Jane Haile

Lie In The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism and the Reality of the Biological Clock Tanya Selvaratnam presents her own story of “heartbreak and self-discovery” relative to her attempts to become a mother at the “advanced age of 40” , having experienced three miscarriages. She notes that women tend not to talk among themselves about failed

Men & Gender Women feel that the gender scales are weighted against them in most fields; and this in turn makes them assume that men will not want to enter into a discussion on equality issues. However without more balanced involvement the situation is unlikely to change. gendercentric posted earlier the question has gender become

Marriage We had of course Kate & William which looks like the first successful royal marriage for a long time because of or despite that fact that the bride is an outsider. But most spectacularly we saw the Archbishop of Canterbury being routed by a combination of gay marriage and women bishops, unless this was

Hands & Bags Even the most avid football fans may feel that they know more than they need to know about English players’ conversation on the pitch? Though probably few of us knew that ‘handbagging’ is footballer slang for ‘a bit of banter’. This seems to be an unlikely cross-over from Mrs Thatcher’s famous wielding

Sexism & Media The research took place over four weeks in 2011 and reviewed (only) the front pages of both tabloids and the quality press. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/15/women-newspapers-front-page Perhaps the most interesting findings of this report relate to the counter-intuitive comparisons drawn between different newspapers. The WiJ found that the most male-dominated was the (‘quality’) Independent with

Are you my mother ? If so, you could do much worse than to start with Are You My Mother?… the second book in a diptych by Alison Bechdel which explores her fraught relationship with her mother in the hope and expectation of finally becoming herself. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_thurman The English-speaking world …unlike the French or the

Vive la France ! Badinter seeks to demonstrate how the philosophy of “naturalism” which gives primacy to me. Elisabeth Badinter the celebrated French feminist and philosopher though probably sets out to demonstrate this truth scientifically in her book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, originally published in French in 2010. Motherhood

Dangerous Woman This massive tome of nearly 800 pages appears to be tapping into at least a couple of recent trends with varying success. The first of these is the new fashion for enormous hardback books a characteristic to which sci-fi and fantasy fiction may be particularly prone; and the second is the surge in

Closes Staff at the pub, famous for its cider, told the couple that they were ‘obscene’ and eventually that they had to leave. Disinterested observers indicate that Bull’s ‘peck on the lips’ of Williams whilst recognized as ‘snogging’ did not fall into the category of ‘heavy petting’ let alone ‘obscenity’. This was a first date