Annette Brock Davis, Sailor

I came across a picture of the sailing barque L'Avenir:

The comments with the picture mentioned a Canadian woman called Annette Brock Davis who, in 1933, became an apprentice on the ship and learned to sail.
There were several hurdles she had to overcome that male apprentices did not, though. To start with, she had to pay double the amount that a male apprentice paid and her contract did not guarantee her a job at the end of the apprenticeship, as it did for the male apprentices. Also, she had to get her father's permission, even though she was 23.
By the end of the training voyage, though, she was offered the position of ordinary seaman with the Erikson Line, which owned the ship. This offer was withdrawn when they discovered that she had got married
She wrote about her experiences in My Year Before the Mast.

Saturday at FantasyCon

After breakfast at the Town Crier, Saturday morning started for me in the lovely courtyard at the heart of the Queen's Hotel:

I was planning for a full day of attending panels - as much as I could manage while remembering to eat!

First was Feminism and Feminist Themes in Genre Fiction, in the Albert Room. Teika Bellamy, who I'd met the previous night, was on this one, along with Cheryl Morgan (member of the Women's Equality Party, among many other things).
One of the questions was what constituted anti-feminist themes, to which the immediate answer was "Chainmail bikinis!"
It was also pointed out that there is a clear difference between novels and TV/film - and more people are likely to have seen something on TV than read a novel, so it's a pity that films and TV series are lagging behind the novels in terms of feminist themes. It surprised one panellist that Star Trek Discovery had gender parity in casting, which is a step forward (but problems with the gay relationship, so still some way to go....).
The book edited by FT Barbini, Gender Identity and Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, from Luna Press, was recommended - the book later won the British Fantasy Award for Best Non-Fiction.
Black Shuck Press are also re-publishing work by lost women writers.
Another writer who was recommended was JY Yang, so I was pleased that I'd picked up her Descent of Monsters at Forbidden Planet earlier this year (that list of books I want to read keeps getting longer and longer!).

Next, in the largest panel room, the Victoria, was Breaking the Glass Slipper. I had no idea what this might be when I went in, but it turned out to be a live podcast (they were also up for a British Fantasy Award, but beaten by Anansi Boys). That was a highly entertaining session, with Claire North the third Guest of Honour and RJ Barker bouncing ideas off each other and being very funny. Claire North also writes as Kate Griffin - I'm sure I've seen some of her books around somewhere.
Top tip from the panel was that koalas have human-like fingerprints, so if you're planning a murder always take a koala bear with you.
They talked about plotting and how they plan stories out. RJ Barker said that "My subconscious is looking after me because I'm an idiot."
They also talked about murder mysteries, with RJ Barker saying that "There's no pity in Miss Marple! Even Sherlock Holmes sometimes gives a villain a 24 hour head start, but Miss Marple would never do that." And, in answer to a comment that Sherlock Holmes was chill: "I don't think Sherlock's chill - he's off his tits!"

Following on in the same room was the Writing for Children panel, with Francesca Barbini (who edited the Gender Equality book and runs Luna Press as well as being an academic) and Pauline Kirk on the panel. I didn't write any notes down for this panel because I was too busy agreeing with what they said about children's imaginations and some favourite fantasy books. Several of the panel go into schools to work with children, so they see what children are interested in first hand.

And following on from that was the Religion in Genre Fiction panel, with a diversity of religious groups represented. Rosanne Rabinowitz writes about Jewish Kabbala and socialism in early 20th century Russia, Tasha Suri has a Hindu and Sikh background and her epic fantasy based around Indian mythology is out shortly, and Iain Grant has written a book about Satan losing his job and going to live in Birmingham. There was also a Quaker lady who had been an activist in Palestine. Again, I was too swept up in the discussion to take notes!

My New Christmas Fairy!

