RosieBell

Sisterhood and its discontents

The latest film version of Little Women directed by Greta Gerwig is a hit which has been nominated for six Oscars. A film with so many women in the main roles is rare, and here are four individual March sisters, their saintly mother and their curmudgeonly aunt. I liked it well enough. The acting is good, it is calendar pretty and I could see the point of the framing device, with the time scheme changed so it is adult Jo, a grown-up writer looking back her girlhood. Of course I have read the books. Others were puzzled and got lost with a character one minute at a debutante dance, the next married and sad, the next skipping about. Also, the scenes were short and choppy so that events like Amy nearly drowning under the ice weren’t built up properly, and it was busy, with the girls constantly hugging or prodding each other. That is meant to be a sisterly dynamic but the determined exuberance got very wearying.

Little Women has been loved by little and large women ever since it was published in 1868. Women writers love Jo, turning out stories, plays and poems and uninterested in the feminine world. Simone de Beauvoir loved the book because Alcott was on Jo’s side, and Jo was an intellectual and destined to have an unusual life (self-identification there!). Jo sits in trees reading books, she detests the “ladylike” cage and she has a wonderful friendship with a boy her own age, Laurie. The tomboyish Jo, the future writer, and sensitive Laurie, the future musician, are a terrific pair. Their friendship is joyful - skating together; running together; laughing, plotting, confiding – and is far better than any love story.

De Beauvoir:-

the relationship between Jo and Laurie touched me to the heart. Later, I had no doubt, they would marry one another; so it was possible for maturity to bring the promises made in childhood to fruition instead of denying them; the thought filled me with renewed hope.
(From Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

Like most of its readers, de Beauvoir was disappointed that Jo and Laurie did not marry in the end. The magical pair grow up, he proposes marriage and she turns him down because she is not in love with him. Laurie fails as a musician and to the consternation and disappointment and even fury of many readers, he marries Jo’s younger sister, the insufferable brat, Amy, who had once burned her sister’s manuscript in a spoiled child’s tantrum.

Ursula Le Guin thought Alcott treated this appalling crime against a writer rather lightly.

We first meet Jo as a writer when sister Amy vengefully burns her manuscript, ‘the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity’. How could a book, a several years’ work, be ‘a small loss’ to anyone? That horrified me. How could they ask Jo to forgive Amy? At least she nearly drowns her in a frozen lake before forgiving her.
(The Fisherwoman’s Story)

In the USA Little Women is one volume. In the UK Little Women splits in two, the second book, Good Wives, following the sisters’ story 3 years on. I first read Little Women when I was about 12 and assumed that Jo would marry Laurie. My own sister plot-spoiled saying no, he married Amy. I was surprised - didn’t the heroine always marry the hero?

Amy has never been forgiven. She has committed terrible sins – of being a snob, a social climber, a failed artist (many women writers regard being a Creative as the only satisfactory destiny) and for marrying the ideal chap, the handsome and sensitive (and rich!) one, who adores you however untidy and vociferous you are, that we all deserve.

Gerwig tries to round out Amy in the 2019 film version, giving her an unlikely speech. Amy does mean to make a mercenary marriage* but no young woman of her time would have been so explicit and aware.

And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family, and if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property, so don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

That’s making Amy a modern woman for a 2019 audience and it jars. (Here’s a clever and fun video of various interpretations of Little Women reflecting the attitudes of the times.)

Hadley Freeman, hat-pin sharp as usual, didn’t much care for the film. 

… imposing modern attitudes on canonical characters in the belief they must be relatable is just lazy. This happens a lot with the Bennet sisters in Pride And Prejudice, and here with the March sisters. A good literary adaptation brings us to the characters, not the other way round; in Emma Thompson’s Sense And Sensibility, Thompson and Kate Winslet don’t wang on about “the marriage economy”, as Gerwig’s Little Women do. Instead, we see how we would have thought in the 19th century. Because it’s one thing to fantasise that we are Jo, and quite another to fantasise that Jo is us. This tendency to overrelate to any fictional character, whether it’s Jo or Fleabag, is less about art and more about narcissism. We don’t have to make everything about ourselves.

I myself eventually thought that the Amy/Laurie marriage made sense. Laurie loves the whole March family, who warmed up his chilly and lonely life when he was a lad. Laurie is a musician manqué, Amy an artist ditto, (she is not a “genius”, she declares), they are a handsome, well-mannered pair who shine in high society and resolve that they will share their wealth as philanthropists and arts patrons – a perfectly decent ambition. Jo tells Laurie when she turns him down that he would eventually hate her graceless manners, her Bohemianism, her eccentricity, her scribbling in attics, and she’s quite right.

