#the women's institute of domestic arts and sciences

[wellpresseddaisy]

I'll finally have time to sew this coming long weekend and I'm paralyzed by indecision. I have 10 yards of white handkerchief linen, but that's going to be summer underwear (if I can ever decide on patterns).

I have 3 skirts that are close to done; they need the seams overlocked or zig-zagged (because linen), the plackets finished, waistbands attached, and hems done. So that's 1 project.

I also need shirts and really want to try some 1920s style ones, but that'a where the rest of the paralyzing indecision comes in. I may have too many options between the Haslam System, Mary Brooks Picken's drafting system, and Countryman and Hopper's Women's Wear of the 1920s (and their 1930s volume).

How can anyone choose?

Pattern images from the URI Commercial Pattern Database. (COPA is an excellent resource)

Any of these would be relatively easily draftable from a 1920s pattern block. There are even more options in some of my Women's Institute books.

And aprons! I need aprons. And some around the house clothes beyond 1 skirt. And probably some different style skirts because look at those style lines:

There are a few dress patterns I want to try, as well, to see if I like 1920s/early 1930s styles better. Or maybe something mid-1930s.

Going back to my roots, apparently, because my vintage love started with 1920s and 1930s styles, I was just too chicken to wear them in my 20s.

I'm sensing fabric shopping in my future. :)

[professorpski]

The best profit will come from regular customers, because the dressmaker will have learned how to find the styles they like, how to design for them, and how to fit them, and all this knowledge will make it possible for her to produce better garments with less labor.

This advice comes from a 1924 volume, yet it is just as sound today as it was then. I know members of the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals who make the wardrobes of corporate women. Once the customer has worked out a certain cut of pants or jacket as their favorite, they will have more than one made for different seasons, etc. And many women do the same with ready-to-wear: they find one garment that fits perfectly and buy it in multiples or more than one color. As a dressmaker, I have made the same favorite patterns, tweaked to my satisfaction, over and over again.

The Dressmaker and Tailor Shop is one of the Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences correspondence course booklets on a complete course on sewing, all of which were first written by Mary Brooks Picken. She was the first woman to write a dictionary, The Language of Fashion, which is still in print and very useful for vintage terms, and co-founder of the Costume Institute which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

You can find the ASDP here in case you are searching for custom clothing, or certification as a professional: https://sewingprofessionals.com/

[mannlibrary]

Mend and  Make New

Featured in the photographs above is some remarkable hand and sewing-machine stitching done in 1893 by Dorothea Beach, a 6th grader at a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sample is from the archives of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences housed at Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Above: Title page, Lake Placid Conference of Home Economics Proceedings;  photo of Flora Rose (l) and Martha van Rensselaer (r) at a League of Women Voters meeting, Hyde Park, NY, 1920 (from Human Ecology Historical Photographs

The AAFCS was founded as the American Home Economics Association at the Lake Placid Conference of 1909. Participants at the annual conference, who had been meeting annually for 10 years,  were passionate about turning the formerly invisible work of women into vibrant arenas for building creative expertise. For the early pioneers of the field, Cornell’s Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose among them, home economics (also known as domestic science and, later, family and consumer sciences) would be a force for liberation. As a newly emerging field of study in land-grant colleges and other educational institutions, it would help women transform practical skills into creative capacity for finding innovative solutions problems that affect both individuals and society as a whole. A key area for this work was the challenge women faced keeping themselves and their families well clothed, despite the hardships of poverty and crises in the national economy.

Above from top:  Display of garments made from men's shirts arranged by Cornell home economics faculty for Farmers Week, 1919; Display of conserved hats prepared for an exhibit at the New York State Fair, 1918.(Both photos from the Human Ecology Historical Photographs collection). 

Through community workshops, live demonstrations at county fairs, and free publications, home economists have sought over the years to help their communities take on the issue of making, maintaining, and repurposing clothing. Teaching children good stitch work was an important start, but the ultimate goal was to grow this basic skill into a nimble ability to refashion unlikely resources, lean household budgets and thread bare clothes included, into fresh elements of a pleasing wardrobe.

“Keeping Clothes Wearable”, by Gladys L. Butt. Cornell Extension Bulletin 536, October 1942, in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online.  

“Mending Clothes and Household Fabrics,” by Gladys L. Butt. Cornell Extension Bulletin 871, 1954; in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online. 

“First Lessons in Sewing: A Manual for Junior Extension Workers in Clothing,” Cornell Junior Extension Bulletin No. 1, 1918, in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online. 

Page from the handout “Restitch and Renew to Keep Clothes in Use,” by Bernetta Kahabka, Extension Specialist, Cornell University, 1974, in the home economics archives of the Rare and Manuscript Division of Cornell University Library. 

Most of the guides to sewing and stitching shown here are available as part of Mann Library’s online Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH) ,  the Cornell Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA), and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. These online repositories offer valuable (yet free!) resources for anyone interested in re-learning the art of making new from old.  “Upcycling,” a term first coined in the early 1990s, has become a common word as awareness of more sustainable “slow fashion” principles has grown. What does it mean exactly? According to merriam-webster.com, to upcycle is “to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item : to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value).” For (happily) growing numbers of us, upcycling has become a fine craft that combines old traditions and techniques with contemporary style to create uniquely personalized wearable art that also signals a conscious effort to avoid harmful waste and use resources sustainably. With a little bit of mindfulness and maybe some handy “how-to’s found in digitized, freely available historical materials, the old can indeed become some bright new for one and all.

Excerpted from Mann Library’s spring 2023 exhibit, Sustaining Style: Towards Responsible Fashion

Display in Mann Library exhibit, Sustaining Style:Towards Responsible Fashion (March 23 - September 15, 2023)

[sistahscifi]

We love this @ebonymagazine cover featuring @nichellenicholsofficial!! Introduce the children in your life to this incredible woman with TO BOLDLY GO: HOW NICHELLE NICHOLS AND STAR TREK HELPED ADVANCE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by @AngelaDalton_Author and @byLaurenSemmer Reposted from @antique_black_things 1967 - Nichelle Nichols is one of the first Black women to cross the color line by portraying a central character that was not a domestic or nanny. 13-year-old Nichelle was a native of Chicago and had won a scholarship to Chicago’s Art Institute. She worked with oil and canvas. As a young adult, Ms. Nichols liked to sew her own clothes. She was following her dream to be a famous singer when she won the role of Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. Eventually, she was ready to leave Star Trek to pursue her dreams with her new husband and son, Kyle Johnson (who would become a star in Gordon Park’s motion picture, The Learning Tree). On hearing her plans to move on with her life, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King asked her to stay on the show and continue as the role model for young Black women; she agreed to stay. After the show was over, Ms. Nichols devoted herself to recruiting minorities, girls and boys, into science programs and NASA. . #ebonymagazine#ebonymagazinecovers #beautifulwomenofcolor #NichelleNichols #blackisbeautifulmovement #blackactress #blackhistory #blackownedbusiness #blackamericana #blackpaper #blackephemera #blackmagazines #vintageblackactress #nichellenichols #lieutenantuhura #nyotauhura #uhura #legend #icon #actress #startrek #60stv #60smusic (at Sistah Scifi) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck11Qz9Pwap/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[argroup6]

Study MBBS in Bangladesh: A Promising Destination for Medical Aspirants

Bangladesh has developed as a favoured goal for students aspiring to pursue a Lone ranger of Medication and Lone ranger of Surgery (MBBS) degree. With its reasonable expenses, high-quality education, and favourable living conditions, Bangladesh offers an amazing elective to more costly nations. This web journal will explore different angles of examining MBBS in Bangladesh, counting expenses, beat colleges, admission procedures, and the advantages for Indian students.

Why Study MBBS in Bangladesh?

Reasonable Fees: One of the most attractive aspects of studying MBBS in Bangladesh is the fees. The MBBS fees in Bangladesh are altogether lower compared to nations just like the USA, UK, or Australia. This makes it a financially reasonable choice for many students and their families.

Quality Education: The medical educational modules in Bangladesh takes after worldwide guidelines and are recognized by major restorative chambers, counting the Medical Board of India (MCI). The colleges offer state-of-the-art offices, experienced workforce, and comprehensive clinical exposure.

