No to DV – A WaDt Blog for Survivors

Dreamers of a New Day, By Sheila Rowbotham

Reviewed by Alison Light

Friday, 21 May 2010

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The whole area of our daily life should constitute politics,” wrote the American social reformer, Mary Parker Follett in 1918: “there is no line where the life of home ends and the life of the city begins”. Responding to the new pressures of modern life – mass production, slums, migration – women imagined better futures. Working conditions, diet, dress, the design of houses, streets and cities, maternity, education, sexual relations – everything was grist to their mill.

Sheila Rowbotham assembles a vast congregation of these “dreamers”: women who worked for social change long before the majority got the vote. Spanning both sides of the Atlantic, and three generations from the 1880s to the 1930s, they don’t constitute a movement or a political tendency. “Domestic redeemers” venerated motherhood and believed in women’s moral mission; free-lovers wanted “selfrealisation” even if it meant slamming the door on home, husband and children. Anarchists proposed independent communities; gradualists got elected to local councils; socialists initiated strikes or joined picket lines.

Dreamers of a New Day brings to life an astonishing panoply of networks, self-help groups, leagues and unions. Countless women were “awakened” by guilt and longing, driven by moral zeal, galvanised by anger. They took their frustrations into community actions and campaigns, food riots, boycotts and rent strikes. They were housewives and workers, immigrants like the Russian-Jewish women who sat all night amid “tea-steam and cigarette smoke”, discussing marriage and the family, to the horror of their menfolk. Or women like Anna Julia Cooper, whose mother had been a slave, attacking white suffrage organisations for their racist assumptions.

Maimie Pinzer, a Jewish prostitute and morphine addict, told a startled upper-class reformer that the marriage ceremony was “the worst lot of cant I ever heard”. Factory girls, shop assistants, “typewriters”, bohemians and schoolteachers, they generated a new political culture as they leafleted and demonstrated, set up their own journals, poured out novels and pamphlets.

None of it came easily. Wanting life to be “all of a piece” might lead to prosecution or worse. Edith Lanchester (mother of the actress, Elsa) was briefly committed to a lunatic asylum by her father for wanting to cohabit with her working-class partner. Kate Chopin’s novel of 1899, The Awakening, cheered many women who wanted, like its heroine, sexual fulfilment rather than dull domesticity. But its publication ostracised the author and ruined her life. Breaking down the walls inside oneself was equally fraught. Tormented by her feelings for her philandering lover, the anarchist Emma Goldman felt a fraud attacking possessiveness.

Dreamers of a New Day is crowded, lively and inspiring. Occasionally its transatlantic threads are left in mid-air and lives are told in snatches on the wing. There are tantalising glimpses of those clubs, choirs, holiday homes, theatre groups, and “mini-utopias”, like the Whiteway Tolstoyan anarchist community in the Cotswolds, which sharply rejected one male arrival who thought sexual “varietism” an excuse for womanising. And what became of Edinburgh’s “Cafe Vegetaria”, a suffrage meeting place in 1909?

In chapters on consumer power and ethical capitalism, Rowbotham stretches her rubric to the limit. Her “adventurers” include entrepreneurs and management gurus. At one extreme is Sarah Lees, suffragist, Liberal philanthropist and later, the first woman mayor of Oldham. She formed a cooperative building society among millworkers. At the other is Ida Tarbell, wanting to humanise the workplace by “scientific management” but against giving women the vote. Rowbotham leaves the last word to novelist Nella Larsen, one of many artists denouncing mass production as a form of psychological subordination, “cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern”.

Dreamers of a New Day argues that women were a profoundly “creative force”, transforming the map of politics. It’s not a nostalgic view. Their demands for a “humane economics” have not gone away. Rowbotham’s book is a tribute to women’s faith in the possible but also to her own unquenchable belief in women.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dreamers-of-a-new-day-by-sheila-rowbotham-1978234.html

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Tiger’s Mistress, a pageant, Judge Howard Stern?
Kid you not read

Shock Jock’s Beauty Pageant-

Source- Center for Decency

As if Tiger Woods’s apology last week for his serial philandering wasn’t enough of a public humiliation, several of his former mistresses have agreed to take part in a beauty pageant in which they will compete for a $100,000 (£65,000) prize.

The Tiger Woods Mistress Beauty Pageant, organized by the US shock jock Howard Stern, will be held on March 10.

So far, only four of the golfer’s former mistresses — out of the 13 identified in the press — have agreed to take part.

They will compete in categories such as “Swimsuit”, “Personality”, and “Talent” to earn the judges’ votes.

When Mr. Stern first announced the idea of the pageant, he said that it would take place only if more than three women responded. All of them had to have been named in news publications as lovers of the golfer.

The prize money for Mr. Stern’s pageant will be supplied by AshleyMadison.com, a “discreet dating service” company. The site, which has 4.5 million users, advertises itself with the slogan “Life is Short, Have an Affair”.

The stunt caps an astonishingly swift downfall for Woods, once a magnet for multimillion-dollar corporate sponsorship deals because of his clean-living image as well as his success in a previously white-dominated sport.

The first hint that Woods had been unfaithful to his Swedish wife came in November last year, with a story in the National Inquirer, a US tabloid. Two days later he was involved in a bizarre car accident amid reports that his wife had chased him out of his $2.4 million Florida home with a golf club. Over the following weeks the names of several alleged mistresses emerged, including that of Rachel Uchitel, a Manhattan VIP party planner who lost her fiancé in the World Trade Centre attack of 9/11.

Woods broke his silence on the scandal last Friday by issuing a lengthy apology at an invitation-only press conference.

“I knew my actions were wrong but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply,” he said. “I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself … I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have far to go to find them. I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself.”

The speech was praised by commentators such as Glenn Beck, the Fox News anchor, who argued in a speech to a conservative political conference that American politicians should modify the same apology for their excessive spending of taxpayers’ money.

“Politicians don’t think the rules apply to them,” Mr. Beck said. “They only think about getting themselves re-elected. They’ve run throug the boundaries of the Constitution.”

Mr.. Stern was’t so impressed. On his daily radio show, he questioned the golfer’s sincerity. “[He] looked like he wanted to be anywhere on the planet but in that room. It didn’t seem like this was his idea, or anything he wanted to be a part of.”

The broadcaster, known for his outrageous pranks, has offered a judging spot to Elin Nordegren, the golfer’s estranged wife and the mother of his two young children. She has not responded to the invitation.

Go here Too: –

Source Boston Herald

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