Fawcett MK: Keeping Up

The language of needlecraft The English language brims over with the imagery of sewing and textiles. You can embroider the truth, weave a web of lies, spin a yarn, needle someone, or stitch them up while knitting your brows and pinning blame elsewhere. All part, of course, of the rich tapestry of life. The phrases are not always complimentary and there is probably some ingrained misogyny there, given that it’s mostly women who have been the ones making tapestries, embroideries, quilts, ceremonial dress, hassocks and wall hangings. Women, often anonymous and invisible, creating beautiful work – examples of which you can easily find in a museum or church near you. We’ll look at some of the great works a little later (you probably won’t have missed the recent arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry), but we should never ignore the art under our noses. Weaving stories Stories and myths centred on textiles are found in most cultures. In Greek mythology a ball of thread and a clever woman saved These...

OFF THE SHELF! Their lordships the Earl of Sandwich, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Cardigan, together with Laszlo Biro, are among many others whose names are embedded in the English language because of something they wore, cooked or invented in some way. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, the women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer wrote favourably about wearing a loose trouser outfit. The idea caught on and ‘bloomers’ quickly became quite the thing for women who wanted less restrictive clothing. Such eponyms are interesting, often quite benign and celebratory of the innovators and inventors. However, no such kudos attended the Reverend James Bowdler, who, in 1807 published ‘The Family Shakespeare’. He believed that the plays could not be read ‘safely’ to women and children unless they were highly edited, cutting out any nasty bits. He changed the text of Hamlet so that the suicide of Ophelia became an unfortunate accident and removed all trace of Doll Tearsheet the prostitut...

All those acronyms We are up to our necks in acronyms. From the RSPCA to the DWD, to CID and HMRC, they are impossible to ignore. They have entered our lives, with numbers increasing daily (along with the new varieties of emoji - which are not actually acronyms, so we’ll save that issue for another day). The first acronyms of note were SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) and POTUS (President of the United States), created in late 19th Century America, as ways of saving words in the telegraph system. The explosion of acronyms during the last hundred and fifty years or so has tended to develop through technology, medical science, warfare, and legal systems, as well as traditional use by societies and charitable organisations. Many acronyms do not trip off the tongue lightly – The NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) founded in 1897 – is a bit of a mouthful, and today, the UN Refugee Agency, (UNHCR) is not the easiest to recall. But other acronyms become familiar w...

Colliding Worlds, Parallel Universes April already, and the blossom is out, the martins are nesting and we can feel the sun’s warmth on our necks. It’s the time of year, as Chaucer noted in The Canterbury Tales , when people long to go on ‘pilgrimages’, (or jolly outings, more likely). Chaucer wrote the Tales between 1387 and 1400, a turbulent time for the world. War and the Black Death had killed millions, there was conflict between competing popes, anti-Semitism was rife and crusader armies were fighting the expanding Ottoman Empire. Huge technological advances were being made, mainly in military hardware and the use of gunpowder. In England, having crushed the Peasants Revolt in 1381, the autocratic rule of Richard II led to his deposition in 1399. Sounds familiar? It might well have been 600+ years ago, but there’s much we can relate to. Chaucer created some lively women fictional characters in the Tales , and there were, of course, many exceptional women living at the time. But yo...

MARCH WINDS When in Rome…. In ancient Rome, March began with festivals to celebrate the start of the military campaigning season. They were dedicated to Mars, the god of war (his name is for ever linked with the month), who became the focus of religious and military cults across Europe. Now, in March 2026, wars rage and powerful men sit in gold encrusted rooms showing footage of real war interspersed with clips from action movies and describing ‘beautiful B2 bombers’ or dismissing their enemy as ‘toast and they know it’. It’s a bit worrying that the worship and cults of Mars seem actually less deranged than the present day. Mars was esteemed for his virtue, was the protector of agriculture, had a romantic liaison with Venus and was father to Cupid, as well as Romulus and Remus. However, he wasn’t actually real, unlike the men bashing each other’s countries to bits at the moment. Music for marching So having set this dismal context for March 2026, we should pause for a moment and look a...

  February has not been a lot of fun so far, has it? Certainly not as far as the weather is concerned, offering us a salad of mud, sodden ground, floods and a miserable pervading damp. But, given the state of the world at the moment, it’s probably more enjoyable to meditate on rain and write about rain than it is to grapple with iniquities of humanity. So, let’s indulge in a few ponderings on women and inclement weather. The Mud March February 2026 might be a bit damp, but February 1907 (and specifically February 9, 1907) was particularly memorable for the women who took part in the infamous ‘Mud March’ from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall in the Strand. It was organised by Millicent Fawcett and the Suffragist movement, with 3,000 women joining to demonstrate their support for a bill on women’s suffrage due to be presented in the House of Commons. Kate Frye , who had joined the suffragists in 1906, described the weather in her diary: ‘…was my utter disgust – and disappointment- to hear t...