We’re heading out of here (for today) but, oh yeah, remembering where we came from.
Via Fast Company editor Jason Feifer comes an advertisement from 100 years ago today in the Wellsville, NY Daily Reporter.
An Indian woman, a Japanese woman, and a Syrian woman, all training to be doctors at Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia, 1880s. (Image courtesy Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine Archives, Philadelphia, PA. Image #p0103) (x)
Women in Film
I have been waiting for these stats for many moons. (Holy SHIT 8% directors)
#I can’t even begin to imagine how bad the stats for PoC are
(Source: dividedconsciousness)
Victims of Amherst College’s rape cover-ups and the disgusting things said to them
Photographs by Jisoo Lee
Project by It Happens Here — Dana Bolger, Kinjal Patel, Sonum Dixit
The fact that people think these things are okay to say makes me want to kill myself.
At 3pm on August 13 2004, Akku Yadav was lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar. It took them 15 minutes to hack to death the man they say raped them with impunity for more than a decade. Chilli powder was thrown in his face and stones hurled. As he flailed and fought, one of his alleged victims hacked off his penis with a vegetable knife. A further 70 stab wounds were left on his body. The incident was made all the more extraordinary by its setting. Yadav was murdered not in the dark alleys of the slum, but on the shiny white marble floor of Nagpur district court.
Laughed at and abused by the police when they reported being raped by Yadav, the women took the law into their own hands. On the day of Yadav’s hearing, 200 women came to the court armed with vegetable knives and chilli powder. As he walked in, Yadav spotted one of the women he had raped. He called her a prostitute and threatened to repeat the crime against her. The police laughed. She took off her sandal and began to hit him, shouting, “We can’t both live on this Earth together. It’s you or me.”
It was a rallying cry to an incensed mob. Soon, he was being attacked on all sides. Knives were drawn and the two terrified officers guarding him ran away. Within 15 minutes, Yadav was dead on the courthouse floor. But his death has not brought the women peace. Five were immediately arrested, then released following a demonstration across the city. Now every woman living in the slum has claimed responsibility for the murder. They say no one person can take the blame: they have told the police to arrest them all.
“We can’t both live on this Earth together. It’s you or me.”
Damn fucking right.
YES
The inanity of the police scares me more than anything else. But I’m sort of proud that all the women are together in this.
Maureen Corrigan on what how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar reinterpreted the literary canon when they wrote The Madwoman in the Attic:
The undercover female tradition that Gilbert and Gubar were talking about was one in which writers as disparate as Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Louisa May Alcott, and George Eliot used similar themes and images to dramatize the social limitations they themselves suffered as women. Once you started looking for metaphors of confinement, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated, you saw that novels like Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey and Middlemarch were jam-packed with images of locked rooms and closets, dungeons and enclosures, as well as overbearing patriarch-jailors.
Image of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar via The Washington Post
Portrait d’une négresse, Marie Guillemine Benoist, 1800
The portrait probably represents a person who really existed, though we have no information about her. The artist didn’t give her name, but the model is wearing the headscarf of the maids in the Antilles.
This Black woman is depicted in an unsual way for her condition of domestic, if not slave. The gaze directly facing the viewers, sat on a chair, wrapped in a rich fabric, she occupies the White woman’s place. Her position is similar to many high society lady’s painted by David, such as Madame Récamier’s that David painted the same year.
The painting emphasizes her skin colour, by the contrast with the white sheet and the clear background. But the artist makes her beautiful, while such a subject would have seen as ugly at the end of 18th century.
The painting is indeed audacious, by the way it depicts a Black person and the role assigned to women in art. It also shows that Marie Guillemine Benoist, who lived through the Revolution, was aware of the importance of sex, race, and social class questions when France was entering modernity.
There is a more developped analysis of the painting, focused on the depiction of race and gender in the painting. You can find it here
dhat essay tho
Sophia Bush has declared war on Urban Outfitters after they marketed a t-shirt with the words ‘Eat Less’ on the front.
The One Tree Hill actress, in an entry on her personal blog, called for them to issue an apology and make a donation to a charity for eating disorders, and said, “It’s like handing a suicidal person a loaded gun. You should know better.”
Sophia wrote, “To promote starvation? To promote anorexia, which leads to heart disease, bone density loss, and a slew of other health problems, not least of all psychological issues that NEVER go away? Shame on you. I will no longer be shopping at your stores. And I will encourage the tens of thousands of female supporters I have to do the same.” source.
