Being the Head-Honcho Has Never Been Easy, and Make That Doubly So If You Were A Woman In the Past.

Often branded as 'whores', 'poisoners', 'witches' and worse, many societies in the past had a visceral distaste of women in power, and many of the same issues still face women in power today. 

A politically manoeuvring woman is so often called a 'bitch', an opinionated headstrong woman is so often a 'shrew', or 'nag'. In moments of arguments they are often infantalised - told to "calm down dear" (David Cameron to Angela Eagle), called a 'girl' (Silvio Belusconi) or a 'brave little woman' (Austin Mitchell on Margaret Thatcher). If they are dressed plainly they are painted as emasculating, ugly, dowdy and homely as if they have nothing else to contribute ("What does she want, this housewife? My balls on a tray" - Jacques Chirac on Thatcher). If they present as too conventionally 'pretty' they are not taken seriously and dubbed 'beauty queens' (Kumara Welgama to Rosy Senanayake) or criticised (as in the case of the ANC  playing fashion police in criticising South African leader Lindewe Mazibuko's outfit).They may even be subject to wolf-whistles rather than being listened to (as Cecile Deflout, the French housing minister).

Given that women in power still face these challenges today in our relatively liberal western-centric society, in the past their successes were nothing short of remarkable. In 'Women Who Ruled- History's 50 Most Remarkable Women' Claudia Gold's impressive research brings 50 of these such women into the limelight they deserve.

Claudia Gold's book is very easy to read for anyone interested in women's history without any polemics, perfect for dipping in and out of. The 50 women listed are organised chronologically.This becomes especially important when we reach the 16thc and the age of European Queens, when often the political fate of one woman's family influences the rise of another. The book is also commendable in offering a wide variety of female leaders, from the near-mythological figures of Jazebel and the Queen of Sheba, through to Eastern leaders such as Wu Hou and Roxelana, as well as the western favourites of 'Bloody' Mary and Elizabeth 1st and finally into the modern day politicians of Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher. You get a real impression that the book aims not to view history through a western lens, but to celebrate and commiserate the lives and careers of as many interesting ladies as possible.

Roxelana, The Ukranian slave who became
Sultana of the Ottoman Empire

The brilliant thing about Women Who Ruled is that Gold gives us a full picture of the women in power across the many countries of the world without romanticising them.
These women did not have to be saints in order to be respected: just as we have Machiavellian kings we have viscous queens. Just as we have weak-willed and exploited kings we also have foolish and naive queens. Just as we have opportunistic lords we have conniving ladies. For some the bonds of family united them together in mutual honour and bravery, and for others the bonds of family were simply threads in a web to be manipulated and cut off at will. The characters in this work are all multi-faceted and, in the brief few pages that are granted to each, you get a real impression of the often dangerous political landscapes that they resided in, and how fickle fate could be to even the most intelligent political wrangler. Across each story, though, we see how each woman (or her family and 'allies') had to rely on their quick wits to carve out a place for themselves in societies that so often mistrusted them.

Whatever your stance on feminism as a whole, this is a very engaging and interesting book for anyone who is a fan of history. I very much recommend it.



Sources

• Top 10 sexist Moments in politics
• 10 Sexist Quotes about Margaret Thatcher
• 'Women Who Ruled- History's 50 Most Remarkable Women' By Claudia Gold

Prisoners and criminals, throughout hsitory, have always occupied a strange place in society's structure. In many ways they still do.

Credit: Yavapie County Sheriff's Office

They are part of society but somehow also in a sphere slightly outside of it. Not to start off on a downer, but criminals can be romanticised in the media while at the same times being subject to human rights violations. Racism and classism are always heavily at work in both arrests and convictions and, in the case of America, whether police officers choose to shoot to kill. Subjects that might be horrific if inflicted on a 'free' 'law-abiding' person, are often treated as jokes when inflicted on the incarcerated. And while the majority of 'law-abiding' society may condemn criminals on principal, for some reason we seem to be relentlessly curious about their mugshots.