Cultural Similarities: For Indian students, Bangladesh offers a commonplace social and social environment. This makes it easier for students to adjust and feel at domestic.

Language: The medium of instruction for MBBS in Bangladesh is English, which kills dialect boundaries for universal students, especially those from India.

Best Medical Colleges in Bangladesh

Dhaka National Medical College Found in the heart of Dhaka, this college is known for its excellent academic environment and modern offices. Set up in 1994, Dhaka National Medical College has developed to be one of the best medical institutions in Bangladesh.

Medical College for Women and Hospital: This is often a chief institution devoted only to ladies. It gives a conducive learning environment for female students, with world-class infrastructure and experienced workforce.

Bangladesh Medical College: As the first private medical college in the nation, it has set tall measures in medical education. It offers broad down to earth preparing and research openings.

Sir Salimullah Medical College: Known for its wealthy history and academic excellence, Sir Salimullah Medical College is one of the most seasoned and most prestigious medical colleges in Bangladesh.

MBBS Admission in Bangladesh

The admission process for MBBS in Bangladesh is straightforward but competitive. Here a step-by-step guide:

Eligibility Criteria: Indian students must have completed 10+2 with Material science, Chemistry, and Science, securing a minimum of 60% marks. They must moreover qualify for the NEET exam.

Application Process: Students need to apply directly to the universities or through authorised agents. Required reports incorporate scholarly transcripts, NEET scorecard, international id, and later photos.

Admission Test: A few colleges may conduct an admission test or meet as a portion of the choice process.

Visa and Travel: Once admission is confirmed, students must apply for a student visa. It is fitting to begin this process early to avoid any delays.

MBBS Fees in Bangladesh

The fees for MBBS in Bangladesh change depending on the college. Normally, the total taken for the complete course ranges from USD 30,000 to 45,000. This incorporates educational cost expenses, lodging charges, and other different costs. The expenses are ordinarily payable in instalments, making it less demanding for students to manage financially.

Advantages for Indian Students

Proximity to Home: Bangladesh's geological vicinity to India makes it a helpful choice for Indian students. Travel is simple and reasonable, permitting students to visit domestically amid occasions.

MCI Acknowledgement: MBBS degrees from Bangladesh are recognized by the Medical Council of India, permitting graduates to practise in India after clearing the FMGE (Outside Medical Graduate Examination).

Internship Opportunities: Students in Bangladesh have got to various clinical internship openings in well-established hospitals, giving them with profitable practical experience.

Conclusion

Examining MBBS in Bangladesh is a reasonable alternative for students looking for quality medical instruction at a reasonable cost. With its trustworthy medical colleges, such as Dhaka National Medical College and the Medical College for Women and Hospital, Bangladesh stands out as a promising destination for medical aspirants. The direct admission process, reasonable fees, and favourable conditions for Indian students make it an appealing choice. By choosing to think about MBBS in Bangladesh, students can see forward to a fulfilling academic encounter and a shining future in the medical field.

Also Read About—-----------------------------------------------MBBS in Kazakhstan: A Comprehensive Guide for Aspiring Medical Students

[whatsonmedia]

Summer Art Attack: Top 10 Unmissable Exhibitions This Season

Summer is a vibrant time for the art world, with museums and galleries unveiling major exhibitions showcasing a range of artistic movements and voices. From iconic Impressionist works to contemporary social commentary, there's something for everyone. Let's explore some of the most captivating exhibitions happening this summer across the globe: Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism March 24 - July 14, 2024 Musée d’Orsay, Paris, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C Celebrate the 150th anniversary of Impressionism's birth! Witness nearly 130 works by iconic figures like Monet, Morisot, and Renoir. This exhibition explores the social and cultural climate that birthed this revolutionary art movement, defying artistic conventions and capturing fleeting moments of everyday life. Musée d’Orsay website Firelei Báez April 4 - September 2, 2024 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez takes center stage in her first museum survey show. Explore her richly colored, layered works that delve into historical narratives of colonialism and the African diaspora in the Caribbean. Báez's paintings, drawings, and installations draw inspiration from diverse sources, weaving science fiction, folklore, and social history into powerful storytelling and mythmaking. Institute of Contemporary Art Boston website Theaster Gates April 24 - September 1, 2024 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo   This comprehensive solo exhibition offers a deep dive into the multifaceted artistic practice of Theaster Gates. A leading figure in contemporary art, Gates employs sculpture, painting, music, performance, architecture, and design to explore social issues. Witness his renowned "Tar Paintings" series and new creations made specifically for this exhibition. Gates' work emphasizes social practice, questioning urban development and its impact on Black communities. Mori Art Museum website Jenny Holzer: Light Line May 17 - September 29, 2024 Guggenheim Museum, New York Thirty-five years after a groundbreaking show, Jenny Holzer returns to the Guggenheim with an expanded version of "Light Line." This immersive installation utilizes electronic signs displaying scrolling text from her vast repertoire of aphorisms. Holzer's thought-provoking messages address social concerns and encourage public engagement, challenging the concept of truth with a stream-of-consciousness style. This reimagined exhibition arrives in a time of societal discussions surrounding truth, community, and individual freedoms. Expect some of Holzer's earliest works alongside new pieces generated with AI, showcasing her constant artistic evolution. Guggenheim Museum website Mickalene Thomas: All About Love May 25-Sep 29, 2024 The Broad, LA Celebrate Black women through Mickalene Thomas' vibrant art! This major exhibition (over 80 pieces) spans two decades, showcasing her signature style of confident Black women in domestic settings. "All About Love" explores themes of representation across mediums (mixed-media paintings, installations, collages, photography) and centers on love as a healing tool. Expect Thomas to confront historical exclusion of Black bodies in art with references to 19th-century French paintings. The Broad website Leila Babirye: Obumu March 23 - September 8, 2024 Yorkshire Sculpture Park West Yorkshire, UK This compelling solo exhibition marks the museum debut of Ugandan artist Leila Babirye. Taking place in Yorkshire Sculpture Park's 18th-century chapel, "Obumu" presents a series of striking sculptures crafted from wood and ceramic. These works serve as a powerful reflection on Babirye's cultural heritage, personal experiences of exile, and her identity as a LGBTQ+ artist in a country where homosexuality is criminalized. Expect to encounter seven monumental wooden sculptures, alongside five expansive ceramic portraits, each offering a unique perspective. Yorkshire Sculpture Park website Silvia Bächli: Partitura May 11 - October 20, 2024 Centro Botín Santander, Spain This thought-provoking exhibition brings the captivating minimalist works of Swiss artist Silvia Bächli to Spain for the first time. Centro Botín presents a curated selection of Bächli's latest works alongside a selection of her earlier drawings, offering a comprehensive exploration of her artistic practice. Bächli's abstract and minimal drawings are deeply connected to her physical movements, reflecting sensory experiences and bodily gestures. Through simple materials like paper and ink, she creates intricate compositions that invite viewers to contemplate the relationship between lines, physical actions, and emotions. Centro Botín website Britta Marakatt-Labba: Moving the Needle March 15 - August 25, 2024 The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo, Norway) This landmark exhibition celebrates the extensive career of Swedish Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba, presenting a retrospective view of her exquisite textile artistry. "Moving the Needle" is Marakatt-Labba's most comprehensive exhibition to date, taking audiences on a journey through five decades of her creative process. Witness never-before-seen early sketches alongside iconic works like "Garjját / The Crows" and "Girddi noaiddit / Flying Shamans." The exhibition culminates with the breathtaking centerpiece, "Historjá," a monumental 24-meter-long embroidery that intricately weaves together scenes from Sámi history, mythology, and daily life. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design website Pino Pascali March 28 - September 23, 2024 Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy Delve into the playful genius of Italian artist Pino Pascali at Fondazione Prada. This exhibition showcases over 50 sculptures and works that blur the lines between illusion and reality. Encounter Pascali's signature "fake sculptures" alongside a giant blue spider – a whimsical yet thought-provoking exploration of artistic perception. Fondazione Prada website Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes April 19 - August 4, 2024 Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany Celebrate the 250th birthday of Romanticism's master, Caspar David Friedrich, at the Alte Nationalgalerie. Immerse yourself in over 100 of Friedrich's breathtaking landscapes, including iconic works like "Monk by the Sea" and "Abbey in the Oakwood." This exhibition also explores the Nationalgalerie's pivotal role in reviving Friedrich's legacy in the early 20th century. Alte Nationalgalerie website For more update on Art & Culture visit WhatsOn Read the full article

[whennnow]

Making a 1925 Bandeau Brassiere

May 28, 2020

[Image ID: a satiny pink bralette laid flat on a dark background.]