Alcott takes some pains in Good Wives to show Amy maturing and gaining depth. I always enjoyed the Amy parts – her humiliations at the hands of richer girls, her entry into high society via her beauty, charm and talent, her glamorous European travels and her refurbishing her clothes and prinking to shine at a ball. I was sorry that the film didn’t include the proposal scene, when Amy and Laurie agree that they will continuing rowing in the same boat. (I’m not the only Amyist).

Meanwhile the Jo parts were much duller. She allows herself to be moralised at by tedious Professor Bhaer for writing pot boilers and for taking an interest in anti-Christian intellectual society. Gerwig got round the awfulness of Bhaer by turning him from an ugly German professor into a gorgeous French critic to be Jo’s unconvincing love interest. She does this in a “meta” way. Jo is the author of the story and her publisher is demanding a happy ending, so Gerwig makes this lovely chap someone Jo has conjured up for the conventional reading public. That’s a slight joke on Gerwig herself when you come to think of it, as she has conjured up an anachronistic Amy to please and flatter the equally conventional film-going public.

*Amy is accepting the attentions of a rich Englishman – how would his family have regarded him marrying a penniless American? American girls were only acceptable wives to the Upper Ten Thousand if they were rich. .

The Cycling Pankhursts

Sylvia Pankhurst had a difficult relationship with her older sister Christabel. Christabel concentrated on campaigning for the vote for upper middle-class women and during World War I was handing out white feathers to non-combatant men. She ended up as an Adventist in the USA. Meanwhile the less glamorous Sylvia was a socialist as well as a feminist, opposed the First World War and in later years campaigned against Fascism and imperialism.

They were both members of the Clarion Cycle Club, “ a socialist cycling group associated with Robert Blatchford’s radical newspaper The Clarion. Unlike most other cycling organisations of the time, the CCC extended membership to women when it founded its first chapter in 1894. Early invites to club meets often noted that ladies were especially welcome, and generally a handful did attend.”

This anecdote from their cycling days indicates something of the friction between the handsome, physically stronger Christabel and her younger, sicklier sister. It seems appropriate that Christabel had a smart new machine, while Sylvia had a cobbled-together affair made out of gas piping.

“Those were the high days of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, and the cycling clubs which helped to make its popularity. Christabel had already been demanding a bicycle at Southport in 1893, but the Doctor shrank from the thought of his young daughters riding among the traffic, and it was not until about 1906 that she had her way. I had no desire to ride; but from the habit of loyalty to her, I stood by her side when she made her demands. Our parents took it as matter of course that if Christabel rode I must go with her as a companion. We were now entered as members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Christabel and Mrs. Pankhurst scanned the catalogues of the principal cycle makers, and consulted the club to discover the best machine for speed. The first grade Rudge Whitworth was the final choice; it cost something over £30. I did not care what sort of bicycle I might get. Already, though our parents never discussed such matters in our presence, I had learnt from our aunts that they were not without financial worries. Therefore I was pleased when our teacher mentioned to Mrs. Pankhurst a cheap little machine, which a comrade had made at home out of gas piping. It was of curious design, low geared and rather too small for me; but it did not occur, either to Mrs Pankhurst or to me, that the machine was placing upon me a considerable handicap, when, in rather poor health, I attempted to keep pace with my elder and more athletic sister.

Thenceforward, every available day was spent in cycling. Though the journeys were often too long for me, and I would scarcely pedal the last miles, the Sundays with the club were pleasant. It was delightful to be out in the country, and the men were kind in helping push one up the steepest hills. It was when riding alone with Christabel that I endured a veritable torture. My crimson face and gasping breath were the wordless answer to her impatient ‘Come on!’ Afraid of being considered a nuisance, I would strain and strive till it seemed that my heart would burst. Finally she would disappear from me, climbing some hill, and arrive home somehow an hour before me. I remember being thrown over the handle-bars and rising up so shaken that I had to walk for some distance before I could remount, while she rode on, not noticing that I had ceased to follow. She delighted in hill climbing, and was proud to be able to mount the noted steeps which some of the men in the club essayed in vain. Dr. Pankhurst accepted, but obviously regretted this craze for cycling, which took us away from home every Sunday and seemed to be drawing us away from the public interests so dear to him.

 

One summer holiday we all had rooms in a farm-house at Pickmore, [sic] close to a camp held there by the Clarion Club. Crowds of young men and women, generally rather ostentatious in their love-making, in what was the Clarion way, came down there, and parties of “Cinderella” children were brought in relays for a week’s holiday. Robert Blatchford spent a few days there with his daughters, keeping exclusively to his chosen circle of friends, as he always did. About the same time the Clarion Clubs held their annual gathering in Chester. Christabel insisted that we should go, and I managed to accomplish the journey somehow. Mrs. Pankhurst joined us by train. Blatchford and his friends had booked the commercial room, the only comfortable room in the hotel, whereat there was much murmuring among the members. He came out to talk to Mrs. Pankhurst, and endeavoured to persuade her that Keir Hardie could not be “straight,” because his paper, the Labour Leader must be losing money every week. Christabel and I were both annoyed by this attack on our friend, and when Blatchford presently invited us into the commercial room, Christabel interposed: “Mother, do not go!” Blatchford’s attacks on Hardie because of Hardie’s work for peace and internationalism were a prominent and regrettable feature in the Socialist movement of those days.”

