Must Read of the Week: Women and Money

This is a new feature where every Friday I post a link to an article/book/comment I read during the week. It’s sort of a rough collection of interesting things found all over the internet, but didn’t seem to fit into a full blog post.

Just the other day my partner and I were discussing how much of the great capitalist machine is relies on women. Consumer goods are mainly a female arena, with some arguments about whether women buy more consumer electronics than men do. Stereotypically women buy more clothes, children’s toys, groceries and goods for the home. Women are also more likely to pay more because products specifically aimed at women are priced higher than the non-feminine counterparts (source).

“Being a woman in this country [the USA] has become an increasingly expensive proposition. It’s not just dry cleaning and haircuts where women get socked: We pay more for home mortgages, health insurance, and cars and car repairs (even when we mind our credit, eat right and exercise, and do our homework), not to mention everyday items like deodorant and disposable razors. “

…

“Though few retailers will cop to it, gender pricing is standard industry practice. It’s especially pronounced at the drugstore, where bathroom staples like shampoo, soap, and razors marketed to women (invariably packaged in pretty pastels) routinely cost more than near-identical products for men. A recent study by researchers at the University of Central Florida examined some 200 sticks of deodorant sold at major drugstore chains and found that sticks for women cost, on average, 30 cents more per ounce than those for men, even when the only discernible difference was scent.”

There is also this article about the hidden costs of being a woman (source) which says:

“Women… pay higher interest rates on credit cards than men do…The study also finds that women with low levels of financial literacy are particularly vulnerable to credit card mismanagement. They are more likely to carry a balance on their cards, pay only the minimum, and pay late fees than men with low levels of financial literacy. At the same time, low-financial literacy women are also less likely to embrace positive credit card behaviours, such as comparison shopping for cards.”

So what does it all mean? Perhaps we should do some research and start learning how to manage our finances, and take a look at the items branded specifically at women and boycott those that charge you more for the pink packaging (or just buy the blue one instead).

Radclyffe Hall – Wicked Women Wednesdays

Wicked Women Wednesdays (or WWW) is a new feature where I highlight a woman who I think is wicked (not in the bad way, wicked meaning excellent, or amazing) on a Wednesday. I’ll try to be as broad in the definition as possible and am planning to give kudos to women who are awesome.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of doing a tour of Highgate Cemetery in London. It is a Victorian cemetery that has loads of famous people and some beautiful tombstones. During the tour (you can only get access to the older West Cemetery by taking a tour), the tour guide mentioned that Radclyffe Hall, a famous author of the lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, is buried here. Now to be completely honest, I had never heard of her, which made her rich pickings for a WWW blog post.

Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) was born Marguerite Radclyffe Hall and inherited a fortune from her grandfather (source). She was educated at King’s College London, and then in Germany (source) and is most famous for being a lesbian and an author (as well as a lesbian author). Her most famous book was The Well of Loneliness which was published in 1928 when she was 48. The book is not graphic but does explore lesbianism and a lesbian relationship. The subject, rather than the content, got the book banned in the UK, although there was significant support for the book (source). From the sources I could find, she only ever had relationships with women, her first with Mabel Veronica Batten (who was 25 years older than her) until Batten died in 1916 when Hall was 36. She then got involved with a sculptor Una Elena Troubridge (1887-1963). Troubridge was married to a much older Admiral Ernest Troubridge at the time and I have to admit, I would love to be a fly on the wall for the argument that lead to Radclyffe Hall being suing him for libel because he described her as “a grossly immoral woman”. (source).

When Hall was 54 she fell in love with a Russian Nurse Eugenie Souline in 1934 and the three women (Hall, Troubridge and Souline) lived together until hall developed bowel cancer and died in 1943 at the age of 63.

Women in Comedy

Let me preface this by saying I love women comedians (sometimes referred to as comedienne). I love Jo Brand, Shappi Corsandi, Sarah Millican with Sunsan Calman and Nina Conti being my current favourites. I think it’s brilliant that we are seeing more and more women in comedy and dispelling the stereotype that women can’t do comedy.

