Judy Chicago - Feminist Art Icon in the UK

Back in the 1990s I arrived early for a conference at UCLA. With an afternoon to kill before the head action, I stumbled out of the Holiday Inn on Wilshire and into the Armand Hammer Museum, where they were hosting the legendary feminist installation, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, about which I knew nothing. I didn't even know enough to be ashamed of knowing nothing. But I was blown away. Forget the negative criticism it received from some critics, which along with a good deal of patriarchal defensiveness (it's not really art just craft etc) meant that it was only shown a handful of times - barely into double figures - between 1979 and 2007, when it finally found a permanent home. It kick-in-the-gut affected me, despite its lavishness, its kitsch, its didacticism, its weight, its moralization, its clichés,  its new-ageism, its self-conscious research apparatus. It read history through the body rather than the (patri)archive. It worked. I bought the book. I worked it into my classes. I went to her shop in Belen, New Mexico and bought the video. Her assistant even showed me into part of her house - she said Judy would probably have invited me in had she been there. I won't reproduce what the article - which is substantial -  says about her work, and The Dinner Party especially, which if you don't know you must check out, and really, get on a plane to Brooklyn and see, it's so visceral. But do try and see the small parts of her very considerable oeuvre that are being shown in London and Liverpool over the next couple of months. You won't regret it. Not many artists set out to make history and succeed.

Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain

Dinner Party Site:

http://throughtheflower.org/page.php?p=10&n=2

Thanks (or is it a hat-tip? what's the difference between that and a shout-out?) to Lynne Baxter for alerting me to this.

The New Suffragettes: Should feminism be back on the agenda?

While some women may feel that feminism has become a dirty word, the organization UK Feminista has taken to the streets to demonstrate against the erosion of the hard won rights that have been won since "first-wave" feminism first gained ground over a hundred years ago. Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of the legendary Emmeline Pankhurst, led the demonstration to Parliament. The demo is covered here by The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/24/suffragettes-storm-parliament-feminism_n_2008361.html

UK Feminista calls itself "a  movement of ordinary men and women campaigning for gender equality". Find out more here:

http://ukfeminista.org.uk/

And in case you don't know who Emmeline Pankhurst was, read here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pankhurst_emmeline.shtml

The history of the original Suffragettes is summarised briefly here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/53819.stm

and here:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/suffragettes.htm

A fuller accoount can be found here:

http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_cjbooks.htm

While the Suffragettes campaigned long and hard, especially under Pankhurst's leadership after 1903, but before the First World War they had little success. However, Pankhurst herself along with many other women in factories and fields campaigned for the war effort and it was perhaps this that swung political opinion in their favour. Pankhurst is sometimes remembered for chaining herself to the railings of Downing Street, Buckingham Palace or to a statue in the lobby of the House of Commons (to prevent being hauled off by police before she finished speaking) but although these events happened and chaining was a Suffragette tactic she did not use it herself. She was, however, imprisoned for demonstrating - which deeply affected her. She is also less often mistaken for the tragic Suffragette who threw herself under the King's Horse at the Derby in 1913, but that was Emily Davison. She died shortly after women received equal voting rights with men, in 1928.

Julia Gillard's misogyny speech

You may have heard about the furore over Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's robust response to a statement made by Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott on sexism and misogyny. Abbott was accused of hypocrisy over the scandal that led to the forced resignation of Speaker of the House Peter Slipper, who had been sending lurid text messages to a colleague. The video had 2 million hits on YouTube, but was removed for copyrigth reasons at the request of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The full 15 minute speech is available however at the Sydney Morning Herald site:

http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-times/julia-gillards-misogyny--speech-in-full-3701787.html

and if you can't spare 15 minutes, a clip is available from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19896465

On a similar theme, Sky TV is no stranger to sexism after the scandal that led to the sacking of Sky Sports pundit Andy Gray and the resignation of co-presenter Richard Keys in 2011 -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVXOc0zyOY

Keys and Gray are now Radio Presenters, but sadly don't appear to be much reconstructed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/mar/14/richard-keys-andy-gray-history

So it's perhapsnot surprising to find that an Australian Sky presenter of 25 years' experience, Tracey Spicer, finally exploded with a public letter to a fictional "Mr Misogynist" railing at the sexism she had experienced in her career (just before Gillard's speech, in fact) that also went viral. You can read it and hear Spicer interviewed here:

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/and-heres-the-news-my-bums-got-nothing-to-do-with-the-story-20121025-28837.html