From Sheila Hanlon’s excellent blog on Women’s Cycling

No True Feminist

Well, things aren't like when I were a girl young woman/feminist. CUSU Women’s Officer Amelia Horgan posted the following statement re an event at Cambridge Union, where Germaine Greer was invited to speak:

“The CUSU Women’s Campaign would like to express concern over the invitation of Germaine Greer …to speak at the Cambridge Union. Greer’s transphobia has been demonstrated not only in her writing, but also in her actions. In 1996 she publicly opposed the appointment of a trans woman academic to a position within Newnham college, outing her in the process. As such, Greer’s invitation to speak within our University community is all the more worrying – is institutional memory really so terrifyingly limited when it comes to bigotry?

Greer does not represent feminism [fetch me the smelling salts], and she does not represent us.”

No she doesn't represent you as she couldn't represent puffed-up sanctimonious prigs - which is something she never was however wrong-headed she can be.

I've just been reading Caitlin Moran's engaging How to be a Woman, which is funny and shrewd in the style of Julie Burchill.  Moran says in her chapter I am a Feminist:- "I've never actually encountered Greer. I've never read anything she's written, or seen her speak. I presume she is a stern, shouting thing, always pointing out the 'right' thing to do: like a nun, but angry.

Then I see her on TV...

Greer says, 'I am a feminist' in a perfectly, calm logical and entitled way. It sounds like the solution to a puzzle that's been going on for years..."

Moran then goes to read The Female Eunuch:- "..what is most notable, for someone raised on rock music, is that Greer writes about being a woman the way men sing about being men. When Bowie describes Ziggy in 'Ziggy Startdust' - 'He was the nazz/with Godgiven ass/He took it all too far/but boy cold he play guitar' - it might as well have been Greer talking about herself. She is the nazz, with God-given ass. She writes paragraphs like piano solos, and her rendering of feminism is simple: everyone should just be a bit more like her. Scornful of any useless inherited bullshit. New, fast, free. Laughing, and fucking, and unafraid to call anyone out - from a boyfriend, to the government - if they were stupid, or wrong. And LOUDLY LIKE ROCK MUSIC."

She had that effect on many and as someone said, that even if you knew you couldn't live as a wild spirit ready to take on anyone and anything, she gave a housewife courage to try for the part-time job and the part-time degree (that was back in the 1970s, when I read her, about 15 years before Moran did).

Moran says that she herself became Greer-ish enough - i.e. someone with strong, confident opinions, to take issue with Greer's thoughts on transgender - a controversy I neither know nor care about.

Can I imagine Greer forming some group "expressing concern" about someone or other invited to speak at the Cambridge Union? Or making a Mrs Grundyish show about boycotting drinks parties held on the premises (read it in the link )?   From way outside academia, I read about the student activists there as a bunch of Victorian matrons, telling the footman that they are not at home to such a person and refusing to countenance women of easy virtue. Much like those conservatives who recoiled from the young Germaine Greer for her opinions on women and sex and her habit of swearing.

Ireland's Honour Killings

I do remember when having a baby out of wedlock was a serious stigma for a young woman and her family. This was the 1970s in New Zealand, and often the pregnant woman would have her baby in secret and put it up for adoption. "Gone up north for a while" the family would say about the daughter or sister. A film of that title was made in 1972:-

 

It starts "Last year there were eight and a half thousand illegitimate births in New Zealand" and in style is much like Cathy Come Home.

"After a young woman falls pregnant, she decides to go against the tide of advice from her family and unsympathetic welfare authorities by keeping her baby. Misery and hardship ensues.  . . The story can claim to have effected social change, stirring up public debate about the DPB [Domestic Purposes Benefit – Sole Parent] for single mothers."

In fact I remember a few films made about pregnant single girls and long concerned magazine articles, as part of the general loosening of taboos at the time, with the result that social serices sympathised more and punished less.

The word "illegitimate" has pretty much disappeared now though in those days it was in all our mouths as a social and moral evil. This was the era between shot-gun marriages (the bride was often pregnant at the wedding) and social acceptance.

That seems the dark ages now though it is only a generation ago. New Zealand, however, was not so priest-ridden or conservative as Ireland, which is now in the news with the discovery of 800 bodies of the children of unmarried mothers in a septic tank in Galway. 

Here's a fine angry piece by Stephanie Lord on what she calls "Ireland's honour killings".

