It's Always More Complicated

Reading this, I'm very much reminded of certain sff stories I read - late 60s/early 70s - that were either directly influenced by this research or via the population panic works that riffed off it: review of Lee Alan Dugatkin. Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity. Does this ping reminiscence in anyone else? (I was reading a lot of v misc anthologies etc in early 70s before I found my real niche tastes).

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What Is a 'Lavender Marriage,' Exactly? Feel that there is a longer and (guess what) Moar Complicated history around using conventional marriage to protect less conventional unions, but maybe it's a start towards interrogating the complexities of 'conventional marriages'.

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Sardonic larffter at this: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'

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Not quite what one anticipates from a clergyman's wife? The undercover vagrant who exposed workhouse life - a bit beyond vicarage/manse teaparties, Mothers' Meetings or running the Sunday School!

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Changes in wedding practice: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Wedding Days:

After the Reformation, Anglican canon law required that marriages took place in the morning, during divine service, in the parish of either the bride or groom – three features which typically elude modern weddings, which usually take place in the afternoon, in a special ceremony, and are far less likely (even if a religious wedding) to take place within a couple’s home parish. The centrality of divine service is the starkest difference, as it ensured that, unlike in modern weddings, marriages were public events at which the whole congregation ought to be present. They might even have occurred alongside other weddings or church ceremonies such as baptisms. A study of London weddings in the late 1570s found that, unsurprisingly given the canonical requirements, Sunday was the most popular days for weddings, accounting for c.44 percent of marriages taking place in Southwark and Bishopsgate. (By contrast, Sunday accounted for just 5.9 percent of marriages in 2022).

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Dorothy Allison Authored a New Kind of Queer Lit (or brought new perspectives into the literature of class?) I should dig out my copies of her works.

I find the text here a bit on the precious side, and leaving me with a whole lot of unanswered questions about Anne Pratt, but yay for drawing attention to her, and the illos of her botanical paintings are lovely: By the time she was in her fifties, Anne Pratt had become one of the most beloved botanical illustrators of the Victorian era. Queen Victoria herself privately relished and publicly praised her work. (The ODNB entry is very sparse, alas).

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And on overlooked women, review of Juliana Dresvina, ed. Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History, based on proceedings of a conference generated by the hashtag #ThanksForTyping that went viral in 2017: 'chapters in this book showcase the contributions, strategies, and lives of women on the lower end of a labor power dynamic with a more famous male figure'. Feel the reviewer's cavils about the relative paucity of material on STEM is somewhat undercut by the final sentence mentioning 'the growing number of historical studies about laboratory assistants, “invisible technicians,” and scientific couples', i.e. maybe this volume is filling a gap?.

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This was particularly pleasing to me a) because many years ago I had to do with the initial acquisition of the archive b) the organisation was originally known as 'The After Care Association for Poor and Friendless Female Convalescents on Leaving Asylums for the Insane', which is one of the great Victorian charity titles, no? and c) what interesting questions to address (including the issues of gender - the association actually became unisex quite shortly, but it's clear that gender, both within the org and its objects, was salient): Mental recovery, citizenship roles, and the Mental After-Care Association, 1879–1928.

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And I discovered this week that one can become a Supporter of the Women's Institute - their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion statement, which has been causing the anti-woke forces to have conniptions. Every so often, yet again, it is discovered that the assumed to be fubsy old WI is actually true to its progressive let us carry on the traditions of the suffrage movement roots, and has a strong record of campaigning, including on various health and environmental issues.

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I will believe this when I see it in the shops: Zoe Williams is pretty much as cynical as I am, having seen this over and over again, about the prospect of The Male Pill:

[O]ne theme that has emerged in studies ever since is that women don’t trust men to take the pill – a small-scale qualitative study in 2011 found that about half of women thought their partners would forget (only one in six men thought they themselves would forget). It’s typically presented as yet another injustice of the patriarchy, that women have to assume all the responsibility for birth control, but the obvious and never mentioned corollary is that we get all the control, and might not want to cede it. A larger and more international study 10 years before sought to dispel this myth, and found that women overwhelmingly trusted their partners to take a pill, though whether or not they would trust a guy they’d just met in a bar was left open.