Today there are hundreds of click-bait websites showing off modern bizarre mugshots, but things are just as interesting if we look back through history to when the tradition of photographing arrested 'criminals' began...

Before Mugshots

In the past, social presentation and the body were very much linked and often criminals were identified and shamed by being branded, tattooed or mutilated in order to display their status.For example, in the film Pirates of the Caribbean (set in around the 1700s) Jack Sparrow has a branding scar that shows that he had been previously convicted as a pirate.

Jack Sparrow Branding scar: 'P' for pirate

As these actions often made the subject unemployable unless they could be easily hidden, it hardly helped them turn over a new leaf. Should the person be captured or questioned, they could easily be linked to past crimes.
When suspects were not mutilated, the police instead had to rely on descriptions, sketches (if available) and the memorization of each person's face and build. In early history, where people were typically more likely to be part of small communities, common kinship and acquaintance meant that people could be easy to track down. While criminals could escape by moving homes to other communities, harsh vagrancy laws often meant that when they arrived in a new community without ties they were rarely very welcome and could even be actively persecuted.
When industrialisation took hold and communities suddenly swelled at an alarming rate, it became far more easy to remain anonymous.A better form of identification and record was needed badly.




The Victorians & Edwardians
 
When the camera was first invented, the Victorians saw an opportunity to record themselves for the future in family portraits, postmortem momentos and for practical reference. When the prices  of this new technology decreased, the police decided to jump on the bandwagon and photograph the people they arrested for further identification.  By the 1870s, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police in Paris, had designed a formulaic photo-record which consisted of one front shot and one profile shot under standardised lighting, which was soon circulated and adopted by police all over Europe and America. And so the mugshot was born.

 George Bennet was arrested in 1860. After many previous convictions he had been taken in for assaulting a police constable. As with all the mugshots, the photograph was accompanied by detailed descriptions to aid with identification and to record his crime. You can find his mugshot in the Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Centre.

 Owen Cavill was arrested in 1914 for sheep stealing, and his mugshot shows the formulaic presentation of the photographs.

In many of the early mugshots the hands are visible as well as the face. This is largely due to the Victorian interest in criminal anthropology and eugenics. They believed that genius, sentiment and criminal 'nature' could be mapped by measuring the head and hands. This belief persisted for quite some time - even in Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes stories the great detective ascribes to the belief that a criminal nature may be identifiable by the shape of his head.
In this picture, the very young Magaret Cosh was convicted of stealing a coat, and was sentenced to two month's hard labour.

Another child to be convicted was 12 year old Henry.L.Stephenson. He was sentenced to 2 months in prison for the crime of breaking into houses in 1873.

Naturally, many criminals objected to being recorded for identification and put up a fight when it came to sitting for their photography, and Victorian policemen were rarely afraid to get heavy handed. This resulted in some of the most distressing and emotive mugshots in the collection. Here Thomas Murphy is restrained by the Manchester Police.

Here too 'Paddy the Devil' (Patrick Cox), a notorious counterfeiter, was restrained in Machester in 1893.

 By The 1920s, despite the unenviable position of the criminals, a certain dapper quality can be seen in many of the mugshots.

Here, William Henry Moore is photographed unusually in his hat. He was convicted in 1925 for dealing in Opium.

Rather topically, given the last few years' rising obsession with paedophilia, this is a mugshot taken in 1920 of Albert.S.Warnkin and Beutler. Warnkin was arrested for trying to 'carnally know a girl of eight years old' and Beutler was arrested for indecent exposure.

Harry.L.Crawford's story is a quite remarkable one. Having been arrested for the murder of his wife, it was revealed that Harry was in fact really Eugeni Falleni - a woman who had been passing as a man since 1899. Little is known about whether Harry was genuinely transgender or had other motives for such cross-dressing, but in 1914 he married the widow Annie Birkett. By 1917 his wife had disappeared under suspicious circumstances. It is believed that this coincided with her revealing to a friend that she had found out "something amazing about Harry". Did Harry murder his wife to stop the secret coming out?