Here's Emmeline, my new suffragette Christmas fairy, who will be sharing the place of honour with my little Christmas policeman, who I bought in Harrods in the 1980s (he's looking pretty good for his age, I think) and for a while was the "fairy" on the top of the Christmas tree at the Metropolitan Police Reference Library in New Scotland Yard.
The suffragette came in a little pack from the Amnesty International Christmas Catalogue, and I just couldn't resist her. Also in the pack are sheets of paper in green, purple, and white with slogans, to make up an old fashioned paperchain (I fastened them together with a stapler) and a sheet of 6 cardboard baubles to cut out. The slogans include "Shoulder to Shoulder" and "Sister Suffragette" as well as "Jolly Holiday" and "Peace on Earth", and the baubles have words like "Equality", "Rebel" and "Sorority". I coloured her in with the suffragette colours of purple and green, with silver stars and a gold hat (since it does look a little like a halo).

Lady Gardeners

I found this picture on Twitter, shared by Kew Gardens. It's how the first young women who worked as gardeners at Kew dressed (so as not to "distract" anyone!) in 1896.

Vera Rubin, Astronomer

It seems a pity to only find out about people like this when they die.
Vera Rubin was an astronomer, who found evidence for the existance of dark matter thanks to her work on mapping the motion of stars within spiral galaxies. She found that the stars in the outer regions of the spiral move at about the same speed as the ones in the middle, leading to the hypothesis that most of the universe is filled with "dark matter", which we cannot detect directly. In the solar system, the outer planets move more slowly than the inner planets. According to general relativity, the stars should shoot off into space, but some unseen matter must be providing extra gravitational pull to cause them to stay within the galaxy.

During her career, Princeton declined to send her a course catalogue because they didn't accept women (she went to Cornell, where she met her husband), she had to talk to the astrophysicist George Gamow in the lobby of the building because they would not allow women in the offices, and when she became the first woman to be given access to the Palomar Mountain 200 inch telescope in California, she found there was no women's toilet.
She never won a Nobel prize, but she did win a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society - the first woman to do so since Catherine Herschel in 1828.

Eagle Huntress

I went to see this film last night, about a 13 year old girl who wanted to follow in her father's footsteps and become an eagle huntress. Her name is Aisholpan, and the film showed her helping with her father's eagle, and at school where she boarded during the week with her little brother and sister (the school being too far away from the family home to go daily), climbing down the cliff to take an eaglet from the nest to train for herself, and on to the annual Eagle Festival, where she was the first girl to take part, competing against around 70 men up to the age of 80.
It was amusing to see interviews with some of the male eagle hunters, who trotted out all the usual rubbish excuses for why a girl couldn't do what they did - and then after the Festival, when she had won the gold trophy, they all had a long awkward silence before they said that it didn't really count, and she wouldn't be able to put up with the conditions of a real eagle hunt in the winter.
So her dad, who was brilliant, and supported her all the way, took her out to catch her first fox with her eagle.
It's a wonderful film, full of beautiful photography, and narrated by Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in The Force Awakens earlier this year.

This is What a Doctor Looks Like

There's a news story going round Twitter about a medical emergency on a commercial airline, and a black woman doctor who was not believed when she volunteered her services to help the patient. There's now a hashtag #thisiswhatadoctorlookslike, sharing photos of black women doctors.
So here's a picture of three of the first non-white women to train as doctors in Philadelphia in 1885, in their national costumes:

They are Dr Anandabai Joshee, from India, Dr Kai Okami, from Japan, and Dr Tabat Islambooley from Syria.

Non-white women doctors - healing people since at least 1885.

Mancunicon Saturday

On Friday morning, we went in search of the free bus service that serves the town centre, but it was a bit of a long way to walk to the bus stop by Oxford Road railway station (the first railway station in the world!) with my Young Man still needing his crutch, so for the rest of the weekend we got taxis either way instead. I could definitely get used to helpful staff phoning for a cab which arrives within five minutes every time I want one!

I wanted to see the A Feminist Fantasy Canon panel, which included one of the guests of honour, Aliette de Bodard. The consensus was that we don't actually want a fixed canon of women fantasy writers, because that would be bound to exclude other writers, but we do want the existance of women SF and fantasy writers to be acknowledged, instead of being discovered anew every generation with astonishment, as if women had never written SF or fantasy before (except for Ursula le Guin!).
At the moment I'm following the re-read of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books on Tor.com - she was writing historical fantasy in the 1970s which was influential, but overlooked now. One edition of her books has an introduction by Lin Carter, who did a huge amount of work to get fantasy books published, and he was astonished that the first four authors he had published were women, and that they were better than any of the men's work he had looked at! Another of those authors was Joy Chant, whose Red Moon and Black Mountain deserves to be far better known.