G.I. Jane again? Rape in the military wasn't just fiction

Back in the 1990s, there was outrage at the way in which Ridley Scott included what appeared to be a rape scene in G. I. Jane - the defence of the Master Chief being that this was what the enemy would do to female front-line combatants in order to manipulate their male counterparts into giving up information. The Tailhook scandal suggested that even in the absence of a threat from an imagined enemy, female military personnel may be at risk from unwanted sexual advances from their male colleagues, and particularly from senior officers. This year campaigner Naomi Klein has given this her attention and there has been some press coverage of the extent of cover-ups and intimidation of women who have accused other serving US military officers of rape, and Tuesday's Guardian reports a just-released documentary film on the issue The Invisible War and relates it to evidence from the UK. Prepare to be shocked.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/oct/29/rape-military-shocking-truth

More practically, the CIPD has surprising survey results on discrimination at work among HR specialists

http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/10/bias-in-the-workplace.htm

and a link to an interesting podcast from 2011 on fairness at work.

http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/_fairnessatwork.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cipd&utm_campaign=cipdupdate&utm_content=311012_na_textlink_feature2.link3

The Post-men Man

Well, welcome back... I actively run this blog to support my Management and Gender course in the Spring Term, but I will less actively post throughout the year. Since my last post, late Spring and Summer were not only very busy but we lost four close friends and relatives including my mother, who was herself a remarkable gender role model. But having got through a very difficult period (another friend says it has something to do with Saturn) and settled into a new term, I  can at last get back to blogging again. Welcome particularly to those who have enrolled on the course for next term and are getting advance-oriented. This is a link I owe to Saku Mantere, on the "End of Man" proposition that has recently been aired (again).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/97be2b80-1339-11e2-ac28-00144feabdc0.html#axzz29UCtgDmZ

Meet Client #9 - the Luv Gov

Just aired on BBC 2 and available in the UK on BBC i-player for a week Client 9 - The Call Girl and the Governor was directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Watch a trailer. It's the story of Eliot Spitzer, the first Jewish President the US never had, campaigning lawyer who took on the mobsters ( eg. the Gambino family) and won, then as New York's Attorney General took on Wall Street's Masters of the Universe - and appeared to be winning. Elected New York State Governor, things started to unravel between Albany's Escher-esque State legislature and the cellar of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's house, complete with heavy punch-bag. Bruno was friends with all kinds of, shall we say, resourceful but unforgiving people, some of whom included the grandiose Wall Street icons the abrasive and self-righteous Spitzer had recently enraged and who were still fulminating thunderously. Apart from the fact that we have wonderfully iconic cameos of masculinity in its middle and old-age, dark, furious, brooding and cynical against the fading light of its conflicting dreams and its dwindling capacity to carry them out without protheses, we have a dramatic and self-attributed display of hubris, as Spitzer was apparently addicted to sex with enormously expensive escorts and spent a small fortune on them (his own, however)  over several years. When this was revealed in March 2008, he resigned, which of course meant that his whole staff complement, innocent of any offence, lost their jobs as well. The woman who took centre stage and revealed most of her mystique on the front pages of dozens of magazines including the doddering Playboy in the affair, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, was far from being Spitzer's muse - it would appear that he only saw her on the odd occasion but that it unfortunately coincided with an authorised wiretap. She achieved specious celebrity and a short-lived pop-career from the affair, and now, suitably photographed with both business suit and gravitas-delivering spectacles, writes a relationship advice column "Ask Ashley" in the New York Post. "Angelina", the girl that Spitzer actually most often saw over a long period, who declined to appear in the movie but allowed her very intelligent words to be spoken by an actress, has an even darker secret to hide: she's now a commodities trader. A rare and disturbing exploration of personal ambition, corporate power, sexuality, surveillance, hypocrisy, fraud, frailty, duplicity, violence, idealism, greed, revenge, overwheening arrogance and occasional reflection that might in the end be just more bathos anyway, everyone comes out of it badly and leaves us with the profundly depressing feeling that there's no-one you can trust and no-one ultimately has any boundaries. OK, we knew that anyway but being reminded of it is hardly uplifting. Nevertherless it's a revealing study of the connection between greed, power and sexuality that we rarely get outside fiction. And as one of the interviewees remarks, there's a culture specific aspect to this - had Spitzer "The Luv Gov" been a French politician he'd probably still be doing the job; almost certainly if he were Italian. As Hubert Waldroup, artist and procurer comments, we are all both animal and angel.  On the evidence here it's animal, angel and idiot. Quel dommage.