 

Another story almost too bizarre to be believed is that of 'Pep the Cat Murdering Dog'. He was admitted to Eastern State Penitentiary in 1924, it is said, by the Pennsylvania Governer Gifford Pinchot. The dog did hard time - sentenced for life for killing Gifford's wife's cat.

In the prison records, Pep's inmate number has been skipped over (but not assigned to anyone else), as if the people recording the logs were too embarrassed to formally own up to  admitting a Labrador as a prisoner. We may never know how far this is fact and how far thisis prison folklore, but it's certainly a compelling story.

Mugshots are, in short, a fantastic piece of social history. They allow us to put  faces to sweeping historical movements and attitudes.

For example, what's more emotive of the civil rights movement then the mugshots of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr? What's more chilling than to see the faces behind such legendary names as Al Capone?  And what is more bizarre than to see a currently well known celebrity photographed in such a sterile setting? And, in the end, when so many family photographs are lost to a historians through either private the collections never going public, through destruction or a simple loss of memory over time, mugshots provide a real timeless record of individuals across hundreds of years.

 Rosa Parks, photographed by Alabama police in 1956, following her arrest during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.

The gangster Al Capone, responsible for the Saint Valentines Day Massacre of 1929.

Martin Luther King, photographed in 1956 during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. Scribbled on top of the photo is a record of his murder on April 4th 1968.

Here is a selection of suffragists who were arrested for a variety of crimes of vandalism in 1914, from smashing windows to attacking paintings of classically 'beautiful' women.

 1 - Margaret Scott, 2 - Olive Leared (née Hockin), 3 - Margaret McFarlane, 4 - Mary Wyan (Mary Ellen Taylor), 5 - Annie Bell, 6 - Jane Short, 7 - Gertrude Mary Ansell, 8 - Maud Brindley, 9 - Verity Oates, 10 - Evelyn Manesta

David Bowie has become an enduring pop icon, and here his mugshot records him for posterity. This comes from 1976 in New York, where Bowie was photographed following a short arrest for cannabis possession.

 Finally, If you'd like to learn more about historical crime, make sure to also check out the Old Bailey Online.

Largely run by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, The Old Bailey Online is a fantastic resource to dig deeper into crime recorded at the Old Bailey in London between 1674-1913. Alongside providing transcripts and scans of the original sources for each recorded crime, it also gives several guides on how best to interpret the evidence, along with articles on relevant issues such as gender in crime.


Sources
-  Last Week Tonight: Prisons
-The Gaurdian: Texas Prsions Violate International Human Rights Standards
- The Telegraph: Dexter Author - Don't Romanticise My Serial Killer
-The Telegraph: Romanticising violence - the serial killers we love to hate
-Huffington Post: 10 Unforgettable Mugshots
-The Independent: 'Courts are biased against blacks'
-Ferguson Protests over the shooting of Mike Brown (via the continually updated tumblr tag)
-Hotties, Hunks and Beat up Celebrities - The Allure of the Mugshot
- 17 Hauntingly Beautiful Victorian Mugshots
-Vintage Mugshots from the 1920s
-The Wanted Victorian Women
-The Smoking Gun: Historical Mug Shots
-BBC History Victorian Mugshots Gallery
-Child Mugshots of the 1800s
-Victorian Mugshots Show 19thc Interest in Criminal Anthropology
-New Zealand Police Museum - Victorian Mugshots
-First criminal mugshots
-Criminal Identification before mugshots
-Suffragette Mugshots
-The Old Bailey Online

Women in science are often really under-represented.