Women's underwear changed a lot at the beginning of the 20th century, as did the fashionable silhouette. Luckily, books for women sewing at home have been preserved and show us what that underwear looked like and how to make it!

In 1925, the Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences published a book on "Underwear and Lingerie" (available digitally through archive.org), which includes patterns for chemises, combinations, drawers, and brassieres. I decided to try my hand at the bandeau brassiere on pages 61-62.

I raided my stash for some scrap fabric (a satiny pink polyester) and some half-inch elastic and got to work!

It's a fairly simple pattern to draft (consisting of two triangles whose base is half your bust measure and whose height is 6-7"). Then you overlap them, use darts to shape the triangles, bind the lower edge, and add straps and elastic in the back.

Ok so things are a bit more finicky than that, but it really wasn't difficult. It only took me three days, but it could have been just one or two if I didn't keep stopping and getting distracted.

My biggest problem was the fact that this pattern is recommended for ladies whose "form is slight' and who have the fashionably flat chest already. I'm... not quite that slight.

So, whereas the book calls for two darts, I needed four - two at the bottom of each triangle, like the pattern says, and two more in the underarm area to stop it from gaping. (This fabric doesn't take pressing well, so the darts don't look great when it's not worn.)

I also topstitched around the overlapped area to hold the two sides together better and keep... everything more secure.

Ultimately, though, this does have a slight "flattening" effect, which might be improved if I knew more about how darts work! It's really comfortable, too, which is always nice and makes it good as a modern bralette.

I'd like to try a variation on this pattern where, instead of using one elastic band in the back, the lower binding (with thin elastic inside) wraps around and hooks or buttons in the front, like on this one and some Kestos bras from the 1930s.

[Image ID: a greyscale illustration of the brassiere taken from the 1925 "Underwear and Lingerie" book. The illustration shows the front and back of the brassiere when worn and is labeled "Fig 55".]

[karina01]

Mirabelle Jones

Mirabelle Jones (they / them) is a queer, non-binary creative technologist, educator, researcher, and transdisciplinary artist focused on the development of interactive and immersive storytelling technologies, educational activism, and ethical AI practices through a lens of intersectional data feminism. In their practice, they design and develop immersive art installations, biofeedback wearables, educational toolkits, mixed reality sculptures, endurance performances, artist’s books, and AI and machine learning-based artworks. They are a PhD candidate at The University of Copenhagen in the Department of Computer Science within the Human-Centered Computing section exploring ethics and AI through creative critical technical practice. They are an affiliate of metaLAB Harvard. They are the founder and curator of AI Performance Space, an online gallery for performance artists around the world working with artificial intelligence. They are a member of Women in Hardware and The Building Trustworthy AI Working Group of Mozilla Festival.

Jones possesses an MFA in Book Art and Creative Writing from Mills College and a BA in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz which informs their narrative-centered creative process. They have taught graduate-level interactive art courses at HackadayU and Codame Art & Tech as well as workshops for metaLAB Harvard, Radiona, Catch: Center for Art, Design, and Technology, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Artsformation among others. Previously, they served as a Senior Designer / Developer of Interactive Technology for the award-winning immersive arts collective Meow Wolf. They are the founder of Art Against Assault, a grassroots initiative encouraging the development of creative works which promote advocacy and raise funds for sexual assault and domestic violence survivor resources. Jones’s works have most recently been featured at Harvard Art Museum, Catch: Center for Art Design and Technology, ATA Gallery, Museum Meermanno, the Center for Performance Research, and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet’s Opera Beyond competition. Their works appear in several collections including the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives and the Center on Contemporary Art’s historic Hear Our Voice (the Women’s March on Washington) collection as well as the special collections libraries of the School of the Art Institute Chicago, Syracuse University, University of California Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mills College, and the University of Northern Texas.

Their performances and visual works have been heralded by the Huffington Post, ArtNet, Ms. Magazine, Techtopia, Ingeniøren, Bustle, ATTN, Refinery29, Mic, Sleek Magazine, Feminist Magazine, Deutsche Welle, Google News, and elsewhere. They have received awards and recognition from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Nordic Summer University, the Pollination Project, the Amplifier Foundation, the KALA Arts Institute Fellowship and the College Book Arts Association. They have been a guest speaker and presenter at arts institutions around the world including MIT, Aalborg University, the University of Gothenburg, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, and Maryland Institute College of the Arts. They are a former Artist-in-Residence of Catch: Center for Art, Design, and Technology, Women’s Studio Workshop, KALA Art Institute, Codame Labs, University of Illinois (Unit One), Hive Gallery, and Arts Everywhere at UNC as well as a former Recurser.

MEOW WOLF SENTIENT SLIME

"Working with lead artist Oliver Polzin, I created a design for the interactive lighting of a group of sculptures throughout Meow Wolf Denver known as Sentient Slime. Using a combination of pressure sensors and RFID interactivity, we were able to incorporate visitor interactions with the slime to see if they were friends or enemies of the slime. Each visitor would receive different lighting and sound interactivity depending on their relationship and a digital storytelling layer provided a riddle for visitors to solve as they interacted with slimes throughout the exhibit."

MEOW WOLF FROG EGG GARDEN

"I had the pleasure of collaborating with Emmanuelle John on the lighting and sound interactivity for floor two of the Cosmohedron, the Frog Egg Garden, of Meow Wolf Denver. This gorgeous space is covered floor to ceiling in textures with embedded lighting giving an impression that is one part amphibious and one part extra terrestrial. Being huge fans of accessibility and spaces for people to rest, we included illuminated and cushioned benches next to large dome windows that look out over the enormous illuminated forest Numia by Caity Kennedy. Emmanuelle and I loved the idea of having small hand-sized sculptures that could work as powerful controllers for sound and lighting not only in the interior of the room but throughout Numia. In the end, we came up with six designs for sculptures, some of which started with Emmanuelle modeling them in clay then I transformed them into 3D sculptures using a combination of scanning and modeling from scratch. These models were then printed in a semi-translucent SLA reminiscent of glass using a Formlabs2. We created casings for these sculptures to hold side emitting LEDs and capacitive touch plates. We embedded the sculptures in the benches with the result that when people placed their hands on the sculptures they could control shifts in the lighting and sound as well as “shoot” light out throughout the forest. When all six of the sculptures were activated, a special environment was activated in the room and outside as well. We also created a wheelchair-height 3D printed ear sculpture with an embedded microphone that would pick up sounds in the room and mix them into the sound throughout the room and throughout Numia."

"Artificial Intimacy is a project that considers what happens when you produce non-normative chatbots based on diverse identities. This interactive installation has three parts: a video installation, two graphic wall hangings, and an interactive chatbot sculpture. The video installation consists of two video screens that depict Leslie Foster: a queer black bisexual artist whose works concern race, indigenous concepts, gender and identity, and Gorjeoux Moon: a trans non-binary femme poet whose works concern trauma, addiction, sex, and gender, conversing with chatbot versions of themselves. The chatbots were consensually trained on a dataset based on Foster and Moon’s social media profiles. The second part of the installation, the wall hangings, are made of a semi-translucent mesh in a gradient of mauve and gold. They depict silhouettes of Foster and Moon alongside quotes from the video. The third part of the installation is a 3D-printed interactive chatbot sculpture that allows you to talk to either Foster or Moon’s chatbot in a conversation of your choosing."

