Esme Needham
Was Cleopatra really a ‘girlboss’?
In the last few years, countless anthologies of great women from history have been published. Many of them, unfortunately, feature already well-known figures: I have three such books which have a section on Cleopatra, despite the fact that her fame probably doesn’t need much boosting.
Nina Ansary’s new contribution to the genre, however, features a very different Cleopatra: Cleopatra Metrodora, an ancient Greek woman who is thought to have…
There were seven of them, to begin with. Seven expensively-educated young men from wealthy families, whose decision to pioneer a new art style sparked an artistic craze which continued for decades. Whatever you know of Pre-Raphaelite art, the chances are that you have images you associate with it: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's baleful “Proserpine”, perhaps, or John Everett Millais's “Ophelia”, covered in flowers and staring helplessly at the sky. Images of women were always at the heart of the…
There are quite a lot of graphic novels around today whose main selling points are their beautiful, elaborate drawings. This book is not one of them. But while some people might be put off by the artwork here – anyone familiar with Darryl Cunningham’s other books will instantly recognise his faceless human figures and blocks of plain colour – I think it’s one of the best graphic novels I’ve read.
Featuring short biographies of seven different scientists who ‘for reasons of gender…
If you asked someone who had never read or heard anything about the origins of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) who they thought might have founded it, the chances are they would guess something along the lines of ‘some well-meaning elderly man who was opposed to the shooting of rare birds for sport’, or something like that. But it seems very unlikely that they would come anywhere near the real founders of the RSPB: a group of women who were passionately opposed to the…
Tessa Boase
Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women's Fight for Change
Aurum Press, 2018; 336pp; £20
If you asked someone who had never read or heard anything about the origins of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) who they thought might have founded it, the chances are they would guess something along the lines of ‘some well-meaning elderly man who was opposed to the shooting of rare birds for sport’, or something like that. But…
After reading this book, at first I was confused about the title: there didn’t appear to be a manifesto in it at all. Then gradually it dawned on me – the entire book is a manifesto, and a powerful one.
Mary Beard makes so many deeply perceptive points throughout the book that I found myself memorising page numbers to refer back to in case I ever wanted to quote her on anything.
The book is divided into two sections, both of which are lectures she has given – the first…
In one of the last poems in this book, entitled ‘To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming’, Ellen Hagan celebrates a woman she saw who had tattoos of flowers and trees all up her leg. She speaks of how uplifting the sight of this ‘garden of a woman’ was, and the poem is infused with a sense of the bravery this random stranger had – to show the world how she wanted to look, and who she wanted to be. I felt like this poem summed up everything joyous and…
Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring didn’t originally intend to call their book Dead Feminists. The title arose as a way to refer to their project in a slightly jokey way, ‘especially as many of the women we’ve profiled have themselves denied being feminists’. However, they wanted to reclaim and own the word ‘feminist’, and decided that the only way to do that was to use it to refer to every single one of the historic and world-changing women profiled in their book.
The…
‘Suddenly, being a woman doesn’t look like such a minefield after all,’ Sara Pascoe says in the blurb for this book. She is referring to all the amazing things she has found out while researching evolution, science and the the history of patriarchy, and seeing how they relate to the way society works – or doesn’t – today. Except that makes Animal sound dry: it isn’t.
Although Sara Pascoe talks about evolutionary science a lot, she never dumbs it down – after all, she isn’…
The conference formerly known as Feminism in London is scheduled to start at nine thirty, and to make sure they get everyone there on time, the organisers have booked Cordelia Fine as their keynote speaker. We are told that she has come all the way from Australia specially to tell us about her new book, Testosterone Rex.
But it's not Feminism in London…
On 23 September, 18 of us went on a bus tour across East Sussex to collect signatures for a petition asking the county council to divest local people’s pensions from fossil fuels. I was a little hazy on the details at first, but by the end I had heard the explanation of what the petition was about so many times that I’m probably still saying it in my sleep.
Equipped with T-shirts (just enough of us were…
The first recorded use of the word ‘queer’ being used in an explicitly homophobic, derogatory sense was in a letter about Oscar Wilde. It’s always meant something strange and suspicious, as in the American saying ‘queer as a three-dollar bill’, or a fleeting reference to the Diogenes Club in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Only recently, though, has it been reclaimed and given a new, far more empowering definition. Instead of being an offensive term suggesting that a person is unnatural in…
When I started this graphic novel I had never heard of the French revolutionary Louise Michel and, after a somewhat dull start, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue finding out. I’m glad I did.
Michel’s story is told by three people who meet on the day of her funeral, 22 January 1905: her friend Elianne, Elianne’s daughter Monique, and the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the famous science-fiction novel Herland.
Michel took part in the…
