An Alphabet of Feminism #10: J is for Jade
J
JADE
Stones on Parade.
A word that may suggest stones or horses, depending on your point of view. Naturally, these senses are distinct, and jade is accordingly given two separate entries in the dictionary.
Jade Burial Mask of King Pakal (Mayan), National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, via flickr user chaostrophy.
The first refers to the stone, itself a hybrid of ‘two distinct minerals’, which ‘for their hardness have been used for implements and ornaments’. These two, Nephrite and Jadeite, originate in different languages (lithos nephritikos and l’ejade respectively), but connect at the identical meaning ‘kidney / colic stones’, in allusion to jade‘s perceived medicinal properties. Famously fascinating to Chinese artists in particular, from as far back as the Shang dynasty, jade was also valued for its hardness and concomitant indestructibility (hence its use in burials, as in the Mayan example on the left) – much more than a simple gemstone.
A Horse of a Different Colour
Jade‘s lexical half-brother form is of unknown origin, though possibly connected to ‘yaud’ via the Icelandic ‘jalda’ (= ‘mare’). Its first citation appears around 1386, and here jade is glossed as ‘a contemptuous name for a horse’, or ‘a horse as opposed to a riding horse’. Its pejorative status may explain its feminine etymology: mares were generally used in Days Of Yore for more everyday work than that chosen for stallions and geldings, losing their rights to many of the Sexy Jobs (racing, fighting, hunting, fishin’, shootin’) because of their perceived Attitude Problems, especially during estrous.
I am, alas, no equine expert so I cannot claim to know how much of this derives from suspicious anthropomorphism and how much from observable truth. It sounds as dubious as similar assertions that ‘all’ women are mardy, but if some horse-fancier out there can prove otherwise, well, I bow to your superior wisdom, and toddle back tail-drawn to the dictionary, where it is safe and warm.
Bring On The Dancing Horses.
More vaguely, jade can signify a rather delicious list of equine insults: ‘a roadster, a hack, a sorry inconditioned wearied or worn out horse; a vicious, worthless, ill tempered horse’, but (and the dictionary is very specific on this point), it is only ‘rarely’ applied to a donkey. In extended meaning, it can be ‘generally’ applied to a horse in a kind of affectionate usage ‘without depreciatory sense’, where its main appearance is in Renaissance comedy. Thus, in Jonson’s beautiful Alchemist (c.1610), the servant Face resents being made to ‘stalk like a mill-jade’.
Alas, since the decline of horses as a major method of transportation, the utility of a catch-all insult for useless specimens has come into question, and nowadays the word is rare. We are left with the slightly more familiar sense, arriving in the 1550s, as ‘a term of reprobation applied to a woman‘. In this instance, it is unclear exactly what it means: its citations largely sound like tautologies, as in ‘an expensive jade of a wife’ (from the Spectator in 1722), and I suppose its significance is in extending the ‘useless’ tag of the original equine. Indeed, given the dictionary’s conservative tendencies over citations (and the early date for this last term) we can assume that these first and second uses of jade are feeding off each other, and probably almost synonymous.
However, like its original horsey meaning, jade as a woman can also be jocular, apparently in alignment with ‘hussy or minx‘; and this latter may, incidentally, derive its playfulness in extension from another animal origin, mynx (‘a puppy’) and / or the Middle Dutch minnekijn, meaning ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’. We might also think of Minnie, herself a sort of feminist icon, if you will.
Oh, Man.
But one of the surprising things about this surprising word is its gender neutrality: thus its third meaning, in application to a man, ‘usually in some figure drawing from sense 1’, that is, (here we are again) back to horse insults. This is the usage it has in The Taming of The Shrew, an early Shakespeare release that titularly plays with subordinating occasionally recalcitrant beasts and frequently riles audiences with its ostensibly despicable gender-politics:
Petruchio: …Come, sit on me,
Katherina: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
Petruchio: Women are made to bear, and so are you.
Katherina: No such jade as you, if me you mean.William Shakespeare, The Taming Of The Shrew (c.1590-4) II.i.198-201.
The ‘Shrew’, Katherina, here dubs her ‘Tamer’ a jade in this third sense, playing with the punning meanings of ‘bear’ that have immediately preceded. Asses are made to bear; so are women. Oh ho. Fun with zeugmas.