Mayim Bailik, who plays Amy Farrah-Fowler
in The BIg Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory has received popular acclaim for how it humanises and brings female scientists to its main cast of characters. Although it wasn't always quite as progressive (originally bringing in the ladies as only somewhat stereotypical girlfriend material), in the more recent seasons the women have their own respected careers and accomplishments that at times even surpass their male counterparts.
It may seem to be over exaggerating to call this an 'accomplishment', but in a time when so many movies still fail the Bechedal Test  and when in the UK men are six times more likely to work in science, it's easy to see why having realistic female role-models for potential scientists is important.

Today, I hope to bring you ladies and gents a few inspiring role models. While we all know the stories of the pioneering Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale,they are not the only women of history who made a difference with their ideas. 

Below is a list of some fantastic female inventors that really deserve more recognition.

Mary Anning and her dog Tray

 The Discovery of Dinosaurs: Mary Anning (1799-1847)

In the early 1800s very little was known about dinosaurs, and some of the greatest discoveries of the ancient creatures came from an unlikely source.
Mary Anning was born in 1799 and was one of nine children of a poor family. As was sadly the case with many families in this period, death surrounded her. Only Mary and one other brother survived childhood, and Mary herself even had a lucky escape: while at a fair as a baby a thunderstorm struck and lightning killed the lady who was holding her as well as two other people but, miraculously, Mary was unscathed. Her father died when he fell from the cliffs at their seaside home and life became a struggle for the family. Mary grew accustomed to combing the beaches for seashells to sell to holidaymakers. Despite her limited start in life, Mary was an educated woman in that she could read and had taught herself geology,

One day in 1811, when Mary and her brother were poking around the cliffs to try to find small fossils to sell alongside their seashells, they came across an amazing find. Sticking out of the rock was a crocodile-like skull. They unearthed the stunning creature and in doing so found the very first complete fossil of a Ichthyosaurus. The fossil was brought by the local lord of the manor - Henry Hoste Henley - who in turn sold it to the Museum of Natural Curiosities in London.
Mary went on to discover more Ichthyosaurs as well as the Plesiosaurus in 1823, a flying Pterodactylus in 1828 and the fish-like Squaloraja in 1829. Braving the dangers of the crumbling cliff faces that had caused her father's death, Mary was able to unearth a remarkable number of quality fossils, which she went on to sell and which turned up in many academic works and collections of the day.

Unfortunately, due to the sexism of Victorian England, and her lowly social status, Mary rarely got credit for her finds, even if she was frequently sought out as an advisor and was well respected. When she died of breast cancer at age 47, the Geological Society (which didn't accept women as members until 1904) recorded her death and her local church commissioned a new stained glass window in her honour. It's rumored that the popular rhyme 'She sells sea shells by the sea shore' was about Mary. So try to remember this remarkable lady when you next wrap your mouth around that tongue twister!

Mary Anning's sketch of Plesiosaurus bones

The Birth of Bullet-Proof Vests: Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014)

Stephanie Kwolek

Science really is a mixed bag. Sometimes, when researching seemingly innocuous new discoveries something with a truly horrendous application is found and exploited. We need only look to TNT and nuclear fusion for this. But, thankfully, the universe is ultimately rather balanced and sometimes unusual things are found that also have unique potential for actually saving lives.So it was with Stephanie Kwolek's discovery of Kevlar - the main component in bullet proof vests.


Kevlar is a lightweight fiber that is stronger than steel and, through this, has the capacity to stop bullets in their track as a body armor. But, in 1965, when Stephanie and her colleagues at the DuPont Laboratory in Delaware were researching, body armor was far from their minds. Instead, they were looking for a strong lightweight fibre that might replace the steel in car tires so that fuel economy could be improved. Kwolek discovered a solvent that could dissolve long-chain polymer into a thinner and more watery solution than most solvents. Despite skepticism from her colleagues, she convinced them to let her put the solution on a spinneret that turned this liquid polymer into a fibre. When they happened upon the discovery they were thrilled by the new creation and the sheer volume of possible applications and Kwolek praised the teamwork that made all of these possible


Today, those police officers that have been saved by Kevlar have joined Dupont to form a 'survivor's club' that numbers over  3,100 members. Her legacy lives on in the thousands of lives saved by the buletproof vests, but kevlar also exists across the globe in the materials of cars and even in space through their inclusion in spacesuits.

