Well I could have celebrated the 135th birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, but I'm not doing that today.
Today it's Emily Wilding Davison, English suffragette. My hero.
Emily Davison was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and a militant fighter for her cause. She was arrested on nine occasions, went on hunger strike seven times, and was force fed on forty-nine occasions....
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Alla Genrikhovna Masevitsch was a Russian astrophysicist. She served as assistant chairman of the Astronomical Council of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
She is known for her work in organizing observations of some of the first Russian satellites.
You've never heard of her not only because she was a woman, but in this special case, because she was Soviet.
Please pardon any infelicities in this,...
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Carla Lavelli - or Carla Celesia of Vegliasco - was actively involved in the Italian women's emancipation movement. She was a member first of the female Lyceum, founded in 1912, and later, in 1914, of a new association of women born from the Lyceum - the Italian Female Artistic Federation, of which group Carla was elected president.
You've never heard of her blah blah surprise...
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What drives you?
What makes you tick?
When Churchill spoke of Russia
He might have of you,
An enigma indeed, a mystery.
Selfish, you certainly are.
Self-centered, uncaring, cruel.
It would be so easy if that were all,
But kind you are,
Feeling, loving, nice -
An overworked word, but good.
You walk through life,
Love those who stumble,
And when yourself you fall,
Accept...
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I am sick of the (to me) flawed and invented characterization of a split in feminism today - largely demonstrated and brought to a head by the reaction of feminists to the #MeToo movement - on the one hand that old school feminists have argued that women could solve the problem of sexual assault by being pragmatic, and just sucking up minor transgressions and coping...
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"Cloudless every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky."
-- Pink Floyd, "Echoes"...
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In early 3rd century BC Arcadia, there lived a poet called Anyte of Tegea (Ἀνύτη Τεγεᾶτις). Anyte was contemporaneously famous as a lyric poet, although none of Anyte's lyric poetry has survived. Anyte also wrote epic poetry, and was famed for that too, but none of it has survived either.
Anyte was also a great epigrammist, and wrote many epitaphs. A handful of these survive....
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I love not life,
Yet life loves me.
In flowing fields of azure silk,
And winding lanes of leafy boughs
She holds me.
Cascading blooms of palest pink,
Imposing walls of granite slope
To waters green and yellow tinged.
The blood-red sun of ancients sink,
Where life's own sea
And love's sky meet -
So blue, last rays of gold,
Night's death is born.
--...
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