But Katherina gives as good as she gets, Minnie-style, using jade to succinctly imply that Petruchio is the sexual equivalent of ‘a sorry, ill-conditioned or worn out horse’ (which in asexual extension gives us jaded as ‘worn out, cynical’ – probably the only form of this word still in common use). That the horse in question may have began lexical life as a ‘mare’ seems contextually unimportant, since nowhere in the history of sexual politics is a woman expected to ‘keep up’ or indeed do much more than ‘fall back’. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the male should be attacked here on explicitly sexual territory, which also draws attention to jade‘s arguable antonyms, ‘stallion’, and ‘stud’.
So where does jade leave us now? Sometime around the 1970s, it was the first sense of the word that spawned the (unisex) name meaning ‘jewel’ or ‘precious stone’, as indeed jade the gem now endures in everyday language. But the flip-side of this now almost obsolete word is its punning sexual suggestiveness, where it is interesting to note that this is one ostensibly female word that turns back to bite its male accusers. A jade’s trick indeed.
NEXT WEEK: K is for Knickerbocker
Five Things I Found At Ladyfest Ten
FINALLY. It’s a fortnight late, but I couldn’t not post about Ladyfest Ten. Rather than reviewing the whole event – there’s quite a few reviews floating around by now – I thought I’d just spotlight the best picks from my rucksack-hoard of discoveries.
For those for whom this blog is a First Foray into feminist websites, what is a Ladyfest? Well, they happen worldwide – here’s Wikipedia’s entry. Succinctly, they’re community-based arts and culture festivals focussed on women creating culture and campaigning for social change. The first one was in 2000 in the US; today Ladyfests go on all over the world. This one, my first, was the decade-marker!
Sarah J, Jenni and I pitched up on the Saturday afternoon with “Rest of the Fest” tix. I went for a wander in the stalls of the Lady Garden (you read that correctly). Hence, without further ado:
FIVE THINGS I FOUND AT LADYFEST
Fat Quarter: my issue 1. Glamorous brown BR Towers carpet not included. Sorry.
1. FAT QUARTER MAGAZINE
My friends, this thing is seriously badass. Give it your time. You won’t be disappointed.
- WHAT IS IT? Zines and self-produced magazines are a rich tradition in feminism, and they all come out to play for festivals. This was no exception – some doing the old school riot grrrl photocopied look, and some glossier efforts. This one, firmly in the latter category, really stood out. Only two issues in since its 2009 inception, it’s beautifully designed, full colour, and fun. I swear, if BadRep was a print magazine, we’d be aspiring to be like this.
- WHY SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION? BECAUSE. LOOK AT IT. YOU WILL SEE WHY. Someone I spotted on the BadRep Twitter feed pronounced them the rightful heirs to the gap left by Subtext, and I reckon they weren’t wrong.
- WHERE CAN I GET MORE? There’s a website here , they’re on Facebook here and editor Katie’s tweeting here.
FQ1 inside spread (I picked the comics page to show off. We're geeks.)
2. FOR BOOK’S SAKE
Like reading? Interested in feminism? You’re welcome.
- WHAT IS IT? In their own words, For Books’ Sake is an intelligent but irreverent website featuring books by and for independent women, including news, reviews, features and interviews. Focusing mainly on female authors (both upcoming and established), we review classic and modern books across both fiction and non-fiction. What really brought the coolness of this project home to me, though, was the moment I rounded a corner at Ladyfest and found myself standing smack bang in front of FBS writer Jess Haigh’s Travelling Suitcase Library, which is, essentially, a kind of Sisterhood of the Travelling Books – she hosts pop-up library sessions where the curious, interested and bookloving can meet, swap books, simply take books away (no membership necessary – it’s all done on trust), or talk books.
- WHY SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION? Because it’s a heartwarming project with serious soul, an open-arms approach to all sorts of writing from Penguin Classics to teen fiction, and an ethos of bonding people through books. Over the desk, Jess spotted me covertly eyeing Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room in a “man, I really should read that at some point” way, smiled, and said, “That book right there? The reason I became a feminist”. That caught my attention. Before long, Women’s Room and I were heading home together. Cheers!
- WHERE CAN I GET MORE? See above, or catch them on Twitter.
3. PAMFLET
So what if everybody’s already heard of this zine. I am fashionably late to the party and you can all deal with it.