Some of this gets a bit into the woowoo, srsly, but I like this, given the excesses of the Ethical Altruism longtermists who are more about saving distant future descendants than doing anything about the here and now:

Powlesland works between two and four days in court each week, taking on housing and employment cases to fund his unpaid environmental activism. Clearly, there is a full life’s work restoring the Roding but if he stayed local, he couldn’t champion bigger environmental causes – he co-founded Lawyers for Nature and is also part of the “right to roam” campaign devised by Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes. “I’ve come to see the importance of cycling between the micro and the macro,” says Powlesland. “If I just work in Barking it’s irrelevant because these trees will get drowned by climate change. Litter picking is a perfect example. It’s a tsunami of single-use packaging and it feels like trying to wipe off the overflow from the bath rather than turning off the tap, and for packaging we really need to turn off the tap. On the other hand, the local helps keep your sanity and keep you motivated.”

And on London waterways, Woe Woe unto the chartered Thames, we feel Mad William would have had a word or two.

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This gave me to think about people finding ecological niches in places that weren't actually set up and designed for that (like the kestrels nesting on urban buildings): The Only Good Thing Left About Facebook. Some people believe that the company’s scandals are reason enough to quit the platform. Others have found one compelling reason to stay. I daresay there are some really, really toxic FB Groups out there: but it also enables these 'pockets of democratic self-governance within a largely antidemocratic space' and mutual support.

Perhaps I found this particularly resonant because last week was the final one in the series of Gayle Rubin's'Fall 2022 Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: "The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960-2000"' which I was attending online - the final one made it very clear how a particular confluence of factors in the urban history/geography of San Francisco enabled the emergence and thriving of leather culture in particular areas during a particular time, and these factors also made for its decline.

I think of all sorts of particular times and places when certain kinds of interaction were made possible.

I'm not sure my own thoughts on these come to much more than this, that I posted a couple of weeks ago, problematising Effective Altruism.

But I lately came across a couple of articles about it (and there are aspects of it that suggests that parts of it are getting cult-like, what? even before we see the crypto involvement thing):

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force: Effective altruism has gone mainstream. Where does that leave it?

I am:

a) okay, I have my own criticism of what Dickens did with Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House from the angle of attitudes to gender, but the idea of 'Telescopic Philanthropy', and being obsessed about Doing Good at a great distance while neglecting the near at hand, did rather spring to mind here. Are there really no problems closer to home, I wonder? It all gets a bit into the realm of Statistics, even before the futurological lot come along.

b) The whole sense of the Othering of Objects of Philanthropy as an entirely different order of being.

c) I am wrinkling my nose at the Reluctant Prophet who is being somehow Effical by sneaking in cheap booze when he goes out drinking with his mates in the pub

d) And the whole, it is more Effical to put your Elite Mind to Making Lotsa Dosh, then giving it away, and while I concede that it is certainly on the whole more useful to give money than amateur volunteer 'help', if somebody has that Amazing An Intelligence:
i) just possibly, they could be deploying it on research towards solving these long-term problems?
ii) Wottabaht the Effics of the financial and industrial enterprises they are exhorted to go and make money in? (this strikes particularly after the Recent Discourse in which someone in particular straits was monstered for having a low-level job at Evil Corp, which, however Evil, provided employee benefits that many employers do not.)

e) I am not persuaded that it is entirely that much of an improvement to sacrifice feelings of warm fuzziness just to replace them with a sense of your effective and moral superiority in altruism.

Okay, I admit it, I want them to go away and read Middlemarch and embroider samplers with the closing passage about 'the growing goodness of the world' and 'incalculably diffusive... unhistoric acts'.

Also, stop thinking that making yourself uncomfortable has any moral value in itself.

Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to register forgotten footpaths:

A clause in right-to-roam legislation introduced by the Labour government in 2000 stated that any pre-1949 paths must be recorded by 2026 to continue to carry public rights. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act contained a provision that will extinguish those rights if the paths have not been properly recorded. In 2015 campaigners including Ramblers raised the alarm about the need to register the paths, with Dr Phil Wadey, a space satellite scientist and vice-chair of the conservation body Open Spaces Society, telling the Guardian: “These paths are all over the place. A lot of them are actually paths that are in everyday use. They are not hidden. We are not talking about paths that have fallen into disuse. There are actually people walking or riding or cycling along them. But they are not on the official map, so they will vanish if applications are not made … People won’t realise until they are gone and then it will be too late.”