"The three parts of the installation combine to help the viewer explore: what happens when LGBTQAI and BIPOC individuals become the basis for chatbots? What non-normative values do the chatbots represent and how are these incorporated? The project interrogates gendered and racialized alternatives to normative voice assistant programs through two individuals while asking: what values are incorporated into voice assistant programs and how do these values manifest? It also considers: can we create digital copies of ourselves based on our data alone? As well as exploring subsequent questions such as: how much data is necessary and of what type to make a realistic replica? Do we prefer these kinds of models to normative chatbot systems? If the data is of us, but not us, what exactly separates us from our data?"

[fatehbaz]

the racism and imperial ambitions of Kew Gardens, plant-collecting expeditions, major scientific institutions of Europe, especially between 1700 and 1900, etc., were merely “covert”? just a little bit “problematic”?

The Natural History Museum is planing to review its collections following fears from museum bosses that they could cause offence. A review has been commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which will include an audit of the statues, rooms and individual items which staff members think show "legacies of colonies, slavery and empire".

In documents [...], the executive board told staff the museum would undertake a review into room names, statues and collections [...]. According to the paper, one curator said "science, racism and colonial power were inherently entwined", and that any collections deemed "problematic" could be renamed or even removed. [...]

It is thought the review will look at the Charles Darwin collection, whose trip to the Galapagos Islands on HMS Beagle was cited by a curator as one of Britain's many "colonialist scientific expeditions". The documents said “museums were put in place to legitimise a racist ideology”, and that “covert racism, exists in the gaps between the displays”. However, speaking to The Standard, a spokesperson for The Natural History Museum said: "Recently we started a review to better understand the history of our institution as a historical and contemporary global collection of natural history specimens.”

Headline, photo, tw!tt*r screencap, and text from: Duffield. “Natural History Museum is due to review ...” Evening Standard. 7 September 2020.

----

Stuff:

- Charles Darwin considered Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego as less intelligent/sentient than domesticated dogs; Carl Linnaeus explicitly and directly plotting colonization and calling Southeast Asian, Latin American Indigenous, and Chinese people “barbaric”, “poor”, etc.

-  The tale of breadfruit domestication, the mutiny on the Bounty, and plantation owners plotting with Kew Gardens to take plants from Indigenous Polynesians and domesticate crops to undermine slave gardens in the Caribbean.

–  “Ghostly non-places; settler-colonial hallucinations and fantasy visions; monstrous plants and animals; hiding, destroying, re-making ecological worlds; permanent cataclysm; the horror of settlement”: Anna Boswell on settler-colonial agriculture/ecology and the role of scientific institutions in legitimating imperial constructions of “new worlds.”

– Conflating women with “bloodthirsty” and “flesh-eating” plants, and the dehumanization of Indigenous cultures through the scientific illustrations of imperial scientific agents and artistic depictions of plants from colonized ecosystems (Euro-American art/botany, 1700s to early 1900s).

- When naturalists from Kew Gardens tried to import marsupials from Australia in order to naturalize the kangaroo to English ecosystems in an attempt build imperial/nationalist identity and pride by demonstrating how the English countryside is friendly, perfect, superior, welcoming to life, unlike the dangerous tropical landscapes at Empire’s frontier (1790s to 1850s).

- Scientists and land managers of Canadian federal government attempting to expand control over the Arctic/sub-Arctic by purposely killing caribou herds to weaken Indigenous autonomy before importing European reindeer to better control Indigenous foodsheds. (1890s to 1930s.)

-  How the gardens, horticulture, and food markets of poor/dispossessed/enslaved in the Caribbean allowed autonomous food networks to exist and undermine plantation owners. (Late 1700s, early 1800s.)

- Grasses, seed merchants, and “the Empire’s dairy farm” in Aotearoa. (European agriculture in late 19th and early 20th centuries.) And: The role of grasslands, deforestation, and English grasses in ecological imperialism in Aotearoa, early 20th century.

- The Scottish-born chief coroner of Adelaide who robbed graves, dissected bodies, and took the skulls of at least 180 Aboriginal people for his home collection. (1900-ish to 1920-ish.)

- Pineapple, breadfruit, and plantations “doing the work of Empire” in Hawaii.

- Mapuche people, Valdivian temperate rainforest, and Chilean/European state plots to colonize Valdivia by dismantling the rainforest to undermine Mapuche autonomy and to create “Swiss or German pastoral farm landscape”.

-  Carl Linnaeus and botanists’ racism against India and Latin America, and the use of botanic gardens to acquire knowledge as an exercise of “soft empire.”

- How Atomic Energy Commission and academic ecologists from the US knowingly and purposely used Polynesian/Micronesian people as human test subjects and profited off of nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific. (Contains many direct quotes from the scientists. Extremely graphic.)

- Dandelions, other non-native plants, and settler gardens changing soil of the Canadian Arctic. (Late 1800s and early 1900s.)

- European botanic gardens in 18th-/19th-century Mexico and Central America as a tool of imperialism and knowledge systematization. (“Botany began as atechnoscope – a way to visualize at-a-distance – but, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was already a  teletechnique –  a way to act at-a-distance.”)

- Memes for when you see a mention of “Joseph Banks” or “Kew Gardens” in any magazine, academic article, museum exhibit, documentary, or something.

- “Fugitive seeds”: Seed-keeping and plant knowledge among Black communities in the US as an alternative current of thought compared to the scientific racism of 19th century scientific institutions.

- How European botanists experimented under the reign of Leopold in the Belgian Congo before transplanting African oil palm to Southeast Asia to establish the first major oil palm plantations; today, 100 years later, oil palm monoculture ravages Southeast Asia and the same plantation company still owns property across Africa.

-  Wild rice, “cottage colonialism” in Canada, imaginative control, the power of names and naming plants. (1780 to present.) And: Kew Gardens plotting to take Native strains of wild rice and domesticate them for cheap and profitable consumption in other imperial British colonies.

- Calcutta  Botanic Gardens abduction and use of Chinese slaves; Kew Gardens (successfully) plotting to steal cinchona from people of Bolivia to service their staff in India; botanic gardens’ role in large-scale dispossession to create plantations in Assam and Ooty (1790s - 1870s).

[dwellordream]

“If girls’ private schools encouraged an intimate atmosphere of nurture, sociability, and fun, much coeducational public schooling retained its competitive practices and was more challenging. Opponents of coeducation argued that the presence of girls feminized and compromised the secondary curriculum. But evidence suggests the contrary: that expectations of male achievement raised the stakes and the competition for girls.

As it was put in an 1841 article in Ladies’ Repository, in many young ladies’ seminaries ‘‘the girl is excused of strict scholarship. . . . She works to disadvantage. The mind itself has not been educated.’’ In contrast to girls educated at such ‘‘finishing schools,’’ the author argued, ‘‘see here and there is one who, we may say, has been educated—who has studied like a boy’’ and you will see ‘‘equality of attainment with any male youth of like years and pursuit.’’ 

Encouraging a girl to study ‘‘like a boy’’ was seldom the goal of the citizens who sponsored secondary schools; coeducational secondary schools which taught ostensibly parallel classes for boys and girls did not always deliver classes of like intensity to both. And sometimes, especially in the earlier days, there were different requirements for girls and boys. …Public schools sometimes attempted to soften lessons for girls so as to address the concerns raised by the debate over emulation.

Nonetheless, in comparison, the point seems indisputable. Girls studying in coeducational secondary schools were more likely to participate in a competitive and meritocratic form of schooling which rewarded and encouraged individual achievement among both girls and boys. Such schools published class rank and scheduled public exhibitions. Evidence from the few coeducational private boarding schools suggests that this might have been the case for both public and private, day and boarding schools. 

Coeducation in practice in the nineteenth century included various arrangements governing the schooling of girls and boys together and apart. The word itself was of American origin and set up an implicit contrast with the tradition of same-sex schooling in Great Britain and in many parts of the American Northeast and South. Common grammar schools united boys and girls in the same classes under the same roofs, and many secondary schools adopted a similar model. Yet the ‘‘coeducating’’ of boys and girls in secondary schools, and sometimes even in grammar schools, generally involved some separation of boys and girls, by administrative order. 