Women were not allowed keep their babies because the shame that their existence brought upon the community would be far too great. They were imprisoned within Magdalene Laundries to atone for their sins of honour, and their babies were removed from them as part of their punishment – women who dishonoured the community were deemed to unfit to parent.

Contemporary Ireland feigned shock when stories of the Laundries and residential institutions emerged. Perhaps the shock of those who were too young to be threatened with being put in one for “acting up” was genuine, because the institutions started to close as the years went on. But people in their fifties and sixties now, will remember how the “Home Babies” sometimes came to schools, and were isolated by other (legitimate) children, and then sometimes never came back. While those school-children may not have comprehended fully the extent of what happened, their parents and teachers, and the community of adults surrounding them knew.

Ireland as a whole was complicit in the deaths of these children, and in the honour crimes against the women. They were the “illegitimate babies” born to the “fallen women” who literally disappeared from villages and towns across Ireland in to Magdalene Laundries. Everybody knew, but nobody said, “Honour must be restored. We must keep the family’s good name.”....

People did know what went on in those institutions. Their threat loomed large over the women of Ireland for decades. On rare occasions when people attempted to speak out, they were silenced, because the restoration of honour requires the complicity of the community. Fear of what other people will think of the family is embedded in Irish culture...

Imprisoning women in the Magdalene Laundries deserves to be named as an honour crime because of a cultural obsession that believed the family’s good name rested upon a woman’s (perceived) sexual activity that either her father or husband or oldest brother was the caretaker of. Her sentence to the Laundry was to restore the family honour.

So the authorities were not winking at the family stoning or stabbing the disgraceful daughter but instead connived with  the Church to imprison her and neglect her children to death. That's not a surprise any more - but I am slightly shocked that the children didn't receive something like a Christian burial. 

FGM on prime time

Wednesday 9pm I was watching a favourite undemanding telly program, Law & Order: UK, and was startled when the usual murder-and-trial plot dealt with female genital mutilation (FGM). The programme is still available on catch up. It includes a strong speech from a woman about the horrors of FGM, both the operation itself and the effects it has on the body and mental state for the rest of the victim's life.

I have to say that I found this speech hard to listen to, as the thought of FGM makes me feel very sick. The woman was denounced as a westernised whore by her hijabbed sister-in-law, so evidently no fears of accusations of islamophobia had constrained the script writers.

I don't think FGM has ever been handled by prime time television before in the way that domestic violence has been in East Enders or marital rape in Criminal Justice. Both domestic violence and marital rape were once thought of as family affairs that sufferers were reluctant to bring out into the open and which the police were leery about getting involved in. Then, after campaigning they came into view as subjects of discussion, as themes in controversial drama then run-of-the-mill drama along with changes of attitude from the public and with more action against the offenders and sympathy towards the victims from the police.

As everyone knows, the UK's record on prosecutions of FGM is appalling. The law against it was passed thirty years ago and the first case will appear in court on April 15. According to Sarah Ditum in the New Statesman there are various reasons for the lack of prosecutions - family loyalty; matters of jurisdiction (the victim is often foreign and has been cut in a foreign country); and physical symptoms  i.e. it is difficult to date when the mutilation took place and so it may not be liable for prosecution under current legislation. There is also the matter of the status of women within the communities where FGM is practised.

“Male violence against women,” says Ali [Nimko Ali, co-founder and CEO of the organisation Daughters of Eve]. “That’s ultimately what FGM is. This is about controlling women’s bodies and controlling how they see themselves in society. A lot of the people that are practising FGM right now are well educated but the women haven’t been emancipated from those cultures and the men ultimately believe in those control frameworks.” There’s an ongoing failure to educate girls about their rights but, Ali stresses, no defence of naivety can be extended to the perpetrators and promoters of this crime: “None of these people are ignorant. Those that are pro-FGM often know more about the law than the people that should looking after the girls that are at risk.” But for a long time, authority figures who endorsed or tolerated FGM within their own communities were treated as the official spokespeople on the issue – and that left girls voiceless. “It’s [politicians] being in bed with community leaders, the male community leaders, that has meant that women won’t come forward,” says Ali. “Because the women know that those they seek to trust are talking to the ones that are seeking to abuse them.” This is the context in which FGM has been allowed to go on unopposed until very recently: one where within certain African immigrant communities black men dominated black women’s lives, and the largely white (and largely, though not exclusively, male) mainstream condoned that domination.

Nimko Ali has appeared in popular women's magazines like Grazia and Stylist and FGM as a campaigning issue has been taken up by the Guardian with resultant action from the education secretary Michael Gove.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has written to every school in England warning them to be alert to the dangers of female genital mutilation (FGM) after a Guardian campaign to bring the issue into schools attracted the support of more than 230,000 people. ....... After meeting 17-year-old Brighton schoolgirl Fahma Mohamed, who led the campaign, Gove has sent a letter to all headteachers in England alerting them to new guidelines designed to keep children safe, which includes guidance on FGM. A spokeswoman for the Department for Education told the Guardian that the education secretary would keep up pressure on schools by flagging up the dangers of FGM again in his annual "back to school" letter in September.