"I don't think there's anything like saving someone's life to bring you satisfaction and happiness." Kwolek enthused as she claimed her award at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Young Ada Lovelace  - by Kate Beaton at Hark! A Vagrant

The Invention of Programming: Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852)
 
Computers have been lurking around history for hundreds of years in some form or another, whether through programmed weaving machines, ancient greek 'programmable' robotics and more. However computers as we know it are largely recognised as getting underway when Charles Babbage invented the machine in the mid 1800s. A computer would be nothing without proper programming, and we should turn to the remarkable Ada Lovelace as the pioneer of this vital invention.

Ada was a world class mathematician and the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron. When she worked as an occasional research assistant (and frequent pen-pal) to Charles Babbage, she envisioned using the new computer for more than just number-crunching. Instead, she was interested in creating a model for how the brain creates thoughts and emotions. She created the first algorithm for the Analytical Machine and so secured her place in history.

She now lends her name to the Ada Initiative, which supports women (including trans and genderqueer women) in the development of free and open technology software. In this field women are woefully unrepresented - making up only 2% of developers - and the Ada Initiative takes its inspiration from Ms Lovelace to push forwards in changing this and to promote feminism in technology and culture.


Creating the Circular Saw: Tabitha Babbitt (1784-1853)

 
 Necessity is the mother of invention and often it will pull you out of traditional gender roles as you search for a solution. One day, around 1813, Tabitha Babbit was watching a pair of men use a pit saw. This was a traditional saw, pulled back and forth over a piece of lumber. The saw, due to the angle of the teeth, could only ever cut when it was drawn forwards, but had to be pulled back in order to be used again. Tabitha was not impressed by how 50% of the effort was entirely wasted, so decided to come up with an alternative.
As a weaver, she used her knowledge to suggest an answer: she invented a circular saw and attached it to her spinning wheel so that it was controlled by a spinning axel. 

The clever invention increased productivity in her community and was widely used, but Tabitha received very little financial benefit due to the Shaker community's belief that no patents should be filed.

Tabitha went on to be similarly inventive and practical in more unpatented devices: she managed to come up with a double spinning head for her spinning wheels, and developed a way of processing multiple cut nails at once rather than the tradtional cutting of one at a time. When she died in 1853, she was mid-way through developing an idea for a false-teeth manufacturing process.


 Weathering the Storm with Windshield Wipers: Mary Anderson (1866-1953)

Another lady who leant her mind to a very practical solution to a widespread problem was Mary Anderson in her invention of the widescreen wipers that you can see on every car today.

Mary Anderson

One wintry New York day in 1902 Mary was riding in a streetcar, clinging to the edge of her seat as the driver tried in vain to navigate through the blinding rain and snow. She exclaimed to her travelling companions why no one had developed a way of clearing the wind-shield so that people could actually see where they were going and they replied that many people had tried and failed to invent such things: it simply couldn't be done. Not a woman to take 'no' lightly, she set about creating sketches and plotting out her invention of windscreen-wipers and, once she had the concept designed, hired a company to make the model and filed a patent.

Seeing how valuable this invention would be, she wrote to a large Canadian company offering to sell her rights, but she was turned down when they decided that her invention had no commercial value. Unfortunately for Mary, she had little further endurance for pitching the idea and, over several years, decided to forget about the invention and let the patent expire. As so often happens in history, at a later date someone revived her idea, went to the right people, and proceeded to make a fortune.


 The Beginning of the American Red Cross: Clara Barton (1821-1912)


Not all inventions are of the type that can be patented, but they can still reach across the world to save and to change thousands of lives. The  Red Cross - a global charitable organisation that focuses on helping people in crisis, who ever they are - is one such life changing invention

Clara Barton

The Red cross was originally launched in America by Clara Barton. Clara was a young woman when the American civil war broke out and did her best to look after the floods of wounded soldiers that came to Washington, despite having had no prior nursing experience.