As we have seen, some high schools, particularly in the Northeast, went so far as to conduct parallel classes for girls and boys, using gender as a principle for dividing students into different sections for as long as they could. Gradually, however, throughout the country, school districts bowed to economic realities and chose to educate their boys and girls together, offering a common curriculum and a common standard for success. For those attending the new public high schools, which became increasingly common in the Northeast at midcentury, coeducational schooling meant attending schools which enrolled more girls than boys. 

The actual ratio varied from school to school. Where the public high school served as a college preparatory school for the affluent native-born, the numbers of boys tended to increase. In less affluent or immigrant communities, boys instead would leave school to take jobs, and high schools would sometimes graduate two or even three girls for every boy. The underattendance of boys at high schools was a cause of regular lament by all, including girl students who were left without escorts after school social functions. Yet it presents the historian of gender with some interesting questions. Some of them are simply statistical. Did girls excel and win honors proportionate to their greater attendance at high school? Did they excel at greater rates than the statistics might predict? And if so, why? 

Girls and boys attending public high schools shared a liberal curriculum, competition, and grades. Unlike female seminaries and convent schools, which taught ornamental and domestic arts alongside more traditional liberal studies, the public high school at midcentury and after did not offer a gendered curriculum. Instead, it taught a classical or liberal curriculum, rich in history, moral philosophy, mathematics, Latin, Greek, and French. Botany, chemistry, and physical sciences were also often taught. Girls and boys took these classes either together or in separate tracks, a significant commonality in a world otherwise stratified by gender. 

Increasingly toward the end of the century, citizens and educators came to question the usefulness of this classical learning to boys and girls attempting to make their way in the working world. And when high schools responded, they brought the gender segmentation of the workforce into school. Commercial subjects supplemented liberal studies, and educators provided manual training and home economics to prepare boys and girls for the future. Even then, though, high schools retained an important core of liberal studies, which established common ground between boys and girls, as well as across classes. In high schools, girls and boys studied together and competed to master abstract subject matter which neither sex could lay special claim to. 

In studying North Carolina’s African-American community in the 1890s, Glenda Gilmore has noted the significance of its leaders’ dissent from the Tuskegee program of agricultural education and manual training advanced by Booker T. Washington. She sees their defense of a classical curriculum for the children and grandchildren of slaves as significant resistance to attempts to create a separate caste in this country under Jim Crow.

Classical education was similarly important for girls, for it offered a common ground on which to compete and succeed beyond the hierarchy of gender. The practice of recitation, saying one’s lessons orally, was not initially designed as a competitive practice. It was simply the most convenient way to test rote memory, the common style of teaching and learning in most grammar schools in the nineteenth century. Yet recitation meant that all would know when a student succeeded, and when one failed. 

More deliberate was the spelling bee, a competition that was both a game and a pedagogy. Some schools held public examinations, which elevated the pressure to ‘‘know one’s lessons’’ to a higher degree. Almost all schools scheduled exhibition days in which students read or recited pieces to the general public and received awards. (In fact, the decision of the cloistered convent schools to bar the public from the awarding of prizes in the mid–nineteenth century was a cause of conflict with parents.) The consequences of such a system for teenage girl students, as for boy students, were that strong students thrived while weak ones foundered. This is an obvious result, of course. Yet in the world of Victorian gender relations, what is significant is that girls and boys were playing fundamentally the same game, both competing in the rough meritocracy that such competition encouraged. 

At least initially and sometimes later as well, they were not equally comfortable with that competition: domestic culture discouraged self-promotion in girls, and successful girls were sometimes abashed and embarrassed. Sometimes, too, parents did not notice, honor, or encourage girls’ school accomplishments. …But within the universe of the schoolroom and at schoolwide ceremonies (neither insignificant for a peer based social world), girl scholars were encouraged and rewarded for achievement—for scoring high, for spelling well, for accomplishments of both mind and habit. They felt the sweet rewards of victory in conquering rivals, earning respect, and taking as prizes a seat at the front of the room. 

These school rules made the institution unique within a woman’s life as it extended from cradle to grave. Not in the family or the workplace or the halls of government did females and males share so similar an experience. Even within the church, where souls were ungendered, women did not preach, sit as deacons, or otherwise live out their identities as equal competitors for eternity. 

Coeducational grammar and secondary schools made all kinds of distinctions, and even those who encouraged girls to compete might in the same breath warn against it. Yet medals were awarded and reputations made in coeducational high schools. Of all the unequal institutions, such schools were the least unequal, and thus must stand as both an important harbinger of the future and a transformer, gradually, of their present.

Girls outnumbered boys in school. Barring other factors skewing accomplishments, girls could thus be expected to outnumber boys on the honor rolls. All things being equal, girls should have been salutatorians and valedictorians and honor-roll students in percentages similar to their representation in the class. In fact, though, girls tended to do better proportionately than boys. Statistics on one school, the high school of Milford, Massachusetts, reveal that between 1884 and 1900 girls represented 64 percent of graduates, a ratio of nearly two to one. But girls accounted for nearly three-quarters of those graduating in the top ten places during the late century.

When valedictorians and salutatorians were designated, beginning in 1889, 86 percent of those so honored through the next decade were girls. Girls’ tendency to dominate the academic ratings was an accepted part of the school’s culture and can undoubtedly be explained in part by Milford’s policy, probably followed by many other schools as well, of granting honors on the basis of scholarship and deportment together. 

Deportment grades measured decorum and tractability; both by socialization and reputation, girls could be counted on to turn in higher performances. Usually there were a few male standouts, but sometimes it was a clean sweep. In the class of 1887 at Milford, for example, boys were completely eclipsed. The class began with an equal number of boys and girls, thirty-one each. By the end of the four year span, though, the numbers had been dramatically reduced to twelve girls and five boys.

The student newspaper announced: ‘‘The girls claim the first ten in scholarship and deportment. In attendance three girls are perfect and in deportment eight; of these, two have the honor of being perfect in both.’’ The article ended by noting, ‘‘These are facts of which they may well feel proud.’’ The reference here is a bit unclear. Perhaps it was referring to the individual girls who had triumphed, each of whom should feel proud. But a more plausible reference is to girls of the class as a group, all of whom, the article suggests, might take pride in their sex’s collective sweep of graduation honors. 

How much of girls’ success can be attributed to their greater skill at achieving perfect conduct? For girls, for whom ‘‘being good’’ was a high priority, school offered any number of ways to fulfill that mandate. If being ‘‘perfect’’ simply required getting to school every day, or behaving once in school, it was certainly doable—a gratifyingly concrete measure for an otherwise elusive moral status.

Almyra Hubbard, a schoolgirl diarist in Hayesville, New Hampshire, wrote in 1859 of her discovery of this back door to school achievement. She knew that she worked hard; her journal, a school assignment itself written faithfully in a careful hand, indicates as much. Yet she did not get top grades and did not seem to be one of the handful of students she mentioned in February who would need to draw to see who got the first seat in the class. She could, however, make sure she got to class—a trip that took her an hour and a half when she walked it—and she seized upon this route to class honor. 

One day, she wrote in her journal, ‘‘There are but few scholars here this afternoon. The room is quite still.’’ The quietness was not just a result of how many were there, but who was there: ‘‘As a general thing the noisy ones do not venture out in unpleasant weather.’’ Almyra Hubbard was both quiet and present, even when her classmates were fair-weather scholars.

When she attended her great uncle’s funeral in April, it was the first time she had missed school in a year and a half. In May the school principal adopted a new rule which advantaged Hubbard, ‘‘by which any one who is absent cannot make up her lessons.’’ She imagined, ‘‘It will cause some of the girls to be a little more regular in their attendance at school.’’ One key component of school success, as Almyra Hubbard had discovered early, was simply the ability to meet school demands for the regular habits of industrial discipline. 

Girls outdid boys in this arena so regularly that when the Milford paper in 1890 reported on two students with perfect attendance throughout their high school careers, it featured what was newsworthy: ‘‘Wonderful to relate, one is a boy!’’ Not all girls had stellar grades in deportment. A consistent problem for boy and girl students both was ‘‘communication.’’ Students in many schools were forbidden to talk among themselves between classes and expected to be quiet most other times, an expectation which few could meet. The entire first-year class at Milford High School in 1865 was called to the teacher’s desk and scolded so that they nearly all cried, Annie Roberts Godfrey reported. 