I was rather charmed by this because the chap in question was constantly turning up in my interwar progressives research, and obviously, he had not lost the faith, the dear creature: Housing: Fairy tale estate aimed at keeping young people local. (Book I am currently reviewing I think srsly misses out the importance of ageing 1930s progressives to certain phenomena of the 70s.)

If those are fairly yay reports, this one is more into the 'sold for a mess of pottage' category', no? I thought I had already posted about threatened closure of important institutions in the Potteries but can't actually find where I did: but what apparently lies behind these decisions -

[T]he Gladstone is to be closed to the public for five months of the year with the Potteries Museum's opening times reduced with the two run jointly by a skeleton staff so that the Gladstone in particular can earn income as a venue for film and TV productions, generating an anticipated £125,000. They will be open to paying visitors and schools on five days a week instead of seven between April and October. The staff cuts of 19 full time and three part time positions are calculated to save the authority £560,000 a year.

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Health and medical stuff:

I wonder if this is another of those health interventions which - at least partly - is a victim of its own success? (and also the arrival of HPV): ‘Peace to millions of women’: A history of the cervical smear test (from certain archives I've had to do with I think there's things left out of the story). Concede that there are numerous horror stories of the way it's conducted that put people off having it done.

This is partly 'how soon they forget' and partly systemic defects in public health: Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.

And this points out (what I found when reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US since Roe) that the situation has been very non-optimal for quite a while:

[I]n the aftermath of Roe, despite the opportunity for physicians to widely provide abortions, the American Medical Association never implemented universal training for abortion care, and many doctors responded to the stigma associated with performing abortions by refusing to perform them. Although legalizing abortion improved access and mortality rates across the board, its siloing into non-profit clinics has had serious consequences. Today we are left with overburdened clinics handling far too many patients traveling great distances to obtain care. Meanwhile, medical schools continue to leave abortion out of their curriculum, and doctors who courageously provide abortion care risk their lives and face harassment and abuse from antiabortion groups.

This, however, is just creepy and weird: Recreational Virginity and the False Promise of Artificial Hymens - back to the C18th???

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And, perhaps not entirely unrelated to the foregoing, a vignette from the Bodleian Library blog into a recurrent issue around the margins of an all-male, supposedly celibate (up to mid-C19th when marriage finally permitted to dons) community: “Procuring, Prostitution, and Perjury”.

Similarly policing the bodies of Others: Why White Women Tried to Ban Native American Dances In the early 1920s, reformers obsessed over the sexual nature of some Pueblo rituals, and attempted to control their performance. Though reading further one sees that it was All More Complicated than that headline leads one to suppose.

Possibly fell into several Russ 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' categories.

Anyway, a woman doctor who works in palliative care in the NHS has written a memoir of her work in the early months of the pandemic -

And one might think that this is a valuable work of reportage by someone in the front line, achieved on top of their harrowing day job, raising consciousness, etc of what it's like -

And there are lots of nasty tweets in response to her 'today is publication day' tweet saying things like 'hope you're giving your profits to the NHS/charity/etc' and that it's self-promotion -

- some of which is from fellow-medics, which as some other fellow-medic pointed out, is absolutely par for the course (indeed, as a medical historian, nothing makes me larf liek drayne than assumption that medprof was massive monolithic conspiracy when they were cats in a sack) (I may also flag up, docs dobbing in other docs to the BMA for 'advertising') -

- but I do wonder if some of what's going on here is that thing whereby people think the writing isn't WORK - ('I've got a great idea for a story... it only needs someone to write it down') - that she just has to go home and transcribe what happened that day - whereas presumably there's a good deal goes into making it into a readable narrative.

'She wrote it but she was just writing down what happened'.

Also I would not be at all surprised that if she did say she was donating all profits to [Good Cause] there would be snarks that it was not the right [Good Cause].

I also think there's that thing going on whereby people think writing is much more well-remunerated than it is and she is going to be receiving wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

But I do wonder if bloke medic did something similar there would quite the same kind of kickback and assumption that he did not somehow deserve the fruits of his labour.

A busy day of seeing the sights (we are having a few days in Belgium).

(Wot is this minimalist thing with hotels that means there is never enough anywhere to put things? sigh)

First thing we went to look at some architecture near the station (turn of the century houses, v eclectic, from faux-Renaissance to Art Nouveau via various divagations): although all the weather forecasts I'd looked at said it was going to be warm and sunny all day it was in fact raining and a bit chilly, though brightened up eventually.