Not enough of a good thing

According to the GMI Ratings’ 2012 Women on Boards Survey which covers 45 countries and 4300 companies globally, there are now more women on boards of directors than ever and the global average has for the fist time edged over 10% to 10.5. Better still, the percentage with the critical 3 seats has risen to 9.8% tantalisingly close to the magic 10.

Industrialized economies as a whole have 11.1% of directors  who are women, 63.3% of companies with at least one woman on the board, and 10.5% of companies with three or more.  Emerging markets have only 7.2% of directors who  are women, only 44.3% of companies with least one woman on the board, and 6.3% of companies with three female directors. But national figures also vary greatly: Norway has 36% female directors, Germany 13% , Japan 1% , South Africa 17%, China 8.5%, and Brazil and Italy both 4.5%. Interestingly the two big risers this year, France and Australia, both illustrate the importance of policy: France being boosted by legislation, Australia by a corporate governance code amendment, and a high-level mentoring program. The debate between legislation- or quota-driven change and reliance on inspired activism rages on.  Read a discussion of  the GMI Ratings Report from which you can follow a link to download it.

Nothing like a red, red, rose

From various blogs and the Socialist Worker we learn how not to celebrate International Women’s Day. Lecturer Cherry Hopton was suspended from her post at Angus College in Scotland for objecting to a piece of appalling kitsch planned at the college to ‘commemorate’ yesterday's International Women’s Day. The college decided to celebrate IWD by giving all the women a red rose by a ‘man in a grey suit’ because, as the posters initially stated, ‘all women love a bit of romance.’ It's really not that easy, guys (surely only men whose most expansively seductive gesture involves the all-night gas station florist could have come up with this dreadful schlock?). Cherry protested, and consequently was  asked to attend a "private" meeting with the Head of Human Resources. When she asked what the meeting was to be about and requested that she be accompanied by a union official, she was suspended without so much as a dandelion being proffered. I wonder what these cheesy autocrats think International Women's Day is supposed to be about?

When your stomach stops churning, you could consider signing this petition in support of Cherry and her employment rights. Or maybe send the Head of HR a nettle. Your call.

Reinstate Cherry Hopton

And while you're in the petition mood, child benefit, one of the major achievements of feminism, is currently under threat in the UK and in need of support.

Save Child Benefit

The first link is to Nick Lowe's "Stoplight Roses".

Doin' it for Themselves.. and the Rest of Us

OK, so it's not international womens day until Thursday, but if you're going to take advantage of any of the events associated with it, a heads-up is surely in order. The UK has close to 400 events planned, compared to just over 200 in the US, which is a reason to be proud but not, I fear, cause to rejoice in the sad plight of one of the wellsprings of feminism. Today's Guardian has a feature on Annie Lennox, to whom we owe the title of today's blog. Barclays Woman of theYear in 2010 Lennox thinks that gay men should be feminists and that men should be welcomed into the movement anyway. The paper has further comments by Woman's Hour's Jenni Murray, with a plea for affordable child-care (which may in practice be gendered but affects single-parents of whom there are a considerable number of men) and Australian novelist, humourist and campaigner Kathy Lette, who points out that whilst in the West the odd woman who gets through the glass ceilling is then expected to keep it clean whilst she's up there, in the developing world one woman dies every minute in childbirth - a statistic that's definitely beyond gender. There's going to be a lot of posturing and drama around on Thursday, and we might hope that some of the more sophisticated rethinkings of the gender divide don't get lost in the noise of the debate on how much flesh female pop stars should or should not reveal. The bottom-line remains, however, that globally and historically women have had and continue to experience structural and personal disadvantages that are frequently life-threatening simply because of their sex. If it takes a bit of drama and a few choruses once a year to get that point over, it's hardly being strident.

Eurhythmics - Sisters are doin' it for themselves

Guardian IWD 100 anniversary page 2012

The Return of the Lad?

