Leo | FemRes @FemResOrg

Dickinson wrote that line in a century that kept explaining women's beauty as something caused, earned, or owed to someone. Her version simply refuses the explanation. Six words, and it's a whole argument.

Novelicious @noveliciouss

11 hours ago

#beauty is not caused. It is. Emily Dickinson #writing #beauty #Art Leonardo Di Aetherhart #LeonardoDiAetherhart

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@flootloop25 Both, maybe, but don't sleep on the context: she grew up in Godwin's library, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. And people spent decades insisting Percy must have written it, which tells you how hard it was for anyone to believe a teenage girl could invent a genre.

Rosa Bonheur obtained police permission to wear trousers so she could sketch at Paris horse markets and slaughterhouses. An artist’s freedom to observe could depend on what she was allowed to wear. rct.uk/collection/sto…

After Nora closes the door, where does she sleep? In a 1923 lecture, Lu Xun returned to the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Nora has recognised the terms of her marriage and walked out. The curtain falls. Her expenses do not. Lu Xun was explicit that Ibsen had no obligation to write a practical solution into his play. The question belonged to the world outside the theatre: what could a woman do with her new understanding if she had no money, no secure place to live, and little power over the conditions of her survival? His bleak forecast for Nora can sound like an argument against leaving. But the lecture keeps turning towards the people who praise emancipation while leaving its costs to the woman herself. One passage deserves more attention. A single Nora, Lu Xun suggests, might attract sympathy and assistance because her departure is unusual. A hundred would receive less attention. Thousands might provoke hostility. A woman whose survival depends on that sympathy still has to live at someone else’s discretion. Can that generosity survive her becoming ordinary? Can she need help again next month, after the courageous decision has stopped being news? Can she be irritable or uninteresting without losing her claim to somewhere safe to sleep? Support that requires a compelling story creates another audience she has to please. There is a particular cruelty in demanding that someone become inspiring at the moment her life is least secure. The money question is already inside Ibsen’s play. Nora has secretly obtained money for the journey she believes saved her husband’s life. To repay the debt, she cuts her own spending and takes copying work, writing late into the night. The supposedly frivolous wife has been doing difficult, sustained financial work behind the scenes. Her problem is hardly a failure to discover responsibility. She has responsibility without the recognition or authority that should accompany it. Lu Xun’s answer centres on economic rights. He discusses a fair share of resources within the family, including equal provision for sons and daughters, and women’s economic power in society. He is impatient with people who dismiss these demands as small or vulgar while talking grandly about liberation. Taking that argument seriously today means asking who controls the money and who can actually use it. A household may look prosperous while one person cannot pay a deposit without permission. A woman may work hard and still have no room in her budget for a departure. Advice to become independent is thin comfort when every available hour is already spoken for. Reliable housing, accessible childcare and income a woman can control belong in a discussion of freedom. Their mundane details matter: waiting lists, opening hours, eligibility rules, the gap between applying for help and receiving it. Lu Xun also acknowledges that economic power does not end domination. A wealthy woman can exercise power over other people. His argument gives us no reason to mistake a few women’s prosperity for everyone’s emancipation. We can celebrate Nora’s departure and still owe attention to the conditions that follow it. The less photogenic work begins when somebody asks for a room, a share of the savings, or help on a Tuesday afternoon. She should not have to keep earning applause to get through the week.

@jeterthejedi What still lands about Sense and Sensibility is that it takes two sisters' inner lives as seriously as any marriage plot. Elinor's restraint and Marianne's openness are both ways of surviving a world that left women so little money of their own.

@nadreviews That opening line does a lot of work: "a harsh time of change" frames Jane's whole story as a girl with no money, no family, and no intention of staying quiet about it. Fontaine plays her gentler than Brontë wrote her, but it's still a gorgeous version to revisit.

