the bars on the windows, which funnily enough, I hadn’t really noticed before.Taking a walk around the outside of the building, it seems that this west mezzanine is the only one to have such protection against the outside world.  Could this have been employed to protect the former occupants of this office – the administrators for the Board of Trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland, and possibly the original Trustees, those of the Board of Manufactures – or merely to prevent intruders gaining access to the collections out of hours? 

From the early stages of the building’s inception security was a significant concern - in the Gallery ‘pass book’ from the 1890s, the first curator, John Miller Gray, records that whenever a new policeman was on duty, he sometimes had ”difficulty in seeing me in [in] the evenings.”  As a precaution, in the days before identity passes, Gray insisted that he himself should ”be required to sign my name on entering, so as to preclude all risk of a wrong person being admitted.” 

Suffragette, Flora Drummond (1879-1949) as General Drummond on Horseback, presumably taken on the occasion of the Suffragette rally of October 9th 1909 in Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery Reference Section

This reminds me of another point of interest concerning security, found amongst Portrait Gallery archival material dating from 1913 – during the suffrage campaign the Portrait Gallery was advised: “it is possible that the situation may at once become serious, and the Commissioner would urge therefore the wisdom of exercising special vigilance over the National Treasures in your charge.”  Consequently, visitors entering the building wearing muffs and carrying parcels were asked to leave these accessories at the front desk, for fear that a concealed weapon could stray too near the portraits.  My, how times haven’t changed!  Thankfully, Mary, Queen of Scots, did not happen to go the same way as the Rokeby Venus, in the infamous 1914 incident at the National Gallery, London.

Earlier this year Dr Katherine Rake, Director of the Fawcett Society spoke at the BPMA about women’s suffrage and other equality campaigns. This talk is now available through our podcast. But if the connection between the women’s suffrage movement and the British postal service doesn’t seem immediately obvious, all will be explained. 

“Human letters” – Telegraph messenger boy A.S. Palmer delivers Miss Solomon and Miss McLellan to 10 Downing Street.

On 23rd February 1909 two suffragettes, Miss Solomon and Miss McLellan, posted themselves to 10 Downing Street, in an attempt to deliver a message personally to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. At this time Post Office regulations allowed individuals to be “posted” by express messenger, so the two women went to the West Strand Post Office and were placed in the hands of A.S. Palmer, a telegraph messenger boy, who “delivered” them to Downing Street. There, an official refused to sign for the “human letters” and eventually Miss Solomon and Miss McLellan were returned to the offices of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Another connection to both the Post Office and women’s suffrage was Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the wife of the political economist, suffrage campaigner, Liberal MP and Postmaster General (1880-1884) Henry Fawcett. At the time of the human letters incident Millicent was the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She and her organisation were more moderate campaigners than the Women’s Social and Political Union, but eventually they achieved their goal.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett who was honoured with a stamp in last year’s Women of Achievement series.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett is regarded as having been instrumental in the campaign for votes for women, in particular the Representation of the People Act 1918, which allowed women over 30 the right to vote if they were married to a member of the Local Government Register, as well as women to enter parliament on an equal basis with men.

Garrett Fawcett’s work and that of the NUWSS lives on in the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men in the UK on pay, pensions, poverty, justice and politics. In her talk, Dr Katherine Rake outlines the Society’s work, giving both a sobering and optimistic appraisal of what has been achieved.

To find out more about this and our other podcasts visit www.postalheritage.org.uk/podcast.

The education pack Messages Through Time (suitable for Key Stage 3 history students) contains colour facsimile archive documents related to the human letters and can be downloaded from our website.

One of the most crucial steps in developing and getting knowledge is to know about the past, and all that has come before you. With that in mind we have put together a brief history of women getting the vote, and notable women throughout the 20th century.

After Australia became its federated in 1901, women achieved the extraordinary goal of becoming the second country in the world for women to achieve the vote. It was enshrined in the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 and the allowance also granted women the possibility of being elected in to national parliament (Australian Women in Politics, 2009). After this point it took a few more years for each of the states to successfully pass bills to allow women in the state houses.

It would be almost another 20 years until a woman was actually elected, when in 1921 Edith Cowan (see website: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/Ao90042c.htm?hilite=edith%3Bcowan) made the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. She was the main instigator of the private bill, Women’s Legal Status 1923 which prevented anyone being discriminated for public function on the basis of sex (Sawer, 2001). Another notable woman was Vida Goldstein (see website: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A090042b.htm?hilite=vida%3Bgoldstein) who ran for both the Senate and House of Representatives in the early years of the 20th century. She had an active voice on some of the most critical issues of the time such as child labour, equal property rights and the push for a basic wage and believed only women could aptly represent women’s interests (Brown, 1981).