- WHAT IS IT? I didn’t want to write a post about the stalls of Ladyfest without including one full-on, photocopied, more old school-stylin’ zine. That zine – and choosing was hard – is Pamflet, who are a “post-everything london girl-zine made by anna-marie, phoebe & nick // photocopied pink n black since 2005“.
- WHY SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION? Because it’s good to have zines in your life. It’s good to put heart into your causes, hobbies, fandoms, to make your own soapboxes out of sticky tape, photocopier drums and internet. It’s the same vein of creativity-meets-sharing that leads people to make mixtapes (and if there’s not a post by me on the sheer joy of mixtaping at some point in the life of this blog, I’m Anne Widdecombe).
- WHERE CAN I GET MORE? Here (blog), here (facebook) and here (Twitter).
4. SHE MAKES WAR
Well, this one’s a bit of a cheat. You’ll have noted that we didn’t actually have tickets to the musical side of Ladyfest, BUT CONSIDER THIS PLUG MY ATONEMENT, for She Makes War, one of the acts that played, is awesome. And I’m making some noise about her here because while she wasn’t on a stall, I was blurting about her to Jenni while we were browsing the stalls, and besides, the Ladyfest buzz has since pushed me to buy her album, and that is what we blog editors call A TENUOUS LINK AND THEREFORE VIABLE. Yes.
- WHAT IS IT? Great music.
- WHY SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION? She’s already sailing a soupstream of soundbites like “special brand of gloom punk-pop”, “grimy angst-pop”, and so on, and you know why that is, guys? It’s because she’s REALLY GOOD. Fans of PJ Harvey, Melissa Auf der Maur et al should particularly consider applying, but I’ll just leave this taster-trailer-thinger here.
- WHERE CAN I GET MORE? Official site! Minisite for album Disarm here! Twitter! Interviewy chat with Wears The Trousers online mag!
5. EDUCATION FOR CHOICE
One of the few talks all three of us made it to, so I’m rounding this off with their call to action.
- WHAT IS IT? “The only UK-based educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make informed choices about pregnancy and abortion.“
- WHY SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION? Because the amount of bogus “unbiased information on abortion” services out there is growing like mould in a petri, along with that worrying US trend for aggressive pickets like this. Sarah C tweeted just as we left the talk to say that she’d passed one herself whilst out in central London. Do not want.
- WHERE CAN I GET MORE? Find out more here (or read yesterday’s post by Sarah J here).
World AIDS Day Shoutout
It mindboggles me beyond words when I read opinions along the lines of “HIV/AIDS is not a feminist issue”. I could go into this at some length, but I’m posting this from work, where my department and I are in the middle of running a World AIDS Day stall, so this is a fly-by post.
I’ve got ribbons, button badges, and a massive pile of red and white iced cupcakes. “No ribbon for me, thanks” is a surprisingly common response, though people seem happy to take a cake without publicising their interest in WAD too openly – but almost equally prevalent are the people like the woman who murmurs, “I wear one of these every year, for my aunt”. HIV carries an incredible amount of stigma even in this country, and it is hugely important that we do everything we can to move the public consciousness on from this.
Abstinence-only sex-ed programs aren’t just ineffective on a basic level – they’re no good for helping people understand the need to be aware of the risks around HIV prevention. Check out this article for an interesting spotlight on how actually, yes, this is your problem too.
I told an otherwise-pretty-liberally-minded acquaintance of mine this year that I would be working on this stall. He burst into nervous, playground lurgy-fear laughter. 
Many countries around the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, have limited or negligible access to up-to-date antiretroviral medication for the management of HIV infection, which Europe and the US have a monopoly on. This needs to change. And you know what? Properly managed, with people properly informed and risk-aware, the infection is, you see, comparable in its day-to-day living impact with diabetes. But you don’t see people being suspended from their jobs, bullied by their neighbours, and ostracised at work for being diabetic.
Stephen Fry may have pissed a load of feminists off the other month, but I’ve never been so pleased to see someone so heavily retweeted.
Let’s get the record straight. Wear a ribbon, and wear it with pride and solidarity.
Fighting for the Facts about Abortion
Hands up everyone who had crappy sex education at school. You know – where you learnt about the tubes and the hormones, watched a video of someone giving birth and then a teacher put a condom on a banana and you were sent on your way. Maybe they also told you to wait til you were married, or you were 21, whichever came first. Hands up – yes, I thought so.