Like Florence Nightingale, Clara saw that the greatest dangers to the wounded were poor medical supplies and substandard care. She mustred the organisation needed to fix this problem, advertising for charitable donations to purchase these supplies and supplied them herself. When the war died down, she went to Switzerland where she became aware of the international Red Cross movement and decided to bring this formula back to America, establishing her own branch of the Red Cross in 1881. She focused on emphasising that the Red Cross was not only associated with the war efforts as they arrived and passed, but also with humanitarian relief from natural disasters. Her tireless work, speeches articles and petitioning ensured the lasting establishment and as a result, she has saved many, many lives all across the world.




 Nowadays, there are many institutions and scholarships put in place to make sure that we nurture the spark of female invention in the scientific communities of the future. But, as we have seen, often some of the most innovative inventions come from unusual places.

I'd like to leave you with two young and enterprising women to watch for the future who prove that invention has no age limit.

Kylie with her Invention

Kylie Symonds and the Chemo Backpack

Cancer is never something that should be inflicted on children, but the sad reality is that many suffer from it. Kylie Symonds, at just 11 years old, found herself battling cancer and relied upon chemotherapy to try to fight the disease. One of the necessary elements of chemotherapy is a set of large and unwieldy IV poles. The poles not only restricted her mobility but, she noted, also were very intimidating to many children. Necessity is the mother of invention and Kylie decided to invent a way around this problem. She created a backback adaptation that would carry the IV medicine instead so that patients could keep mobile and, through the backpacks's colourful designs, feel less frightened by the normally stark medical equipment and feel more, well, normal. The design is practical as well, with the IV drip back being kept in a protective metal spiral cage.

Now, well on the way to full recovery, Kylie is trying to raise funds to put the innovative backpack into production so that other children can benefit from it. If you'd like to help fund her invention, check out her page on Crowdrise.com.

Deepika with her invention

Deepika Kurup and her Low Cost Water Purification

 Deepika, at only 14 years old, is bound to have a fantastic scientific career ahead of her. The inventive young lady from Nashua, New Hampshire, entered The Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge  and secured the $25,000 prize with the fantastic water purification system.

After seeing children in India drinking dirty water directly from a stagnant pool she was motivated to find a low cost way of solving the global water crisis. Spending 3 months of her free time and leafing through PHD papers on water purification methods, she found that the popular water purification methods were substandard because they required electricty to power UV lamps. Electricity, naturally, is in short supply in places where clean water is a challenge and is necessarily expensive. Other methods, such as using chemicals, lave a foul taste in the water. Under the support of her mentor from 3M, Deepika instead suggested a solar powered method and tested her machine in her back garden using contaminated water from the Nashua wastewater treatement facility. Her invention uses a system that exposes titanium oxide and inc oxide to sunlight that creates a cheical reaction to generate hydroxyl radicals which, in turn, kill harmful bacteria. Within a matter of hours, under this system, the water had significantly fewer coliform units and E.Coli colonies.

Deepika plans to work with 3M to develop her solar powered water filtration unit and will speak with other companies to try to gain funding and charity support. With such a passion for science, I doubt that this will be the last that we hear of her.


Sources
-F***k yeah female inventors
-How the big bang theory got good women in Science
-Five Female Scientists Who are Missing from the New 'Cosmos'
- The Inventor of Kevlar...Dies
- 11y/o girl invents Chemo Backpack
-15 Trailblazing women and how they made the internet
-Hark! A Vagrant 298
-19 Things you might not know were invented by women
-Herstory Network: Tabitha Babbit
-Trota: Cool chicks from history
-10 famous films that surprisingly fail the Bechedal test
-Why has the UK got so few women scientists?
-Bechedal Test Movie List
-BBC Primary History: Mary Anning
-Mary Anning: The Natural History Museum
- 10 useful inventions that went bad
-Creative Innovation
-The Red Cross
-Deepika Karup

This week I'd like to nudge you in the direction of a fantastic Youtube series: PBS Ideas Channel

As you may have noticed from my previous recommendation for the Youtube channel Vsauce, there seems to be a direct correlation between quality educational videos and awesome, balding, beardy geek-men.
Hrm. 