Both this women have a critical influence, though it was after both World War I and II that women were able to challenge the status quo and make real, effective and lasting change. In 1949 Dame Enid Lyons became the first woman elected to cabinet, however she wasn’t give a portfolio at all. Another small shift was made when in 1966 Dame Annabelle Rankin was give the role of Minister for Housing. Finally, it was Dame Margaret Guilfoyle who became Minister for Social Security in 1975, and subsequently Minster for Finance in the early 1980’s (Sawer, 2001).

In more recent times women have been powerful figures within both the ALP and Liberal Coalition. Amanda Vanstone was the youngest woman elected to the senate in 1984 (a title now taken by Natasha Stott Despoja), and became a front bench minister (the only female) in 1996 when John Howard came to power. She eventually became Minister for Immigration which is still typically seen as a ‘male’ ministerial position. Despite the fact that she was labelled a ‘political hyena’ by Wayne Swan (Walsh, 2003) she was also given the position of Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Reconciliation which was a central priority at the time.

Of great contrast to this is the current Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Ms Gillard has achieved an astronomical amount in politics, and in are article on her ‘personal perspectives on Parliament: Lower House’ (2008) she puts this down to the “historic male definition of the job and the power structures” which is only propagated by a condescending tone from the media. She came to power in 2007 and in her roles for Minister for Education and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations she faces significant challenges in reforming their practices and creating significant change. At the same time as she was elected, so were 40 women to the House of Representatives and  27 to the Senate (Electoral Commission Stats) She has also been given the title of ‘acting Prime Minister’ when Kevin Rudd is overseas, so she becomes the first woman of her time in such a role.

Lastly is Quentin Bryce, who became Governor General in September 2008, and is the most politically powerful woman in Australia. After activly participating in all areas of life from sport, to philanthropy and extensive teaching in the area of law, Ms Bryce, who was previously Governor of Queensland, was given the role by Kevin Rudd. Although the position is traditionally seen as ‘above politics’ with sole allegiance towards the Queen, she has been criticised for working with the Prime Minister on the countries international affairs.

On the indigenous front is Marion Scrymgour a woman who holds the title of the first indigenous female minister. After being elected in 2008 (Australian Electoral Comission, 2009), she is currently the deputy chief minister of the Northern Territory, as well as Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Minister for Family and Community Services, Minister for Child Protection, Minister for Indigenous Policy, Minister for Arts and Museums and Minister for Women’s Policy.

On a more general note, the creation of the non-government “women in politics coalition” in 1992 represents the growing representation and changing times. 2 years laster came a very decisive move on the issue when the Labour party voted to achieve 35% representation in all its parties by 2002. Currently in federal Parliamnet there are 60 women, which is a total of 26.5% of the whole Parliament (National Labour Womens Network, n.d).

I slept badly and was woken at 5am by those bloody church bells ringing like some giant alarm clock! A curse on religion.

We went through the same routine as yesterday but the breakfast was worse, one hot dog sausage,tea and bread, no margarine after yesterdays first and last taste.

At 10 we were given a choice of activity. We could either spend an hour walking around the exercise yard,(Bob chose that), or an hour and a half of sport, which I chose, hoping I could exhaust myself enough to get some sleep.

About 15 of us were taken across to a gym where we were given another choice, do weights or play football. I chose football so we had to carry two sets of goals onto a tarmac covered area surrounded by high fencing, and split into two teams of four a side.

We started to play and it was very competitive. After about 15 minutes I was knackered.There was this big bloke covered in tattoos and I stuck out my foot to tackle him. Unfortunately I mistimed it and tripped the bloke up, causing him to go scudding across the tarmac on his knees,skinning them badly. Despite that he leapt to his feet and came at me, calling me,’a fat fuckin’ cunt’ and threatening to kill me. Screws came running from all directions and held him back and tried to calm him down. The screw who was refereeing came up to me and said,’Better steer clear of himson!He’s murdered two already so one more won’t make any difference’. To be honest I was terrified, and spent the remainder of the game running in the opposite direction whenever he came near me. I was relieved when we were taken back to our cells and vowed that in future I would walk around in circles with Bob!

