Category: Herstory

Hidden women of history: the Australian children’s author who captured the bush – before May Gibbs’ Australiana empire  | The Conversation

Louise Anne Meredith drew her literary inspiration from the Australian landscape and crafted her own ‘brand’ in its image. May Gibbs, who did the same, began publishing after her death.

Unlike Gibbs, though, Meredith’s illustrations were naturalistic. She rendered native Australian flora and fauna as characters for children’s literature, arguably beginning this tradition. But she didn’t “cutesify” them, or give them human features.

While Meredith is largely remembered for her botanical illustrations and travel writing, she was prolific as a children’s writer. She published a range of books for children set in Tasmania, created from her colonial perspective. Public knowledge of her contributions to Australian children’s literary history is scarce outside Tasmania.

Last year, the Royal Society of Tasmania established the Louisa Anne Meredith Medal to be awarded every four years to a “person who excels in the field of arts or humanities, or both, with outstanding contributions evidenced by creative outputs”.

Source: Hidden women of history: the Australian children’s author who captured the bush – before May Gibbs’ Australiana empire

Revealed: face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave where species buried their dead | University of Cambridge

A new documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by a team of archaeologists and conservators led by the University of Cambridge.

New analysis strongly suggests that Shanidar Z was an older female, perhaps in her mid-forties according to researchers – a significant age to reach so deep in prehistory.

Without pelvic bones, the team relied on sequencing tooth enamel proteins to determine her sex. Teeth were also used to gauge her age through levels of wear and tear – with some front teeth worn down to the root.

At around five feet tall, and with some of the smallest adult arm bones in the Neanderthal fossil record, her physique also implies a female.

This archaeological work was among the first to suggest Neanderthals were far more sophisticated than the primitive creatures many had assumed, based on their stocky frames and ape-like brows.

“As an older female, Shanidar Z would have been a repository of knowledge for her group, and here we are seventy-five thousand years later, learning from her still,” Pomeroy said.

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/shanidar-z-face-revealed?

130 years of Women’s Suffrage, the role wāhine Māori played, and today (Published: 19 September 2023)

It is 130 years since Aotearoa New Zealand became the first self-governing country to give women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

Kate Sheppard is likely the most recognised suffragist, but there were many others including Meri Mangakāhia (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Te Teinga, Ngāti Manawa, Te Kaitutae) and Ākenehi Tōmoana (Ngāi Te Rangiitā, Ngāti Papa-tua-maro, Ngāti Ngarengare, Ngāi Turahi).

Meri was the first woman recorded to address the lower house of the Te Kotahitanga Parliament (Māori Parliament) in 1893 calling for Māori women to be able to vote and stand for parliamentary seats. Ākenehi, who joined Meri at her address to the lower house, was a well-educated prominent Māori woman leader of chiefly status.

At the heart of the Māori women’s movement were concerns about the well-being of Māori, the loss of land, and restrictions on Māori women’s rights to own land imposed by European laws. ‘Wāhine rangatira’ (women of chiefly status) were used to having decision-making power, but the new European system forced them to find new ways to assert their authority.

Source: 130 years of Women’s Suffrage, the role wāhine Māori played, and today

The deadly serious world of poison gardens – and why I planted my own | The Conversation

Matriarchal knowledge

Australia does not boast any public poison gardens but Felicity McDonald runs a witches’ garden in the Mitta Valley, Victoria. Although it is not a poison garden, Felicity does have a lot of poisonous plants – hemlock, wormwood, hellebore, hogweed, datura, rhubarb, hydrangeas, foxglove, yew and more.

McDonald stresses poisonous plants should only be accessed under supervision. “Being a witch’s garden, we have plants that heal, however some of these plants have contradictions which could make you very sick or result in death.” She guides groups around the garden – school groups, senior citizens, families and Wiccans (people who follow pagan rituals and crafts) – describing plants’ medicinal and poisonous qualities.

I ask McDonald if there is a matriarchal knowledge associated with women and plants, especially poisonous ones. Yes, she says, and it is all about control. Reducing a woman to home duties, she says, denied her power. “But ancient Egyptians worshipped Isis, goddess of healing and magic. In Celtic Britain, the goddess Brigid was responsible for healing, poetry and smithcraft. And in Norse countries, Eir was the goddess associated with medical skill.” So while women had little influence in the public political sphere, they exercised power in the realms of herbs and healing.