Rape and domestic violence will be forever with us, however glaringly their hatefulness are shown in fictional form on prime time telly. FGM though, a form of child abuse as well as a tool for female control, is a very specific practice and could be ended like, say, foot-binding, or the scold's bridle (to mention a Scottish practice and avoid accusations of racial and cultural superiority and imperialism). It's been allowed to carry on for a generation, which is a scandal, and the specifics of this neglect, and why those with suspicions or actual information did not act,  have not yet been clearly stated. According to Nimko Ali:-

A watershed moment for us was when the NSPCC got on board and started talking about it in terms of child abuse. Since I started campaigning against FGM, I’ve noticed time and time again how we have the information and we also have the structures to deal with abuse here in the UK, but in the case of FGM, these just don’t come together. Frontline staff who deal with children, like teachers and social workers, have an abundance of this information – they just don’t pass it on. At an All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting two weeks ago, a doctor told me that she sees girls in her clinic who have undergone FGM all the time. I said, ‘Why haven’t you told the police?’ and she replied, ‘Well, I’d want to be anonymous.’ That was so disconcerting. She would never have said that about rape victims; she knows in the case of rape that it’s a clear-cut crime where information has to be passed on. A Metropolitan police officer told me that they have all the resources in place to deal with FGM cases, but no frontline staff are passing on the information they have. Openly recognising FGM as child abuse should change all that.

My lord hath so bewhored her

On the gender segregation issue here's an interview with Marieme Helie Lucas, an Algerian feminist and sociologist:-

Maryam Namazie: What is the nature of the recent sex segregation scandal at Universities UK where the representative body issued guidance saying side by side sex segregation was permissible? Why does it occur and by whom is it imposed? Also, it’s more than just a question of physical separation isn’t it?

Marieme Helie Lucas: Just like with the niqab, it’s an extreme-Right political organisation working under the cover of religion to promote sex segregation as a pawn in the political landscape and using all possible means to make itself visible and impose its mores and laws. The idea is to permanently demonstrate that the law of god (as interpreted by them) supersedes the law of the people. It is a blatant attack on the very principle of democracy and one woman/man, one vote, particularly relevant in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death.

So please don't think that those demanding gender segregation are for harmless religious and/or cultural sensibilities be accommodated. Think of it as a political  demand from a particularly repellent ideology- and then you will less squeamish about opposing it.

The whole interview is excellent.

Also from Maryam Namazie, a principal organiser of the campaign against the UUK's guidelines:-

"Gender apartheid is an Islamist demand to increase power and influence by asserting medieval rules on women and the society at large. The groups lined up to defend UUK’s indefensible position are all hard-core Islamists who hide behind ‘Muslim’ and religion to push forward their regressive and misogynist far-Right politics: Hizb Ut-Tahrir, FOSIS (Federation of Student Islamic Societies), Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA), and Islamic Human Rights Commission…"

Loonwatch wrote an article about the campaign being simple Islamophobia dressed up. The author of it, in the comments, said Maryam Namazie was "worse than a whore."

Muslim women of a questioning and liberal turn are generally called that:-

I am the latest in a bunch of women, specifically Muslim women, who have come under attack from a group of misogynist men. Their aim is supposedly to combat Islamophobia yet ironically their appalling behaviour is unIslamic and actually fuels anti-Muslim sentiment.

It’s rather funny how our ‘Muslimness’ is questioned to destroy our credibility. Accuse a Muslim person of drinking alcohol or eating pork and you have instantly ruined their reputation. And if you’re a woman, well, that’s ten times worse. The combination of being an ex-Muslim (which I am not by the way) and a ‘whore’ is lethal.

Unseating the Segregationists

Well, can you believe it?. An illiberal piece of policy is advanced by a powerful body, against it comes a petition, a demonstration, media shouting and then the policy is withdrawn. Amazing.

To recap,  Universities UK, (UUK) (formerly The Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom)  put out guidelines that allowed speakers at meetings in universities to insist women and men be segregated for "genuinely religious" reasons. Student Rights picked this up.  The bloggers you'd expect - Maryam Nazie,  Ophelia Benson,  James Bloodworth produced angry posts. The mainstream media moved in - Nick Cohen in the Spectator, and Yasmin Alibai-Brown, finely furious, in The Independent.  

Imagine the scenario:-

Sheikh Shifty is invited by some ISOC group to speak about Freedom and Justice at the University of Excellence.  Sheikh Shifty will only speak if the women sit separate from the men.  
 