Despite the bold attempt in the 1990s by young Ladettes to colonise the space vacated by males morphing into the New Man, it appears that masculine Lad-ism is back with a vengeance, having retaken that terrain, and the Ladettes with it. Although the Unilad website has now closed down, the Laddish discourse has plenty of channels open, including other websites, blogs, magazines and even alternative student newspapers. When done cleverly, it manages to deploy complex irony to deflect criticism as Rachel Aroesti points out in the link above. Some sites, such as Toplad, don't set their aspirations quite so high, however, with some stomach-churning posts, although True Lad does appear to operate at a marginally greater elevation. Recent outbursts have included the City boys rugby tour email leak, where rich lads outlined a 13-point plan for a trip to the Dubai Sevens, which included cheating on their girlfriends, and last year's Andy Gray and Richard Keys sexism-on-air scandal, resulting in Gray's sacking (as a serial offender) and Keys' resignation and apology. The flames were fanned further by Jeremy Clarkson leaping to their defence and condeming their punishment for "heresy by thought". Which you might think odd, because perhaps the only even half-acceptable defence of most of this type of behaviour is that it is thought-less.

The New Lad: Half a Boy and Half a Man?

 Natasha Walter looks at the effects on women of this atavistic trend in her 2010 riposte Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. On current evidence the second edition will need to be much thicker. Fnaar-fnaar.

Women Chefs Chop to the Top

Back in the 1950s, British kitchen doyenne Fanny Cradock, was incensed by Raymond Oliver's views that women could not cook at the highest level, because they lacked the necessary discipline and self-confidence to be creative (no lack of old chestnuts on the menu there then). The theatrical prima donna, cooking in a ballgown ("only a slut needs an apron" she declared), held the French superstar TV chef and legendary owner of the 3 Michelin-starred Le Grand Vefour in Paris' Palais Royale to a draw in a cook-off in front of a large audience at the Cafe Royal in London. Fanny herself, however, was not herself a restauranteuse and it took another 50 years or so for a female UK chef to head a 3* Michelin kitchen - Clare Smyth, at the flagship restaurant of the far-from-mimsy Gordon Ramsay, no less. Ramsay also appointed the very-much-out-and-proud lesbian winner of 2012 Hell's Kitchen, Christina Wilson, as Head Chef of his
new venture Gordon Ramsay Steak at the Hotel Paris, Las Vegas. But
although 2011 saw a record 11 women holding head chef positions at Michelin starred restaurants in the UK, the overall scenario is of a male dominated profession - women hold less that 20% of the 187,000 chef posts. The Guardian illuminates. Raymond, btw, is no relation to Jamie, and yes, he did complain about the result.

The Women Who Oppose Female Bishops

The Women Who Oppose Female Bishops

We're used to the Glass Ceiling, and it's relatively rare for women who acknowledge its presence to express opposition to its removal. But the Stained Glass Ceiling is somewhat different. Women from within the Church of England who may be somewhat diffident about women priests are not hesitant about voicing their absolute opposition to female bishops. The Guardian elicits the views of the perhaps ironically named Emma Forward, a member of the Anglican Church's Synod (General Assembly) and Christina Rees, a campaigner for equality in the Church. An interesting video talk by feminist theologist Maureen Fiedler discussing her book Breaking the Stained Glass Ceiling: women Reliigous Leaders in their Own Words which contains interviews with female faith leaders can be found here.  Note that around 27 minutes in she notes that women hosted and performed the eucharist in the early church, which is counter-evidence against one of the main points offered by the women who oppose what they see as change in tradition, which now appears as a long-overdue return to the basic principles of the fledgling evangelical church. Nevertheless, it would probably take the discovery of an unknown female disciple (perhaps working in the kitchen at the Last Supper?) to shake the views of some of the more hardline fundamentalists.

Davies Report One Year On

Carolyn McCall (CEO Easyjet)                                             Angela Ahrendts ( CEO Burberry)        For my first post, my thanks to Elisabeth Morris for a link to a roundtable discussion hosted by the Financial Times on the anniversary of the Davies Report on women's representation at senior levels in major organizations (this complements the annual Sex and Power Reports produced by the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission). Lord (Mervyn) Davies holds the quite reasonable view that the current situation is unjustifiable. UK Business overall achieved around 10% a year ago, with the FTSE 100 improving from 12.2 to 15% this year. Yet despite this positive trend, there is less encouraging news from the FTSE 250 and signs that Davies target of 25% by 2015 could be a serious challenge. No surprise there for readers of the Female Footsie Report produced by Susan Vinnicombe and colleagues at Cranfield annually. The authors discuss the latest one in a video clip on the site.  And here's a very interesting report from Bloomberg Markets with interviews with female CEOs and international comparisons called Shaking up the Old Boys Club