Both McDonald and the duchess note the number of women with traditional expert plant knowledge has declined over recent centuries. I ask the duchess whether she mourns this loss of plant-related matriarchy. She answers, “A matriarch implies a strong woman who is a leader but often the best poisoners were acting quietly behind the scenes; tending to their gardens; weeding, drying herbs.”

Plants in a pot.
The author’s modest poison garden. Prudence Gibson, CC BY

 

 

Source: Friday essay: cure or kill? The deadly serious world of poison gardens – and why I planted my own

The Burning Times –  Donna Read

This documentary takes an in-depth look at the witch hunts that swept Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The film questions whether the widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times.

Source: The Burning Times – NFB

‘The bush calls us’ | Ruby Ekkel | The Conversation

Australia’s early women bushwalkers shunned convention by walking unchaperoned and wearing shorts. These fascinating photos and archival snippets tell their story.

In the 1920s and ’30s, some people scoffed at the idea women could handle rugged encounters with nature. The bush was considered a place for men.

The Melbourne Women’s Walking Club was the first of its kind in Australia. But other women of the era also took their place on the walking track. They include Jessie Luckman of Tasmania, Marie Byles and Dot Butler of New South Wales, and Alice Manfield who led guided walks on Victoria’s Mount Buffalo.

Thanks in part to the audacity of early female bushwalkers, it is no longer controversial for women to walk unchaperoned or wear shorts.

Many members of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club went on to become committed conservationists. Several played vital roles in advocating for the protection of the natural spaces we enjoy today.

For example Jean Blackburn, an enthusiastic club member from 1934 until her death in 1983, played a leading role in the creation of national parks in Victoria.

The club survived the stresses of the Second World War and a slump in membership in the 1950s. Today, more than 100 years after its inception, the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club is still going strong. In fact, today it boasts its largest ever membership.

Source: ‘The bush calls us’

Friday essay: public ‘pash ons’ and angry dads – personal politics started with consciousness-raising feminists. Now, everyone’s doing it

Personal activism has achieved major legislative change, such as no-fault divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion. But it’s also used by groups who want to reverse that change.

Thanks to “personal politics”, the everyday lives of Australians have been transformed in areas like no-fault divorce, providing safe abortions, decriminalising homosexuality, and introducing health and welfare programs tailored to women and LGBTIQ+ people.

Political change continues to be driven by personal stories.

Family Court violence

Men’s and fathers’ rights groups emerged in the lead-up to the 1975 Family Law Act and have continued to push back against feminist-led reforms to family life since.

Groups such as the Divorce Law Reform Association emerged in the late 1960s, sharing stories of distressed fathers who were required, by law, to support their divorced spouses and children.

After the Family Law Act passed, a rather angry masculinist activism argued for the “return of the fault factor”. The association’s president threateningly predicted “violence” if these male “victims” of oppression did not have their grievances recognised.

The Lone Fathers’ Association circulated stories of men who “considered kidnapping, even suicide” because of delays in the Family Court and a sense they were not being given a “fair go”.

Such groups argued the Family Law Act had turned divorced fathers into wage-slaves because they were required to provide child support, even if they had very limited custody.

No-fault divorce, the Divorce Law Reform Association argued, was making it “too easy” for women to leave marriages. At a Senate inquiry in 1980, it argued legal determinations of fault were required to “preserve the benefits, worth, stability and integrity of marriage” and prevent an ocean of male distress that was unfolding without it. A father was, and should remain, “the head of his own house”, the association argued.

In the early 1980s, the Family Court, its judges and their families became the target of lethal violence. Between 1980 and 1985, a series of bombings and shootings resulted in the death of one Family Court judge and another judge’s wife. They also resulted in the serious injury of Family Court judges. In 1984, the Family Court in Parramatta was bombed, though in this case no one was injured.

The “cause” of this violence, whether directed towards judges or families, was widely represented as a Family Court system that did not attend to men’s needs. As feminist scholar Therese Taylor observes, these activists had managed to turn “murder into the final proof of paternal love”.

From the mid-1990s, “men’s sheds” proliferated across Australia, and from 2010, they began to receive Commonwealth funding. There are now at least 1,250 of them (with access usually restricted to men). They promise to address isolation, poor mental health and suicide among (particularly older) men by providing “traditional” male activities and social contact.

In 2010, Men’s Sheds were awarded Commonwealth funding to support their expansion across Australia. In 2020, their funding was increased. A recent report commissioned by the Commonwealth government found most sheds reported being “well-funded and well-resourced”.

