Larvatus Prodeo

…for your weekend reading pleasure.

Polly Toynbee kicks off a celebration of the last 50 years of the Guardian’s women’s page:

I might be on the women’s page still if I hadn’t unexpectedly been offered a job as social affairs editor at the BBC. Would I ever have made the jump from Guardian women’s page to Guardian comment page without leaving first? The fact that I even ask this question shows that the word “women” still signifies what it always did - “other”, “second class”, “not serious”, “not one of the boys”. That - paradoxically - is exactly why we still need a women’s page. The revolution is only half made, and sometimes it seems to go backwards. Who else will keep banging the drum?

Some excellent pieces from the last 5 decades.

On money:

I just cannot think myself into the skin of a man in circumstances like this and I need help to understand. I suppose there is many a man who thinks quite simply that as he alone brings money into the home he alone has the right to dispose of it, and that his wife is only his agent in doing the shopping, even for her own clothes. This seems to me to reduce the wife to the level of an unpaid employee (or slave, some would say), but I think that such a man tells himself that it is just because he does not regard the wife of his bosom as an employee that he does not want to have any kind of financial contract with her; that petty bookkeeping would make the whole relationship sordid and loveless.

But really, I think, these husbands subconsciously apprehend the truth that money means independence and that the wife with pennies in her pocket can cock a snook at him and go off on a bus to visit mamma, buy a highbrow magazine or a pop record, have a drink in a pub, or whatever she fancies. And this they cannot bear.

…on families:

John is a year old. Elderly ladies outside shops make friends with him as he sits In his pram watching the cars pass; women in cafés return his smiles over their coffee cups; old men on park benches tickle him under his chill, and children ask me “if they can push my dear little baby.” These, however, are all strangers. Most people who know us, and in a small town like this many do, also know that John is a mongol baby, and their reactions are quite different. With a few heart-warming exceptions they stand and talk to me with eyes averted from the pram. They inquire about other children but are careful, so careful, not to refer to John. When I return from pushing my invisible baby round the town in his invisible pram, my husband assures me that they mean well. They are trying to spare my feelings. And I sit and wonder what sort of a mother can have her feelings hurt because someone has taken an interest in her baby.

…on music:

Someone had an old guitar and the more energetic among us sang with hoarse voices the familiar strains of “She loves you, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” At 6.30 this changed to a fairly goodnatured chant of “Why are we waiting?” but at seven only the screams, groans, flashes of caustic wit and blaspheming were heard, for the pushing had started.

The police at the entrance started trying to force the crowds back, the people at the back pushed persistently forward, those in the middle, including myself; were slowly being crushed together like the filling inside a gigantic sandwich. At eight o’clock we could not move and I had the unnerving experience of realising my feet were not on the ground.

…on sex:

Anonymity gave me the freedom to voice, for the first time, exactly what I wanted when it came to sex. I found the freedom to vent all those doubts I had felt for so long - and to write about a woman finding a way to be in sexual control. Finding a way to have exhilarating sex, the kind that can transport you to another plane. I wasn’t sure, though, that I wanted my husband to know of this woman. I’m seen as a good, sweet wife. I didn’t want to let him down.

…and, of course, Andrea Dworkin:

I have a modest proposal. It will probably bring the FBI to my door. But I think that Hillary should shoot Bill and then President Gore should pardon her.

Fabulous stuff. Go read it.