#feministfriday episode 520 | Bye
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the final Fem Fri! I am going to end as I began, with a veritable smorgasbord of women you will be interested to read about and think about and listen to.
Let's start, though, with the link that started it all. I read something that I thought was interesting, and it was about women, and it was a Friday, so I sent it to some of my favourite colleagues with the subject line #feministfriday. Little did I know that I was committing to a decade of sending emails about interesting women on Fridays!
In the Middle Ages the word “spinster” was a compliment. A spinster was someone, usually a woman, who could spin well: a woman who could spin well was financially self-sufficient — it was one of the very few ways that mediaeval women could achieve economic independence. The word was generously applied to all women at the point of marriage as a way of saying they came into the relationship freely, from personal choice, not financial desperation.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/03/how-to-be-alone-school-of-life/Here's an unbelievable legend that I only found out about this week - it's Ida Tarbell, who brought down John D. Rockefeller, the richest man ever to have lived, out of revenge. I love her:
Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with a 19-part series in McClure’s magazine, a masterpiece of journalism and an unrelenting indictment that brought down one of history’s greatest tycoons and effectively broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly. By dint of what she termed “steady, painstaking work,” Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and—with the help of Mark Twain—candid conversations with Standard Oil’s most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which sealed the company’s fate. She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era. “They had never played fair,” Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil, “and that ruined their greatness for me.”
The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon | Smithsonian
John D. Rockefeller Sr. epitomized Gilded Age capitalism. Ida Tarbell was one of the few willing to hold him accountable
Okay, reading and book learning are fun, but have I ever featured Ex Man, Tifa's deathless classic? You need this in your life:
EVERY GIRL HAS THOUGHT ABOUT IT, BUT NEVER SAID IT OUT LOUD!!!! I DECIDED TO PUT IT IN A SONG!!!!!! ITS ABOUT MY EX-MAN!!!! BRAND NEW WASHROOM PRODUCTION!!!! ON THE LOVE BUG RIDDIM
Now, let's imagine if you can combine reading and book learning and music. I don't think there's anything as 👀 as Tifa's Ex Man in Brooke Di Spirito's musical of The Beautiful and Damned, but it's really excellent. Enjoy this story of persistence and love:
“They weren’t super happy about this second-year student, coming to us and asking to do such a large project,” Di Spirito says. “I was sad for a little bit. But I kept thinking to myself, ‘I have to do this thing.’” She went back to the drawing board, strengthened her proposal, and returned to the group with a more refined blueprint of her vision. This time, they agreed to move forward.
'The Beautiful and the Damned' Comes to Life in Musical Form
Brooke Di Spirito so loved the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that it spawned a radical idea: she would adapt the Jazz Age story into a musical.
Let's stay with the Fitzgerald community for one more link, because I think all the time about how thrilling it would have been for Martina Mastandrea in this moment:
From its inception, my research project has had to face a challenge well-known to silent film scholars: all the film prints but one were presumed lost. For the first year and a half of the PhD, therefore, my analysis of these pre-sound films could only be based on reviews, film stills and publicity. But, one year ago, I made a discovery that radically changed the course of my research. While browsing a 1992 issue of The New Yorker at The British Library, my eyes fell on the list of films that The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had presented at a New York theatre that year. The title of the film screened on 25 February, The Chorus Girl’s Romance, caught my attention as it was the same as that of the first silent adaptation made from a work by Fitzgerald [...] the film recently acquired by the Department of Film was the one many researchers had considered lost.
https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2017/07/13/rediscovering-the-first-film-based-on-f-scott-fitzgeralds-work/Of course, we have loved looking at art together. I can't believe I saw this work in June and am only just showing it to you! Here's Vigil 2.0 by Caterina Barbieri and Ruben Spini:
You can find her bandcamp here:
And here's an interview between the two of them in which Caterina references St Teresa of Avila. Glad we could get a medieval saint in the mix here as well:
the vocabulary of confinement has a spatial dimension that has always fascinated me and that I feel has been an archetype of the female condition ever since the dawn of time. I think of all the women who were unable to move freely in the outside world and who observed it from a window, concentrating all their energies on the inner world, opening cosmic chasms and building “interior castles” — to use a mystical metaphor coined by Saint Teresa of Avila, of which I am very fond.
Terra Incognita. A conversation with Caterina Barbieri | | Flash Art
Caterina Barbieri is an Italian musician and composer. She completed her studies at the Conservatory of Bologna and then at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Her compositions are delicate inter
While you listen to Caterina’s music you can read about Wendy Carlos, who pioneered and to a great extent popularised the Moog synthesiser:
Carlos herself was key to the final version of the Moog synthesiser that made it onto the shelves, suggesting that the inventor add features such as a filter bank and a control to allow the pitch to slide up or down.
Wendy Carlos: pioneering electronic musician and first trans woman to win a Grammy - Classic FM
Wendy Carlos won three Grammy awards in 1970, making her the first trans woman ever to win at the prestigious awards ceremony. Here’s her story...
Team - I think this is me saying goodbye now. Thank you for being a part of this; it has been a much bigger part of my life than I ever expected it to be. You can find the archives here, with this year's newsletters to follow. Thank you to friend and subscriber Tom for preserving this for us all:
https://illustrious-daifuku-343ad1.netlify.app/Thank you too to Ellis, Margo, Cis, Kerry and Jenny for your kind guest editing. Love you 💗
I'll close with an image that will live in my heart forever, and I hope yours as well. It's Susan Sontag in a bear suit:
Love,
Alex.