Lunch was down on the ground floor, with more helpful staff behind the counter - we had a burger and potato wedges, and drinks from the American Craft Beer stand which the hotel had laid on specially for the Con. I never usually drink lager, but the Amber Lager I had was really very nice (and now I've forgotten the brewers!). Outside the windows, the rain was blowing sideways, which really made me feel I was back home!

Later, the Young Man went to the Tribute to Tanith Lee, another great fantasy writer, while I went to the Kaffeeklatch with Charles Stross.
This was very exciting. I first became aware of Charles Stross when he won a Hugo for Equoid - and thought that I probably wouldn't like to read it because it was described as horror. Then I saw him at EasterCon last year, sharing a stage with Jim Butcher - and they were both very funny together. So I tried one of the Laundry Files series, and was instantly hooked. For me, horror is a lot easier to read when it's also very funny. The other people in the room with Charlie were far better versed in his work than I was - now I need to look out for the Merchant Princes series, too.
He is immensely busy at the moment, with five books on the go at different stages (on another panel the following day he said he managed to watch about two new films a decade, prompting the response "That's why you meet your deadlines!"). He also gleefully described the way he's going to blow up Leeds (with added dragons and elves) in his next Laundry Files book, and make Bob (main character in the Laundry Files) go on TV to be interviewed/grilled by Jeremy Paxman at the beginning of the following book about elvish immigration policy!

Later, we went to the talk by Lilian Edwards entitled Privacy and Identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which she said was her Daredevil talk, with a bit of Captain America. She works in the area of privacy laws, and casually mentioned being quoted in New Scientist, and attending a House of Lords committee - but she's also a great Daredevil fan (and a fan of the present trend for male heroes to take their tops off for the delectation and delight of middle aged women!). The talk also went off into the areas of real names on Facebook - and the good reasons some people have for using a pseudonym, illustrated with the way Matt Murdock's life was ruined by him being outed as Daredevil.

We were going to the Little-Known British SF TV shows of the 1950s to 1970s talk - but it was in Room 6 and there was no way we were going to squeeze in, so we went up to the Presidential Suite for the Elsewhen Press book launch. We didn't stay too long, because the Young Man needed to sit, and all the chairs were taken, but several of the authors appearing in the new anthology read from their work, with the backdrop of sunset over Manchester from a great height.

We finished the evening off with An Adventure in Time and Space: 53 Years in 53 Rels - a play dashing through the entire history of Doctor Who, with a small cast who all played several parts (and were all holding their scripts, which didn't detract from the fun at all), with minimal costume changes (Adric had his gold star of mathematical excellence; Davros sat in a chair holding his arm at an odd angle etc.) with Daleks and dinosaurs being represented by toys being waved in the air from the side of the stage. It was very funny.
There was a running gag about girl companions leaving to get married ("Yay! Feminism!"), topped off by Missy snogging the Doctor near the end ("Yay! Feminism!"), and the chap playing the War Doctor did a very good John Hurt impression. He also played the Fourth Doctor. Oh, and Leela had a Scandinavian accent for some reason.

Trowelblazers - Margaret Murray

I first became aware of Margaret Murray's name because of her books on witches. As academic work, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe has been largely discredited now, but the book she wrote for the popular audience, The God of the Witches, has been very influential in the formation of the modern religion of Wicca.
But before she started writing about witches and pagan religion, she was an Egyptologist.
She studied under Flinders Petrie at University College, London, becoming his copyist and illustrator and providing the illustrations for his report on the archaeological dig at Qift. When she was promoted to Junior Lecturer in 1898, teaching the linguistic courses in the Egyptology Department, she became the first female lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom. She also taught Ancient Egyptian history and religion.
In 1902, she went to Abydos where Flinders Petrie was digging, for practical archeaological experience. As well as Hilda Petrie, there were other female archaeologists there, and the experiences she had there led her to feminist points of view (some male excavators objected to taking orders from a woman, for instance). She discovered the temple to Osiris at Abydos, and wrote the site report.
In 1908, she was chosen to perform the public unwrapping of a mummy from the Tomb of Two Brothers, excavated by Petrie. Around 500 people attended.

