Abandoned Women

From the Daily Record:

THEY are the women history has chosen to forget – the 2500 Scots banished to Tasmania for the pettiest of crimes.

Today, for the first time, we can reveal the stories Scotland was too ashamed to tell – and celebrate the women cruelly sentenced to exile on the other side of the world.

Not only did these formidable females survive the treacherous journey and years of servitude, many went on to become model citizens once free and the mothers of a new nation.

In her new book, Abandoned Women, historian Lucy Frost remembers these long-forgotten women. More than 12,500 British convicts were banished to Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania – between 1803 and 1853. A fifth were Scots women.

Review - Calling Invisible Women

Review of "Calling Invisible Women" by Ben Steelman at Star News Online:

Ever since H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, the notion of invisibility has been like catnip for writers and filmmakers.

Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" used invisibility as a metaphor for discrimination and for white America's blindness. H.F. Saint, in "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" (1987), used invisibility to probe the yuppie lifestyle. "Hollow Man," the 2000 Paul Verhoeven film starring Kevin Bacon, seemed to posit that invisibility might prompt an otherwise normal man to become a serial rapist.

But what about the Invisible Woman? Except for Marvel Comics, which promoted the Fantastic Four's "Invisible Girl" to adult status some years back, the idea hasn't been kicked around that much.

So Tennessee author Jeanne Ray is almost plowing virgin soil with her new novel "Calling Invisible Women" – and she's harvesting a bumper crop.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, "Calling Invisible Women" takes the perspective of a woman of a certain age – specifically, 54-year-old Clover Hobart, a sometime garden columnist for her hometown paper in Ohio.

Anonymous in Their Own Names

From We-enews:

Edward L. Bernays, Heywood Broun and Harold Ross have long been lauded as media innovators, their accomplishments chronicled in hundreds of articles and books. With very few exceptions, though, writers have failed to recognize a fundamental reason for the success of these three remarkable media ventures: each man had an uncredited collaborator.

"Anonymous in Their Own Names" consists of separate but intertwined biographies of these three women whose work was invisible in their own time and has remained invisible to countless authors who have detailed their husbands' accomplishments but could not "see" the crucial contributions of their wives.

Their invisibility is ironic given that they were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands and repeatedly battled the government and societal norms to continue using their names.

Still, they carried out their most important work anonymously--masked by their husbands' fame, which they helped create.

From the Publisher - Vanderbilt University Press:

Anonymous in Their Own Names recounts the lives of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, had a profound and enduring impact on the media in the first half of the twentieth century. With her husband, Edward L. Bernays, Doris E. Fleischman helped found and form the field of public relations. Ruth Hale helped her husband, Heywood Broun, become one of the most popular and influential newspaper columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 Jane Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, started the New Yorker magazine.

Yet these women's achievements have been invisible to countless authors who have written about their husbands. This invisibility is especially ironic given that all three were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands, then battled the government and societal norms to retain their names. Hale and Grant so believed in this cause that in 1921 they founded the Lucy Stone League to help other women keep their names, and Grant and Fleischman revived the league in 1950. This was the same year Grant and her second husband, William Harris, founded White Flower Farm, pioneering at that time and today one of the country's most celebrated commercial nurseries.

Despite strikingly different personalities, the three women were friends and lived in overlapping, immensely stimulating New York City circles. Susan Henry explores their pivotal roles in their husbands' extraordinary success and much more, including their problematic marriages and their strategies for overcoming barriers that thwarted many of their contemporaries.

Long Haired Village

From The Nation:

HAIR is very important to women, who generally use it to highlight their features, but for the women of the ethnic Yao people of Huangluo Village, China, hair is their most prized possession.

Located in the Longji Scenic Are of Gulin, China, Huangluo Village numbers around 82 households of Red Yao ethnics, who get their name from the traditional red clothing. Like many other Chinese villages, Hunagluo enjoys very attractive natural surroundings and has plenty of ancient traditions to keep tourists entertained, but the most fascinating thing about it is the women’s obsession with long hair. In fact, the Yao settlement has received a Guinness certification for the “world’s longest hair village” and is also known as the “Long Hair Village” across China. Considering the average hair length of the 120 women in Huangluo is 1,7 meters and the longest locks exceed 2.1 meters, I’d say its reputation is well-deserved.

Hair has always played a big part in the lives of the Red Yao women of Huangluo. Until a few years ago, it was considered so important that no one, apart from the husband and children was allowed to look upon it when let loose.

Misattributed Female Firsts

From Policymic:

As America mourns the passing of Sally Ride, much has been written about her status as the first female American astronaut. Somewhere along the way, the word “American” sometimes gets dropped, and we begin to think of her as the first woman in space. In fact, that title belongs to  Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, who flew the Vostok 6 into space in 1963, 20 years before America sent a woman into space. What other feats of feminism happened decades, or even centuries, before we think they did?

Results of Amelia Earhart Search

Further to my blog post on More On Ameilia Earhart Search, comes this from Heritage Daily:

Earhart, who was the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, was en route to Howland Island on the 2^nd July 1937 when the Electra 10E aircraft she and Noonan were in disappeared. Many experts believe that a navigational error which led to the pair running out of fuel over the sea was the cause of their disappearance.

Though disappointed by initial findings the group leading the project, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIHGAR), still believe that Earhart and her navigator Noonan crashed onto a reef off the Kiribati atoll Nikumaroro, in the Pacific Ocean and died soon after.

Obit: Marjorie Chibnall

From the Telegraph:

She was known for her many studies of Anglo-Norman history, including, most notably, her mighty six-volume edition and translation of the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History, published between 1969 and 1980 — the product of 30 years of painstaking work.

Her first publications, a series of papers on alien priories (English religious houses under the control of a mother house abroad) began before the Second World War, and she continued to publish into her 90s. Her last book The Normans, published in 2006 when she was 91, won praise from a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement as “a masterly work, the most elegant and concise account of Norman history currently in print”.

Baby Cages - 1930s Parenting

From Nine MSN Health & Wellbeing:

It's possibly wrong to judge other ages by the standards of our own, so we'll try to reserve judgement about these photos of child rearing techniques from 1930s London.

Short on space? Want baby to get fresh air and sunlight? Why not dangle them from your window in a cage! 

What could possibly go wrong?

The baby cages were at least designed with the best intentions, allowing families living in blocks of flats without gardens a way of giving their babies a taste of the great outdoors.

Historic Newspapers

If you do not know already about this great service, then here is the lowdown.

Historic Newspapers offers you a selection of original newspapers dating back as far as the 1800’s. The archive is made up of of over 7 million editions from all over the world. To date the UK titles have been catalogued as far back as 1900 by date and title, there are also lots of US and regional issues, as well as many from the Victorian era.

These have proved to be popular gifts for milestone events, particularly birthdays and anniversaries, but also for historians and schools. In addition, Historic Newspapers offer free teaching history resource packs and also have a newspaper research facility with a dedicated team in place for special requests.

My copies arrived yesterday - thanks Thomas! 

• Times 18 August 1820 Trial of Queen Caroline
• Times 4 April 1913 Trial of Mrs Pankhurst (Suffragette leader)
• Times 5 July 1934 Death of Marie Curie

They were carefully wrapped and boxed for the long journey down under - and arrived in very good condition!

I urge you all, researchers and readers alike to avail yourselves of this wonderful service. And folks, the kind people at Historic Newspapers are offering readers a special discount on all purchases over £5.00 - just type in the code: 15TODAY when finalising your order.

Happy reading!