The problem that I have though is when women comedians take it too far, when the comedy starts verging on misogyny. An example is the latest of the BBC series Watson and Oliver. I’m not at all saying that women shouldn’t be the butt of jokes and that women aren’t allowed to be laughed at, but this show has made me feel increasingly uncomfortable. The sketches seem more desperate than funny, and there is some part of me that worries that because these are women comedians, it’s ok. It’s fine to laugh at women because secretly they’re all ridiculous. And it’s okay for us to say so because these two women said it on the BBC.

It reminds me of the famous cross dresser David Walliams. In his Little Britain show there were loads of cross dressing men who were the butt of the jokes (particularly the two Victorian ladies), which seemed to make it okay to openly laugh at anyone who was trans in any way, especially because he’s open out as a cross dresser. He could do so much more for the awareness of trans and trans issues that just making them the butt of his jokes, but I digress.
I suppose perhaps I need to accept my label as a prude, and a feminist without a sense of humour, but I just feel that comedy can do so much better than just picking on easy targets. If you look at most of the sketches on Watson and Oliver, they imply a number of things that are just plain wrong, for example women police officers are terrible at their jobs because they’re too busy singing in the car, which I think was funny the first time but its now just trying to hammer the point home that they really are rubbish. That women are so insecure they are almost rendered useless.

I’m not saying its all bad though, but I do think that people in the media have a responsibility to understand what will be taken as a light-hearted jab and what negatively portrays people who are already excluded in so many places. Yes, it’s great to have comedians of both sexes, but how would you view these sketches if they were done by a pair of men? There would be an outcry against them, it would be seen as blatantly sexist. I think I’m just railing against the prevailing culture where we’ve descended into the lowest from of wit. It’s easy comedy, but it’s also very lazy.

Must Read of the Week: Joan Smith

This is a new feature where every Friday I post a link to an article/book/comment I read during the week. It’s sort of a rough collection of interesting things found all over the internet, but didn’t seem to fit into a full blog post.

This week I discovered Joan Smith

I found Joan Smith via the an article about the revival of the feminist movement, posted on the Guradian website. A few of my favourite extracts are:

For anyone who believes gender equality is no longer an issue, the economic crisis is a wakeup call. Unemployment among women rose by almost 20% between 2009 and 2012, compared with 0.32% among men. Vital services for women, including shelters for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, were among the first to feel the Coalition government’s axe. I’m sure some of the feminist energy that is around at the moment has been generated by the urgent need to protect women’s interests. But it’s also a reaction to the growth of a vast commercial sex industry, which has flooded popular culture with crude sexual images of women.

…

Women’s rights are human rights. It’s one of my favourite slogans. Twenty-first-century feminism is about girls’ education, safe contraception and abortion, freedom from sexual and domestic violence, and the right to enjoy public space. It’s a vibrant and radical manifesto for a supposedly defunct movement.

Her book Mysogenies is on my reading list, along with the follow up The Public Woman.

Barbie

Image from the Mattel shop

In the news this week (source) has been the feminists in Berlin protesting (in a sort of Occupy Wall Street type way) against the Barbie Dreamhouse experience that has opened up. The article says:

“Barbie: The Dreamhouse Experience portrayed a sexist image of women in that it suggested the role of women was to “always look good and clean and cook”.

“We do not want young girls exposed to an elementary age sexist propaganda, which is why we are protesting against the opening of the Barbie Dreamhouse on 16 May and for raising children without sexism,” the group said.”

So I went off to write a post about Barbie and how she is a great mark of evil for all women, she doesn’t do enough to show that women can be anything they want to be and boxes us into this stereotyped world where women are only around to look fabulous and wear pink.

I started with Barbie’s illustrious career. I tried to prove my own view that although there were a few examples of Barbies that were doctors or astronauts, there were very few of these. What I found was shocking. Barbie has gotten so much bad press that Mattel (the makers of Barbie) seem to be far more responsible and diligent than many other toy manufacturers when it comes to Barbie’s career choices. If you look at what her career choices have been over time she’s actually quite impressive. The current line-up of the “I can be …” range includes (source)

• Actress
• Baby Doctor
• Magician
• Nurse
• Pancake Chef
• Pet vet
• Pilot
• Swim Champion
• Track Champion
• Zookeeper
• Arctic Rescue
• President (Available in different race dolls!!!)
• Skier
• Teacher
• Tennis Player
• Sweet Chef
• Sea World Training
• Dolphin Trainer

If nothing else, researching Barbie certainly made me insanely jealous of little girls who get to play with them and that aside, I do think that while I do find the fact that everything is tinged in pink irritating, there is a lot to be said for the power that Barbie has.

