So inspired by the Ukrainian feminists I’ve been researching—Nataliya Kobrynska is the type of writer often called ‘ahead of her time,’ but really, women have always been writing and advocating against patriarchy and misogyny—we’ve only been led to believe otherwise. In 1884, she initiated the creation of the Society of Ruthenian Women in Stanyslaviv, writing: We have set a goal to promote women’s ideas via literature, for the latter is the best way to show the bright and dark sides of our social system, its requirements and drawbacks… Yes!
And I found the superhero I needed all my life: Ms. Fury. Predating Wonder Woman by six months and cat woman by a quarter-century, it was a popular comic written by a woman—June Tarpé Mills. And Ms. Fury was a single mother. So great!
And a poem by contemporary Scottish writer Claire Aksew:
How to burn a woman
You will not need kindling.
I think I’ll go up quick
as summer timber, my anger
big and dry as a plantation
that dreams of being paper:
the updraft already made
in the canopy, and heading down.
Bring your axe to split me
into parts that you can stack
over the dry leaves, over the coals:
my old coat and my bedding box,
the things given to me by women.
You’ve heard of spontaneous human
combustion. They say it’s fat:
once lit, it flares so white-hot fast
the bones give in.
Make your touch-paper long.
Spread the word that the crowd
who will gather should stand
well back. I am coated
in the accelerant of men:
my craving for their good necks,
their bodies in button-downs
crisp as a new book.
As you douse the embers
I will smell like ground elder
choking the cemetery —
roots looping up
out of dead women’s mouths,
a problem thing
you’ll never get cleared.
Make the stake thick, the bonds
stiff on my innocent wrists.
Burn me the same way
you burned her: do it
because we took the plain
thoughts from our own heads
into the square, and spoke.
---Claire Aksew
This morning it occurred to me that those who love strong men & autocracy come from that impoverished people’s magazine dynamic. If a celebrity wears it, owns it, does it, it must be a solid value.
I am heartened by the women who keep some distance from the men, even their men, dispassionately observing the baboon pecking orders and such.
And then there are the grapes of Wrath women who take over after the men are utterly defeated — that was wife’s prairie grand mother after her husband lost the farm during the depression.
Thanks, Freya
This morning it occurred to me that those who love strong men & autocracy come from that impoverished people’s magazine dynamic. If a celebrity wears it, owns it, does it, it must be a solid value.
I am heartened by the women who keep some distance from the men, even their men, dispassionately observing the baboon pecking orders and such.
And then there are the grapes of Wrath women who take over after the men are utterly defeated — that was wife’s prairie grand mother after her husband lost the farm during the depression.
I LOVE this.