The Female Conference Delegate's Check-list.

Sadly, academia is no better than the rest of society when it comes to institutional misogyny: it takes five minutes over coffee to hear the most appalling examples perpetuated by people who probably think they know better, or exist within structures and cultures which do not encourage reflection or critical perspectives.

Which is why this Conference Sexism Bingo Card exists (click to enlarge):

Take it along to your conferences and see which excuses you hear. Having seen it, I wondered how the conference I've co-organised on Welsh writing in English holds up.

• Organisers: one male, one female.
• Prize winners: both female. 
• Keynote speakers/special guests: 4 female, two male.
• Presenters: 25 female, 13 male.  
• Panel chairs: 3 female, one male (more tbc though).

I can't say anything about the attendees yet, as bookings have only just started to trickle in, but I have to say that the Association for Welsh Writing 2015 conference is looking fairly good. Largely female speakers and chairs, A wide range of texts, periods and subjects covered, with no evidence of personal or institutional sexism. We hope the atmosphere and personal behaviour will match this, and I'm pretty certain that it will. We hope too that the debates and critical perspectives taken are also free from patriarchal perspectives which can't be captured in a check-list such as that I employed above: power and discourse are so intimately bound up with notions of sex and gender that unbundling them has to be done slowly, carefully and (obviously) retrospective, and I have no intention of acting like some kind of ideological cop.

The one cavil I have is that of the papers with an identifiable author-subject, it's running in favour of men by 17-11. There has been a concerted effort in the field recently to promote the study of work by female authors, sometimes in the teeth of some who wrongly believed that the political-industrial nature of Welsh anglophone culture meant that there were only male writers. This is part of the wider discussion to be had about female writers and their histories of suppression or exclusion. They were always there, but ignored or silenced by family, publishers, reviewers and also academics. Hence this book:

So I think AWWE15 proves that the top line of excuses doesn't hold true. Nor does 'women never volunteer to present'. Perhaps it's easier in the humanities, which have a larger proportion of female colleagues than some other disciplines, but I'd have to be an idiot to think everything was fine.

If you'd like to attend a conference like this, get in touch. March 27th-29th, Gregynog, Powys.

Laudanum Habit Doth Detract From Lady Caroline Lamb's Complexion (pages 3-12)

Mrs Brightside posts this image, an imagined 18th-century edition of Cosmopolitan:

They're not so far removed from reality: the period saw an explosion in journals and almanacs for women. The Ladies' Mercury appeared in 1693 and promised (in a phrase you may recognise from a more modern medium), to deal with 'Love Etc.' (or indeed this). The Lady's Magazine (link includes images and text) turned up a century later and doesn't look much different to the gentler mags available now: grovelling royalty rubbish and style tips, some romantic fiction to divert a gentlewoman's attention from the Servant Problem and of course the Agony Aunt, in this case Mrs. Grey, 'The Matron'. Of particular interest to those readers contemplating, ahem, 'enhancement', there's an article on 'Wax Bosoms' 

In many cases, the problem pages seemed to become thinly disguised erotica for the readers - The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (link is to images) seemed so interested in the subject of whipping one's daughters and servants that contemporary pornography started to satirise it, according to Marcus's Between Women: "Those stories in the Ladies' Magazines/ Are scarcely credible, that is to say/ They may be true, but brought behind the scenes/ The sense of being there they don't convey… It's pleasant while you're whipping!/ "I'll go and give it to the Girls!"'

Also available: The Lady’s Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, whose 'Old Woman' counselled lots of housework as the answer to pretty much all emotional difficulties. By 1859, advice had hardly changed: the Weekly Magazine informed newly-wed wives that:

Your duty now is to your husband.  No wife should have a soul above buttons nor should she ignore the fact that man’s heart lies very near his stomach, and that cold mutton dampens the flame of wedded love.  

