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

Where are the faxes of yesteryear?

I get a lot of my social history from novels and second- and third-rate novels can unintentionally tell interesting stories about the customs of their age. So when I listened to Lucy Kelloway's lively History of Office Life (sorry deadline passed – memo got lost in the internal mail/you must have accidentally deleted my message) I was reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, which is set in an advertising agency, Pym's Publicity. 

Murder Must Advertise is not much of a detective story, as the plot is elaborate rather than ingenious and the hero is Lord Peter Wimsey, the most annoying of the amateur sleuths from the golden age of detective fiction. But it does pick up the atmosphere of the office – those daytime villages with their feuds, friendships, gossip, rumours, the management being the squires alternatively disciplining and giving the villagers treats.

On the first page we are taken to the typists' room, which is the social hub. The workers are “frivoling” and arranging a sweepstake. Enter one of the managers.

“Mr Ingleby, can you spare me a moment?”

At Mr Hankin's mildly sarcastic accents, the scene dislimned as by magic. .. Mr Willis, rising hurriedly with the tray of carbons in his hand, picked a paper out at random and frowned furiously at it. Miss Parton's cigarette dropped unostentatiously to the floor, Mr Garrett, unable to get rid of his coffee-cup, smiled vaguely and tried to look as though he had picked it up accident and didn't know it was there, Miss Meteyard, with great presence of mind, put the sweep counterfoils on a chair and sat on them. Miss Rossiter, clutching Mr Armstrong's carbons in her hand, was able to look businesslike, and did so. Mr Ingleby alone, disdaining pretence, set down his cup with a slightly impudent smile and advanced to obey his chief's command.

“This,” said Mr Hankin, tactfully blind to all evidences of disturbance, “is Mr Bredon.”

When the city took over from the tribe or clan human beings created a neighbourhood or a guild or a political group or a blog-with-commenters or some other small community. The office workers travel to populate the daily office village and instead of the blood tie it's the work that pulls the group together – the work and the profit if it is a money-making concern. In the early nineteenth century Charles Lamb returned to his East India Office after he had retired and found that he was now a ghost, as colleagues are when estranged from the business of the office and have become merely part of its history and folklore at best.

Sayers herself worked in an advertising agency in the 1920s.* Middle-class women started working in offices around the late nineteenth century. They were first of all kept segregated in case they distracted the men and for fear of corrupting their own morals. In Sayers' office mild gallantry and a little flirting are allowable but the women were still supposed to stay chaste.

He went and told Hankie once that he'd seen me at the dog-races with a gentleman friend. As if it was any business of his what a girl does out of business hours. … Just because anybody's a mere typist it doesn't mean one's a heathen slave.

And Miss Meteyard, the only woman copywriter, can be blackmailed because “of some man or other”, which the strait-laced owner of the company would take a dim view of.

Later on offices became more raunchy until the 1960s when the secretaries were pinchable bottoms, which preceded our own time of appropriate behaviour and sexual harassment.

The business in Murder Must Advertise is the new profession of advertising which was less hide-bound than, say, law. So it is possible for Miss Meteyard a Somerville graduate, to be a copy writer as Sayers was (she worked on the Guinness Toucan campaign).* The rest of the women are secretaries, typists, facilities managers and cleaners, as they tend to be today.

The typists tapping rhythms on their percussive typewriting machines are the female heart of the office, and they have feminised it, buying the cakes for tea and organising collections for wedding presents – still pretty much part of the secretarial job. This feminisation makes the atmosphere of Sayers' office very different from Trollope's all male clerks outfits where social life was at the chop-house. Many secretaries and PAs take on the matriarchal and social oiling role – buying flowers, offering tissues and concern and handing round the giant Sorry You're Going farewell card for everyone to sign.

From the 1973 television adaptation. They had cups and saucers those days.

The internal telephone is not used as it would have been in an American office of the same vintage. The British stuck to their messengers for a long time, and in Sayers' novel the office boys have an important part in the plot as the eyes and ears. A modern counterpart would be the IT support person who accesses everyone's computer in person or digitally and can snoop. In the Golden Age of detective fiction the murders were usually done in a country house or village or some other limited community so everyone could be accounted for and alibis concocted. Sayers got round the problem of a hubbub of employees through the office boy's tenacious memory and sharp observation to narrow down the pool of suspects. (Later on P D James stuck to outfits like a publisher's or research unit to keep the number of likely murderers down.)