Mine was pretty similar (aside from one teacher telling us that an orgasm was like a really good sneeze… no, I don’t know either). Relationships and feelings and other relevant things weren’t discussed, and neither was abortion, despite the girl I sat next to in design tech having had one just the year before.
The A Word
In a way, I am relieved. Because I have seen some of the materials used to discuss abortion in schools all over the country, and they make my blood run cold. Most of it is little better than anti-choice propaganda, and much of it is simply untrue. Abortion makes you infertile, abortion gives you breast cancer… These lies are imparted to young people at the hands of abortion ‘experts’ who are invited into schools, often by well-meaning teachers desperate for guidance on how best to handle ‘the A word’. Young people deserve better than this.
The problem goes far deeper than the curriculum, of course. Abortion happens, whether it is legal or not, safe or not, all over the world. Globally, about 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion (some global and local stats). Reluctance to discuss abortion openly and truthfully in the media and in popular culture is doing untold damage to individuals and to women’s precious right to choose. How are teachers and youth workers meant to offer unbiased information and support if they themselves have never had the chance to have an open discussion? To hear the facts?
Secrets and lies
Refusing to tackle the subject of abortion allows stigma to flourish, putting young people facing unplanned pregnancy in a position where they may not even feel able to ask for help. Scaring young women into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term benefits no one.
But no matter, right? There’s plenty of information freely available, and countless support and counselling services. So here’s a fun game: why not google ‘pregnancy counselling’ and let me know how many of those first page results you reckon are really offering unbiased information? If you find any really choice quotes please comment and share!
Freedom to choose
I’m not assuming all BadRep’s readers are pro-choice, but I’m sure there are some of you. Perhaps, like me, you’ve waved a placard or shouted into a megaphone for a woman’s right to choose and to control her own body.
Standing up for safe, legal abortion is vital, as there are plenty of people who will take any opportunity they can to turn the clock back on reproductive freedom. Some of them are sitting in Westminster right now, deciding your future. (That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?)
But the war is also being waged quietly and efficiently on another front, in our classrooms and in a host of so-called counselling clinics. It’s up to us to expose the propagandists and arm young people with the facts so that they can make their own decisions.
Yes! But how?
Well… *puts on charity trustee hat* Education for Choice are the first line of defence. They are the only UK-based educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make informed choices about pregnancy and abortion.
With their mighty army of four staff they do heroic battle against the forces of misinformation on a shoestring budget. Times are hard for everyone right now, but in order for EFC to continue working in schools, with youth workers and health professionals, they urgently need your help.
Please:
- Donate £5, £10, or whatever you can spare to their emergency fund
- Pledge your support for the A Word campaign
Help EFC put abortion in the spotlight and make sure that young people’s right to unbiased information is at the top of the agenda.
What else can I do?
- Teach PSHE or know someone who does? Check out these resources.
- Have some time to spare? Become a Champion for Choice.
- Under 21? Have your say on the Youth Advisory Group.
- Have children of your own? Talk to them.
Gaye Advert and the Great Cock ‘n’ Balls Swindle
GUEST POST SHOUTOUT: Please welcome Rhian Jones of Velvet Coalmine.
******
Sexuality in Rock’n’roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.
– Ian Penman, NME, 1979
I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.
– Gaye Advert, 1977
Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.
I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved The Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And most of all, I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.
Despite their intelligent, era-defining songs like Bored Teenagers and The Great British Mistake, you have to dig through several layers of punk sediment before the Adverts come to light. They were one of the first punk bands to gain commercial success, and how much of this achievement was down to Gaye is open to depressing debate. A groundbreaking example of the Babe on Bass, her experience prefigured the problems faced by lone women in bands from Blondie to Paramore: scepticism towards their musical ability tied to a disproportionate focus on their looks.
She could have the impact of five Runaways, Patti Smith’s armpit, and Blondie’s split ends on Britain’s vacant female scene.
– Jane Suck, Sounds, 1977
Gaye’s elevation to national sweetheart began as a generic punk fairytale. In 1976, she and her partner TV Smith made an escape in time-honoured fashion from their Devonshire coastal town to London, where they swiftly formed a band. The Adverts became a fixture at pioneering punk venue the Roxy before being snatched up for a tour with the Damned and a contract with Stiff Records.
