In late July and August, Sirius (known as the Dog Star), appears to rise at the same time as the sun. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the belief was that the combined heat of the two stars led to intolerable blazing hot weather, which in turn resulted in thunderstorms, fires, drought, high fever, and madness – a period known as the dog days. Today the phrase tends to evoke the hot, lazy days of summer, and until recently this time of year has been known as the ‘silly season’, described by the Cambridge Dictionary as a time:
‘usually in the summer, when newspapers are full of stories that are not important because there is no important, especially political, news’.
The silly season, if it ever really existed, is now in the past, and today’s news bulletins are more likely to lead to despair. Wars are raging around the world with scant hopes for peaceful resolutions. The climate emergency is terrifying. In Britain, dreadful harms have been inflicted on women and girls and there has been moronic street violence. Prisons are at capacity and social media are floundering in mires of conspiracy theories and misogyny. Yet at the same time, the ‘normal’ August events have continued – holidays, exam results, the Proms, country shows, sport, pop festivals and unstable weather. And, as so often in our lives, we manage to navigate several realities at the same time.
August Women
If we can look beyond the seeping nastiness of violence and misogyny though, we can reflect on August 2024 and note the many, many women who have been pushing through the barriers and scorning the stereotypes.
August medals: In the Olympics, the 16-year-old skateboarder Sky Brown won a medal in spite of dislocating her shoulder only a few days beforehand. Julien Alfred won the first ever gold and silver medals for the tiny island of St Lucia. Women competitors showed warmth and admiration towards one another, and an affectionate and revealing conversation between Kelly Holmes and Keely Hodgkinson, gold medallists from 2004 and 2024 respectively, is inspiring to watch.
Of course, with the Paralympics just starting, there will be many more examples of remarkable women – like Jeanette Chippington, swimmer and paracanoeist who has represented Great Britain in seven Paralympics since 1988, when she was18!
August music: Errollyn Wallen CBE, is a Belize born British composer and musician who has just been appointed as the Master of the Kings Music. This is King Charles’ first appointment to this role. In 2020 she was the first black woman to have a work featured in the Proms, following a commission during the Pandemic to compose a rearrangement of Jerusalem for the last night. There was a vitriolic backlash to her work, and she received many abusive messages, which she dealt with rather well. She said:
“I spent the next day, Sunday, just going through deleting, deleting, deleting, hundreds and hundreds of messages, very abusive, thinking ‘well, actually, when was the last time somebody really talked about a new piece of music in the national press, so yeah, I’ll take it’.”
Wicked August? The renowned Irish writer Edna O’Brien died at the end of July at the age of 93. She grew up in an Ireland that was strictly religious, conservative, and misogynistic. Her first novel The Country Girls, was banned in Ireland and she spent much of her life in England. Her 1965 novel, August is a Wicked Month, was reviled as shocking and scandalous and she was accused of corrupting the minds of young women. In 2016-17 when she was in her late eighties, she travelled twice to Nigeria to speak to some of the 276 girls from Chibok who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram jihadists. Following the visits she wrote Girl, her final and deeply harrowing novel.
"You hear these terrible stories and you absorb them,’ she said. ‘They haunt me still."
Equality in August: It may not have come to your attention, but August 26th was Women’s Equality Day in the United States. It commemorates the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution, which in 1920 granted women the right to vote.
This Women’s Equality Day, let us recommit to building a country and a world where our daughters have the same opportunities as our sons. Because when women thrive, we all thrive.
News from MK Fawcett
August update on our campaign for a Safer, Healthier, Fairer Milton Keynes
We have circulated background papers with baseline evidence of the need for making MK Safer, Healthier and Fairer
We have now contacted all three MPs representing Milton Keynes
We have had a preliminary meeting with Emily Darlington MP to discuss the issues raised in our campaign
We are arranging meetings with Chris Curtis MP and Callum Anderson MP, and plan to have similar discussions with them.
We will continue to promote the campaign and encourage people to become more engaged with the political process.
We will include an update in every blog. Thank you for supporting us in our campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights.
To see the papers we have produced, or if you have any queries, please contact us at miltonkeynesfawcettgroup@gmail.com
Museum revelations In the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral there is a fascinating museum, where a visitor can explore all kinds of exhibits from Neolithic burial sites to a representation of the town sewage works. Tucked away in a corner, displayed within a glass case, is a small, beautifully embroidered cape in the purple and silver colours of the early suffrage movement . It is unfinished, with a caption explaining that it once belonged to Millicent Fawcett, who lived in Salisbury for a while. It is probably too small for Millicent herself to have worn but perhaps it was intended as a gift for a child – a mini-Suffragist perhaps. Whatever its actual history, it triggers a poignant reminder of how young Millicent herself was when she became committed to the cause of women’s suffrage. By the age of 19, for example, she was collecting signatures to support a petition to parliament that she was actually too young to sign herself. Museums are wonderful for revealing fascinating and unexpecte...
Nourishing our minds Welcome to (L)egoland, where cruel and pompous men are strutting their stuff and playing with countries as if they were little plastic bricks. In this global playpen for billionaires, the President of the United States, having played a leisurely round of golf, feels he can in all seriousness quote Napoleon: ‘celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi’, (he who saves his country violates no law). So, for this president, laws don’t apply, people are fired from their jobs, lying has become the norm, women scarcely feature, and war ravaged countries are eyed up as potential holiday resorts. Is switching off the answer? Elsewhere in the world…well….where to start? Misery, violence, racism, misogyny, poverty, abuse? Levels of awfulness so great that for some of us the only answer is to switch off completely. How many people have you heard saying ‘I can’t watch the news anymore, it’s too upsetting, I can’t face it’ . But if we don’t face it, what then...
Take a moment. Wherever you are - sipping your oat-milk skinny latte in a high street café, squashed up and perspiring in a crowded train, tram or bus, staggering round a supermarket with a loaded trolley, sitting studiously in a library…….. wherever you are, take a moment to glance around and check how many women are sporting short hairstyles. And if you spot a carefully trimmed bob or pixie-cut, is the proud owner a younger woman? Probably not. What’s going on? Have the iconic styles of Audrey Hepburn, Mary Quant and Tilda Swinton all disappeared? Is there a new and secret ponytail mandate that is being communicated through a clandestine social media platform? Or is it simply that hardly any one under 50 can afford to get a haircut these days? It creeps up on you, this realisation that long hair is now a la mode. And it’s only when you see a large group of young women together that you notice it. To be fair, teachers, sports coaches and nightclub managers have probably been aware for...
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