So, this week I bring you another Youtube channel that I often spend my breakfasts enjoying...





Hosted and written by Mike Rugnetta, the channel explores the links between popular culture, science and technology, maths, philosophy and art.

Quick-paced, bright, interactive and with it's finger on the pulse of internet (and 'real life') pop culture, the channel  encourages you to look deeper into many aspects of our life that we take for granted, pulling them apart and comparing them across a whole host of genres.

Who knew, for example, that retro 'bullet-hell' games could be seen as 'meditative'? Or that seeing the movie Ender's Game could be a political action? Or that glitchy art shows us that broken is beautiful? Or even that a tagged Instagram serves a far greater purpose than being just a photo? You could even ask, if you were feeling seasonal, what Father Christmas and wrestling have in common.

What I enjoy about PBS ideas channel is the philosophical feel behind all of the topics, and the genuine appeal to human curiosity. Mike and his team are very well read and so often the arguments - while very approachable - are quite academic and detailed. Yet they remain light-hearted, and inspiring.

At the end of every episode Mike shows up the best comments from the community of subscribers and interacts with them. He's always open to having his mind changed, and can even openly criticise himself and his own views, occasionally returning to certain topics more than once. The community if vibrant and enthusiastic, and so there's a great dialogue that goes on even when the episode itself comes to an end.

Simply put, I love the channel, and it served as an inspiration for this blog, so you should definitely check it out.

In other news...

I've recently found a couple more PBS-funded channels which look like they have great potential: PBS Games Show and It's Okay to be Smart
I might take a closer look at the latter soon. Alas, this blog isn't gaming-focused, so I'm unlikely to speak about the former any time soon. (If it was, I'd be nudging you towards Pewdiepie, Robbaz and Vanoss too. So many great lets plays out there.)

Who needs TV when you have youtube, eh?

This week's article was inspired by, of all things, an Idiot Abroad.

An Idiot Abroad, Season 3

I don't really watch the programme, but some evening channel surfing took me to Series 3 where Karl and Warwick Davies team up to explore the route of Marco Polo to China.
As a newcomer to the show it was rather awkward to watch: Karl seemed miserable when Warwick was happy and vice-versa. There were some great adventures and high moments, but on the whole it was cringe-worthy to watch Karl's genuine discomfort and anger at his being picked on (though at this point he rather expects it). It was outright painful to watch Warwick's genuine distress at Karl's occasional irritation at being 'slowed down' by the dwarf actor 'like he was dragging a Henry vaccum behind me, and having to stop and empty it now and again', to the point where the usually good humoured man was driven to tears. 

On their adventures the men also came across the Indian attraction - 'The Spider Girls' - a pair of conjoined twins named Ganga and Jumana Mondal (formally Ayara and Jayara Ratun). Joined at the pelvis, with fours arms and three legs, the ladies work travelling in the 'Dreamland Circus' in India. Their act involves sitting on display within the circus tent, where paying customers can enter and interact with them. In this case, Warwick was also lifted up onto their makeshift stage, much to his discomfort.


There is something incredibly old fashioned and unsettling to most modern Westerners about this display of disability in this 'Freak Show' format.  