A devotee of Iggy Pop and the Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, Gaye made her musical presence a vital part of the Adverts’ brand of thuggishly intrepid punk. Their breakthrough single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes hinges on her instrument’s ascending throb. Most Adverts songs are played as though they’re throwing punches, TV Smith’s vocals advancing in one-two jabs while Gaye’s bass lines bob and weave. On stage, she was a static and self-contained sounding-board for Smith’s livewire showmanship.
image by Flickr user ariel awesome
But her visual presence hit equally hard: she caught your eye, you caught your breath. Her iconic look – battered black leather and a kohl-rimmed thousand-yard stare – drew on Suzie Quattro and Joan Jett’s effortless rocker fundamentalism rather than the try-hard iconoclasm of Jordan or Siouxsie. Gaye was punk’s terrifyingly blank, stark, dead-eyed minimalism made flesh, the girl nihilist next door.
For Greil Marcus, both Gaye and the Slits were punk’s ‘pretty people who made themselves ugly’ – although clearly not ugly enough. As the reminiscences of her admirers on tribute websites and YouTube comments testify, Gaye was punk’s first female pin-up. Her press and TV appearances stirred hearts and hormones across late-70s Britain, pulling the plug on her wish to be one of the boys.
I wasn’t made to feel as conscious of the fact that I was female [at the Roxy], as I was by the rock press.
– Gaye in Vacant: A Diary Of The Punk Years, Nils & Ray Stevenson
In a 2001 interview with the website Punk77, Gaye recalled that “the media would concentrate on irrelevant things like clothes or be extra critical of my playing in the same way that some men are prejudiced against women drivers”. The hackneyed trope of whether girls can play seems especially incongruous in punk, a musical movement studded with gleeful and defiant amateurism. Nevertheless, Gaye’s playing was picked on as “plodding” and her mute ‘fixed sultriness’ unfavourably compared with the vocal talent of other punk women. This latter criticism betrays, among other things, a peculiar disapproval of girls in non-singing positions, as though there were a correct set of requirements for band composition, with musical preoccupation on the part of female members an intrinsically suspicious transgression of their allotted role.
1978 single cover, uploaded to an extensive gallery of punk singles cover art by Flickr user Affendaddy
Dismissal of Gaye’s musical credentials went hand-in-hand with an insistence on her value as eye-candy. According to the NME, their bassist’s ‘superb squeakers’ were the best thing about the Adverts and the only conceivable cause of any mainstream notice they might attract. Stiff Records instantly latched onto Gaye’s looks as a marketing tool, giving the Adverts’ debut single a cover bearing a close-up of her face – all eyes and lips, the band’s name an afterthought. This was a stunt pulled without the band’s prior knowledge, which Gaye avenged by refusing to appear in other band photographs for the single.
As the Adverts gained more media attention, Gaye’s image began to dominate the band’s press. Again, the novelty of her status as sole female in a role other than singer seemed to confer as much fascination as her looks. She complained of fending off photographers’ requests for her “to pose with my jacket undone” and sudden “leching” from men she’d considered her friends. After ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ hit the Top 20 and the band appeared on Top of the Pops, the national response to Gaye was extraordinary. The Sun described her, bafflingly, as ‘one of the saucy girl singers who have taken over pop’, and the Daily Express swooned that she possessed:
…[the same] fragile beauty that made the world and Mick Jagger fall in love with Marianne Faithful. Gaye is beautiful, she is as dark as Marianne was fair, with black hair and Castillian white skin…
This presentation of Gaye, and its explicit comparison to pliant and angelic pre-punk darling Faithfull, attempted to explain her as a continuation of the past, rather than a messy break with it. As revolutionary a moment as punk was, it operated within a reactionary framework in which its icons were objectified and misunderstood.
The Adverts disbanded in 1979, their split hastened by Gaye’s discomfort with, and other band members’ resentment of, the puddles of critical drool collecting at her feet. Gaye’s enduring reputation as prototypical punkette pin-up tends to overshadow what she actually did – which was, in her own words, “[try] to get a good sound and play right. I’m not one of Pan’s People.” She had the misfortune to attempt this within a context in which women on stage, regardless of their reasons for and intentions in being there, were automatically sexualised, examined and evaluated in a manner wholly absent from attitudes towards their male counterparts. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
*
[Thanks to tvsmith.com and Punk77 for several of the above quotes.]