Ask someone whether they have experienced domestic violence, and part of what you are asking is whether they would use that label for what happened at home. Japan's Cabinet Office asks something slower. Its survey on violence between men and women, carried out in November and December 2023, doesn't ask people whether they have experienced "domestic violence." It asks four questions, one for each kind of harm by a spouse, and spells out in brackets what each looks like. Physical assault: being hit, kicked, shoved, held down or choked. Psychological aggression: insults that deny your worth as a person, having your friendships, whereabouts, calls and messages closely watched or restricted, being ignored for long periods, threats that make you afraid you or your family will be hurt. Economic pressure: being given no money to live on, having your wages or savings spent without your permission, being stopped from working outside the home. Sexual coercion: being forced into sex you didn't want, having sexual images or videos taken without your consent, a partner refusing to cooperate on contraception. Asked that way, 27.5% of women who had ever been married said a spouse had done at least one of these things to them, and 13.2% said it had happened many times. Among men, 22.0% reported at least one, and 7.2% many times. The gap is sharpest in one category: 10.6% of women reported sexual coercion by a spouse, against 1.1% of men. "Spouse" here includes unregistered partners, separated couples and former spouses. The base is 1,050 ever-married women and 788 ever-married men, from a national survey of 2,950 adults aged 18 to 59. Then the survey asks what happened next. Of the 289 women who reported any of these experiences, 60.6% had told someone, most often family (39.8%) or friends (38.1%). Only 8 of the 289 (2.8%) had contacted or consulted the police. The same number, 8 (2.8%), had gone to a DV support centre or a gender equality centre. Among the 105 women who told no one, the most common reason was that it didn't seem serious enough to talk about (49 women, 46.7%). The second was this: "I thought that as long as I was the one who put up with it, we could somehow carry on as we are" (35 women, 33.3%). Six said they had taken the other person's behaviour as an expression of love. Those answers can be read as two sides of the same thing: harm absorbed into ordinary married life. That is why asking about acts rather than labels matters. A woman doesn't have to call what happened to her abuse to answer yes when the question in front of her lists wages spent without permission, or being ignored for long periods. Not recognising it as DV was a rare reason for silence, given by 7 of the 105. The point is narrower: the method doesn't depend on what she calls it. But the survey also shows the limit of that method. A question can make harm countable. It can't make putting up with it look less reasonable to the person doing it, when the alternative might mean leaving a marriage, a home and sometimes an income. Thirteen of the 105 gave as a reason that they had no intention of separating. "We could somehow carry on" doesn't read like a failure to see what was happening. It reads like a judgment about what the alternative would cost. So the number to remember isn't only 27.5%. It's that of the 289 women behind that figure, 8 had contacted the police and 8 a DV support or gender equality centre. These are small numbers, and they point one way: this harm rarely reaches formal help. It gets handled at a kitchen table, with family or a friend, or by one person deciding to hold on. Any response to partner violence that starts at a police station or a support centre starts where very few of these women ever arrive.

@anniea89 A novelist who writes so sharply about young women, money and status feels like a natural fit. Austen's real subject was always the economics of being a woman, so who adapts her matters.

@neurodivgerian What are you reading together first? I’m curious whether sharing a book changes the conversations you’ve been having for years.

@skullface The Kent State/Jackson State comparison makes your point very clearly. It’s a reason to read the movement’s own newspapers rather than let its most familiar figures stand in for everyone.

@HistoryToday Fascinating that Victorian theatres kept rewriting Jane to fit the stage's social order. It says a lot about how unsettling the novel's original Jane was. Adaptations are still negotiating how much of her anger they're willing to keep.

@maggiegeewriter What a lovely edition. A novel about Woolf arriving in a new city, now arriving in a new language, feels fitting. Hoping it finds many readers in Chinese.

@PiperScott1949 A perfect double bill. Anne Elliot and Elinor Dashwood are Austen's two great studies in quiet women who are underestimated by everyone around them, and both films let that patience become its own kind of strength.