Sayers' office workers have proper tea breaks and a woman with a tea trolley – something I'm old enough to remember from a few decades ago, a time when you went out for lunch with a beer or two chucked in, instead of the sparkling water, a sandwich and a browse of the internet at the desk. They are still Misters and Misses and will be until the 1960s until there is only one ancient scary bloke who everyone calls Mr (as in my place) and email address lists are organised by first names rather than last.

Lucy Kelloway now has a new series The Joy of 9-5.  It was unionised factory workers who won the 9-5 and the paid holidays which spilled over to the office workers. These days though many paper-pushers and email-copyees work punishing hours. However the maternalism still remains in that although the hours hurt, HR and the management hand out pain-killers in the form of stress counselling. Admonitions are wrapped up in praise. Rather than being nosy about our sexual morals the management worries about our personal problems which they investigate with psychometric tests finding out whether you are a Dominant Influencer Steady or Compliant (DISC) . The many courses we are offered on work management, self-realisation, know yourself, how to be more effective – it is a blurring of lines between office and home, along with the other blurrings. Thus work steals more and more time. Sayers' characters below top management level had to sign the time register; these days it's moral pressure of not wanting to be seen to be the first to leave.

We are mostly doomed to work and if we can, we find something interesting to do among congenial colleagues. Sayers' advertising agency in spite of murder and blackmail is more fun than than the paper suppliers of Ricky Gervais's The Office.

Miss Meteyard,:- “Sopo Day is Cinema Day.” “Leave the Laundry to ruin itself while you addle your brains at the Talkies.” Muck! Dope! And they pay me £10 a week for that sort of thing. And yet, if we didn't do it, what would happen to the trade of this country? You've got to advertise.'

And everyone smokes as they did to about the beginning of this millennium. I remember when the accounts room was blue with haze.

The big campaign Sayers' advertising agency works on is cigarettes.. “This scheme should carry a strong appeal to women.. We want to get women down to serious smoking. Too many of them play about with it.... You can smoke a lot more of them in the day without killing yourself. And they're cheaper. If we increase women's smokes by 500 percent – there's plenty of room for it-”

That is what really makes this novel show its age. Also, the newspaper that runs the advertisements is the Morning Star.  It's a fictitious paper. The Commie rag with that name was then called the Daily Worker. 

*She came up with the Toucan rhyme for Guinness:-

 

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.

Cycling into style

Splendid page of cycling cartoons here from Kate Beaton:-

"The greatest thing about the invention of the bicycle and ladies starting to ride them is: everything. The clothes! The bikes! The attitude! But perhaps especially: the scads of satirical cartoons made at the time that were supposed to make women look shocking and inappropriate but just makes them look super stylish and badass instead."

Women just look utilitarian these days, which I suppose is a natural trajectory. Trousers suits on Western women once looked edgy, now they look ordinary.

However, here's a gang of stylish women in the June 1897 edition of Vanity Fair:-

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. 

Scottish Referendum 2

Today I had a coffee in the Cuckoo Bakery. They're running a referendum poll based on a choice of three cupcakes.

YES 27.7%, NO 54.9% and UNDECIDED 17.4%. A swing to the NO campaign of 8.5% in the last two weeks.

The Cuckoo Bakery is a cafe at the bottom of Dundas Street, on the border between New Town gentility and Stockbridge Boboism. Pretty young waitresses with necklaces made out of typewriter keys serve you. Given the female nature of the clientele, the NO majority is not surprising.

"The poll found 56 per cent of women questioned backed the union, while 27 per cent of females favoured independence, with the remaining 17 per cent undecided."

 

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.

We Don't Want No Segregation

My partner and I were once travelling on the eastern side of Turkey. That is noticeably more conservative than the western side, and we followed the Lonely Planet's advice. He changed his shorts for trousers and I put on a long skirt. On mini-buses if there was a spare seat next to me and a man got on he would not sit next to me, so my partner and I would swap seats If a woman came on, it was vice versa.  We were trying our best to be culturally sensitive, and though we found this particular custom absurd, there's plenty to admire about the people in eastern Turkey.

