By: Alice,
on 4/4/2015
The flow of girls in particular from the safety of Britain into the war zones of the Middle East causes much hand-wringing. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says one in six of foreigners going to Syria and Iraq are women or girls.
The post The myth of the pacific woman appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julia Callaway,
on 12/16/2014
The light in the Orkneys is so clear, so bright, so lucid, it feels like you are on top of the world looking though thin clouds into heaven.
It doesn’t even feel part of the UK: when you sail off the edge of Scotland by the Scrabster to Stromness ferry, you feel you are departing the real world to land in a magical realm.
Nowhere else on earth can you go to a place and see eight thousand years of continuous history in such a tiny space.
Skara Brae is what remains of a neolithic village, older than Stonehenge and the pyramids, kept secret underground until uncovered by a severe storm in 1850. You can walk in and sit down, look around at the stone walls, stone beds, stone cupboards, dressers, seats, and storage boxes. Recognizably human people lived here, seeing this same landscape and coast, feeling the same wind on their faces that you do, their eyes resting on the doors, hearths and toilets (one in each dwelling).
This is ‘stone age’ but talking about such ages is a misnomer in the Orkneys where they had no appreciable bronze age nor iron age so proceeded from the non-use of one metal to the non-use of another in what is now the best preserved neolithic site in Europe.
The Orkneys have been so fascinating for so long that even the vandalism needs to be preserved. In Maeshowe burial mound you can see where Viking tourists who came to the monument, already ancient by their time, wrote graffiti about their girlfriends on the walls. They wrote in Norse runes.
The Orkney islands were the headquarters of the Viking invasion fleets, and to this day the Orkneys are the only place in the world besides Norway where the Norwegian national day is celebrated.
The islands are filled with Tolkeinesque place names like the Ring of Brodgar, the Brough of Birsay, the Standing Stones of Stenness. Sagas were born here, like that of the peaceable 12th century Earl of Orkney, treacherously assassinated and now known as St Magnus, after whom the cathedral is named.
Sagas were created here in living memory. This is where the British home fleet was at anchor and the German fleet still lies. The battle fleet of the German Imperial Navy transferred in its entirety to Scapa Flow in 1919 to await a decision on its future. The German sailors could not bring themselves to give up their ships; they opened the seacocks and scuttled them all. At low tide you can still see the rusting hulks of Wilhelmine ambitions to dominate Europe.
If the Orkneys sound bleak and rocky, that would be the wrong impression to leave. They have rich and fertile farming land with green plains rolling on under a pearl sky. People tell folk tales around the peat fires, drinking ginger-flavoured whiskey; an orange cat pads around the grain heaps in the Highland Park distillery, and the islands shimmer under the ‘simmer dim’ of nightless summer days. I should be there now.
Headline image credit: Stromness, Orkney Islands by Geoff Wong. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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By: Alice,
on 9/16/2014
Scottish women are said to hold the key to independence, as they predominate in the ‘no’ camp. Men have been repeatedly estimated from poll data to be around 50:50 for and against, while those women who were sure of their intentions were 60% against.
This has been represented as an alarming gender divide, but a look at the history of women fighting for the vote in Scotland shows they have long been resolute in their positions, more concerned with what politics could do in real life than the grandstanding of political ideas, and much more internationalist than their sisters south of the border.
The Scottish route to women’s suffrage started in 1867 with the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage; similar societies were established in Manchester, London, and Dublin. Later these suffragists were joined by the suffragettes, who attracted considerable publicity for arson, vandalism, and hunger-striking in the cause, to the disdain of the constitutional campaigners who thought this sort of behaviour counter-productive. This major division in tactics has served to obscure the fundamental similarity of both campaigns as both sides were directed towards the same objective: for women to have the vote on the same basis as men, which was then on a property-owning franchise. They also both steered away from engagement in other social activities. The vote was all-important, it was a millennialist objective, which once achieved would inaugurate an era of social justice and peace. Other social activity was at best a distraction and could wait till after the advent of the franchise. For this reason English suffragists such as Millicent Fawcett were not involved in important campaigns like those against the Contagious Diseases Acts and for temperance, whatever their personal views may have been.
