Women's Views on News |
- Outdoor pursuits: not for women?
- It is never the child’s fault
- A brief history of infant feeding
- Defending people facing poverty
| Outdoor pursuits: not for women? Posted: 06 Aug 2013 09:35 AM PDT
Guest post by Connie Cramp. For almost two years now I have been working in a well-known shop specialising in outdoor equipment. I took the job because I grew up in a family that had a passion for the outdoors, and I had been climbing, walking and travelling for most of my life – I thought my knowledge and experience of the outdoors would be useful in helping other people. But during my time at the shop, it’s slowly become clear that the world of outdoor activities is not always a welcoming place for a woman. What strikes me most about the shop is the difference between the ranges of clothing available for men and women – women are given a wide selection of casual T-shirts and skirts, but not much actual, technical clothing that would be useful in the outdoors. The range of technical clothing for women is less than half of what it is for men, and it’s mostly pink and purple. I’ve had customers complain to me many times that they’ve found what they want but they won’t buy it because it only comes in bright pink. The same applies to most of the products directed at women – boots, rucksacks and sleeping bags, are overwhelmingly pink and purple if they are aimed at women. Even the socks are gendered – a few weeks ago, I found myself stocking the shelves with a range of socks aimed at women called ‘Trail Diva’. Recently, the visual merchandising guy came in and redecorated the whole of the women’s section so that now it looks more like someone’s living room than a place which takes seriously a woman’s desire to explore the outdoors. He’s dressed the mannequins so that they’re wearing floaty skirts and strapless dresses, instead of the walking trousers and boots that the men’s mannequins are wearing. If the shop is supposed to be encouraging women to engage with the outdoors, it’s not doing a very good job. It looks more like it’s encouraging women to sit on the side-lines and look pretty, while the men do all the climbing and the mountaineering. This all came as quite a shock to me. Given the vast array of female role models in outdoor pursuits it seems strange that the shop can’t take women seriously as consumers of outdoor equipment. There are so many amazing, talented women in outdoor pursuits – Lucy Creamer, for example, eight time British Climbing Champion, or mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who was the first woman to summit Everest solo and without oxygen, or Squash Falconer, who paraglided from the summit of Mont Blanc last year, or Leah Crane, who won the British Bouldering Championships in 2009 at the age of just 18, or Arunima Sinha, the first female amputee to scale Everest. In 1808, Marie Paradis was the first woman to successfully summit Mont Blanc, at just 18 years old. Gertrude Bell has a mountain in the Swiss Alps named after her, after she climbed it in 1901. Women such as Julia Bradbury, who presented, amongst other things, Wainwright Walks, German Wanderlust and Icelandic Walk, are putting women’s walking and mountaineering in the public eye, and showing that women can be just as passionate about, and skilled in, the outdoors as men can. This is just a tiny insight into some of the many women who are highly skilled, adventurous people with a passion for outdoor challenges. It’s a shame that a chain of shops with the aim of helping people to enjoy the outdoors safely and comfortably can’t be more inclusive. It’s always been difficult for female climbers to prove themselves. This article in the Guardian shows how women struggled with the prejudices of men, trying to free themselves from the expectations of 19th century society. More recently, in 1995, Alison Hargreaves was widely criticised for being an irresponsible mother, after her death while climbing the notoriously difficult K2 in the Himalayas. As far as I know, there are very few, if any, stories about male mountaineers being careless fathers for undertaking such a dangerous activity. Two weeks ago, a team of all-female climbers scaled the shard for Greenpeace, to protest against drilling in the Arctic. This was, bizarrely, criticised by Telegraph writer Toby Green as ‘sexist’, because an all-female team implied that it was ‘harder for a woman to climb a tall building than a man’. Despite consistently equalling and surpassing the performances of men in areas such as mountaineering and climbing, it seems that women are still seen as somehow less worthy of attention. And this, I think, is a point illustrated by the shop in which I work. Although it’s true that it isn’t really aimed at professionals, the shop is the first port of call for many people who are interested in and passionate about the outdoors, and I don’t think it’s sending out a very good message to its female patrons – women are ‘divas’ rather than serious walkers, women need flowery skirts and casual shirts rather than waterproof trousers or soft-shell jackets, women only want pink clothing. With out-of-date, misguided ideas like these being peddled by one of the biggest retailers of outdoor equipment in the UK, is it any wonder that people still aren’t taking women in the outdoors seriously? This article was first posted on The F-Word on 29 July.  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2013 06:00 AM PDT
