Twittering the Library

Libraries have reported mixed success with social networking tools, but, undaunted, last night we started twittering some of the more interesting things we’ve found so far in the Feminist Library cataloguing project.

We discovered that the pamphlets about “MEN” are few enough to fill just one mini-pamphlet box and that there were parties in the 80s (we guess) for women and El Salvador.

Most excitingly of all, we found a first edition of Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence – only 90p in 1981.

We also found a lot of directories of women’s organisations and statistics for the labour market in Finland (1982 & 1984) – I kid you not, Finland.

We’ll be tweeting on an ad hoc basis – some nights like last night there will be a quite a few posts, and other days there will be nothing (we’re a bunch of volunteers with day-jobs, after all), but if you’re interested in keeping up with our random finds and other project news, you can follow us here. There’s also an RSS feed of what’s being said by and about us here.

Hags, Harlots, Heroines Community

After a long time in development, hagsharlotsheroines.com, the website devoted to writing about inspiring women, has relaunched itself as a Ning community.

As I said in my presentation on Third Sector 2.0 at Online, the research jury is still out with regard to hosting gated communities, but Hags version 1 was supported by a great range of women writers, so hopefully it has all the right ingredients for success: a pre-existing real-world community, a specific focus for practice and an active and well-connected operating team (Laura and Helen Wilkinson, Kim Rooney and Diane Laidlaw). And Virago Press, the best-known publisher in the subject area, is a supporter.

If you’re a woman writer, historian or are interested in writing by and / or about women, Hags might just be the online community for you …

A Brief History of Blame

We tend to think of vicarious liability as a modern product of a society we believe is becoming more and more litigious. However, continuing my reading around case studies and their historical use, I’ve come across a portrait of how blame and fear of blame was heaped upon medical personnel delivering babies in 17th century France [1].

Katherine Crawford, in her 2007 book European Sexualities described the division of medical roles thus:

Male physicians dissected deceased pregnant women to understand reproduction, while female midwives attended living pregnant women. Trained largely through an apprentice system, midwives learned from other midwives and from participating in deliveries … As literacy spread, many midwives also consulted instructional manuals … Mostly, however, women learned by doing, and communities respected experienced midwives. Surgeons might assist if complications required their skills to remove a fetus, but social decorum preferred that women attended women.

By the late seventeenth century, however, female authority over childbirth came under attack from male physicians and men-midwives who privileged expertise over experience. Claims for rational investigation were combined with worries about population depletion blamed on the alleged murderous ignorance of female midwives [2].

Lianne McTavish denies a strict division along lines of gender politics, though she does find that “Female midwives not only marshalled male witnesses as a means of self-protection, but they sometimes also attempted to shift the responsibility onto men.” [3] She highlights the legislative position: