Criminal Records of Victorian Women Online

From the Times of Malta:

Thousands of Victorian criminal records giving details of female convicts, including a teenager jailed for five years for stealing an umbrella, were published online for the first time.

Family history website Ancestry.co.uk said more than 4,400 criminal records and 500 mugshots will be included in the collection.

Women and young girls featured in the records include Mary Richards, who was jailed for five years in 1880 at the age 59 for stealing 130 oysters valued at eight shillings; Elizabeth Murphy, 19, sentenced to five years of hard labour in 1884 and seven years of police supervision for stealing an umbrella; and Dorcas Mary Snell, 45, who was sentenced to five years of imprisonment with hard labour in 1883 for the theft of a single piece of bacon, although she was paroled two years later.

The website said the records, the originals of which are held by the National Archives, provide a picture of the “harsh” British judicial system at the time.

The site’s international content director Dan Jones said: “Crime is more often associated with men; however, these intriguing records shed light on some rather colourful female lawbreakers of their day and, given the petty nature of many of their crimes, also serves as a reminder of how harsh our judicial system was not so very long ago.”

Justice for Noor Faleh Almaleki

From NY Daily News:

An Iraqi man in Arizona accused of killing his daughter because she had become too westernized was convicted on Tuesday of second-degree murder.

Faleh Hassan Almaleki was found guilty of running over his daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, with his SUV in October 2009.

Prosecutors claimed the 50-year-old Muslim man committed an "honor killing" because his daughter had dishonored him by living with her boyfriend and his mother.

Almaleki was also found guilty of aggravated assault for seriously injuring Amal Edan Khalaf, 43, the mother of his daughter's boyfriend.

He was acquitted of first-degree murder and first-degree attempted-murder charges.

Noor Almaleki, 20, died at a hospital on Nov. 2 after fighting for her life for nearly two weeks.

She was run down by a Jeep Cherokee in a parking lot in suburban Phoenix while walking with Khalaf on Oct. 20.

6 Generations - Story of Chumash Women

From Santa Ynez Valley News:

Audiences at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival applauded “6 Generations,” a movie that brings Chumash history to life.

The film, available on DVD at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, features performances by Ernestine Ygnacio De Soto, a living Barbareno Chumash descendant.

Her mother was the last Chumash native speaker, and her grandmother and great-grandmother helped anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and John P. Harrington understand the Chumash language in the early part of the 20th century. These early recordings can also be heard at the museum.

The film’s producer, museum anthropologist John Johnson, shares screenwriting credits with De Soto.

“History is often told using information from the dominant culture,” Johnson says, but De Soto’s story is told through the voices of generations of Chumash women.

With “6 Generations,” De Soto says she is “honoring her children, her ancestors, and herself,” by keeping the flame of Chumash history alive. She and her family are not members of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.

This film enhances her one-woman performance with rare, historic photographs and recordings of the Chumash language and songs, as De Soto becomes each of six women in her family covering 200 years of Chumash life in Santa Barbara.

Women Live in Fear During Chechnya's Islamic Revival

From VOA News:

Many Chechen women are the first in three generations to cover their heads. In the officially atheist Soviet Union, women in the Caucasus burnt their headscarves, in an effort to dissuade youth from falling under the sway of religion.

“The headscarf is a symbol of purity and worth,” says Malika Omarova, head of the Union of Chechen Women in Grozny. “When I was a student, I never wore a headscarf, not one person forced me. But, I want our women to wear them - it is in our blood. That is what makes us Chechen.”

The Russian republic of Chechnya has seen two of modern history’s most brutal separatist wars in the last two decades, with atrocities committed by both rebels and federal forces. But Mr. Kadyrov, a former rebel who changed sides after the first war, has brought a semblance of stability to Chechnya, which has seen massive investment by the Kremlin. But Mr. Kadryov’s reign has also seen a resurgence in Islamic belief and practice.

In today’s Chechnya of cafes and fashion boutiques, the mandatory headscarf symbolizes this Islamic revival.

“Chechnya is already among one of the world's most repressive societies, with the state controlling almost every aspect of daily life," wrote Jennifer Windsor of Freedom House in a report on Chechnya “With the Kremlin largely out of the picture, the culture of impunity we have seen develop under [Mr.] Kadyrov is likely to worsen, leaving the population more vulnerable to abuse.”

The battle is being played out in universities, state buildings and now in the street, where a wave of attacks last year took place on women for not wearing headscarves. Mr. Kadyrov denies his men were involved.

Françoise Giroud - Warrior

From the Jewish Daily Forward:

To many, Françoise Giroud, born Lea France Gourdji in September 1916 to Turkish-Jewish parents, was an example of a woman who handled power with uncommon grace. Giroud, who died in January 2003 at age 86, served as France’s minister of culture. In 1953, she co-founded the influential political weekly L’Express to advance the agenda of French-Jewish politician Pierre Mendès France, who soon after was elected prime minister. Journalist for a number of leading weeklies and author of more than two dozen books, from novels to biographies (of Alma Mahler and of Karl Marx’s wife, Jenny, among other liberated women), and advocate of women’s rights, Giroud epitomized a successful career woman at a time when such were still rare in France.

Yet, as “Françoise,” an admiring, unsparing new biography that appeared from Les editions Grasset on the anniversary of her death, January 19, underlines, Giroud’s success came at the cost of genuine inner torment. The book’s author, Laure Adler, herself a noted journalist, quotes eminent French-Jewish statesman Robert Badinter, who states that Giroud was a “warrior.” And indeed, she had plenty to fight against during her long and storied career.

Memorial: Triangle Waist Company Factory Fire

From the New York Times:

In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.

Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.

Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed, Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.

Lost Daphne du Maurier story found after 70 years

From The Telegraph:

The Doll, billed as “a dark story of obsession and jealousy”, is the peculiar tale of a man who becomes infatuated with a woman he meets at a party. He visits her home only to discover the real object of her affection: a life-size, mechanical male doll.

The story was written around 1928 and the female character was called Rebecca, a name du Maurier would use a decade later in her most famous novel.

It is one of 13 du Maurier short stories to be published in a new anthology.

The author made reference to The Doll in her autobiography but biographers and academics failed to find it. Ann Willmore, a du Maurier enthusiast, spent years on the case and finally unearthed it in a 1937 compendium, The Editor Regrets, featuring short stories that had been rejected for publication.

Vanishing Women of Natural Beauty

I was reading Vincent Akanmode's article " Vanishing Women of Natural Beauty " when I came across this pargraph right at the conclusion:

Physicians in ancient India are reckoned to have used skin grafts for reconstructive works as early as 800 BC, but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that plastic surgery began to gain recognition in Europe and America, with Dr. John Peter Mettaeur as America’s first plastic surgeon of note.

Amazing!

John De Lisa - Looking At Ancient Cultures

From SILIve:

John De Lisa can combine modern technology with primitive artifacts.

A teacher at St. Joseph Hill Academy, he recently gave a PowerPoint presentation on what he learned last summer as the recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Summer Seminar Abroad Scholarship.

One photograph was of a helmet mask from the Mende people of Sierra Leone, which De Lisa explained represented the queen and was worn during the initiation of young girls into the status of womanhood.

"It is believed that the spirit of the queen possesses the wearer of the mask and speaks through her, giving instruction to the initiates in the lore of the tribe and the knowledge she will need as a wife, mother, and adult member of the community," De Lisa said.

Another artifact was an Akua-Ba from the Asante people of Ghana. A woman who wants to become pregnant straps the carved, wooden fertility statuette to her back and carries it as she would a real baby. The Akua-Ba is thought to ensure not only conception but a healthy infant.