I had dinner at 12 and as expected it was totally disgusting, but I still cleared my plate. No doubt you could get used to it but I’m certain no one could ever say they enjoyed it. After all, we were there to be punished and eating certainly rammed that point home!

After dinner Bob and me discussed our chances of release. Three miners had been released yesterday and Bob’s hopes were pinned on him going today.He said he couldn’t stand another day inside, let alone a weekend. I was a lot more pessimistic about my own chances and was resigned to spending the weekend inside. If I was released then that would be a bonus.

My pessimism seemed justified when the screw let Bob out at 2.15 for another visit, and I felt deserted and alone as I sat in the cell and cursed my lodge officials. I jumped when I heard the door being opened at three, thinking it was Bob returning but the screw informed me I had a visitor, Mrs Callan. As we made our way downstairs I guessed that Mrs Callan was the wife of the Durham Area Secretary and wondered why she’d been sent to visit me. At least it would be contact with the outside world.

I was taken to the reception area and told to wait until I was called. My name was called and I went into a room with a long line of tables running the entire length. I was taken to the middle and couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Kath sitting there and all we could do was just stare lovingly at each other. We both tried to talk at once but were interrupted by the arrival of Tommy Callan, his wife, and John Chapman, Westoe Lodge Chairman, who was full of lame excuses for not coming earlier. I listened to them impatiently until they took the hint and left us alone. Kath told me that I would almost certainly be released today because my solicitor was appearing before the Judge in Chambers at 2.30. She was shocked at seeing me in a  prison uniform, and by the whole degrading process of visiting someone in prison. A screw came up and told us our 15 minutes were up and asked Kath to leave. She told me she’d left some cigarettes and two cans of lager, and said she hoped to see me later. I hoped so too!

After I was given my goods, which included a box of chocolates from Mrs Callan, I was locked back up in the cell. I ate all the soft centres from the chocolates whilst Bob paced up and down the cell, driving me nuts with his patter, saying he was getting out for certain but that I would probably have to remain on remand because of my previous record. He said that this was Tommy Callan’s view as well and I began to get really depressed. Suddenly the cell door was opened and the screw said;’Come on lads, you’re out on bail’. I could’ve kissed him I was so relieved. We grabbed our stuff and headed down the stairs. The warden kindly allowed us to give our chocolate and cigarettes to two lads from Blyth whom Bob had befriended somehow and they were overjoyed to get them. In prison terms they were rich.

We were given our clothes back to change into and had to sign for our things kept in a big envelope. When I opened mine to check it I found £17.70p which puzzled me because I’d been lifted with only the 70p! Bob also had £17 extra and we wondered whether we should say something because maybe they were trying to trick us so they could keep us in. We agreed to sign and then waited for the arrival of the Chief Warder with our bail forms. He solved the puzzle by saying,’As a Yorkshireman I support your fight but disagree with the violence. We had a collection amongst the warders and the extra money is to take your wives out for a nice meal’. I was genuinely touched by this show of support and thanked him. He said he hoped he’d never see either of us again and then got us to sign the bail forms. Mine said,’The defendant is not to go within 200 yards of any NCB premises where picketing is taking place except to go to work in the normal course, and to attend the DHSS office at Monkwearmouth between the hours of 10am – 4pm’. I would have signed anyting, even though I was effectively banned from picketing. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we walked out of the main gate at 6pm. You’d think I’d just done 3 years, not 3 days!

Bob’s sister dropped him off at home and then was kind enough to drop me off at home. Kath and me were overjoyed to see each other and the girls were embarrassed as we kissed and hugged.Later, after we’d eaten a delicious meal and I’d put the girls to bed, Kath told me of the struggle she’d had to get the Lodge to visit me. She even had to find out the visiting times herself! The only help she’d got from the lodge was a lift to and from Durham, and she said that in her opinion none of the bastards seemed bothered I was in prison. That didn’t particularly surprise me given other events, but what did have me fuming was the pressure Kath had been put under by those bastards. She has enough shit to cope with without men who are supposed to be on my side adding to it. I intend raising the issue at the next union meeting, if only so other lads don’t suffer in the same way. Bastards!!