Alex Brooker and Adam Hills

In modern times, we like to think ourselves as more 'civilised': to put a disabled or disfigured person on a stage to gawp at would be a hideous way of objectifying them, we often think. In many ways, in Britain, we're moving in a positive direction. The feminist movement has recently made steps to being more trans-inclusive than ever and carries on in criticising the body-shaming culture of western society. In doing so we are encouraged to view people based on their inner worth and identity. This too can be put towards disabled and disfigured people: the paraolympics is more popular than ever, and - following on from their popularity in covering the games and more - the presence of disabled celebrities is growing. This can be in the positive form, such as with Adam Hills (who was born without a foot) and Alex Brooker (Who was born without a foot and has hand disability).  Simon Western - a disfigured Falklands war veteran - was recently chosen as the subject of 'the people's portrait'. These people are held on their own merits and are celebrated or, as in the case of the infamous Oscar Pistorius trial, condemned.

However, despite this, there is still rampant,cruel ableism. There is always thoughtlessness and

Simon Weston Portrait

gawping, and even intentional childish cruelty. While we get a taste of this in Idiot Abroad, Gervais has already stomped over this territory many times before. In his 2009 tour Science he gleefully mocked Susan Boyle: 'When she first came on the telly, I went, "is that a mong?"' "She would not be where she is today if it wasn't for the fact that she looked like such a f***ing mong."' In the tour he refused to apologise for the word, insisting that the use of the word as Downs-Syndrome shorthand was outdated and he had reclaimed it outside of its original meaning. All the same, at a later date, he did apologise when a campaigner and mother of two autistic children broke down in tears as she explained about how the word was still used in it's original cruel fashion. Genuinely shocked, he admitted being 'naive' and backed down.
Nevertheless, in his radio show back in 2003 the same unthinking (and this time crueller) ableism was at work as he, Stephen Merchant and Karl mocked the facially disfigured Victoria Wright, mocking her large head and likening her to 'Bo'Selecta'. Victoria wrote about her experience on her blog and demanded and apology from the show's creators, but despite receiving the apology, she was mocked again, as Gervais asked Karl 'Where would the woman who complained about you come in the [Freak of the Year] chart?'.
The aim here isn't to offer up Ricky Gervais as a convenient scapegoat, but it does show how easily - even absent-mindedly- the general public can turn on people just because they are different. 'Disfigured', 'Disabled' and 'Different' people still occupy a very complex place in society,

How, then, could people live as 'Freak Show' performers?

Otis Jordan

As I discuss in my (rather dry) essay on the Freak-Show performer Frieda Pushnick's obituary, while doubtless some performers were exploited; many performers viewed their occupation as a legitimate form of showmanship and, often, a well paid one too. Frieda believed that there was nothing wrong with appearing as an attraction in Ripley's Believe it or Not. When asked if it was alright for disabled and disfigured people to be put on display she replied "If you're paid for it, yeah". This echoed the response of Otis Jordan, who in his career was billed as both 'the Frog Man' and 'The Cigarette Factory' for his performance. In 1984, in response to public complaints about what they percieved as exploitation, he insisted that there "wasn't anybody forcing him to do anything" and represented himself as a businessman, adding "Hell, what does she want for me - to be on welfare?". 

With all this in mind, I wanted to reccommend a website that has fascinated me for years now: The Human Marvels

 The Human Marvels tackles this complex relationship of 'Circus Freaks and Human Oddities' and keeps an archive about the lives of countless people of difference. This wonderful resource shows the stories of these people through history, highlighting their struggles, triumphs, showmanship, humanity and pride.
The subject will never be an easy one, but there is much to be learnt from the stories of these people's lives and the Human Marvels is a wonderful way to start.

http://www.thehumanmarvels.com/

Sources 

The Human Marvels.com


Victoria Wright and the Ricky Gervais Show
Idiot Abroad Season 3 - Warwick and Karl's Emotional Moment
The Spider Girls Wikipedia 
Adam Hills 
Alex Brooker
Idiot abroad season 3 review
Susan Boyle 'Mong' comments
Gervais' 'Mong' apology 
Victoria Wright
My essay on Frieda Pushnick's obituary
The People's Portrait
Otis Jordan

Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1990: University of Chicago Press)