The Paula Principle

Paula in literature

I’m always on the lookout for examples from fciton and other kinds of literature

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
Read More

PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
Read More

why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

Early modern England: whose skills were applauded?

I've just read Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: roads to fulfilment in early modern England,  about what people valued during the early modern period (that's 1530-1780, for those who like me need a definition).  KT provides a glorious stream of quotations on 6 areas where people might have sought fulfilment - wealth and possessions, fame and afterlife, honour and reputation, and so on. One of the areas is 'work and vocation', and this chapter provides nice  insights into the division of labour. "Some occupations were thought to be unmanly because they could equally well be performed by women: brewers, bakers, and cooks all suffered from this stigma."   I wouldn't…
Read More

Competency and choice

In the past couple of months I've been to two different productions of The Merchant of Venice.  I posted earlier on the Almeida's brilliant Las Vegas-style version, and the very PP-relevant way it interpreted the final act. Last night it was the Globe Theatre's production, with Jonathan Pryce as Sherlock and his daughter as his daughter (i.e. Phoebe Pryce as Jessica).   I have to say that I found this production a good deal less gripping, though I always find it a delight to be in that setting, especially on a fine night with a crescent moon, and there was lots to appreciate. As I noted in the earlier post, choice…
Read More

Portia and Paula

We went last week to the Almeida Theatre's extraordinary production of Merchant of Venice.  It's set in Las Vegas, with gaming machines and glitz everywhere, and intermittent appearances from an Elvis imitator.    Portia is a dizzy blonde on 6-inch heels, and the competition to win her  hand is pitched as a TV reality show.  The accents are full-on American, except for Shylock who speaks with a thick German intonation, initially from behind a broad business desk. For the first three acts I enjoyed the imagination that had gone into it and laughed at the jokes embedded into the glitz, but wondered how they were going to pull it into meaningful…
Read More

Why doesn’t women’s work figure in literature?

  We went to the Design Museum, mainly to see my daughter who works there, but also to look at the exhibition on Women, Fashion & Power.  This cigarette card caught my eye because of the title at the bottom (rather blurred, I'm afraid):  "VAD woman'.    How fashionable you think her uniform is, and what it says about her power, is not the question here.  I came across Voluntary Aid Detachments when I read Dorothy Whipple's novel High Wages.  It's one of the very few books I've come across which deals more than just fleetingly with women's paid work.  High Wages  was first published in 1930, and has now been smartly reprinted by…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Ibsenning

I've been lucky enough to go to two Ibsen productions in the past week: Ghosts at the Almeida and The Doll's House at the Duke of York.  I enjoyed both, but for me the former was far the stronger, with tremendous power and a beautiful rhythm to the production.   The climax, with Helen Alving cradling her dying son Oswald, could be entirely depressing, but here we saw the sun rising as he slipped away, and although her future is hardly a bright one the visual effect was one  of some kind of redemption for them both.      I was again amazed at Ibsen's boldness.  In one play he…
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PS on older women working, and Shakespeare

A PS to yesterday's post, where I pointed out that women aged 45+ are most often found to be breadwinners.  Kimberley Botwright of the OECD's Public Affairs directorate has been running a rather improbably but delightful series of blogs linking Shakespeare plays to current OECD analyses.   So far we've had Merchant of Venice used to explore issues of financial stability, and Romeo & Juliet for policies on youth and risk. Her post on Love's Labour's Lost  led me to data on labour market participation.  If you toggle it to show the figures on employment rates amongst  older women, you can see that there's a pretty strong relation between  them and the relative prosperity of the…
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why so little fiction on women at work?

I've been looking for examples from fiction to illustrate the  5 Paula Principle factors: discrimination; child/eldercare; psychology/self-confidence; vertical networks; and choice.  I've sought help from friends who are much better read than I am, and here's the curious thing:  it is quite easy to find examples from classics from C19 or earlier - but not from contemporary novels. An obvious example: in Middlemarch Dorothea's intellectual ability is put humiliatingly at Casaubon's service - she acts as his note-taker and amanuensis but does not dare to aspire to anything greater (though eventually the frustration bursts out, in a heart-rending scene).   Helpful friends pointed to various examples from Dickens, Austen etc.  I've found good…
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Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
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Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
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