#feministfriday episode 507 | Loads of treats
Good afternoon everyone,
Been a while since I did an old fashioned mixed bag Fem Fri. Enjoy some links with no connections between them. Or no connections that I intend at least! If you see the whole thing coalescing beautifully, that's great.
Let's start with a link from Dearest, which is a highly enjoyable Substack on auction jewellery sales. There's both weird stuff and beautiful stuff, the latter of which is foremost but the former of which is definitely present in the work of Gilian Packard:
Packard was particularly known for using geodes in her designs, and the tourmaline and zircon bib necklace above is one of hers. It’s from 1970, and features tourmaline crystals set amid a web of polished and textured gold links in geometric shapes echoing those of the crystals. Packard was also the first woman to become a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of the Great Twelve Livery Companies of London.
Squashed jewelry, a stag beetle, and Stephen Sondheim
And a beguiling pool of aquamarine.
Now here's a review of a book about cats by Kathryn Hughes that I quite fancy. Love the picture of a line of cats singing too:
One of the book’s most interesting chapters delves into the peculiar (and, to modern eyes, counterintuitive) way in which cats figured in anti-suffragette propaganda in the early 1900s. The cat, like the suffragette, could be pejoratively framed as embodying the worst aspects of unaccountable femininity: ‘arbitrary and cruel, prey to fashionable whims and unaccountable desires … slinky and spiteful, loyal to no one but themselves’. At the same time, campaigners for women’s rights derided the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act (1913) – which allowed medical authorities to authorise the temporary release of hunger-striking prisoners from jail, only to immediately rearrest them as soon as they regained their health – as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. The cat’s unaccountable fickleness and predatory cruelty, then, could be used to castigate both the suffragettes and the powerful patriarchal authorities arrayed against them.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/catland-kathryn-hughes-reviewThis is my new favourite Ariana Grande track:
Love,
Alex.