Scottish women took another path, with a much more inclusive vision of the purpose of political activism. For them the vote was one of a number of issues on which to campaign, and temperance was another. Using the vehicle of the Scottish Christian Union, Scottish women allied with the American Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the most powerful women’s suffrage organisation in the world.
The temperance cause was part of a set of progressive measures as disparate as anti-slavery, ‘social purity’ (sexual control), universal education, and promoting enhanced domestic skills to the poor. All had women as prime movers or playing a prominent part – the so-called ‘feminine public sphere’. Scottish women embraced this ‘woman’s mission’ with a vengeance, for example eagerly seizing on the municipal vote which was granted to Scottish women in 1881, in order to favour candidates who wanted strict alcohol licensing. Other areas of activity included such practical institutions as the Glasgow Samaritan Hospital for ‘diseases of women’ and rescue homes for ‘female inebriates.’ It has been said that alcohol more than slavery or suffrage or any other single cause politicised American women. Megan Smitley in The Feminine Public Sphere (MUP, 2009) has convincingly argued that the same can be said for Scottish women.
In the United States the Women’s Christian Temperance Union saw through enfranchisements state by state, and sent out missionaries to New Zealand (which became the first nation to enfranchise women in 1893) and to Australia (which started enfranchising with South Australia in 1894). Isabel Napier, who was National Superintendent of the Suffrage Department of the Scottish Christian Union, grew up in New Zealand and retained strong links. “When Suffrage became law in New Zealand all their influence was thrown on the side of Temperance Reform,” she said, “and so you have the advanced laws that now obtain.” WCTU speakers toured Scotland from the Shetlands to the Borders, hosted by the Scottish Christian Union.
In contrast, English women considered the US temperance campaign vulgar and did not welcome WCTU speakers; they feared the ‘Americanisation’ of their field. Nor did English and Welsh temperance organisations officially support women’s suffrage (though individual members doubtless did).
The importance of this tradition of social activism for the independence debate has been that Scottish women were not moved by the same arguments as men. The ‘Braveheart tendency’ of independence at all costs as a patriotic ideal, regardless of the consequences, has had limited feminine appeal. As Lesley Riddoch wrote in The Scotsman: “Toughing out controversy and appearing to spoil for a fight may earn respect from male commentators and small armies of cyber-angry, anonymous men. Clever dick answers, snide-sounding put downs and swaggering arrogance turn off watching women as swiftly as they appear to engage watching men.” That was the level at which most of the independence campaign was fought, however, leading to a frantic late catch-up as more ‘woman friendly’ policies were rolled out.
The issues that women took most interest in were: How would either side deal with child poverty, low pay, and poor housing? What could be done about the European-wide disgrace of poor health and low life expectancy in parts of Scotland? Finally (and in a manner that would be instantly recognisable to nineteenth century prohibitionists) how to deal with the appalling levels of alcohol abuse in Scotland which are so damaging to personal health and family life?
Such practical matters of national renewal were often drowned out by masculine bluster.
The post Scottish Women and the Vote appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 5/8/2014
I support democracy. I like to think I do so to the extent of willingness to fight and perhaps die for it. This is not so extravagant a claim, within living memory the men in my family were called upon to do exactly that.
Universal suffrage is consequently my birth-right, but what is it that I am being permitted to do with my vote, when the political parties have so adjusted the system to suit themselves?
In the coming elections for local councils and the European Parliament, two relatively recent changes have stripped away most of the choices voters had and given them to the political parties. The Local Government Act 2000 and the party list system, introduced for European elections in 1999, are both triumphs of management over content. Both shuffled power from an aggregate of the electors to a small number of people running the party machines.
When I first saw local government in action, as a junior reporter on a local paper, I felt admiration for the range of abilities and oratorical skill that leading councillors brought to their posts. They were people who not only worked unpaid, but often made real financial sacrifices in order to work for their locality. When I occasionally attend council meetings today I am struck by the poor quality of the debates, the inability to see the implications of policy beyond party advantage, the lack of intellectual rigour, the sheer irrelevance of most of this political process to the business of local government, which is now carried on by senior officers.
