Brazen Hussies adds depth and breadth to the second-wave stories of our popular imagination: consciousness-raising circles in the suburbs, femocrats seizing power in government, Germaine Greer urging a female orgasm-led revolution. The film’s focus is the movement’s key campaigns. While their brothers and lovers were dying in Vietnam, early women’s liberationists organised against women perishing in backyard abortions. Covering domestic violence, equal pay and childcare battles, it also reminds us change can be glacial.
Category: Herstory
Witch hunt tourism is lucrative. It also obscures a tragic history – National Geographic
[W]hile witch tourism may be fun, some scholars worry that these stereotypes do more harm than good. The selling of dolls in gift shops like those in Spain “perpetuates the idea that the so-called witches … were not victims of a terrible persecution, but were fictional figures,” says Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch. “I do not think the tourists who buy these dolls realize that these were women who were charged with fictional crimes, and then horribly tortured and most often burned alive.”
Hundreds of years later, misperception around witchcraft still circulates. As a result, witch hunts are very much a 21st-century practice in many parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea.
While authorities in most countries simply turn a blind eye, some legal systems sanction the persecution. In addition to having laws against sorcery (a crime that carries a death sentence), Saudi Arabia established an anti-witchcraft unit in 2009 within the country’s religious police department.
“Violence against women has greatly intensified in recent years,” says Federici, “for reasons, I believe, that have some relation to the violence inflicted on women through the witch hunts of the past.”
The failure to recognize the history of the witch hunts may be a factor, too. “No ‘day of memory’ has been introduced in any European calendar,” writes Federici in the introduction to her 2018 collection of essays Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.
Source: Witch hunt tourism is lucrative. It also obscures a tragic history
New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live?
According to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the answer is grandmothers. “Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are,” says senior author Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In 1997 Hawkes proposed the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that explains menopause by citing the under-appreciated evolutionary value of grandmothering. Hawkes says that grandmothering helped us to develop “a whole array of social capacities that are then the foundation for the evolution of other distinctly human traits, including pair bonding, bigger brains, learning new skills and our tendency for cooperation.”
Source: New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
Whitlam’s women’s adviser Elizabeth Reid details unwelcome advance from governor-general Sir John Kerr – ABC News
A pioneering feminist trying to change things from the inside, Elizabeth Reid was subjected to the very behaviour she was fighting against — including an unwanted sexual advance from the governor-general.
BRAZEN HUSSIES | Documentary Australia Foundation
Lindy Chamberlain’s infamous interview: The full story.
In October 1982, Lindy was convicted of murdering her little girl by slitting her throat. Her husband, Michael, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact.
Media interest in the case was enormous, and people paraded outside the court wearing t-shirts that read: “The dingo is innocent”.
She was sentenced to life in prison, but served three years before Azaria’s matinee jacket, the existence of which police had refuted, was found partially buried near a dingo lair at Uluru. Courtesy of the new evidence, Lindy was released on remission and later pardoned and awarded $1.3 million in compensation from the Northern Territory government.
But it did little to reclaim the public’s favour.
An assumption was made about what a grieving parent looks like, and through Lindy’s infamous interview and other media appearances, many decided she didn’t fit. How could a bereaved mother appear so cold? Where are the tears?
Source: Lindy Chamberlain’s infamous interview: The full story.
Disney’s Mulan tells women to know their place
The story of Mulan has been told and retold for 1,600 years. This latest version is more conservative, when it comes to a woman’s place, than one told in the 17th century.
Within the film, the villain Xianniang (Gong Li) provides a powerful contrast to Mulan. Xianniang invites Mulan to join forces and rebel against the Emperor. She wants to build a kingdom where strong women like them are accepted for who they are, but Mulan responds, “I know my place” – emphasising her duty is to serve her Emperor.
Ultimately, Xianniang sacrifices herself to save Mulan. By refusing to work within the system, Xianniang’s death signifies the failure of her radical approach.
Rather than being a story of female empowerment, Mulan promotes the idea that women must put male authority figures before themselves to achieve recognition.
The story of Mulan hasn’t always sent this message. In a version by the 17th century author Chu Renhuo, set at the end of the Sui Dynasty (581-618), Xianniang is a warrior princess who becomes Mulan’s sworn sister. They lead a group of women soldiers and travel together. This friendship is absent from the Disney film.
300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?
It spanned more than a century and a half, and resulted in about 2,500 people – the vast majority of them women – being burned at the stake, usually after prolonged torture. Remarkably, one of the driving forces behind Scotland’s “satanic panic” was no less than the king, James VI, whose treatise, Daemonologie, may have inspired the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Now, almost 300 years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a campaign has been launched for a pardon for those convicted, an apology to all those accused and a national memorial to be created.
“In Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, there are monuments to all sorts of men on horseback, and even a full-size statue of a named bear. But there is nothing to commemorate the hundreds, if not thousands, who died as a result of one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in Scottish history,” Mitchell said.
Those arrested under the Witchcraft Act were usually tortured into making confessions. Women, who made up 84% of the accused, were not permitted to give evidence at their own trials. Those convicted were strangled and burned at the stake so there was no body to bury.
Vida Goldstein was one of the first women in the western world to stand for parliament. Her fight still resonates today
Vida Goldstein, born in the Victorian city of Portland in 1869, was the first woman in the western world to nominate for a national parliament.
When Australian women were granted the right to vote by an act of parliament in 1902, the rest of the world recognised this new country as extraordinarily progressive. Women all over the world envied their Australian sisters – Vida was even invited to the US as a representative of “Australia, where women vote”.
Her last campaigns took place during the first world war; she vehemently opposed the then prime minister Billy Hughes’s two attempts to introduce conscription for overseas service. Defying not only the government but a large part of the population, she led public meetings – returned soldiers set fire to her platforms several times – and took steps to see that women and children did not starve while men were away fighting. When conscription was twice defeated, she felt vindicated.
Vida Goldstein was a woman of great ability, courage, intellectual force and determination: surely an asset to any parliament. Had she lived in the US or the UK, where she was lauded and admired, I believe she would certainly have been a member of the national legislature. Both countries had women in parliament or congress within five years of them gaining the vote; in Australia though, it took 40 years after women won the vote to see them take a seat in parliament.
History Week | SheSaw
Each day of History Week see a virtual statue unveiled to a Sydney woman whose story deserves to be remembered.
Source: History Week | SheSaw