She also did important work in Maltese archaeology, together with Edith Guest and Gertrude Caton Thompson, and continued her interest in Egyptology throughout her career.
So it's a shame that her interest in Folklore and witchcraft has come to over-shadow her important contributions to Egyptology and archaeology more generally. When she died, at the great age of 100, Glyn Daniels (another well known archaeologist) called her the Grand Old Woman of Egyptology.

The Art of Travel

In my researches for The Secret of Saynshand (silkpunk adventure in China and Mongolia), I've just come across a gem of a book, which tells everything a traveller needs to know when they're going on an expedition. It was written in 1872, by Francis Galton (himself a seasoned traveller in Darkest Africa) and the subtitle is "Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries".
A lot of it is very sensible advice, about pitching tents, drying your clothes over a camp fire, and so on, but there are parts of it that are, to modern eyes, quite hilarious.
Like his section on allowing women on the expedition, for instance:

"Natives' Wives - If some of the natives take their wives, it gives great life to the party. They are of very great service, and cause no delay....for a woman will endure a long journey nearly as well as a man, and certainly better than a horse or a bullock." He goes on to quote a Mr Hearne, an American traveller of the eighteenth century, who recorded the words of a 'savage' chief: "'Women,' said he, 'were made for labour: one of them can carry or haul as much as two men can do. They also pitch our tents, make and mend our clothing, keep us warm at night; and in fact there is no such thing as travelling any considerable distance....without their assistance.' And 'though they do everything, are maintained at trifling expense: for, as they always stand cook, the very licking of their fingers, in lean times, is sufficient for their subsistence.'"
So, they work harder, and you don't even have to feed them properly! Isn't that great?
He goes on to add, in a more general way: "It is in the nature of women to be fond of carrying weights; you may see them in omnibuses and carriages, always preferring to hold their baskets or their babies on their knees, to setting them down on the seat by their sides."

Trowelblazers - Jane Dieulafoy

Here she is, on a card in a series of famous explorers from 1885. The image is taken from Look and Learn.

I first found out about Jane Dieulafoy at a talk at EasterCon called Trowelblazers - mostly about female archaeologists, pioneers in the field who had been forgotten about.
She was an explorer, archaeologist, photographer, journalist and novelist. In archaeology she is best known for her excavations at Susa. Archaeological technique was in its infancy at the time, and she devised new techniques, monitored trenching excavations, mapped and labelled meticulously, and directed the efforts of hundreds of local men who were employed to dig the sites.

Here's a picture from Archyfantasies blog, of Jane at the excavations in Persia.

But her adventures had started before that. She also counts as a Woman Warrior. At the age of 19, she married Marcel Dieulafoy, who volunteered for the Engineering Corps on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Jane went with him, dressed in a soldier's uniform, and became a noted sharpshooter.
After the war, they travelled the Middle East, and excavated at Susa, sending several artefacts and friezes back to France. Two rooms in the Louvre are named after her, and the Lion frieze she sent back is displayed there. The French government made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1886 for her contributions to French archaeology.
While in the Middle East, she cut her hair short and wore male clothing for convenience, because it was difficult for women to travel freely in that region at the time. When she returned to France, she just carried on wearing men's clothing - which was illegal in France at the time. She, however, got special permission from the government.
She died in 1916.