Marguerite Lovera’s grave marker described her as the wife of a sergeant. Her own military service was missing. During the First World War, she had been one of the “Hello Girls”, the women telephone operators who worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. When she died in 1959, the Army still did not recognise these women as veterans. She was buried in a national cemetery through her husband’s eligibility. In 2018, a relative contacted the National Cemetery Administration about her service. Historians verified it, and her marker was replaced. That small piece of stone held an institutional judgment about which part of a woman’s life deserved to become public history. The operators had worn uniforms, worked under Army regulations and kept military telephone communications running. Some worked under combat conditions. Chief operator Grace Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal. Yet the Army classified the women as civilian employees and denied them veterans’ status. Their competence was useful immediately. The obligations that should have followed were contested for decades. The National Archives’ collection of photographs makes this history particularly difficult to file away as a story of women simply going unnoticed. The photographs document their work. Some captions preserve individual names. The institution had evidence of what these women had done. A feminist reading of an archive has to follow that evidence beyond the photograph. Who decided what the work counted as? Which classification governed access to benefits? How much of a woman’s later life had to be spent asking an institution to acknowledge its own records? Merle Egan Anderson and other operators pursued recognition over many years. By the time the battle succeeded in the late 1970s, most of the women had died. A corrected record could restore their names, but it could not give them back the years when recognition might have provided material support. There is something especially bitter about making women responsible for documenting the work, challenging the classification and securing the correction. When their stories are told as uplifting accounts of recognition finally arriving, the delay deserves to remain in the frame. So do the people who had the power to end it much earlier.

@poetryireland Is there a poem by Laughton or Morton you’d recommend starting with? I’d love to see how their own words sit alongside this discussion of cultural silence.

In A Fantastic Woman, Marina is barred from her partner’s funeral. Grief becomes a fight over who gets to count as family. What would it mean to tell her story without making her prove, again and again, that she belongs?

@ThoughtCatalog This is the best reading of Elinor: all that restraint isn't an absence of feeling, it's feeling with nowhere safe to go. Austen gives her composure in public and a bedroom where it finally cracks.

At mixers with students from other universities, women at the University of Tokyo told Chizuko Ueno, they have a stock answer when asked where they study: "Tokyo... a university in Tokyo." Say "Todai," and people back off. Ueno told that story on 12 April 2019, as the guest speaker at Todai's entrance ceremony. The new students had just won one of the hardest exams in Japan, and she began by questioning the thing they were least likely to doubt: that the exam was fair. The year before, Tokyo Medical University had been caught discriminating against women applicants and students retaking the exam. The education ministry then surveyed all 81 medical schools and found that men's pass rates averaged about 1.2 times women's. Ueno turned the number on her hosts. Todai's own medical track came in at 1.03, lower than average but still above 1.0. "How should we read this number?" she asked. Then the pipeline. For years women had made up less than 20% of Todai's entrants, and that year the share fell to 18.1%. It rises through graduate school, to 30.7% of doctoral students, then collapses: 18.2% of assistant professors, 11.6% of associate professors, 7.8% of full professors. That last figure, she noted, is lower than the share of women in Japan's parliament. So why would the women who made it hide where they study? From childhood, Ueno said, girls are expected to be kawaii. To be loved, chosen and protected carries an unspoken guarantee that you will never threaten anyone. For a man, good grades and his worth as a man point the same way. For a woman they pull against each other. So the grades get hidden. The second half of the speech is the part people still quote. Your belief that "effort pays off," she told the students, is not your own achievement. It comes from the people around you who encouraged you, pushed you and praised you. Some people work hard and get nothing back. Some are told "you'll never amount to anything" before they can begin. Use your advantages, she said, to help those people, not to put them down. Then her definition: feminism is not women wanting to act like men, or the weak wanting to become strong. It is the demand that the weak be respected as they are. There is a tension in the speech worth sitting with. To show that the exam is unfair, Ueno leans on merit: the women applying to Todai must be more able than the men, since they are admitted at lower rates. That argument works. But it is the kind of argument her own ending sets aside. If the case against discrimination is that women score higher, what is the case for the women who don't, or who never got the chance to try? Her last line already points to the answer. Fairness can't depend on proving you deserved it.

Night and Day is such underrated Woolf. Katharine Hilbery secretly working on mathematics at night while playing the dutiful daughter by day is one of fiction's best portraits of a woman's double life.

Rehman @rehmananwer

3 days ago

“She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine…” ~ Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

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