Godfrey was in the second-year class, and was also called up, where she ‘‘acknowledged that I had communicated but would try to improve. I did not cry.’’ The next year, though, Godfrey’s problems with communication meant that her deportment grade was very low—‘‘only 78, lowest in school, I fear.’’ We have no records for how Godfrey fared at graduation, but clearly convent schools were not alone in attempting to impose serious constraints on student sociability during school itself. It was an innovation in 1894 when Salem High School instituted a ‘‘whispering recess,’’ which allowed students to talk softly between classes. 

- Jane H. Hunter, “Competitive Practices: Sentiment and Scholarship in Secondary Schools.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.  

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs  - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of  valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

[wellpresseddaisy]

Hilariously (in light of the poll calling people 26+ old), I had to stop working on my foundation pattern draft today because leaning over the table that long aggravated my lower back.

(It likes to sieze up every so often, mostly due to hormonal imbalance and me not stretching as well as I should. The table is also not quite the right height for me to work on.)

On the bright side, the Picken Square really does make it easy to draft a foundation pattern. Once I figured out what the instructions were telling me I was in business.

[professorpski]

Pants as Pajamas, 1921

One of the hardest ideas to get your mind around today is that women were not supposed to wear pants outside of certain situations for the first half of the 20th Century. The 19th Century discussion about women in pants evolved around woman’s rights as skirts were often long, voluminous, and often made little sense for certain kind of activities. By the end of the century, women reformers would also point out that voluminous skirts and petticoats meant women were more likely to drown than men during misadventures at sea. Pants crept into women’s wardrobes slowly and were considered appropriate only for sports and playwear, for dirty chores, and for at-home wear like these pajamas until the 1960s.

These pajamas are one sleeping option found in the Underwear and Lingerie booklet published by the Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences in 1921. They clearly were not the most common choice as they were preceded by multiple version of nightgowns, started with the simple cut-on sleeve kimono, the tucked yoke, raglan sleeved, and then three versions made of lace. The pajamas are far plainer than all but the simplest nightgown and only blanket stitching along the edges is suggested.

They may have been counting on the fabric itself doing much of the work of ornamentation as they write, “figured cottons and silks or striped flannelette may be employed with excellent effect....” So, playing with stripes--one of my favorite activities--or with a print may have been the favorite choice. As pajamas were considered more modern and more sporty, that kind of playfulness would have been part of their appeal.

[husheduphistory]

Evil in Arkansas: The Shattered Hopes and Horrors of the Crescent Hotel

When people arrived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas in May 1886 the excitement was palpable in the air. After two years of construction a new hotel was opening, but this was no typical boarding house. This hotel promised luxury, and it delivered. Large and airy rooms, an extravagant dining area, opulent gardens, swimming pools, tennis courts, fine linen, stables, and impressive landscapes all set the stage for a dream-like experience. It opened on such a positive note, but in 1940 when the owner walked out the doors for the last time they left a house of horror behind them.

The Crescent Hotel was an architectural marvel strategically placed amid natural wonders. The waters of the Ozarks were becoming known all over the nation for having alleged healing powers and the Eureka Springs Improvement Company, founded by the former Governor of Arkansas, knew the best way to get people to visit was to give them a place to stay. After two years of construction the hotel opened with a bang in the form of a gala ball, a full orchestra, and a banquet dinner for four hundred of the country’s most prestigious all traveling to Arkansas to experience what the Eureka Springs Times Echo called “America’s most luxurious resort hotel.” The opening night entertained former governors and the Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine, but one person not mentioned was “Michael”, the Irish mason who fell to his death inside the building during construction.

The Crescent Hotel circa 1886.

As much as people enjoyed the parties and extravagance, it was not enough to keep a steady stream of visitors coming through the doors. When it became increasingly clear that nearly sixty natural springs in the region did not actually wield any healing abilities the reservations dried up leaving the future of the Crescent Hotel in question. Unable to keep its seventy-eight rooms full of tourists, the hotel transitioned into the Crescent College & Conservatory for Young Women in 1908. It became one of the most exclusive boarding schools in the country for “fine young ladies” while still functioning as a resort during the summer months. Newspapers advertised the school as having “Preparatory and College courses. Certificate privilege. Music. Art. Expression. Domestic Science. 23 new pianos. New $2,000 Kimball pipe organ. $300,000 fireproof building, elevator, rooms with private bath. Horseback riding is a prominent feature of life at the college.” The perks were printed, advertised, and sung for all to know. What was kept more quiet was that allegedly in the early years of the Conservatory a young woman fell to her death from one of the top-story windows. With the 1930s came the Great Depression and like the fate of the hotel before it, the money coming in was not enough to sustain it and the school closed in 1934.

Residents of the Crescent College & Conservatory for Young Women. Image via https://crescent-hotel.com/history.shtml 

On Thanksgiving Day 1925 the residents of Muscatine, Iowa had their radio stations tuned in to KTNT and were hearing the voice of Norman Baker for the first time. Baker, a former machinist, performance artist, and art instructor, had recently landed a license for a 500-watt station greatly due to his promises to “popularize Muscatine, Iowa throughout the world.” He knew his audience, a rural population that was deeply suspicious of “big business”, and his message became us -vs- them with Baker claiming he was in the corner of the rural people, launching venomous attacks on air against corporate trusts, Wall Street, and the American Medical Association, just to name a few. Strategically laced into the tirades were advertisements for the many mail order products Baker was selling to his audience. By 1929 Baker was already wealthy and well known, but then he heard about the doctor.

For many years Baker was a vocal critic of medical professionals and when he heard about Dr. Charles Ozias and his cancer sanitorium in Kansas City he declared on air that he was going to investigate. According to Baker, cancer was caused by aluminum products and surgeons looking to remove the disease from the body were only “cutters” looking for a payday. He announced that he was looking for five volunteers to be treated in Kansas City. The spots were quickly filled and in the spring and summer of 1929 they were treated by Dr. Ozias. By the fall of that year Baker was piecing together his new magazine, TNT, and in it he was planning a feature declaring that cancer did not require surgery, that a series of injections was the secret to curing the disease. By January 1930 he acquired an elixir recipe from Dr. Ozais and was freely proclaiming in his publication that the treatment was a success and that everyone could rest easy now knowing that cancer could be cured by his mixture of glycerin, carbolic acid, alcohol, brown corn silk, clover leaves, and a “tea” brewed from watermelon seeds. In the same year he opened his own hospital, the Baker Institute in Muscatine, a place he claimed could cure cancer easily and effectively. His words, advertisements, and creeds were all positive, but they were also blatant lies. What the public did not know was that none of the five volunteers were recovering. In December 1929 the first volunteer died and was quickly followed by the other four, all leaving their money to line Baker’s silk pockets.

Norman Baker. Image via Grossheim Collection/Musser Public Library/https://muscatinejournal.com/

In April 1930 Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, came for Baker, his hospital, and his bogus “cures” for cancer that were killing people at an alarming rate. The response from Baker was furious and the result was a war of words filled with vitriol, accusations, and extravagant lies. In April 1930 the Journal of the American Medical Association stated:

“What is Mr. Baker doing with the money that he is snaring from the pockets of sufferers with cancer and wheedling from the funds of chiropractors, naturopaths, nostrum promoters and other medical malcontents? The viciousness of Mr. Baker’s broadcasting lies not in what he says about the American Medical Association but in the fact that he induces sufferers from cancer who might have some chance for their lives, if seen early and properly treated, to resort to his nostrum.”

Baker responded with a $500,000 lawsuit against the American Medical Association for defamation while also claiming that they sent armed assassins to kill him, assassins that he successfully fought off in a shootout. On May 12th 1930 he held an outdoor “demonstration” of his cancer cure, drinking a large amount of the concoction before performing open air surgery on a sixty-eight year old man he claimed had cancerous tissue on his brain. Before tens of thousands of people he opened the man's skull and applied his elixir before declaring “Cancer is cured.” People flocked to him. By the end of 1930 he had made today’s equivalent of 4.8 million dollars off of people’s suffering.