"Rouse, Ye Women" - Chainmakers Strike of 1910

Chainmaking is a job that's usually thought of as heavy labour, and the biggest chains were made by men in factories - the sort of chain that would hold a big anchor for a ship, for instance. But smaller chains were made by women at home, in little forges in the back yard, and the short lengths they made were joined together into longer chains.
I remember reading about a typical woman's day in one of the areas where chains were made, where she got up in the morning, stoked the fire, made a yard of chain, and took it down to the foreman who gave her the money for it - and then she could go and buy enough food for breakfast for the family.
In 1910, 800 women chainmakers went on strike in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, after a minimum wage was set for chain making which their employers refused to pay. This was the princely sum of tuppence ha'penny an hour, which was about double what some of the women were getting. The strike lasted for ten weeks, and in the end all the employers agreed to the new wages. Twelve of the women strikers were over 70 years old and one of them, Patience Round, was 79. She combined chain making with caring for her crippled husband, and was quoted in a newspaper article saying "these are wonderful times - I never thought that I should live to assert the rights of women."
There was even a song "Rouse, Ye Women!" to the tune of Men of Harlech, and there is an annual Festival in the Black Country celebrating the women chainmakers.

Viking Women Warriors

There's been a recent study showing that 50% of the burials at a particular Viking site were women who had come from Scandinavia - they can tell this by isotopes in the bones - and some of those women were buried with weapons.
This does not mean that half of all Viking warriors were women. For a start, the sample is too small to extrapolate like that. It does mean that people should stop making assumptions and start looking at the evidence.
Previously, it has been assumed that a man buried with a sword was a warrior, and that a body with a sword was always a man. Occasionally, it has been shown that women were buried with weapons, but instead of making the same assumptions as one would if it were a man, the excuses begin - oh, it didn't mean she fought; it was just a symbol of authority. There's a burial from the Isle of Man which is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon Women by Christina Fell which always cheers me up when I re-read it, because there is no doubt that this was a woman who fought, and did embroidery as well. Why shouldn't that be true? And why shouldn't men be allowed to both fight and do embroidery?
Not everyone fits into neat little gender-assigned boxes, and things which are "obviously" feminine in one generation or in one part of the world can be "obviously" masculine elsewhere. I once saw a documentary which included a group of people in Madagascar or somewhere similar where only the men did embroidery, because the women "obviously" didn't have the fine motor skills necessary for the best work.
There's another class of burials which are obviously of women, but who have a "sword-like" object with them. And instead of saying "It's a sword", this has been interpreted as being a tool for weaving. Having done a bit of weaving, frankly I doubt it.
Let's look at the evidence, rather than the assumptions, which will undoubtedly show us that the past was more interesting and with greater variation than we ever assumed.

Sally Heathcote, Suffragette

Google tells me it's Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday today (she would have been 156), so it seemed appropriate to talk about Sally Heathcote, the heroine of the graphic novel by Mary Talbot, Kate Charlesworth (the illustrator) and Bryan Talbot.

The first thing to say is that I've learned a lot about my own local history from this book. I grew up in Manchester, and that's where the story starts, in the household of Mrs Pankhurst. Sally is in service there, and later moves to London where the headquarters of the Votes for Women movement were.

I'm about half way through the book at the moment, and enjoying it immensely. It includes leaders of the movement I'd never heard of (it wasn't all the Pankhursts, though they are the most famous suffragettes), like the Pethick-Lawrences, and Emily Wilding Davison, the woman who threw herself under the King's race horse, who Sally meets when she goes up to Edinburgh for a demonstration.

It's very good at showing the gradual hardening of attitudes among the politicians of the time. First, women asked questions at public meetings about votes for women - and were thrown out. Then they were banned from attending the public meetings, so they protested outside. Then they started getting arrested. When they demanded the status of political prisoners they were refused, so they went on hunger strike - which led to force feeding, and the notorious Cat and Mouse Act, by which a woman would be released from prison when she was weak from her hunger strike, and re-arrested as soon as she had recovered.
But the women didn't go away, and they didn't stop asking the Establishment for the vote.

Female Assistant Librarians

There's a lovely article in the blog The Cat's Meat Shop (at http://catsmeatshop.blotspot.co.uk) from 1888, about the suitability of a career as an assistant librarian for young ladies - as long as the objection of climbing ladders was taken away! It was posted on 21st February - and it's nice to see that Manchester was one of the most forward-looking cities of the time, with 42 female assistants, including a branch librarian with a salary of £75 a year!

