She dedicated almost a decade to the meticulous research and writing that culminated in her final book Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920, published by Oxford late in 2012 just before her 80th birthday. This pioneering study is yet to receive its full recognition. Leonore demonstrates the significance of sibling relationships and their key role in the extensive family networks that provided the capital, personnel, skills and contracts crucial to the rapidly expanding commercial and professional enterprises of the era, and how these changed as families became smaller from the end of the 19th century. Through studies of particular families (including the Freuds, Gladstones, Wedgwoods and Darwins), she explored sibling intimacy and incest, and some famous brother-sister relationships.
Category: Politics
Ethical Food – Food, Production & Ethics
Women often can be the first to be marginalised as agriculture is increasingly mechanised. Women tend to have less access to resources, finance or training than men, so land farmed by women is often less productive. If women worldwide had the same access to productive resources as men, this could increase yields on women’s farms by 20–30% and raise total agricultural output by 2.5–4%. Gains in agricultural production alone could lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger …
WOMAN SLAYS VAMPIRE vs READER, SHE MARRIED HIM … Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs Twilight
… Buffy eclipses the anodyne Twilight series. Buffy is a character in her own right, a woman who, albeit a student still, knows her own mind, acts independently, and leads her team. Even when she consults with her teacher – the school principal, a man ‘in charge’ of the educational institution where Buffy meets and matches the vampires she slays, she consults with him on a basis of equality. He may advise and mentor, but on Buffy’s terms and on Buffy’s ground. She seeks when she chooses to seek information. She assesses and assimilates where she makes the decision that the information imparted is ‘right’. It is no surprise that followers of Buffy included women who took on powerful roles in the polity – at least one, the former Senator Natasha Stott Despoja – going on to lead her political party (the Australian Democrats – AD).
End All Violence Against Women!
In some conflict situations, it may be more dangerous to be a girl or a woman than a soldier. Violence against women has become a real epidemic that must be stopped.
Yet we know how violence against women can be eliminated. In 1995, close to 20 years ago, 189 governments came together in Beijing. They adopted a Platform for Action that spelled out key strategies for governments, civil society, the private sector, international partners and all stakeholders to end violence against women, empower women, and achieve gender equality. In 2013, the UN Commission on the Status of Women further defined what needs to be done. This includes effective prevention strategies that address the root causes of gender inequality and the lower status of women in all spheres of life. Whether it is in the economy or in the political sphere, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalized. Instead, we need families, communities and nations where women and men are equally valued and where women can participate fully.
Herstory – Women’s Liberation Halfway House
In 1974, a group of women formed the Women’s Liberation Halfway House (WLHH) in Victoria to provide support and accommodation for women and accompanying children fleeing from domestic and family violence. Forty years on, the need for high security refuge…
Women as Renegades – Fighting for Peace during War
The challenge women made to the establishment in rejecting the call to support the war is an area rich in history. It confirms that exploration of the reasons for women to take a stand that put them at odds not only with government but with women who sided with the war effort is esential for undertanding women’s activism during wartime.
Can We Talk? Gossip in American History and Culture
Rumor, hearsay, tittle-tattle, scuttlebutt, scandal, dirt. From mid-to-late 1600s colonial Virginia churchyards and New England courthouses to the early-twentieth-first-century blogosphere—and in many places and times in between—gossip has been called many things. It is one of the most common—and often…
Reading as Life Line: A Literary Mother from 11th Century Japan
“For we think back through our mothers, if we are women,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, the book in which she reflected on women as writers and pondered the scarcity of women’s writing in world literary…
Remembering Naomi Jacob (1884-1964)
Although she was brought up in the Church of England, Jacob converted to Roman Catholicism at around the age of eighteen. But she remained proud of her Jewish heritage. This is most clearly demonstrated in The Gollantz Saga, which she began writing just before the Nazis swept to power in Germany. Beginning in early nineteenth century Vienna, it follow several generations of a Jewish family, as the head of the house establishes a business and life in England, moving among the British upper classes. The series is an engaging and warm exploration of family ties and rivalries, and the principles of honour and loyalty.