What happened in the interim? The Local Government Act 2000 did away with the old committee system that had run councils since 1835, through more than a century and a half of municipal progress. The government imposed a ‘leader and cabinet’ system. Active local democracy was ‘modernised’ into non-existence; only cabinet members now have any authority and even their role is merely advisory to the leader.
The leader appoints the cabinet; the rest of the councillors are supporters or impotent opponents. There is no political brake on the leader’s authority, but decisions can be criticised in retrospect by a ‘scrutiny committee.’ This is not local democracy but local autocracy.
Is it any wonder that people of quality are reluctant to come forward to be councillors when they have no influence except that can be garnered by toadying to the leader, who might then appoint them to the cabinet and put some money in their pockets? People of quality wanting to act in public affairs realise they could have more influence in pressure groups. Of course, there are still some meritorious councillors, just as under the old system there were some fools. My observation is that the balance has shifted and there are now fewer people of quality prepared to go through the system.
Voters were in fact given something of a choice over the introduction of the Local Government Act 2000: they could choose whether to have the directly elected mayor and cabinet system, or the leader and cabinet system. There was no option of retaining the tried and tested system of committees where every councillor had a voice. So it was a charade of a ballot where only votes in favour were requested and counted. This used to be called ‘guided democracy’ in east European countries.
As with every centralisation, those who already possessed power welcomed the developments of the Act with hands outstretched. It put more money into the system, gave senior officers more power (which, since it had to come from somewhere, meant commensurately less for elected representatives), paid councillors, and gave ever-increasing sums to cabinet members for special responsibilities.
In a few places the gimmick of directly elected leaders (confusingly referred to as mayors) was tried. The public were indifferent everywhere except London where candidates from both major parties have excelled as mayors, but London is more like a city state with a president than a municipal corporation. Elected mayors in four of thirty-two London boroughs have added to the cost of the process but contributed nothing to efficiency. Outside of London there are eleven directly elected mayors, with two other towns having tried but abandoned the system as an expensive flop. This local lack of democracy is one of the ways in which the system has become fragmented, the responsiveness of the elected moving further and further away from those they are supposed to represent and towards their party loyalty.
On a larger scale, there is the other election we face this month, for Members of the European Parliament, which has been entirely taken over by political parties. A system in which electors voted for a local MEP was replaced in 1999 by the European Party Elections Act with a party list system with the additionally unfriendly title of ‘closed list.’ That means voters can vote only for a party, and the first candidates on the list chosen by the party will get in — even if that person is heartily despised by their own supporters, so long as they are favoured by the party bosses.
This is not an arcane argument about supposed representation with no relevance to individuals. I have a property in Greece. I had a problem with the planning authorities there where I felt I was being discriminated against as a non-Greek. Contact my Member of the European Parliament, I thought. So who is that?
I found Greek MEPs with parties like the Popular Orthodox Rally or members of groupings such as the Nordic Green Left Confederation, but no member for the Dodecanese islands. After one and a half days of trying to make contact with people via the Internet, Brussels and party offices, I finally called a London MEP who had a Greek name so I supposed she might know something. She was in fact very helpful, but is this any way to run a representative democracy? I did not vote for this MEP, at best I might have voted for a party list on which she appeared somewhere.
In the UK we now have this party list system; single transferable votes (for directly elected mayors); the mixed member system for the Welsh assembly (don’t ask); regional proportional representation for the Scottish parliament and first past the post for general elections.
I still think I would still fight for democracy, but which democracy is that?
Women and the Vote, is published by Oxford University Press and available from September 2014.Jad Adams is an independent historian specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research. His forthcoming book,
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Image credit: Westminster Bridge, Parliament House. Photo by Jiong Sheng, 25 September 2005. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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By: Kirsty,
on 3/14/2014
Tony Benn has left as an enduring monument: one of the great diaries of the twentieth century, lasting from 1940, when he was fifteen, to 2009 when illness forced him to stop.