Obvious answer - tell the misogynist theocrat to take a hike, in these words,

"I am sorry to inform you that it is against the principles of the University to allow meetings to occur with gender segregation."

But not in the UUK's horrible management speak:- .

if imposing an unsegregated seating area in addition to the segregated areas contravenes the genuinely-held religious beliefs of the group hosting the event, or those of the speaker, the institution should be mindful to ensure that the freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker is not curtailed unlawfully

There was a petition and a small demonstration which Channel 4 covered at length.

Then the BBC began to thunder. The Today programme (1:35) on 11th December had a long piece which started with the reporter regretting his old LSE, the one in the 1980s where students were raucous but not so ready to be offended, or offended on the behalf of putative others.  
 
The next day the BBC got Nicola Dandridge, the Chief Executive of UUK, into the Today (2:10) studio. Regular Today listeners recognised the tones with which Justin Webb interrogated her. It's the one which they use on a duplicitous politician who has no moral leg to stand on -  who has, say, been fiddling her expenses.  It's the voice of outraged decency against a moral moron and it was music to my ears, an angry liberal telling off a squirming piece of inconsistency and illogic. (For a biting take down of Dandridge's muddled defence, I would strongly recommend this.)

"If this is all that Dandridge means – that people have the right to sit where the hell they want and some will sit cliquishly by gender or other groupings, there is no role for Universities and no reason why the situation should ever be addressed in policy.

Worse, “If women want to sit where the hell the want”? IF? What is this world in which you live where women routinely have no desires and sit where they are told without a single thought disrupting the gentle currents of air between their ears?

All women always sit where they want unless coerced or forced. The fact that you can’t acknowledge this openly, that women naturally have desires and preferences, that we make conscious choices here-there-and-everywhere, speaks to a profound sexism whose paucity of respect for a woman’s mind truly challenges the ability of words to express. I can only repeat your own phrase:

    If women want to sit where the hell they want

and goggle at your idea that you will only impose segregation in times and places where women have no preferences.

The politicians  -  Chuka Umunna , Jack Straw, Michael Gove, David Cameron spoke out.  Under the threads of their statements in the Guardian commenters were saying, Bugger me, the horrible Tory creeps are right this time. I'd normally be spitting that politicians were interfering in University affairs - they really shouldn't, you know - but I'm cheering them. If the representative body of the Vice Chancellors and Principals are so bloody clueless, and the NUS are so supine, they need to be kicked.

I think a lot of the response has been visceral. The suffragettes weren't force fed for this, the women who fought a grinding battle to get entry into English universities shouldn't be pissed  on   

So now the UUK has withdrawn gender segreation from its guidelines. It looks like the forces of light have won for once. 

Congratulations to those who attended protests and wrote copiously.  If only every campaign could be so successful.  But what a ridiculous waste of everyone's time and anger-fuelled action.

Flesh is Grass has a sane, thoughtful piece:-

Women always miss out when public spaces are segregated by leaders and organisers – even if voluntary, it’s a small change in culture, in the general view of what is acceptable. Authoritarians always use the values of open, pluralist societies against those societies themselves, and weaken them incrementally. Let’s stop this.

She also pointed out that feminists like Caroline Lucas, MP, Green Party and Natalie Bennett, Leader, Green Party did not speak out. I read that Caroline Lucas had said it wasn't a priority. Also there hasn't been a peep out of that clutch of feminist writers in The Staggers.   Polly Toynbee,  one of the old-guard Guardian, undid the miserable expectations we now have of her paper, by sticking to her old feminism and atheism.  At least they didn't publish any of their usual apologetics on these matters. The Observer has an editorial  and a good piece by Catherine Bennett.

On the other side:-

Well, one is an article which looks like parody in the Huff Po by Camilla Khan, the Head of Communications,(!) Federation of Student Islamic Societies, who tries to wrap this up in a mixture of post-modernism and spirituality.  She has managed to use every con-trick word - those words that irritate like berry bugs in a bra cup - "discourse", "empower", "nuanced"  and "diversity, "

Firstly, the term segregation itself is highly problematic and acts to conflate the reality further. As Saussure theorised on syntagmatic relations, ‘within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage,’ and segregation connotes various forms of separation and oppression.

The problem is calling segregation, segregation.  If you called it something else it would be fine. Telling Molly when she walks into a room that she can't sit here because she's a woman, isn't segregation, just nuanced diverse empowerment.

Tendance Coatesey has a bit of fun with Khan's linguistic studies - Saussure is old hat, I understand - but she really should read a bit of Orwell, and note that calling mass murder "liqudation of anti-social elements" doesn't stop it being mass murder.  But whoever has influenced her writing style, it wasn't Orwell.

Her other con-trick is that very old anti-feminist ploy, that women taking a different (and different will mean inferior) place is a path to spirituality.  So the anti-suffragists said that women agitating to take part in public life spoiled their purifying influence and their moral specialness.  They were meant for a higher destiny.