All I Wanted was a Tshirt....

...it shouldn't be so difficult, surely?

So, I read Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight. I thought that Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel was a really cool character, and I would really like a tshirt in the colours of her costume, with the red shoulders and gold star and stripes and blue body.
There's a whole internet out there, selling all manner of stuff - surely someone makes this?

As it turns out - no.

There's someone on Red Bubble who is selling a tshirt which is kind of like what I'm after - but that's it.

So I went on the Marvel Comics website. Captain Marvel is their character. If anyone sells merchandise for that character, it should be them, right?
Wrong.
They sell 34 tshirts and tops on their website. Thirty of them are labelled "for men" and "for boys" (though I don't see why little girls shouldn't be able to wear the small tshirts - they're the same shape as boys when they're children, more or less).
Four out of 34 tshirts are labelled "for women". Of these. one has a picture of Iron Man, with the caption "I only kiss heroes". One is labelled Girl Power, and features six female superheroes, including Ms Marvel. One is labelled "I Love a Man in Uniform" with several male superheroes depicted, and the final one has the caption "Girls Rule the World", with the description "plus plenty of glitter to chase the bad guys away." Pink glitter.

I was not impressed.

Also on the site are 10 items of sleepwear, all "for boys", 9 costumes and accessories, all "for boys", and six outerwear, all "for boys".

Seriously, Marvel - this is rubbish! You're ignoring fifty per cent of the population, many of whom would like to buy your merchandise, if only you provided it.

On the plus side, while I was looking for something to wear, I came across the Carol Corps, at http://carolcorps.tumblr.com/ and they are brilliant. They also appear to make their own costumes.

What has it got in its Pocketses?

Not a lot, if you're a woman and your clothes have been designed without any!

Kyle Cassidy wrote a post about this on her blog, back on the 29th April, and I found it re-posted on Swan Tower blog. She also wrote a follow up post on 2nd May.
Basically, she was complaining about the design of women's clothes. Men's clothes almost always have pockets. Trousers, jackets - they all have places for men to keep their keys and loose change and whatever else they want to carry around with them. Some women's clothes have pockets, but a lot of women's jackets have fake pockets - just a flap with nothing inside - and skirts rarely have pockets. (I'm wearing a skirt now that has one tiny pocket at the back - it's almost impossible to put anything useful in it).

This is not a new problem. When I worked at the Children's Bookshop, I used to browse in the quiet times, and I came upon some fascinating articles in bound volumes of old Girls' Own magazines. These are wonderful big books, with pictorial board covers and gilt lettering, and they date from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century.
In one of them, I once found an article which was almost identical to the recent blog post! There were even line drawings of young ladies' skirts with and without pockets, with a plea for a sensible approach to dress making (a lot of girls would have been sewing their own skirts) by adding pockets to keep such useful items as a handkerchief or pair of scissors, or small change when they went out.
It's a piece of advice I heeded when I sew my own skirts - I usually use a pattern of an A-line skirt with built in pockets on the seam. I have quite basic sewing skills, but this is an easy one to do.
When I find myself wearing clothes without pockets, I use one of my medieval re-enactment pouches on a belt - prettier than the modern bumbags, I think! It's very rare that I carry a handbag.

What we need, as we needed a hundred years ago, is for clothing designers to actually think about how women will be wearing the clothes they are making, and what women will be doing when they're wearing them.

Ladylike Behaviour

I found this image on the Sharon Kay Penman Fan Club Facebook page (I'm a great fan of her books, particularly the Welsh trilogy and the Queen's Man mysteries - and anything else with Eleanor of Aquitaine, for that matter).
It's from the Smithfield Decretals, held in the British Library, a work of canon law with lots of pretty pictures like this - and the person who posted it on Facebook found it on a blog called Interesting Pretties.
Every lady should be able to defend her own castle.

I have a hand-and-a-half sword myself, and though I'm not very good at using it (lacking anyone to practice with locally) I still get to go out on the battlefield at re-enactment shows.