While I agree that Barbie is hardly the best feminist role model, she can’t be knocked for her career choices.

Susie Wolff – Wicked Women Wednesdays

Wicked Women Wednesdays (or WWW) is a new feaure where I highlight a woman who I think is wicked (not in the bad way, wicked meaning excellent, or amazing) on a Wednesday. I’ll try to be as broad in the definition as possible and am planning to give kudos to women who are awesome.

(Picture from the Gent Magazine)

This week’s WWW is Susie Wolff. She’s a Scottish racing driver who just happens to be a woman as well. She started off in karting (which for non-racing people is kind of high powered really fast go-karting) and earned her first accolade in 1996 as British Women Kart racing driver of the year (she was 14 years old at the time). She then continued to race and moved up the ranks through various different forms of motorsport, up to the 11 April 2012 when she was named as a development driver for the Williams Formula One team.

As much as she’s doing brilliantly, of course a woman in such a male dominated arena will have her detractors, such as Sir Stirling Moss (an xx year old ex racing driver) who said told the BBC (source):

“I think they have the strength, but I don’t know if they’ve got the mental aptitude to race hard, wheel-to-wheel… We’ve got some very strong and robust ladies, but, when your life is at risk, I think the strain of that in a competitive situation will tell when you’re trying to win. The mental stress I think would be pretty difficult for a lady to deal with in a practical fashion. I just don’t think they have aptitude to win a Formula 1 race.”

Then there is Berney Eccelstone ( who is the Fomrula 1 Boss) who said (source):

“There’s no reason why a woman shouldn’t be able to compete with a man. Unfortunately, the way things are, I don’t imagine a lady will ever get the chance to drive a Red Bull or a Ferrari. The only chance is with a lesser team – and they only take someone if they come with a good sponsor. Regretfully, the problem is that many ladies who could compete probably as well as the guys won’t get chance.”

Wolff has responded to both of these comments, but my favourite is where she said:

“…this is a results-based business, and if your times are good enough you will get your chance.”

If nothing else, when men quip that women can’t drive, just mention Susie Wolff. She’s a shining example of a wicked woman.

Surplus Women

Something else I picked up from the Woman’s hour podcast about the 1920s was the concept of “surplus women“. This was used to describe the problem prevalent around the world wars when the population of women significantly outpaced the population of men. While this seems like an amusing item to think on, you need to understand the view of the day.

Before the 1920s, women were property and belonged either to their fathers, or when they became of marrying age they belonged to their husbands. It was a general problem because these women without the right to work and be independent legal entities, they were stuck. The poorer women could become servants, able to earn some wage and live with their employer and richer women would live off their wealthy family fortunes but the middle class women, with no family riches and no skills were stuck. They had no way to earn money and nowhere to live.

The term was first coined by a group of researchers in 1851 when looking at the census of that year (source ) and it was actually because of a strange anomaly where, for no particular reason, there were 400 000 more women over the age of 20 than there were men.

These figures were then exacerbated by the effects of the first world war, leading the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School For Girls to give the following speech to her 6th form class (source)

“I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. “Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. “The war has made more openings for women than there were before. But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle.”

During the first world war 750,000 men of marriageable age in Britain were killed, 1,350,000 were seriously wounded and an estimated 200,000 were profoundly shell shocked (source). This meant that over and above the problem that was identified in 1851, which had not been resolved there were an additional 2 million marriageable age men who were out of the running.

This surplus women problem actually had an upside, with many women becoming trailblazers and some would even argue that the problem is what provided a lot of momentum to the suffragettes and the women’s movements.

The daily mail also describes an ‘explosion’ of lesbian relationships (source) (there is so much offensive in that particular view that I won’t even go there). It is more respectably and fairly discussed in Virginia Nicholson’s book Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War where she says

“The lesbians themselves had their own charmed circles, however; and saw themselves as the last word in modernity and emancipation.”

So perhaps the Surplus omen weren’t actually a bad thing. I think it sort of shows what women can do when we’re not busy being wives and having husbands and such. That’s of course my opinion, but then I am biased, being one of those that are the last word in modernity and emancipation.