Source: Friday essay: public ‘pash ons’ and angry dads – personal politics started with consciousness-raising feminists. Now, everyone’s doing it

Critics are calling MONA ‘childish’, but history shows us how much the public love an art forger

The experts who criticise the fake Picassos and argue MONA’s reputation is damaged fail to recognise how the rebellious nature of art forgery so perfectly aligns with the museum’s reputation for shaking up the art industry.

Past exhibitions at MONA have created controversy and drawn protest from animal rights campaigners and enraged Christians.

One of the museum’s most popular works is a device that mimics the human digestive system and converts food into excrement, which is dispensed daily. The forged Picassos and the establishment’s snooty reaction actually encapsulates and emboldens the museum’s public image.

In time, the controversy will be seen as a positive story for MONA, and not the bonfire of integrity imagined by its critics.

The experts who warn of damage to Tasmania’s tourism industry have not stopped to appreciate the significance of a woman producing the fakes hung in the museum’s Ladies Lounge. Art forgery is exclusively a male activity.

Experts in this field such as Noah Charney and Thierry Lenain haven’t identified a single female art forger.

There may be hundreds of women producing art forgeries. They and their works are unknown because their paintings have not yet been revealed as fakes.

Until they are unmasked, Kirsha Kaechele can be recognised as the world’s most famous female art forger – an accolade that is certain to attract new visitors to the museum.

Source: Critics are calling MONA ‘childish’, but history shows us how much the public love an art forger

Josephine Butler: the forgotten feminist who fought the UK police – and their genital inspections | Women | The Guardian

In her memoir, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, Butler described her deliberations as filled with angst. She and her husband, a headteacher in Liverpool, knew it would harm his career. But neither was in doubt that the acts had to be fought. They gave the police the power to carry out compulsory genital examinations of women they believed to be prostitutes – but not their male customers. If the women refused to be checked, they were sentenced to jail with hard labour. If found to have a venereal disease, they were forcibly detained in a “lock hospital”.

In 1870, the LNA seized the chance of a byelection in Colchester. Sir Henry Storks was the Liberal candidate and a former governor of Malta, where he had introduced similar laws. He was also on record as arguing that the acts should be applied to soldiers’ wives – a suggestion which appalled Butler, who took it as proof that the acts were an insult to all women and potentially the start of something even more broadly threatening.

Convinced that MPs had deliberately avoided publicity when the laws were passed, Butler and her supporters organised prayer meetings and gave out thousands of leaflets. This provoked a furious response and repealers were repeatedly attacked. Butler was forced to hide from an angry crowd in a grocer’s cellar, and to leave a hotel in which she had booked under a false name in the middle of the night. But when the votes were counted, it was clear that the bold tactics had succeeded. Storks lost.

When the “first wave” of feminism is referred to, it is usually suffragettes that people have in mind. Less often remembered is that this was not the first time the British women’s movement rejected the reformers’ tactics of petitions, letters and lobbies in favour of a much more direct challenge.

At the root of her determination to overthrow the laws lay her conviction that they violated women’s civil rights. In speeches and writing, she cited the principle of habeas corpus – the prohibition of unlawful imprisonment – that she saw as fundamental to the British constitution. While advocates of women’s rights had long recognised the myriad ways in which women were disadvantaged, the repeal campaign was the first time that the forceful and legal operation of a sexual double standard was publicly challenged by women themselves. The coalition of police, military and courts that promoted the CD Acts, Butler told supporters, was “a diabolical triple power”; the forcible inspection of genitals was itself an assault.

Evidence heard by a Royal Commission pointed to the different way of doing things in Sweden. There, free advice and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases were offered in clinics to all who sought them. This, rather than unrealistic demands for total abstinence, was the model proposed by the reformers – and one far closer to a modern public health approach.

But such progressive notions were ignored, as was a recommendation that the age of protection (consent) be increased from 12 to 14. Instead, MPs chose to retain the status quo whereby men could legally have sex with children (which we would now call rape; the age was raised to 13 in 1875). It took more than a decade of campaigning by more than 100 local groups, and many years’ worth of evidence showing that the acts had failed to curb disease, before parliament backed a motion to suspend them in 1883. Butler was in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons, where women were allowed to watch from behind a screen, when the cheer went up.

Source: Josephine Butler: the forgotten feminist who fought the UK police – and their genital inspections | Women | The Guardian