Then Rubens' House - chokker, including parties of quite small schoolkids, WTF, but at least there was not much in the way of Symbolickal Nekkid Ladybits on show among the plethora of artworks.

After lunch to the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which has quite a lot to offer via family which was MAJOR in printing in Antwerp for several centuries and did very well out of it, while advancing the state of the art of printing, knowledge, keeping in with the government, the Church, etc.

Also did the Cathedral, in which some items from the currently closed for refit Museum of Fine Arts are displayed - also has two Rubens altarpieces. There was also a set of carved 12 apostles + 12 female figures, alas and sigh, representing abstract concepts.

By the time we were done there it was coming up the time cultural sites were about to close, and we were ready to put our feet up.

ETA Felt I'd left something out: the Maagdenhuis Museum in the former girls' orphanage: which, compared to the Foundling Museum, is a bit less memorable, even if a lot older.

Went aaaargh at reading this:

There was much more of a philanthropic bent in Victorian society and I think what might have happened to us is we had so many years of a well-functioning welfare state that personal and business philanthropy was no longer required.

a) the inefficiency and inadequacy of Victorian charity, not to mention the degradation it imposed upon its beneficiaries, were WHY THE WELFARE STATE ffs.

b) personal, if not business (?business??????), philanthropy went on after the inauguration of the welfare state to point out things it wasn't doing, providing services it didn't (e.g. up to 1974, contraception), and lobbying to get the state to do stuff. (I R Archivist, I have catalogued many and many a collection of records of voluntary organisations.)

Sigh.

Am disinclined to read the book, somehow.

Having my attention drawn (via firecat) to this piece on 'Racial Capitalism', which recalled to me some of the ways marketing leapt onto 'Women's Lib' in the late 60s/early 70s ('You've come a long way, baby') - not sure whether there were similar manifestations with respect to Black Power.

A tailpiece to Deborah Orr's column in today's Guardian about the perniciousness of treating motherhood as a 'lifestyle choice' (which I cannot find online, only the main portion), which reminded me of my beloved Dame Rebecca's comment over 100 years ago, in the course of her evisceration of Sir Almroth Wright's notorious Unexpurgated Case Against Women's Suffrage: 'Apparently motherhood is an extravagant hobby of [woman] which she carries on simply to give trouble'.

Also I am rather horrified by this report on charity call centres, in which, quite apart from the ethics of these operations, the conditions of employment sound Dickensian.

Further to my post yesterday apropos of 'annoying maverick' trope, and riffing off something I was reading (#iftoldyouidhavetokillyou), and a piece today about the kinds of people (i.e. celebs) who get awards and accolades for their charitable works:

But you know who else does a lot for charity? People who work for charities every day. People whose schedule is so taken up with working for charities that they wouldn’t even be able to take several months of the year off to make multimillion dollar movies. People who get shot at while working for charities. People who might be the face of a movement, were celebrities not always parachuted in to be that face. People who have worked 30 years for minimal pay for charities. People who end up being decapitated in Syria. In fact, the list of people who do a lot for charity is immense, but the quickest way for any of them to determine if they will ever get an award for their efforts is to ask themselves: am I famous for something else? Because if the answer to that is no, I’m afraid they’ll be going away empty-handed.

Thinking about that time-travel narrative which is about Important Crux-Moments in History and how few of these narratives are NOT about War, Military Leaders & Men of Destiny, and Significant Moments in the History of Western Civ - and therefore wondering about what events that are not about who won what battle when and people who were not military leaders where change would influence The Whole Course of History or at least e.g. certain parts between the Mediterranean and the North Sea/Baltic.

There are people who have been influential whose gifts did not, really, lie in the realm of fighty stuff (except occasionally as metaphor). Suppose, I posit to myself, St Paul had drowned in that shipwreck?

Or, you know, woman actually got competent obstetric care, bore a living child and survived childbirth? (e.g. Princess Charlotte).

Intervening to advance or retard scientific and technological developments.

I really liked MA Foster's Morphodite trilogy because the idea was that there was some apparently obscure individual removal of whom would destabilise an entire society or at least the current governing system, which over the course of the trilogy got fined down to 'very minor intervention not even involving murder changes things radically'.

And, in today's Ripperology entry of We Are Only Interested In People Of The Day Already Known About -

Weis also discusses whether, in their “madcap twenties”, Shakespeare and the more overtly gay Christopher Marlowe had an affair.