Manifesto Report 2024

 

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Some Rain Must Fall

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  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...
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Trusting the Evidence

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DELIVERING JUSTICE DCI Vera Stanhope, wearing her battered hat and sturdy wellies, follows her cases with grim determination. She uses her sharp wits, intuition and empathy to solve each crime. But there always comes a point where she needs the hard evidence and demands answers from the team around her – from the pathology lab and from the long-suffering Jac, Joe and Kenny. They don the blue gloves, search the crime scenes, make the phone calls and spend hours poring over camera footage – finding the information that Vera needs to secure a prosecution. Countless television crime series have made us familiar with the paraphernalia of forensic science, down to the goriest details. We all know and understand the importance of evidence, don’t we? The blue gloves, the white suits, the shoe covers, the endless scrolling through data – we see these every day on screen. Television may offer us an increasing number of women scientists and investigators, but it is in the real world that women ar...
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Off The Shelf

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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...
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