If you’re interested in guest posting on BadRep, drop us a line and tell us what you’re thinking at [email protected]
An Alphabet of Feminism #9: I is for Infant
I
INFANT
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)
LinkedIn.
Have you ever noticed how many I-words have the in/im prefix? These clarify what something is not.
Thus, in-nocent, in-nocuous = not harmful (the same root as ‘noxious’), im-potent = not powerful, in-capable = self explanatory; &c.
Infant is one such, but cleverly concealed by an unexpected etymology. Along with its archaic variants (enfaunt, infaunt), it derives from the Latin infans, which is the Greek ‘phemi’ in its plundered Roman form, ‘femi’, plus the Latinate negative (in- = ‘without’).
And phemi / femi? ‘To make known one’s thoughts, to declare’ or, simply, ‘to speak’.
Don’t Speak.
So an infant is ‘without speech’; or, as its first definition clarifies, ‘a child during the earliest period of its life (or still unborn)’ – Shakepeare’s ‘Infant, Mewling and puking in the Nurses Armes’.
Mew.
Newborns / kittens must indeed rely on ‘mewling’ for their day-to-day needs, but paradoxically such speechlessness gives them a symbolic potency that rings in the ear.
Indeed, they (babies, not kittens) have ‘spoken’ throughout history, from whistleblowing on promiscuous parents to confirmation of marital fidelity.
But hold on just one gosh-darned minute: that’s female fidelity, of course. The maternal connection is the only one you can prove, sans DNA testing. Male extra-curricular activity is neither here nor there.
And history is full of those awkward occasions when ‘speaking likenesses’ gives rise to speculation about what the child’s mother was up to nine months previously.
Mother’s Ruin.
Strangely, the infant’s own inevitable silence simply compounds the seeming power of what ‘they’ are saying: you’re hearing with your eyes rather than your ears. Or just reading.
Indeed, Paulina, the faithful lady-in-waiting in The Winter’s Tale would prove her mistress’ daughter legitimate by pointing to her book-like qualities: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father…’
Well into the seventeenth century, the village gossip could also deduce parental naughtiness through something as seemingly random as a child’s constitution: weakness or disease suggested either that the parents had been having too much sex to copulate at their full vigour, or else that conception had happened during menstruation. You slags.
And it didn’t stop there: infants could also tell tales through the very time of their arrival. It was commonly believed that young’uns entered the world nine months to the day after their conception. Consequently, no child born on a Sunday could be christened until its parents had made a public apology for their desecration of the Lord’s Day. Busted.
Even a child’s existence could be disastrously significant.
To sea, To sea…
In 1741, the retired sea-captain Sir Thomas Coram set up London’s first Foundling Hospital, whence came unfortunates from all walks of life to ensure that their screamingly ill-begotten infants would be cared for and kept from incriminating them (not necessarily in that order).
In many instances, such abandonment was the alternative to killing the child or leaving it to die. So Coram was hardly acting on a whim: the social repercussions of Sin were severe, poverty and gin dependency rife (a woman’s problem, and also a means of inducing abortions – why else ‘Mother’s Ruin’?) and the streets covered with child corpses.
Infantine... 'The Angel In The House', photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron
So Coram’s critics accused him of fostering sin, by giving it a Hospital wherein to hide: to offer succour to bastard infants was to shield the sinful and encourage further debauchery. Let the wages of sin speak loud and clear.
Speak Now, Or Forever Hold Thy Peace.
In its second meaning, infant becomes more defined: it does not simply signify a speechless-screaming babe-in-arms, but also ‘a person under legal age; a minor’ (someone who has not ‘completed their twenty-first year’).
Here it is law-based, in reference, for example, to all those boy-kings of our early royal history (how many can you name????) – whose legitimacy is the most important thing of all, taking priority over minor considerations such as… oh, I don’t know, BEING OLDER THAN SIX.
Infant in this sense connotes something like having yet to earn freedom sui juris; the legal understanding that a person is fit to govern themselves (and, in royal cases, a country), and consequent emancipation from the rule of parent, guardian or Lord Protector.