As with life, Islam acknowledges that we form different groups who occupy various intellectual and social spaces. Diversity is celebrated with spirituality at the forefront, forming a broad frame of reference which is not always easily comprehensible to those outside of it.

No, I can't comprehend how her spirituality is so much compromised when she takes a bus, goes to the cinema or sits in her cultural studies class. What about the diversity of those women who don't want to be herded with other women, and men also.  Is that celebrated? (Add "celebrate" with abstract nouns to my list of berry bug words).  I think the "diversity" is a pretty damned narrow one. 

Second is Shohana Khan. Khan is a member of Hitz ut-Tahrir, the fighters for a Caliphate where apostates will be killed.   

Her argument boils down to:- Men and women must be separated because otherwise they will get sex on the brain and not be able to do something.

Rather the concept of separating men and women in public spaces in Islam, is part of a wider objective. Islam has a societal view that the intimate relationship between a man and a woman is for the committed private sphere of marriage, and should not be allowed to spill outside of this sphere. This is because in society, men and women need to cooperate to achieve things in society whether in the work place, in education, in interactions across the public space. Islam firmly believes if the sexual instinct is let loose in this public sphere, it can taint and complicate these relationships. Therefore Islam promotes ideas such as honouring women which are upheld in society, but alongside such ideas specific rules and laws are implemented to help maintain the atmosphere of healthy interaction between the sexes.

And if the woman breaks these rules, eg by not covering her head she's fair game is she?  

I think it has been observed that public school boys for instance, especially in times past, had a highly unhealthy attitude towards women because they weren't used to them as normal human beings.  So you're talking garbage - and rather prurient garbage at that.  Islamists are as sex obsessed as Hugh Hefner.

Now I won't say I haven't been at a public meeting and thought a chap in the audience was rather a dish. In fact, political meetings at universities is where many of us met our soulmates - that person who was highly vocal about the need to oppose nuclear proliferation and had lovely grey eyes.  The partnerships of couples who fell in love with the shared ideals and the person can be highly productive. The Pankhursts were one such couple.  Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan were another.  So I can't deny there is a sexual element at public meetings, as there is in the offices where we work.

But that it should dominate someone's mind so much that it screws up their ability to act! What's wrong with them?  Knowing how to behave in public is part of growing up, as is concentrating on the matter at hand. The only people offering distractions who should be segregated are those twerps with buzzing mobile phones.

So a victory this time round.  End with Any Questions  (:38).  Shami Chakrabati took what has been a common attitude - why on earth are we even talking about this?

Johnathan Dimbleby: Is there justification for segregation in an educational setting?

Amjad Bashir  (small business spokesman for UKIP, Pakistani immigrant, from Bradford): No.  The answer is no. Absolutely not. . .  All through my life, and my children, my grand children are all mixing, all sexes, whether it's primary schools, whether it's secondary schools. whether it's universities. There is no room. This is England This is the twenty first century.  It's not Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed to drive, It's not Saudi Arabia, where they are not allowed to have bank accounts. This is England. We should allow our youngsters to mix and decide their own future. This is the twenty first century. I am against this segregation.

Egyptian women cycle against harassment

Campaigners in Egypt say the problem of sexual harassment is reaching epidemic proportions, with a rise in such incidents over the past three months. For many Egyptian women, sexual harassment - which sometimes turns into violent mob-style attacks - is a daily fact of life . .

In 2008, a study by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights found that more than 80% of Egyptian women have experienced sexual harassment, and that the majority of the victims were those who wore Islamic headscarves.

Said Sadek, a sociologist from the American University in Cairo, says that the problem is deeply rooted in Egyptian society: a mixture of what he calls increasing Islamic conservatism, on the rise since the late 1960s, and old patriarchal attitudes.

Egyptian women fight back:-

Women's initiative launches "We will ride bicycles" campaign

An Egyptian women's initiative has launched a campaign entitled "We Will Ride Bicycles" to confront sexual harassment in the streets and public transportation. . .

"Riding a bicycle and feeling the breeze of the air is one of our simplest dreams," said the campaign's event page, adding that all women should be allowed to freely ride bicycles without being harassed or judged.

The activists behind the campaign said they chose the theme of riding bicycles to promote women and girl's rights to run errands through cycling without being afraid of attracting negative reaction in the streets.

Scheduled for Saturday, the event's assembly point will be outside October War Panorama on Saleh Salem Street and its end point will be at Azhar Park. “The campaign’s main objective is confronting the unjustified rejection of the community concerning females riding bicycles,” said Michael Nazeh, one of the founders of the campaign.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

Susan B. Anthony, February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906
American campaigner for women's suffrage and civil rights

Wadjda

I could not miss a film about a girl longing for a bicycle so as to pedal against the patriarchy.  Wadjda is a charming film.

