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

[FibonacciSeries]

Carry on.

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!)

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 can believe that.

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....

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

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.

'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...

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.

The mirror crack'd from side to side - mind you, Tennyson was Victorian, not mediaeval. And my main view of the Lady of Shalott is through the PreRaphaelites.

Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

Didn't Da Vinci write notes in mirror writing, too?

(I really should be thinking about mirrored storage pools.)

I don't speak Arabic, but there is a bit in Ahdaf Soueif's 'Map of Love' where she talks about the etymological relationship between the words for women and for mirror (mir'ah?), and whether woman is a reflection of man.

Da Vinci did do mirror writing.

Also, not that this ties in, but I constantly have to explain to non-Latinists why I'm reading a journal called 'Speculum' if I'm not a gynae. It's the Latin for 'Mirror'.

I think the mirror cracking is interesting - that's in other things too, I think? I can't think what, but it feels familiar.

And there's a mirror stage in (?) Freud, isn't there?

yes, annie, it was completely unnecessary.

• my name is not Elis or Ellis.

• if you don't want people to pull you up on bitching, try not bitching

• and then bitching about being pulled up on bitching!

I have been having a conversation irl (!!!) about how stuck we can become in our discourse between

• despair at the rigidly enforced and toxic feminity du jour

• and how close to misogyny you can unwittingly get when complaining about this

Everyone has to tread this line in their own way but I think some people need to look at that line with a bit more thought. I really do and I am sorry if I have offended people by expressing my unease with some aspects of how some posters do it. but there is absolutely no need to drag this up months later.

I am only standing up for myself on this because I have recently had the chance to have some really good conversations on this that has reassured me on the possibility of, and necessity for, greater nuance than we always get on this.

I would have once liked to have had such conversations on here but I doubt it is possible now with such long memories and hard-borne grudges.

good point re glass quality (i know nothing of the history of this tbh)

how funny that despite us seeing more variety of people, it doesn't stop the "ideal" being quite rigid

it was depressing in really quite remote towns in south america that all the mannequins in women's clothes shops were tall, white, blonde - completely opposite to the appearance of the majority of people who lived in that area

I get that you're upset, Eilis (and I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong, but frankly, it's difficult).

I'm troubled that discussing things, even from a negative slant, is characterised as 'bitching'. It's horrible negative stereotype, and it shuts down the discussion on both sides, IMO.

I do think there is a discussion to be had about how women relate to each other, but I don't think it is fair to carry it out by flinging insults.

annie's posted because she's upset. Which is obvious. Yes, obviously, it wasn't the best idea, but what happened, happened only a few weeks ago. Not months. It's not fair to characterise that as a 'long memory'. I don't think you can reasonably argue both that no-one should criticise other women, and that you should be immune from criticism when you do it.

petula - that's fascinating, and depressing, about the mannequins.

I wonder if the availability of so many images doesn't in some way help create rigid ideals? I mean, in the past, you could judge what was attractive, but if people couldn't often see themselves, in a way, it might be harder to learn how to conform?

I believe - not sure - that we learn to process the amount of visual distinction we need, and not much more. So maybe if you didn't see much variation, you wouldn't notice the tiny differences we're taught to notice (and deem 'deviations from attractiveness')? Tiny things might not have mattered so much?

eilis your thoughts about this are really interesting and important to discuss, but perhaps in a less personally-directed way. if it had been me i would have been very hurt by the original criticism and i wouldn't have been able to forget it easily.