Susan Hawthorne explains the key ideas in Vortex, the running theme in the book of the myth of Cassandra and Trojan horses, how growing up in Australia has affected her work and why she asks readers whether we care about the safety of lesbians.
Source: #120 Susan Hawthorne – Vortex: the Crisis of Patriarchy — FiLiA
The medicalization of childbirth and the marginalization of the midwife has made childbirth a much more dangerous process.
Source: The 20th Century Coup of The American Childbirth Industry — Lady Science
Computing did not start with Ada Lovelace, rather its origins lie in the much older crafts of weaving and calligraphy.
Source: Before Lovelace — Lady Science
With Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman set to take centre stage, there are calls for the world’s major economic powers to boycott this weekend’s G20 summit over the jailing of female political prisoners who campaigned for the right to drive.
This month, a UN human rights committee expressed alarm at the worsening health of the 31-year-old, who is on a hunger strike, and urged the Saudis to immediately release her.
Up until June 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world where women were banned from driving cars.
Just months before the restriction was lifted, the Saudi Royal Court issued a decree ordering a group of female activists who had been behind a Women2Drive campaign not speak to the media.
They were later arrested.
The Dick, Kerr Ladies football team attracted 53,000 fans to Everton’s Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920. But instead of being used as proof of women’s football’s popularity, it turned out to be the beginning of the end.
Throughout 1921, the matches came thick and fast for Dick, Kerr Ladies, but storm clouds were brewing for the women’s game.
League football had resumed in 1919 after the Great War, with men coming back from the front to resume their former lives.
However, in every aspect of life in 1920’s Britain, women were finding their voice in society. Suffrage had been granted to women over the age of 30 in 1918 — although genuine equality only came in 1928 with universal suffrage for those aged over 21.
However, in sport, patriarchy still ruled.
On December 5, 1921, just under a year after the spectacularly successful match at Goodison Park, the Football Association (FA) banned women from using its grounds, saying football was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”.
The FA did not recognise women’s football again in any form until 1969, almost 50 years later.
What Lederberg did was spend decades investigating the way micro-organisms share genetic material, trailblazing work at a time when scientists had little sense of what DNA was. So did her first husband, Joshua Lederberg, who died in 2008. Yet far more people have heard of him than of her, a disparity that some experts attribute to a phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect. The term, coined by scientific historian Margaret Rossiter, is a nod to 19th century suffragist Matilda J. Gage, who, as Rossiter puts it, first described the bias that has led to female researchers being “ignored, denied credit or otherwise dropped from sight” throughout history.
The Matilda Effect goes hand in hand with another phenomenon: the Matthew Effect. Per the Gospel of Matthew, those who have plenty shall have more in abundance, while those who have little will find it taken away. Rossiter, now a professor emerita at Cornell University, thought there should be more focus on the fact that female scientists had for centuries ended up on the short end of this maxim. She wrote a paper introducing the term in 1993, and, she says, “it took on a life of its own.”
Lederberg’s legacy matters because she is more proof that science is and has been a realm of women. Today women are better represented, but prejudices linger. And young girls still have fewer scientific role models than boys do.
“We have to work really, really hard on this in our society on every front,” says Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. “Just the fact that her story is being told now is a triumph.”
Source: Why Don’t We Remember More Trailblazing Women Scientists? | Time
Firstly, and especially for anyone who isn’t already aware of this, the purple line is a line of temporary skin discoloration that can be seen in the anal cleft of some women as they progress in labour. In early labour, the line is short, and it gets longer as labour progresses. Some midwives are good at telling how far along a woman is in her labour by looking at the purple line.
The purple line was first discussed in the literature (to my knowledge, but please see below) in a letter written to The Lancet by Byrne and Edmonds (1990), who described it as a ‘clinical sign which will indicate the progress of the first stage of labour without vaginal examination’. Interestingly, they attributed a Sister H Lake as having first observed the purple line. I can only assume that Sister Lake was a midwife, and have previously made some efforts to track her down, but without success.
In 2010, Shepherd et al published the results of their research study into the purple line. In an article that is freely available, they observed the progress of 144 women in labour and saw evidence of the purple line in 76% of the women. These researchers hadn’t set out to find out more about the actual physiology of the purple line, but their results showed a medium positive correlation between the length of the purple line, the dilation of the woman’s cervix and the station of the baby’s head. One of their findings that I find the most fascinating is that the line was far more likely to appear when a woman was in spontaneous labour.
Having seen the purple line many times myself, though, I find it hard to believe that Sister Lake was the first birth attendant to notice it. I often wonder whether, one day, someone doing some historical midwifery research will come across an even earlier reference to this in old texts. Or perhaps in other eras it was so well known and accepted that there would have been no need to even mention it…
Gomeroi woman Rachael McPhail had the idea to include the traditional place name on post items and began petitioning Australia Post only two months ago for three key actions.
- Australia Post has voiced support for traditional place names being included in postal addresses
- Ms McPhail would also like to see Aus Post compile a database of traditional place names cross-referenced with postcodes
- An online business is already providing an option for traditional place names on order forms
Also https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia
It took 200 years to get a statue honouring the life of pioneering philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, but its creators have faced criticism from almost the moment it was unveiled.
The new sculpture was met with dismay and bafflement by some when it was unveiled in north London on Tuesday, with critics asking why it did not directly depict Wollstonecraft and why the “mother of feminism” had been celebrated with a naked female form.
The writer Caitlin Moran tweeted: “Imagine if there was a statue of a hot young naked guy ‘in tribute’ to eg Churchill. It would look mad. This, also, looks mad.”