They are published as nine volumes but these are perhaps ten percent of the 15 million words in the original dairy. I am one of the few people to have had access to the manuscript diary, in the course of writing my biography of Benn. For this I received every assistance from him and his staff in the jumbled, chaotic office in the basement of his Holland Park Avenue home.
The diaries of course are of historic interest because they reveal the work of a cabinet minister and member of parliament for more than fifty years. Over time the Benn charts post-war hope, the rise of the Labour militants, the battle of Orgreave, and the decline of the Left. The books also have descriptions of constituents’ experiences in his weekly surgery, an opportunity to meet the people and sample their woes, which is hated by some MPs but was embraced by Benn.
They also show the development of Benn’s family of four children, twelve grandchildren, and the suffering of the death of parents and partner. One would be hard put to it to find anywhere in literature a more poignant description of death and continuing loss than Benn’s of Caroline, his partner of more than fifty years whose illness and death was described in remorseless detail in manuscript, some of which was published in More Time for Politics (2007).
Benn had always felt he ought to be writing a diary, as a part of the non-conformist urge to account for every moment of life as a gift from God. He explained at one of our last formal conversations: ‘It’s very self obsessed. I must admit it worries me that I should spend so much time on myself, I saw it as an account, accountability to the Almighty, when I die give him 15 million words and say: there, you decide. I think there is a moral element in it, of righteousness.’
This need to see time as a precious resource to be accounted for went back to his father, William Wedgwood Benn (Later Lord Stansgate) who expected the boy Benn to fill in a time chart showing how he had made use of his days. Benn senior had read an early self-help book by Arnold Bennett called How to Live 24 Hours a Day on making the best use of time. ‘Father became obsessed with it,’ Benn said.
Tony Benn had been keeping a diary sporadically since childhood. It had always been his ambition to keep one, and early fragments of diary exist, including one during his time in the services, where diary-keeping was forbidden for security reasons so he put key words relating to places or equipment in code. In the 1950s he began keeping a political diary and wrote at least some parts of a diary for every year from 1953. The emotional shock of his father’s death in 1960 and subsequent political upsets stopped his diary writing in 1961 and 1962 but, with a return to the House of Commons in sight, he resumed it in 1963.
He started dictating the diary to a tape recorder in 1966 when he joined the cabinet because he could not dictate accounts of cabinet meetings to a secretary who was not covered by the Official Secrets Act. Benn would store the tapes, not knowing when he would transcribe them, or indeed if they would be transcribed in his lifetime. His daughter, Melissa spoke of arriving at their home late at night when she was a teenager, and hearing her father’s voice dictating the diary, followed by snoring as he fell asleep at the microphone.
Benn stopped writing the diary after he fell ill in 2009 in what was probably the first stroke he was to suffer. He explained to me:
‘You can’t not be a diarist some of the time. One day is much the same as the other and it is a lot of effort. You really do have to be very conscientious and keep it up in detail and keep up the recordings and so on and it took over my life, also I’m not sure now that I’m not in a position on the inside on anything where my reflections would be interesting. I think my reflections might be as interesting as anybody else’s but whether it constitutes a diary when I’m not at the heart of anything…
‘I never thought of it as an achievement, just something I did, it’s been a bit of a burden to have to write it all down every night. It began as a journal where I put down things that interested me during the war, I drew a little bit on that for Years of Hope (1994). You can say you’ve achieved a reasonably accurate daily account of what has happened to you and since people are always shaped by what has happened to them so if you have a diary you get three bites at your own experience: when it happens, when you write it down and when you read it later and realise you were wrong.’
Benn did not think he would publish it in his lifetime, but in about 1983 he decided to type up six months and have a look at it. He invited Ruth Winstone to help with the diary in 1985 and found they worked so well together that she stayed and edited all the diaries.
His final thought on the long labour of the Benn Diaries was: ‘I couldn’t recommend anyone to keep a diary without warning them that it does take over your life.’
Jad Adams’ Tony Benn: A Biography is published by Biteback. His next book is Women and the Vote: A World History to be published by OUP in the autumn.
Image credit: Portrait of Tony Benn. By I, Isujosh. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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