Catching up on the news I find that Kneel Kinnock spoke at the TUC Conference on September 5th, the day we were jailed. He said,’Violence creates a climate of brutality. It is alien to the temprament and the intelligence of the British union movement’.What a load of bollocks! How the hell does he think we got unions in the first place? By asking our lords and masters for permission? NO! Through the blood of thousands of workers in the past who fought to get them. Even bloody Thatcher has the Suffragettes to thank for using violence at times to win the vote. If we have to rely on shits like Kinnock then we will lose everything our ancestors fought for with their blood. Fuck Kinnock, and his softy lefty mates. I for one will fight to keep those rights, and build on them, and so will millions of others.

A journalist from the New Musical Express rang and has asked if he can stay with us for a few days to write an article about the strike. Kath has agreed and he’ll arrive tomorrow night.

“You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman” – Jane Galvin Lewis

I’m a feminist. It’s not seen as fashionable to admit that these days, I know, but quite frankly, I don’t care. In fact, I was born a feminist; the fourth generation of women in my family to so define themselves. I am the great-grand-niece of a first wave feminist, the daughter of a second-waver, and I hit my teens just as the third wave began to break. But wait, I hear some of you cry, what’s with all that wave business? Surely a feminist is a feminist? Well, yes – but, as with every type of political or cultural movement, feminism has developed over time in a number of different historical phases.

Put very simply, the first wave of feminists were the suffragettes; the brave and often very radical women who campaigned for female suffrage during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries who fought against the widely-held belief that women were too irrational and easily influenced to exercise the vote (often seen to be caused by that uniquely female catch-all diagnosis of hysteria, which was allegedly the result of a ‘wandering womb’ – no, really!). Having found that their attempts at peaceful protest were being frustrated at every turn, in Britain some of these women broke away from their less radical sisters (the suffragists) and got seriously fierce, beginning a campaign of civil disobedience that included breaking windows, chaining themselves to the railings outside Downing Street, setting fire to post boxes and, in one particularly tragic case, dying after throwing herself under the hooves of the king’s horse during the 1913 Derby.

Many suffragettes were arrested, imprisoned and force-fed in jail after going on hunger strike (look up the so-called ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ of 1913 for the full horror of this). Despite a great deal of public and official disapproval of the suffragettes’ actions, theoretical approval for granting women the vote was actually in place by the time World War One broke out in 1914. However, much as with the contemporaneous idea of Irish Home Rule, the war got in the way of this policy being immediately implemented, as the war effort became the government’s major priority. It is often and erroneously believed that British women gained the vote in 1918 only as a direct result of their war work; they took on the (often dangerous) jobs left behind by men called up to fight in the trenches in order to keep the home front functioning, and certainly did their cause no harm at all by doing so. British women over the age of 30 were enfranchised in 1918, albeit on a property qualification. Women had to wait another ten years before they got the vote on equal terms with men, thus formally ending the first wave of feminism in Britain.

“Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got” – Janis Joplin

The second wave of feminism is mainly associated with the 1960s and 1970s (although it is arguable that it still continues, and co-exists – sometimes uneasily – with the third wave), and with a much wider range of issues, including day-to-day discrimination, legally enshrined inequalities between the sexes, the status of women within the family and the workplace, sexuality and women’s reproductive rights. It is this wave of feminism that the now often dismissive descriptive ‘Women’s Lib’ was coined for and is still usually associated with (see below).

The 1960s, in particular, are often associated with peace and love and civil rights and equality for all, but that certainly wasn’t always the case. Many women were politicised by the civil rights and anti-war movements of the period, but soon discovered (then as now, sadly) that sexism and discrimination were rife even in these new, utopian activist sub-cultures, whether they subscribed to the hippy ethos or not. Even hippy chicks themselves often found that they were still expected to play the ‘little wifey’ role; expected to do the cooking, roll the joints, stand around silently looking pretty while the men talked politics, and open her legs whenever (and for whoever) she was asked to – in fact, a lot of young women involved in the hippy movement found the idea and practice of free love very coercive, one-sided and not very liberating (see Jonathon Green’s excellent oral history of the era, Days In The Life: Voices From The English Underground 1961-1971, for some interesting examples of this from the British underground press). The fightback, in part, began here, and these were rightfully and righteously angry women.

Not all of the women of the second wave were from the alternative community, but it soon became clear to many women from all walks of life that the social, cultural and political inequalities they were encountering were inextricably linked, and that feminism meant far more than just the fight for equality of suffrage. For the second wave (and beyond), feminism was about women’s lives on every level. The achievements of the second wave were many, they fought to give us equal pay (in theory), abortion rights, paid maternity leave, child care provision and equality in divorce law, amongst other groundbreaking rights for women – and many of these are now rights that today’s women take for granted.