While business boomed for Baker the American Medical Association continued their fight, debunking his open-air demonstration and slamming his broadcasts using scientific fact against him. Finally, at the end of May 1931 his broadcast license was revoked and a warrant was issued for his arrest for practicing medicine without a license. Baker fled the state and spent some time in Mexico before returning to Iowa, serving one day in jail for his medical practice, and making an unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat. He left Iowa but in 1937 he resurfaced in Eureka Springs as the new owner of the Crescent Hotel.

The Crescent Hotel was reopened as Baker Hospital and the horrors immediately resumed. Claiming he could cure cancer and aided by the “healing springs” surrounding his “Castle in the Sky” thousands of people went to him, excitedly putting their lives directly into his deadly hands. Baker peddled multiple elixirs and advertised that they, along with fresh air, healthy food, and exercise were “proven” to cure cancer. With all its promises, its setting on a high hill overlooking the Ozarks, and its lavender and purple painted walls the Baker Hospital probably seemed like a soothing oasis when in fact what lay behind the doors was pure evil.

Baker Hospital advertisement. Image via https://crescent-hotel.com/history.shtml

Baker took in patients that had money and no nearby family, forcing them to sign papers willing all of their money and belongings to him should something happen to them. He also forced their signature on letters to be sent out at a later date stating that their health was vastly improving. He advertised treatments of elixirs and exercise but he left out that he also included drilling holes in patient’s skulls, painful injections, and brutal surgeries allegedly carried out in the dank basement. Those patients suffering and screaming were whisked away to the sealed off “psychiatric ward”, far from the eyes and ears of those touring the facility before unknowingly signing away a life to a madman. Relatives of patients would receive the pre-signed letters from their family members stating their improving health before finally getting one from Baker, regretfully informing them of their family member peacefully passing and requesting money to handle their final affairs. The money went into his pocket and the bodies were disposed of secretly while some pieces of those who passed before them rested in multiple jars stacked in the morgue and buried outside.

For approximately two years Baker preyed on the sick, unaware that he was being investigated by federal authorities. On September 1st 1939 Baker was finally arrested but the charge was not for medical malpractice, it was for mail fraud for sending out brochures claiming he had a cure for cancer.

On January 24th 1940 Baker appeared in court where he and two other employees of the Baker Hospital were convicted. Baker was fined $4,000 and sentenced to serve four years at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. It was determined at his trial that Baker made approximately four million dollars from the dying patients. It is unknown exactly how many people lost their lives because of Norman Baker and his hospital.

Mugshot of Norman Baker. Image via https://crescent-hotel.com/history.shtml 

Baker was released from prison on July 19, 1944 after serving four years during which he stated “If I could keep my radio station open, I would make a million dollars out of the suckers of the states.” He moved to Florida where he lived until his death in 1958.

From 1940 to 1946 the hotel sat empty before passing through several hands and suffering a massive fire in 1967. On February 28th 1997 the building was purchased by current owners, member of the Roenigk family, who committed to a plan to restore the Crescent Hotel to its former glory. Today the Crescent Hotel offers guests fifteen acres of trails and gardens, guest rooms with balconies, fine dining, a swimming pool, and the New Moon Spa. Another feature of the Crescent Hotel draws heavily on its tragic past, the ghost tours. Considered “America’s Most Haunted Hotel” the guests of the Crescent frequently report sightings of apparitions, doors slamming on their own, disembodied voices, unexplained sounds and strange sensations. Some report seeing Baker, others report watching nurses walking down the hall, but others report activity that they attribute to Michael the Irish mason or to the women who called the former school home. 

The Crescent Hotel circa 2014. Image via Alan Islas https://commons.wikimedia.org/

While the horrors of the hotel are available to all guests through tours, the history archives on the fourth floor, and a Walking Tour Book available at the front desk, the man responsible for it all lays in a grave nearly 500 miles away in Muscatine, Iowa where he first planted the seeds of his monstrous medical scheme.  

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

Grave of Norman Baker in Muscatin, Iown. Image via Findagrave.com.

****************************

Sources:

The 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa https://crescent-hotel.com/history.shtml

Legends of America: The Haunted Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ar-crescenthotel/ 

Historic Hotels of America https://www.historichotels.org/us/hotels-resorts/1886-crescent-hotel-and-spa/history.php 

Newspapers.com

FindAGrave.com

[argroup6]

Pursuing MBBS in Maharashtra: Your Gateway to Excellence

Embarking on a journey to pursue a Lone ranger of Pharmaceutical, Lone ranger of Surgery (MBBS) degree may be a noteworthy turning point in any aspiring doctor's life. Among the plenty of alternatives accessible in India, Maharashtra stands out as a conspicuous goal for medical education, eminent for its top-tier medical colleges and colleges. In this comprehensive guide, we dive into the subtleties of examining MBBS in Maharashtra, counting expenses, best medical colleges, and eminent medical colleges for Indian students.

Study MBBS in Maharashtra

Maharashtra gloats a wealthy embroidered artwork of educational education, making it an alluring goal for students trying to pursue MBBS. With its dynamic culture, state-of-the-art offices, and famous staff, Maharashtra offers a conducive environment for academic and individual development.

MBBS Fees in Maharashtra

One of the essential contemplations for trying medical students is the taking a toll of education. In Maharashtra, MBBS expenses shift over education and categories. By and large, government medical colleges offer subsidised educational cost expenses for neighbourhood inhabitants, making them a reasonable choice for many students. Private medical colleges, on the other hand, may have higher educational costs. Be that as it may, grants, gifts, and budgetary help alternatives are accessible to eligible students, facilitating the money related burden of pursuing MBBS in Maharashtra.

Best Medical Colleges in Maharashtra

A few regarded medical colleges in Maharashtra are synonymous with excellence in medical instruction. Among them, the taking after colleges stand out:

Maharashtra University of Wellbeing Sciences (MUHS): MUHS could be a head institution devoted to advancing higher education in wellbeing sciences. With its comprehensive educational programs, state-of-the-art framework, and research openings, MUHS offers an enhancing learning involvement for MBBS students.

DY Patil College, Pune: DY Patil College is famous for its world-class medical education programs. The university's medical college in Pune, DY Patil Medical College, could be a favoured choice for many aspiring specialists due to its modern offices, experienced staff, and accentuation on common sense learning.

Symbiosis Medical College for Women, Pune: Advantageous interaction Worldwide College may be an all inclusive recognized institution known for its intrigue approach to instruction. Symbiosis Medical College for Women, subsidiary with the university, offers an all encompassing learning environment for female medical hopefuls, cultivating academic brilliance and administration aptitudes.

Bharati Vidyapeeth Regarded College, Pune: Bharati Vidyapeeth Regarded College could be a conspicuous title within the field of medical education. Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College Pune, a constituent college of the college, is committed to supporting competent healthcare experts through its thorough academic programs and clinical preparation openings.

Striking Medical Colleges in Maharashtra

In expansion to the previously mentioned colleges, Maharashtra is domestic to a few trustworthy medical colleges that cater to the differing needs of Indian students. A few outstanding medical colleges incorporate:

DY Patil Medical College, Pune: Subsidiary with DY Patil College, DY Patil Medical College is eminent for its state-of-the-art foundation, experienced workforce, and hands-on clinical preparation openings. The college is committed to creating competent and compassionate healthcare experts prepared to meet the advancing healthcare challenges of the 21st century.

Symbiosis Medical College for Women, Pune: As a portion of Symbiosis Universal College, Beneficial interaction Medical College for Ladies is committed to enabling female medical students and cultivating sexual orientation uniformity within the field of pharmaceuticals. The college offers a steady learning environment, advanced offices, and investigates openings to support future ladies pioneers in healthcare.

Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College Pune: Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College Pune could be a prestigious institution known for its academic greatness, clinical preparing offices, and research activities. The college is committed to all encompassing education, emphasising moral values, social obligation, and proficient keenness among its students.

MGM Medical College, Aurangabad: Mahatma Gandhi Mission Medical College in Aurangabad could be a famous medical institution known for its comprehensive educational programs, experienced staff, and clinical exposure. The college is devoted to creating talented healthcare experts competent in addressing the healthcare needs of society with compassion and competence.