Among Spanish royals – to this day – children who are not the direct heir to the throne have the title Infante / Infanta; presumably giving us English our third definition for infant (‘a youth of noble birth’), these are princes of the blood, but they ain’t ruling nothing.
Exit, Pursued by a Bear.
It is also worth considering the more direct fate of infants’ mothers: ‘The very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during marriage’ wrote William Blackstone in 1765. A financial, legal and social dependent – like the children she bore – a wife could be ‘infantine’ through her official speechlessness, than which there is no more perfect example than Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854-62):
He’s never young nor ripe; she grows
More infantine, auroral, mild,
And still the more she lives and knows
The lovelier she’s express’d a child.
Yet, like the screaming infants littering Coram’s Fields, the silent appendage speaks vicariously: dress, jewellery and inactivity declare her husband’s wealth and status; ‘mildness’ and ‘loveliness’ (like youth and innocence) embody the ideals men battle to protect, with smatterings of the overpowering Rightness of the domestic sphere.
She remains, of course, firmly on her pedestal, and statues, as we know, do not speak (unless they are late Shakespearean and have the rather badass Paulina fighting their corner).
So being infantilised does not mean saying nothing; rather, it means saying what those around you choose to hear.
NEXT WEEK: J is for Jade
Second Class Citizens: How the Legal Aid reforms will rig family law
The government’s point of view was that it was time to make big decisions about priorities.
BBC article, 15 November 2010
In cutting legal aid for nearly all areas affecting the family sphere, the government has made it very clear where their priorities lie, and it is not with the most vulnerable members of society. The cuts are all over the place – family law, immigration, employment – and it is difficult to decide which of these is going to disadvantage women the most.
Even looking at a single area – family law – yields some very interesting data. Legal aid is not available for uncontested divorces, it can only be applied for where the other party contests the petition. Of the divorces granted in 2008 in England and Wales, 67% were granted to the wife. For all of the divorces granted, unreasonable behaviour was the most common reason for divorce. Of the contested divorces initiated, women were more likely to be granted Legal Aid as they are more likely to have no income of their own.
Taking Legal Aid away from contested divorce cases, therefore, is likely to result in far fewer cases being brought before the court, as the main instigators of divorce proceedings will not be able to afford to do so. So what are the alternatives if you’re stuck in a marriage and you want out?
Mediation isn't possible for everyone. Image captured by rsepulveda on Flickr.
The problem with mediation
Well, there’s mediation, which only works if the two individuals can agree on an amicable arrangement. I’m thinking that most people wouldn’t want to go through the court process if an amicable arrangement was possible. Even setting aside the thorny issue of child custody, solicitors claim that 4 out of 5 men try to hide wealth in divorce settlements. Going to court can prevent this through the agreement of a “consent order” deciding how property and assets are to be split. If the parties do not follow the order, the court can then enforce it. I find it laughable that those men would volunteer their hidden wealth because they’re around a mediation table rather than in a court room. Net result: wives lose out in a settlement, and have no recourse if the other party reneges on the agreement.
Domestic violence cases
Suppose that it’s worse, and that the woman is in an abusive relationship. Currently, if a woman wishes to keep her address secret, she can apply to use her solicitor’s address instead of her own. Most importantly for violent cases, it is recognised that mediation, which is voluntary, is inappropriate where there is a fear of violence by either party. Ah, I hear you cry, but funding will continue for family law cases involving domestic violence.
The thing is, “domestic violence” comes under section (b) of the Act, “unreasonable behaviour”. This doesn’t need to include the particulars of any violence experienced, but can be something much milder. In fact, unless the husband has a string of convictions for violence, it’s actually easier in some ways to have a divorce granted by citing milder grounds, as the other party is less likely to contest the petition. With domestic violence cases under-reported, it is difficult to estimate how many mild petitions for “unreasonable behaviour” hide battery and abuse. 77% of domestic violence victims are women, 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and on average a victim will experience 35 assaults before calling the police. An inadequate avenue of escape previously partly available to thousands of women across the UK is now being firmly barred.
The cost of being single. Image captured by CascadeAndSTAN on Flickr.
The cost of being single
So why even get married? Surely it’s safer for all women to apply for divorce now, and to refuse to enter matrimony in the future. Why not simply opt for that? Put simply: money.