Urbanism, fear of feminism, increased literacy and the consumer society provided the motor for the explosion in women's magazines in the nineteenth-century - the problem page was born in this era, alongside some very explicit discussions -  but the earlier ones are still remarkably similar to the modern templates (check out the Hindustan Times' magazine, Brunch!: 'Women Love Shoes!'). Titillation overlaid with moralising, moral panics and compulsory heterosexuality, all served up with a hefty dose of consumerism. And if you worry about your daughters' magazines, remember this: every generation back to the Ladies' Mercury thought that reading matter was ruining the youth!

If you're searching for good solid advice from Agony Aunts of the past, you need to read Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe - a compendium of hilarious advice. Here's a taster:

Girls girls girls…

I'm not from much of a feminist background: my parents are Irish/Catholic and wouldn't have much to say to Dworkin except perhaps 'we're calling the police, hell-hag', but my mum went to university and became a doctor, so it's never occurred to me that the high point of a woman's career should be being spit-roasted by drunken footballers.

But apparently that makes me a weirdo, because all women want to be a WAG, don't they? So much so that you can now buy the soundtrack to post-feminism.

What a civilisation… shopping and shit music.

Ladies, Pay Attention

I believe this covers all the bases. Disney sums up your options:

And the prize for consistency goes to:

…who tells The Observer that women politicians shouldn't be judged by their looks.

Caroline Flint, the minister for Europe, who is interviewed in today's Observer Woman, says media attention on her looks is insulting

She's absolutely right. Even better, she utters these timeless truths (in the news section teaser for the interview) across the space of several pages of the Observer Woman, while posing in a range of beautiful, revealing dresses while sporting the hair and maquillage of a Fifties femme fatale.

Needless to say, this softest of soft interviews (does she have leadership ambitions) doesn't find space to point out that she is the hardest, most elitist of the Blairite clique. You couldn't switch on the TV in the late nineties without seeing her advocating benefit cuts for the very poorest or some other mean-spirited, arrogant attack on the underclass, all delivered with a straight face as she claimed that sating the bitterness of the Daily Mail was socialism in action. Who cares that she's damaged the lives of women in this country (never mind the Iraqi victims of the war she loved), when she looks stunning in pastel silk?

She's hard, selfish, determined and utterly soulless - she'll go far. Still, policy is so last century - it's how she looks in a frock that seems to matter, which is an odd stance for a liberal newspaper's women's magazine to take, but there you go - we've been down the post-ideological rabbithole for a long time now.

Girl Power?

In response to my post 'Tory Tory Tory', some brave soul accused me of being afraid of powerful women, and ended (I hope ironically), with the phrase 'girl power'. What's wrong with women? 'Girl' is a demeaning, disempowering term used to sell poor quality records written by men and sung by women controlled in every way by a shady management team.

Feminism, on the other hand, is about celebrating the achievements of women and combatting the structural and personal attempts by entrenched interests to repress them. Thatcher is certainly not on the side of the angels: did she promote individual women in her party and government? She did not. Did she promote the interests of women as a collective? Again, she did not.

Am I frightened of powerful women? Let's have a look at the list of women I revere, shall we? You may even, Anonymous, have heard of some of them!

Aphra Behn, The Wife of Bath, Mrs. Bandanaraike, Constance Markiewicz, Bernadette Devlin, the Miners' Strike wives and female supporters, Emily Davison, Margaret Atwood, Angela Davis, Ulrike Meinhof, Hermione Granger, Barbara Castle, Rose Cohen, Jane Austen, P J Harvey, Laurie Anderson, Sally Beamish, Nicola LeFanu, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Kate Roberts, Fflur Dafydd, Hannah Arendt, Gwyneth Jones, Sarah Cracknell, Polly Toynbee, Calvin's mum, Gwen John, Tove Jansson, Kate Atkinson, Laura Cantrell, Kathryn Williams, Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy, Molly Bloom, Dorothy Edwards, Mrs Doyle, Thursday Next, Granny Weatherwax, Lyra, Jessica Mitford, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Aunt Agatha, Florence, Helen Walsh, Sarah Waters, Elizabeth Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sheri S Tepper, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Storm Jameson, Jan Morris, Helen Clark, Katherine Mansfield, Tiffany Aching, Millie Jackson, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Further suggestions welcome.

Will this do?