“You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump.  Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word” – Elizabeth Bibesco

Exactly. For me personally, feminism doesn’t have to mean the now-clichéd rad-fem sporting unshaven armpits, short hair, dungarees, no make-up and a shouty misandry (although if all that’s your thing, please go right ahead. Apart from the misandry. Obviously). I may usually be seen slobbing around in battered old jeans and flip flops, but I see no conflict in being a feminist and enjoying dressing up – and I don’t dress for men, I dress for me. Those who know me well will be aware of my love of shoes (I’m currently obsessing over a pair of red and white polka dot Mary Janes with a six inch heel – I could never walk in them, but they’re just gorgeous), and that I own a very large box stuffed full of make-up (not that I wear any of it very often; but black nail polish is essential – when my (straight) male friends aren’t nicking it off me, that is!). I choose to dress how I want, and I see that choice of how I appear to the outside world as being part of my feminism.

Despite having been brought up in a household that subscribed (and still subscribes) to second wave principles, my own feminist awakening came with what is sometimes considered the starting point of the third wave: the Riot Grrrl movement. Admittedly, I got into it through the boys – as a massive Nirvana fan, I couldn’t ignore Kurt Cobain’s references in interviews to girl bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, The Raincoats and The Slits. I loved the fact that here were women who rocked out just as hard as the men; and, in some cases, beat the men at their own game (I spent most of my teenage years wanting to be Donita Sparks from the kick-ass, tomboyish grrrl-metal band L7 – actually, scrub that, even at the age of 33 I still want to be her!). For someone like me, a politicised and very obsessive music fan who often found herself dismissed and marginalised by male music fans, the Riot Grrrl movement opened my eyes to the fact that it didn’t have to be like that, that I could get up there and make my own art with reference to my own life, without needing to subscribe to the dominant male worldview I saw all around me. And that was – still is – bloody inspiring.

“Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a “real” man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and “unfeminine” and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and…for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement” – Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

Over the next few weeks I’ll be organising and preparing to facilitate three exciting banner making sessions at Glasgow Women’s Library. These will take place on:

Tuesday 22 September, 1pm to 3pm
Tuesday 29 September, 1pm to 3pm
Tuesday 6 October, 1pm to 3pm

This is part of Gude Cause which was formed to mark the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Suffrage Movement Procession along Princes Street in Edinburgh in 1909. The culmination of this celebration will be a re-enactment of this march on 10th October 2009.

No demonstration could ever be complete without an array of colourful banners and placards, and the re-enactment of the women’s suffrage procession will be no exception.
It’d be great to see some friendly faces at the banner making sessions to use your arts and crafts skills to produce a GWL and WEA banner to be taken on the re-enactment march in October.

Give me a shout if you’dlike some more information, or have a look here:

http://www.womenslibrary.org.uk/2009/09/banner-making/

http://www.gudecause.org.uk/

You can attend one or all three of the sessions, depending on what suits you. Come along and try your hand at banner making in a friendly relaxed environment.

To register your interest or book a place: please call 0141 552 8345 or email loraine.williams@womenslibrary.org.uk or laura.dolan@womenslibrary.org.uk

     I am a day late but wanted to commemorate that yesterday,  August 26, is the anniversary of the day in 1920 that the 19th Amendment went into effect. It gave women the right to vote in the United States. I named the post after an antique sign my mother gave me when I was in high school. It has hung in a prominent place in all of my dorm rooms and apartments since then as a reminder of how lucky I am not to be born back then, because, let’s face it, I would have been in jail on a hunger strike at some point in my life if I were.

…women got the right to vote when the 19th Amendment went into effect.

Here are some suffragettes on “College Day” picketing the White House three years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.  Photographer unknown.

Beginning in January 1917, suffragists began picketing the White House, something that had never been done before. Through cold and snow, rain and wind, each day the suffragettes would show up. As Carrie Chapman Catt had organized her workers around themes, so would Alice Paul. Special days for picketers from different states, a college day, a teacher’s day — even Susan Anthony’s birthday — kept the movement going.

When Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, the pickets continued despite threats of arrest, for the suffragettes had been going strong for almost six months. Not even arrest and jail could stop them. Conditions in the workhouse where they were sent were appalling and the superintendent was belligerent toward them. After large play in newspapers nationwide, protests of their treatment came from around the country, so much so, that those who had been against suffragists previously began supporting their cause. It even became fashionable to picket for suffrage and then serve time in jail. [source]