… Wilcken created fairy queens and sprites of traditional fairy beauty. Her tales are filled with romance and the tensions and consequences created by human men and their love of female fairy creatures. Wilcken speaks of the folly of love and her fairies are cautioned that ‘Men are a false race. They rush in at a moment’s pleasure and break the hearts of those who trust them’. In ‘The Jenolan Caves, N.S.W’, Wilcken’s hero discovers a traditional fairy, a ‘beautiful girl…her hair a mass of golden curls; her eyes of the deepest blue’. Falling in love, ‘passionate thoughts overtake him’ and though the fairy does not reciprocate, when he steals a kiss she is turned to stone. The consequences are a warning and a lesson to all maidens in the colony to be guarded and wary of men and their lust.
Category: Women’s History
A Century of Feminist Foreign Policy – Looking Back for Help Today
Since WILPF’s inception, the world has experienced 224 wars. During that same timeframe, women won two important struggles for human rights. The first, of course, was the right to vote in 1920; the second, the right to reproductive freedom in 1972. Jacobs, and the group that formed out of the Hague conference insisted then, and we insist now, on a third human right —the right to be at the peace table; to be part of the decisions to make war or keep the peace. Fewer than one in 40 of the signatories of major peace agreements since 1992 have been female, according to the UN development fund for women. This needs to change.
Today, there are 50 ongoing violent conflicts resulting in 50 million refugees around the world, and untold death and destruction. The international trade of lemons and toothbrushes is regulated, but not guns and other weapons. Would the adoption of more feminist foreign policy and an increase in women’s participation in peace negotiations put an end to arms and conflict? Probably not. But the point is not to end conflict, but to resolve it without recourse to military violence. The world is missing a powerful opportunity for creating sustainable peace when it turns to military solutions and restricts the participants at peace negotiations to the men with guns.
Throwing the First Punch for Battered Mothers
… modern advances in the judicial system … give abused mothers fighting for child custody a reason to believe change is coming. In 2004, the State of Wisconsin’s legislature passed a law that “instructs judges to make domestic violence their top priority by stating that ‘if the courts find that a parent has engaged in a pattern or serious incident of interspousal battery, or domestic abuse, the safety and well-being of the child and the safety of the parent who was the victim of the battery or abuse shall be the paramount concerns in determining legal custody and periods of physical placement” … [Meanwhile] the child protective agency of the city of New York was discovered to have “unconstitutionally removed children from the custody of their non-abusive battered mothers after substantiating mothers for engaging in domestic violence” … Although this may not seem like hopeful news in itself, the fact that this injustice was revealed is a step in the right direction.
Discrimination – A Coat of Many Colors
[In the General Motors (GM) case] … to [outlaw] sex and race discrimination [experienced by individuals or a group], the courts would have had to recognize a new minority classification, African American females. The court opposed the creation of any new classifications proposing that, “the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, [would] clearly raise[*] the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” If the women had been able to show that they had been victims of discrimination because they were black or because they were women they would have had a case, but because GM was not discriminatory against white women nor black men, the women had no legal case.
Margaret Sanger – Fighting for Reproductive Rights
Margaret Sanger treated many women who had illegal and dangerous abortion procedures. She fought for birth control information and contraception to be made available, and found it essential to women’s health for this information to be legal … It was very dangerous for Sanger to provide her services and information and she often risked jail time in order to help women.
In 1914, Sanger started The Woman Rebel, a feminist publication. She wanted to provide women with information about contraception. Sanger openly challenged the state and federal Comstock Act, which criminalized contraceptives (“American Experience: Margaret Sanger”). In 1916, Sanger was arrested for opening the first birth control clinic in the country. She worked toward better forms of contraception other than the diaphragm, which was expensive. Sanger helped with the creation of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive …
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – A History of Equal Pay
Lilly Ledbetter’s eight year battle started with a little note she found in the women’s bathroom at work. The note ranked her salary alongside the much higher salaries of three male tire-room managers, and Ledbetter was shocked to see that her male peers were making $14,000 and more per year than she was. “I’d worried about being paid less than the men who were doing the same work I was,” Ledbetter records in her memoir, but she never had evidence to prove her suspicions (5). Armed with this alarming new information, Ledbetter took action and sued Goodyear for pay discrimination.
Marie Curie – Celebrating an Inspirational Woman
… a fabricated scandal was brewing over personal letters published by a right-wing news source that were exchanged between Marie and Paul Langevin, a brilliant former pupil of Pierre’s seated in an unhappy marriage. Marie Curie’s fellow scientist Albert Einstein felt deep outrage on her behalf over this ordeal, and wrote her a letter proclaiming his support:
“I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels … If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated” (Einstein 6).
Lucy Frances Nettlefold, OBE (1891-1966) – Cross-Fertilisation: from Commerce to Committee – Pt 1
At the age of 12, Nancy decided to read Law at Newnham College, Cambridge. This ambition was realised in 1910, after she received her first LLB from the University of London. This first degree was completed in an acknowledgement of the fact that the University of Cambridge did not, then, award Law degrees (or indeed any degrees) to its female graduates … It is a tribute to her determination that in 1914 Nancy went down from Cambridge with a Double First in The Law Tripos: in Part I she was second between the male and female Lists, and fourth in Part II. The year 1948, when the University of Cambridge began awarding degrees to women graduates, finally saw Cambridge award her an MA (Cantab).
First Ever LGBT History Festival – Women & the United Kingdom: Part 2
Sonja Tiernan outlined the very cross-class and life-changing relationship of the daughter of big Anglo-Irish landlord and the working-class Esther Roper from 1897. Eva ‘rejected her aristocratic lifestyle, moving from an opulent mansion in the beautiful countryside of Sligo to a mid-terrace property in the smog-bound quarters of industrial Manchester’. They were together for 30 years. ‘Once labelled as a pair of oddities, it is now clear that the women were open about their relationship, mixing with an eclectic group of radical gay and lesbian activists. The couple became formidable political advocates in England often organising successful and radical campaigns for social justice …