Women’s access to income through employment will be significantly curtailed as public sector jobs are shed, and their access to government assistance and benefits will be cut. The cuts will hit women twice as hard as men, and the poorest 13 times harder than the richest. I guess it’s a good thing that the number of women already below the poverty line is negligible… oh wait, one third of women earn less than £100 a week. A working lone parent with two children will suffer cuts of 10.4% of their income, compared to a two-parent, two-child family on a modest income’s drop of 6.2%. To give you an idea of what this means, in London, 9 out of 10 lone parent households are headed by women.
What am I supposed to do about it?
Taken individually, any of the above measures are regressive. Put together, and they are positively draconian. The only saving grace is that these changes have not yet been confirmed, and are still subject to a public consultation (ending 14 February 2011). Make sure your voice is heard, by completing the online form. Unless we speak out now, it may cost us far too dearly in the future.
[Guest Post] A Minister for Women? I’d prefer Silly Walks, thanks.
GUEST POST SHOUTOUT: The Working Girl, who’s guestposting for us today, blogs on the world of work, politics and feminism over here.
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Bless the Labour government of 1997-2010. They did quite a bit of good. Minimum wage, Northern Ireland and Civil Partnerships are all some of my favourite things, behind whiskers on kittens. They did, however, invent an awful lot of tosh to appear modern and popular.
One of these inventions was the post of Minister for Women. Created in 1997 and given first to Harriet Harman (who was also the last Labour minister to hold the post in 2010), it was meant to look at gender inequality throughout Britain. The post was expanded to look at other inequalities and discrimination in 2007 and now the full title is Minister for Women and Equalities. Because women are so under-represented in Parliament (although you’ll be forgiven for not being bowled over by the number of ethnic minorities either), the specific
title ‘Minister for Women’ has been retained.
I have a few issues with this. One I would like to illustrate using Ainsley Hayes, she of the long blond hair and happy gun-toting Republican ways in Season 2 of The West Wing. When being invited back to her alma mater to debate the Equal Rights Amendment (which specifically stated that discrimination against anyone because of their gender was illegal), Sam assumes she’s all for it. She’s not, and here’s why:
It’s humiliating. A new amendment we vote on declaring that I am equal under the law to a man? I am mortified to discover there is reason to believe I wasn’t before. I am a citizen of this country; I am not a special subset in need of your protection. I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old white men. The same article fourteen that protects you protects me, and I went to law school just to make sure.
You can see her in quite frankly awesome action here.
Emily Proctor as associate White House counsel Ainsley Hayes in The West Wing.
I don’t understand why we are singled out for special rights as if we need protection – we’ve already passed various laws stipulating that I cannot be paid less or treated with disrespect or sexually harassed because of my gender. I’m OK with these laws. I want to see society catch up with our legislation, but I feel that having a specific Minister for people like me who have ovaries is, quite frankly, patronising.
It’s also completely redundant. If they actually did anything to stem the misogyny and discrimination faced by women every day, I’d applaud. But they don’t, because they can’t, because so much of what we face is ingrained within society. We’re slowly turning it around – another hundred years or so and we might be nearly there – but I don’t think having a specific Minister stops any employer in their tracks from giving that woman a smaller pay raise than her male counterpart, or that man over there denying his wife the right to work because he wants her to have his dinner ready every day, or that assistant from cutting and pasting his female boss’ head onto the Page 3 girl and sending it round the office.
Current incumbent Theresa May, image via Wikipedia Commons.
Finally, my huge issue with our Minister for Women and Equalities is that it’s always given to a woman, generally as an additional role to her main ministerial duties. This sends the message that gender equality is something additional, not important enough to be a main duty – and it’s certainly a woman’s issue, nothing for the men to worry about, hur hur. By placing this so predominantly in the female sphere, we are telling men that they don’t need to think about gender equality, that it’s fine for them so they shouldn’t fight for it, that it’s purely something that the discriminated against need to fight for and correct.
Our next Minister for Women and Equalities should be a man. Then they have to argue that women’s rights are a necessity that are already afforded to men without question, that gender inequality affects children of both genders by reducing financial remuneration and by encouraging stereotypes, that maybe, just maybe, men can be feminists too. Sad that having a man in the role would make other men sit up and notice, but at this point in time, I’m willing to use all my tools in my box. If they won’t listen to women’s issues when declared by a woman, then maybe it’s time for the testosterone to even things up a little and help bring gender equality into the male-dominated public sphere.
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