Guest post from Jo at Everyday Victim Blaming. Trigger warning: this petition text contains references to sexual assault that may be triggering to survivors. Yesterday, a man walked free from Snaresbrook Crown Court despite pleading guilty to 'sexual activity with a child' after the prosecutor Robert Colover and judge Nigel Peters described the 13 year-old victim as a "sexual predator". I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I could have been that 13 year-old girl who the judge and prosecutor descrbed as ’predatory’. Now, I work with other women who have survived similar experiences. I have seen first hand how this kind of victim blaming prevents women from coming forward and protects men who commit these crimes. It's unacceptable that the Crown Prosecutor – the person who this young girl was relying on to help get her justice – used this kind of language in court. It's a sad fact that this kind of attitude is commonplace within society and the legal establishment. We need to make a stand and send a clear message: It's never the child's fault. I'm calling on the Crown Prosecution Service to look at the language used by Robert Colover and meet urgently with our organisation and other groups working with victims of rape and sexual assault to ensure this never happens again. Please join us. To sign the petition, click here.  |
| A brief history of infant feeding Posted: 06 Aug 2013 04:15 AM PDT
The biomedical industry certainly threw fuel on the fiery debate about infant feeding when it began developing alternatives to human milk in the late nineteenth-century. But don't think that's when the discussions over whether or not breast was best began – physicians, philosophers, and social activists have been debating the topic and prescribing maternal behaviour for a lot longer. As far back as the oldest and most significant medical papyri from ancient Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus (circa 1550 BCE), there were remedies for women suffering from lactation failure: "To get a supply of milk in a woman's breast for suckling a child: Warm the bones of a sword fish in oil and rub her back with it. Or: Let the woman sit cross-legged and eat fragrant bread of soused durra, while rubbing the parts with the poppy plant." If the prospect of a "sword fish oil" massage seems a little unappealing, consider the foundlings of eighteenth-century France, for whom the safest method of feeding was, apparently, directly from the udder of a goat or ass. Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician from the first to second century CE, recommended that newborns should be given no food for the first two days of life – imagine the tears! – before being breastfed by a nurse until the twentieth day post-partum whereupon the mother would take over the responsibility of feeding. Despite these recommendations, it was a widely accepted social practice for wealthier families in ancient history to employ a wet nurse. Commonplace among the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, so routine was the practice that it was regulated as a profession with laws and contracts – it is thought that wet nursing was introduced to the UK during the Roman occupation. With the practice of wet nursing heavily entrenched among the wealthy, this gave rise to a public sentiment which was not just opposed to breastfeeding, but downright disgusted by it; one tract from 1695 declares: "a lady that will condescend to be a nurse, though to her own child, is become as unfashionable and ungenteel as a gentleman." Time passed but men continued to advise women about their bodies and how they should raise their children – notably philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who, despite abandoning at least one of his own children to the foundling hospital, urged for women to take inspiration from nature and breastfeed their infants. At this time, the transmission of infectious diseases and opiates through breast milk was not understood and such was the demand for wet nurses that even those with venereal and other contagious diseases, as well as those addicted to opiates, found employment. Rousseau's comments did, therefore, have some worthwhile merit and by the mid eighteenth-century books and pamphlets drew upon his notion of "natural" feeding and advised against the use of wet nurses. A number of historians have attributed aristocratic women's reticence to breastfeed during this period on issues inexorably bound up with gender norms, including the impact it would have on their figures, the way it prevented them from wearing fashionable clothes, and restricted their access to social activities. A woman's decision not to breastfeed, however, was revealed by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) as sometimes the product of rather less frivolous, feminine fancy and rather more misogynistic coercion: "There are many husbands so devoid of sense and parental affection that, during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness, they refuse to let their wives suckle their children." Throughout history, there was often parity between the way that the very rich and the very poor fed their infants – although for very different reasons! In the wake of the industrial revolution, social class and wealth continued to be the greatest determinants of how women fed their children. As entire families relocated from rural to urban areas in search of work, low wages combined with a high cost of living often forced women out to work and they were left with little alternative than employing