Note, though, how inconvenient it was. The bloke who got on looked tired, and had probably been working all day in the fields. But a cultural practice prevented him from taking a little ease for half an hour.  Also, countries where women are segregated usually mean the women stay at home. These are not just Muslim countries. When a woman friend and I travelled around Greece in about 1979 it looked like a virus had wiped out the female population. The corollary of the local women being kept apart is that we visiting women were harassed constantly. It was a relief to get back to Britain and be treated as a normal human being.

This is working up to segregation at universities which has made big news recently.

Over at Loonwatch, an Islamophobia watch site, they are puzzled that people should get so upset about men and women being segregated at meetings at universities that they, the complainers, are very unlikely to attend.  They also think it's hypocritical, given the amount of gender segregation there is in our society.

Of course our society has a fair amount of informal segregation. Hen parties (which are yukky from other points of view) and stag parties for instance. However, the woman who goes on a girls' night out or to a women's networking event would be appalled to be segregated at a public meeting.  It was the formal connivance of the UUK to segregation that made everyone so angry.  

There are times when a woman is a female body. In a changing room, in a toilet, in a hospital ward, giving birth, flirting at a party wearing a low-cut dress and having sex.  But that at a meeting she should be regarded as a female body rather than another citizen, another listener, questioner, point-putter or heckler is insulting to every suffragette and every feminist who fought for women's equal rights in the public sphere.  

Here are some  of the arguments set out by Tehmina Kazi, the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. The full piece is here. 

Aspects of the gender segregation debate that have annoyed and perplexed me

Denial that gender segregation even exists in universities.

Downplaying of the discrimination and shoddy treatment faced by women who have experienced it, which goes back many years.

Those who are unable to see why it is problematic for a public body like Universities UK to prioritise the whims of external speakers over university public sector equality duties, and THE SPIRIT of equalities law.

No-one has given me a GOOD reason as to WHY gender segregation it is practiced in the first place, in either civic or theological terms. "Because we've done it for years..." does NOT count.

 . . .
Women who turn around and say, "But I've never had a problem with being segregated." Fair enough, but where is the empathy for people who HAVE suffered as a result?

[An old feminist recognises "I've always got on very well with men. as an argument for anti-feminism.]

 The endless comparisons with toilets. Since when did the privacy issues of taking a dump compare to those of engaging one's brain and listening to a speaker as part of an audience?

The endless comparisons with single-sex educational establishments, which people actively CHOOSE to attend. Even if the choice was made for them by their parents, you'd think they would be able to enjoy such freedom of choice themselves at the age of 18, SHOULD they decide to attend university. What people effectively have NO choice over is attending a public event at a MIXED university - either as a guest or student - where the arrangements inhibit them from sitting or entering alongside the opposite gender.

(As for the single-sex colleges at Cambridge University, they were originally set up to help redress the gender imbalance in higher education. As I understand it, at least one of the Cambridge colleges in question intends to become co-educational when the proportion of women at Cambridge reaches 50%).

Confusion over the distinction between discretionary segregation (where people randomly sit where they wish, perhaps in same-sex clusters) and organised segregation (which is either enforced by the event organisers, or requested by the student societies in question). [See above for my point on the informal and formal.]

Complaints that the issue is receiving disproportionate public attention NOW. Where were these complainants when women's rights activists were raising these issues within the community for YEARS? Keeping schtum and not upsetting the apple cart, yes?

Complaints that those who raise this issue MUST have an Islamophobic agenda, when many of them are actually Muslims whose concerns have been brushed aside for years. (As an aside, many of these same Muslim activists have ALSO done a lot to challenge GENUINE anti-Muslim sentiment).

Assumptions that those who campaign against gender segregation in university events MUST also automatically oppose it in congregational prayers. This is not about acts of worship, as Equality and Human Rights Commission Chief Executive Mark Hammond made clear: "Universities can also provide facilities for religious meetings and associations based on faith, as in the rest of society. Equality law permits gender segregation in premises that are permanently or temporarily being used for the purposes of an organised religion where its doctrines require it. However, in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public it is not, in the Commission's view, permissible to segregate by gender."

This issue will come up again in another guise, and again will have to be slapped down. It is a waste of everyone's time and energy.