Wajdja, played superbly by Waad Mohammed, is a spunky tomboy and rebel, the Saudi descendant of Jo March in Little Women, whom Simone de Beauvoir and other feminists have always loved.  Like Jo she is best friends with the boy next door and like Jo she lives in a highly religious society but Islamic Saudi Arabia is far more restrictive than nineteenth century Protestant America. Her mother does go out to work - but wearing an abbaya, and with a long commute to an all female workplace driven by an illegal immigrant, Saudi women not being allowed to drive. Wadjda's father is sweet to her, however work keeps him away from home and he is also considering a second wife, his first wife being unable to bear more children.

The school that Wajdja attends is reminiscent of a convent circa 1880.  The girls wear long, heavy dresses and there is much emphasis about keeping out of the sight of men.  They are a prurient, giggly lot, kept under control by their strict, heavy-eyed headmistress (Ahd Kamel) .  Everyone is sex obsessed. The girl who has a clandestine rendezvous with her "brother" is married off, one of the girls in Wajdja's religious class, who's about 14, has also been married, the headmistress is anxious about romantic friendships between the girls, and when Wadjda falls off her friend's cycle and cuts her knee, her mother is afraid that it's blood from a broken hymen.

Wajdja longs for a bicycle, and in order to pay for one she joins the religious school so she can enter a Koran knowledge and reciting competition with a big money prize.  We have some rather Hollywood conventions of following your dreams and  the suspense of whether she will win or not but because of the film's gentle pace and the exotic location it feels fresh and the stakes seem real.  You do root for the delightful Wadjda and her longing for a bicycle is the longing for freedom and action. 

At the end of the nineteenth century the bicycle was a symbol of liberty for women.  They became independently mobile and they also had to stop wearing whalebone and other constricting clothing. They could go out to work, attend Suffragette meetings and, of course, socialise with young men.  When women first straddled the machine they were seen as bold and unwomanly.  So Wadjda's mother, who is lovely and talented, was married from high school, and is much hampered by her female role, but thinks that bicycles can prevent you having babies. 

In Saudi Arabia the religious police have only just allowed women to ride bicycles, and then only with a male guardian in parks. The religious police are mentioned, but it is more social than legal sanctions that make everyone tell Wadjda that bicycles aren't for girls.

Although the women are highly constrained, the view of Saudi is not overly dark. These are ordinary middle class people with strong family and tribal ties, habitually religious and also showing a fair amount of affection towards each other. When Wadjda does her Koran recitation, the liquid chanting is hypnotic.  Again, as in a convent, the clothes may be drab and the behaviour repressed while the religious performance offers drama and poetry.

There are some final twists to the story with two scenes of heartbreaking disappointment but in the last scene Wadjda has broken free with her mother's approval and is pedalling with her friend around the wide, sandy streets of the neighbourhood until she comes to a busy highway, where no sane being would cycle. She is smiling and the film ends on a hopeful note.

Bravecleavage

Today on Woman's Hour (first item) they were discussing Disney making over Merida, the red-haired heroine of Brave, into something sexier and more feminine for merchandising purposes.  Little girls were angry that Disney has spoiled Merida, as Disney does most things it touches. 

"I like Merida because she likes wearing loose-fitting dresses so she can aim properly when she's hunting.   And I also like her because she's not one of those pink girly princesses who is always flapping around looking for boyfriends."

Going by the pictures, they've changed a quirky kid with a bow and arrows to a hot babe, who spends her time in the hair-dresser's rather than on the archery field.

The mothers on Woman's Hour were annoyed as well, as Merida is a gutsy princess they like their daughters to admire, as any decent mother would far rather their daughter had a pin-up of Jessica Ennis (achievement, drive) than of Kate Middleton (expensive teeth).

The little girls favoured Merida's penchant for dress suitable for active pursuits.  One of the worst films I've ever seen in my life was Van Helsing.  Among its general badnesses was Kate Beckinsale playing Anna Valerious who was constantly pursued by evil winged vampires.  If a family curse had me being pursued by evil winged vampires I'd wear a loose top, jogging bottoms and trainers, or the nineteenth century equivalent, not a corset and high-heeled boots up to my thighs.  I'd also tie back or even cut my hair, however tumbling and curly. Throw her to the vampires.

What not to wear when chased by evil vampires

I can understand why the little girls were so furious with the Disney makeover.  If you love a character, you hate them being messed around.  When I was little I adored Emma Peel, as played by Diana Rigg, in The Avengers.  She raced about in a Lotus Elan, wore cat suits and karate kicked the baddies.  I'd have been raging if she had appeared in a frilly dress and stilettos, and had waited to be rescued. 

Emma Peel was replaced by a less fighting woman, and the show fell out of my ratings. 


Diana Rigg as Emma Peel