a peasant wet nurse – even once the safety of the practice was called into question. However, as patent baby-foods developed in the mid nineteenth-century, their medical merit was propounded by doctors and Victorian childcare manuals enthusiastically recommended feeding infants Horlicks, Robinson's and Nestle's among others. While Victorian breastfeeding mothers were told not only to abstain from sexual activity but that they should behave like cows and refrain from social contact, rest much and eat bland food (thankfully not grass!). Advice no-nonsense child-guidance book writer, Mrs Panton, responded to with: "Let no mother condemn herself to be a common or ordinary 'cow' unless she has a real desire to nurse…" The very rich, no doubt swayed by the health benefits promoted in new advertisements, were keen for their newborns to benefit from this significant scientific development, whereas for the very poor the decision to formula feed continued to be a decision borne out of need. In the wake of World Wars, such was the necessity for many of the poorest women in the UK to return to work soon after giving birth, that the government issued a welfare food product called National Dried Milk, of which 124 million tins were distributed in Infant Welfare Clinics between 1945-1949, before discontinuation on safety grounds in the mid 1970s. As a corollary of the second wave feminist movement, women began rejecting the authority of medical discourses about their bodies – including male authored accounts of childbirth and child-rearing – making them more empowered to breastfeed. During this period, breastfeeding initiation rates rose significantly across the developed world and have remained relatively static since then. And so the debate rages on about whether "Breast is Best". While this brief history of infant feeding is by no means exhaustive, it raises what has often been missing from the advice books and medical recommendations –exactly who is looking after Mum?  |
| Defending people facing poverty Posted: 06 Aug 2013 01:09 AM PDT
Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed aims to bring together groups of claimants campaigning against cuts and combat the negative stories that appear all too regularly in most of the press about them. Its Facebook page shares news about claimants who are being penalised as a result of government cuts, like 57-year-old Veronica Kenning from Birmingham who is dying of cancer, and who faces eviction from her home because she cannot pay the £23.57 demanded by the council. Or Irene Lockett, 52, from Kirkby, Merseyside, who was awarded the Carer of the Year title at Croxteth Park Nursing Home where she worked, has fostered several youngsters over the years and gave up work as a carer when she had a heart attack. She could not pay the docked extra £23.24 per week docked under new welfare rules. In the first month of the tax year on Merseyside alone, more than 14,000 people fell into arrears – 6,000 for the first time. Nationally, at least 660,000 of society's most vulnerable families have been hit by the under-occupation penalty with tenants forced to make up 14 per cent of their rent for one extra bedroom and 25 per cent for two. It has a link to news that The United Nations Development Programme, which has just published the Human Development Report, said last week: “The United Kingdom, unfortunately, has an exceptionally high degree of inequality.” The report shows that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons share a lower proportion of the national wealth – 14.6 per cent – than in any other Western country. This is only marginally better than in Russia, the only industrialised nation, east or west, to have a worse record. Measurements of the gap between rich and poor tell a similar story. The richest fifth of Britons enjoy, on average, incomes 10 times as high as the poorest fifth." Britain ties for the worst performance by this yardstick among Western nations with Australia – and is, says the report, exactly the same as in Nigeria, much worse than in Jamaica, Ghana or the Ivory Coast and twice as bad as in Sri Lanka or Ethiopia. Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed also collects facts and figures, like data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2009 that shows that the poorest 10 per cent of households pay 47 per cent of their income in tax, a higher percentage than any other group. And campaign updates, such as CaerphillyAgainst the Bedroom Tax, which presented a 2,000-signature petition to a council meeting on 23 July; and information about co-ordinated demonstrations, such a day of action against the Bedroom Tax. The group takes inspiration from the National Unemployed Workers Movement founded by Wal Hannington in 1918, which went on to organise the infamous hunger marches of the 1920s and 30s. The Facebook page says that Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed campaigns for political change to address injustice and persecution of benefit claimants, continuing to build alliances with trade unions and progressive organisations around the world. All this reminds me of the early days of the Anti Poll Tax movement. Lots of small, localised campaigns petitioning councils, turning up at courts to stop them issuing warrants, gathering outside the houses of non-payers to stop the bailiffs. The Anti Poll Tax movement saw off Thatcher – let's hope this movement has the same effect on this government.  |
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