Datta Meghe Medical College, Nagpur: Datta Meghe Medical College in Nagpur could be a driving medical institution committed to excellence in education, research, and healthcare conveyance. With its present day framework, well-equipped research facilities, and clinical preparing offices, the college offers a conducive learning environment for aspiring specialists.

MBBS Admission in Maharashtra

Admission to MBBS programs in Maharashtra is essentially based on execution in national-level entrance exams such as NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test). Eligible candidates must meet the endorsed qualification criteria and qualify the entrance exam to secure admission to their favoured medical college or college in Maharashtra. Also, candidates may ought to fulfil domicile requirements and other criteria indicated by the particular teacher.

Conclusion

Studying MBBS in Maharashtra offers a door to academic excellence, professional growth, and individual fulfilment for trying specialists. With its regarded medical colleges, trustworthy colleges, and dynamic educational environment, Maharashtra gives a conducive environment for sustaining the following era of healthcare experts. Whether it's DY Patil Medical College in Pune, Symbiosis Medical College for Women, or Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College Pune, the state offers a bunch of openings for Indian students to set out on their journey towards a satisfying career in pharmaceuticals.

[wearejapanese]

By Yuka Nakao, KYODO NEWS

After several high-profile incidents in recent years highlighted Japan's problems with sexism, a Japanese women's studies pioneer has been presented a special recognition from Finland, a leading country in promoting gender equality.

Chizuko Ueno, a sociologist and a prominent feminist figure in Japan, was one of the first 16 recipients from around the world to receive the Han Honours. She was acknowledged for her "tirelessly and fearlessly" work toward gender equality, according to the Finland Promotion Board.

Through her research, books and activities, Ueno has continuously provoked debates in issues including gender discrimination and sexual violence.

In April, Ueno gave an impassioned and unfiltered speech at the University of Tokyo matriculation ceremony, in which she said the nation's top university is not immune from gender problems and, like any major institution, reflects society's tendency to discriminate against women.

The 70-year-old scholar, who is also a chief director of NPO Women's Action Network, pointed out that less than 20 percent of students entering the University of Tokyo are female. This is despite there being plentiful evidence that female applicants have higher standard scores than their male competitors.

Ueno said one reason for the discrepancy is the gender discrimination that is inherent in the education investment decisions made by Japanese parents. Traditionally, sons are expected to attend university while daughters will often be enrolled in junior colleges.

Even Todai female students feel compelled to conform to Japanese social norms. Ueno gave the example of such students hiding the fact that they were able to enter the prestigious institution in order not to show up male students from other universities, but when the roles are reversed, male students are happy to boast.

She also referred to a criminal case in which five male students sexually abused a female student that attended a private university. One of the accused said during his court hearing that he had looked down on women because they are "stupid."

Ueno reminded newly enrolled students who prevailed against their peers in the fierce entrance exams that they can thank their good circumstances as much as their hard work for them getting to where they are. She said they were lucky to have people around them who encouraged them, supported them, lent a helping hand, and recognized their accomplishments.

"There are people whose drive is dampened even before they try because of negative comments or thoughts like 'You won't succeed no matter what' or 'After all, nobody believes in me,'" she said. "I hope you won't focus your efforts only to win the game for yourself."

"I hope you will use your gifted talents and favorable environment to help those who are less fortunate, and do not denigrate them. And I hope you live your life by accepting who you are even with your weaknesses and by helping and supporting each other," she continued.

The scholar told Kyodo News that, at first, she thought of declining the offer to give the speech.

After considering the social situation in Japan and learning that there were people in the university who worked hard to nominate her, she decided to go ahead.

Ueno said no one tried to intervene in or censor her speech, in which, when explaining women's studies, she covered topics like what women used before tampons and sanitary napkins were ubiquitous, as well as the plight of sexual minorities in Japan.

"I appreciate the trust the university administration placed in me," she said.

The scholar said discrimination against women in Japan is the consequence of political mistakes in the past decades, and thus "a human disaster."

As globalization changed the world, all societies looked to bring women into the labor market, requiring the domestic burden they traditionally carried to be transferred.

While Northern Europe and North America relied on care service in the public sector or cheap labor in the market, countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, South Korea and Japan looked to a strong male breadwinner model.

The model, in which men earn a living and women tended to domestic and care duties, "privatized" unpaid work in which grandmothers were called upon to care for younger family members, Ueno said.

"But now, none of these options work in Japan," she said, adding that "what has happened is that gender has become something functionally equivalent to race or class in other societies."

The aftermath of a political decision manifested in the fertility rate, Ueno said.

Countries with a male breadwinner model have the lowest fertility rate, with Japan at 1.42 as of 2018 -- well below the 2.07 necessary to sustain the population. The rate figure represents the average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime.

Although Japan's equal employment opportunity law came into force in 1986, women's double burden of work and family care has not changed. Combined with the easing of a series of labor regulations, the number of irregular workers increased dramatically.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 56.8 percent of female workers were in irregular employment as of January 2019, more than twice the percentage as male workers.

But with neo-liberalism pushing "self-determinism and self- responsibility" as a principle, the most socially vulnerable were made to believe that they are at fault for efforts that fail to pay off, while the people with the most advantages believe they owe their success solely to their own abilities, Ueno explained.

"This is what I've been saying is wrong," she said.

Although it is hard to change this trajectory immediately, Ueno says there are changes afoot.

"It's not true that the #MeToo movement did not spread in Japan," Ueno said, pointing to women who took to the streets to denounce Finance Minister Taro Aso after his comments that seemed to make light of an alleged case of sexual harassment by then-Vice Finance Minister Junichi Fukuda.

A man alleged to be Fukuda can be heard asking in an audio clip released by the Shukan Shincho magazine, "Can I give you a hug?" and "Can I touch your breasts?" Fukuda stepped down after the accusations but has continued to deny them.

Aso, a 78-year-old former prime minister, came under fire after saying that there is "no such thing as a sexual harassment charge."

"It's not the same as charges of murder or sexual assault," he told reporters. But in Japan, perpetrators of sexual harassment can be charged with crimes, including sexual assault, rape, or libel.

The protesters included women lining the sidewalk in front of the Finance Ministry building in Tokyo holding signs reading "We won't condone sexual harassment" and "#WithYou" in a show of solidarity with victims of sexual abuse.

Similar protests, organized via social media by women's rights activists, were held in Kyoto and Sapporo.

Another significant shift is coming from older Japanese women apologizing to younger women for failing to raise their voices against sexual abuse in the past.

In an online edition of magazine Hon no Mado, Kyoko Nakajima, a writer in her 50s, lamented that she had not been more vocal when journalist Shiori Ito, born in 1989, shocked the country by alleging a high-profile journalist had raped her, only to suffer an intense public backlash.

"If our generation had raised our voices, society might have changed, even a little," Nakajima reportedly told Ito. "I am really sorry for (leaving) the situation where you had to persevere on your own."

"There are no young women now who think men are better than them," Ueno said. "The problem lies in society, whether it is ready for them or not."

After the matriculation ceremony, the University of Tokyo newspaper conducted an online questionnaire and received answers from 4,921 people, including 603 students.

According to the reports, 61.7 percent of the University of Tokyo students were in favor of the speech, while 87.5 percent of people outside the university valued it. Among the students, 82.2 percent of women appreciated the speech, while 53.1 percent of men responded positively.

"As a graduate of a public high school in a rural region, I feel that one's environment hugely impacts their further education," a male fourth-year law student wrote when explaining why he appreciated Ueno's speech.

"I think those of us who successfully entered the University of Tokyo for some reason, have to bear a responsibility to make society better in any way."

Many respondents reserved judgment, and those who disapproved of the speech argued that Ueno's interpretation was arbitrary or unsuitable for a celebratory occasion, the report said.

But one third-year female arts and sciences student said the speech had a massive impact.

"I think the speech described well the situation of female students in the university as well as women and minorities in society," she wrote.

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2019/06/5fbad0a24182-feature-feminist-scholar-calls-japans-gender-problem-human-disaster.html