Feminist Pub 16: where the Bluestockings develop armoured stockings to deal with the thousand paper cuts

Sorry post above so behind.

Is interesting with regards to height, when working in Vietnam those born before the war are quite shorter, and the country suffered near famine afterwards and during. (People related to the communist party are markedly taller from that generation). Though it seemed people born in the 90's are generally much taller.

'Even from that age' ...Ursula le Guin pointed out once, what's the first question we ask about a newborn baby. So that we can put it into the appropriate box. Going now...going, going...

Health inequality is now a huge field in its own right, it's where the authors of The Spirit Level came from. And there's still a lot of it, and increasing I think. www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/impacts/health is a brief intro. Going to go do something useful now honest.

I would agree with the not telling apart, DW has remonstrated me for calling some girls - boys. Though when they have bald square heads, boy just seems to be my first guess. She has got wound up about DS being called a girl while

As the sahm propping up the bar, I bring you several websites mentioning full-length mirrors were invented in 17th century, and this book if link works. called Mirror mirror by Mark Pendergast. In that extract it mentions a London glassmaker who improved his glass by adding iron oxide who was then able to make larger mirrors 82x 48 inches. 1676 George Ravenscroft.

I prop merely to serve...

Oh and several of those mirror sites point out the number of associated superstitions and customs around mirrors, so you are onto something. Trust it to be a brit who invented the full-length....

Yes, I can believe that.

Can't remember details for the British army, but I have a vague memory that about a third of Russian recruits in WW1 were rejected for reasons relating to malnutrition and undernutrition - and chronic vodka-related alcoholism. I may have forgotten some of the details in the last 20 years, but yes, WW1 did highlight class differences in terms of health in all countries.

Yes, I agree. It is a really fascinating thought.

We also see far more images of other people. I don't think life was ever quite so isolated as crappy 'ye olde' novels make out, but you'd just never see the variety of people.

I was also reading Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, which admittedly isn't historical fact but is pretty well researched AFAIK, and she has someone claim the average difference in height between officers and men in one of the regiments was 5 inches (no sniggering, please). It made me think how used we are to seeing a huge variety of people.

But even if you were using glass and candles or buckets of water - it's still nothing like walking down the street and seeing your reflected self in the window of a shop, or on the security camera screen over the till in the corner shop, or even the photo of myself which is in the corner of my IM conversations with colleagues - we just physically see ourselves in so many ways these days, even if we aren't trying to. It would have been much less common 200 years ago, if you weren't rich, and 500 years ago, for poorer people, probably quite rare indeed - you'd have had to go to some effort, whereas today, it's difficult to avoid.

It's this afternoon, so I'll probably come back in cringing and vowing celibacy (ha!) sometime late afternoon.

Don't go yet LRD! What time is the date and when can we expect an update?

petula - but, that goes back to plate glass. Doing that against a diamond-pane window, especially with thick, bubbly glass, wouldn't work very well, I think?

And thanks, annie.

Okay then. Get back to work, woman, and stop swooning over a date like a schoolgirl!!

i suppose you would have to wait for it to get dark and use a candle next to a window if you didn't have a mirror. or water during the day (see narcissus)

Erm, probably telling me to get back to work. I might come and 'argh' about it later, though, depending how it goes.

You'd be so dependent on your sisters/friends telling you how you looked
Or servants, if you had them.

I realise I don't know much about the history of mirrors, but I would assume it was the industrialisation of glass manufacture which started them becoming more widespread. And Versailles.

Am resisting temptation to google history of mirrors, as I should be working.

No need to live update the date - I will be in a yoga class with the phone off, so couldn't follow anyway. (Yes, this is an entirely selfish perspective!)

Ooooh, a date! Could you give us any details? Or should be not be distracting you and more and telling you to Get Back to Work?

I feel that live-posting a date would be a step too far towards the Borg.

Though, after EBear's post, I am feeling the power of the Borg.

That's a fascinating point, EBear.

It's interesting, in the Middle Ages there are huge numbers of 'mirror' metaphors, and people constantly title books things like 'The Mirror of Virtues' or 'The Mirror of the Life of Christ,' because they're so fascinated by the idea of something that reflects the truth back at you.

Full-length mirrors must make a huge difference. Does anyone know when they came in?

I bet that affected women's interpersonal relationships, too. You'd be so dependent on your sisters/friends telling you how you looked (which I know you see teenage girls on trains doing all the time!).

Re: mirror - I remember when I was 18 and walking about a departmental store and getting a fright when I saw the colours I was wearing. But I still forget to look in the mirror before I go out ...

I'm practising the phrase "you should ditch your gender delusion - it clouds your judgement". I envision using it quite often in the year.

I really really wish this british obsession with looks would fade back out again.

I was thinking about this at the weekend - not in terms of British particularly, but I was in the BL's Gothic exhibition, and one of the exhibits was a black obsidian mirror, used in seances.

It made me think about mirrors - I know they have mirrors from the Romans and earlier, which are basically disks of polished metal like silver. But glass and metals like silver were luxury items, so many poor people would never have seen themselves, except maybe in a bucket of water. Whereas now, we have mirrors everywhere and plate glass and shiny metals and cameras including selfies and CCTV images - it's very difficult not to go through a day without seeing yourself these days, even if you don't have a selfie-obsession, and thst must all feed how we feel about each others and thus everyone else, compared with an age when everyone else would have been more familiar with how we looked than we did ourselves.

I think it's the other way round - I think if you don't think about whether you are discriminating or not then it clouds your judgement.

That is so true. The problem is we are encouraged to assume that everything is equal from the start, and anything we do, like considering whether or not we're discriminating, is a move away from the default, equal situation.