Chapter 6: The Activist’s Attic
only to be dismissed as insane, troubled, hysterical or angry: Some of the women who were deemed hysterical for objecting to their role in Victorian times were sent to psychologists or given electric shocks or drained by leeches in the hope their ‘restlessness would abate’; in America, ‘angry’ women were fitted with ‘Scold’s bridles’, iron masks that both covered their faces and stilled their tongues.
The sin . . . is challenging male authority: Sydney Anglican clergy wife Lesley Ramsey wrote in 1996: ‘Over the past thirty years of ministry in Anglican churches in Sydney, I have wrestled with God over my status as a woman. I don’t know any woman who hasn’t, because it is part of our rebellious nature.’ Southern Cross, winter 1996, p.18.
if such a woman approaches the pulpit: MOW National Magazine, April 1992, p.6.
‘stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights’: Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, Pan, 2012.
one report estimated: Ibid.
‘Through archives, the past is controlled’: Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, records, and power: The making of modern history’, Archival Science, 2002, 2, pp.1–19. For an analysis of how this worked in the national archives of the apartheid regime in South Africa, see Verne Harris, ‘Redefining archives in South Africa: Public archives and society in transition, 1990–1996’, Archivaria, fall 1996, p.42, and ‘Claiming less, delivering more: A critique of positivist formulations on archives in South Africa’, Archivaria, fall 1997, p.44.
‘the rain can be an event’: Rebecca Solnit, ‘Every protest shifts the world’s balance’, The Guardian, 1 June 2019.
Chapter 7: Honour the Temporary
‘Hope and peace have to include’: Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, Riverhead Books, New York, p.132.
Chapter 8: Accept Imperfection
Diana Vreeland as having the ‘face of a gargoyle’: Daphne Merkin, ‘The unfairest of them all’, The New York Times, 16 October 2005.
Catherine the Great looked . . . like . . . David Cameron: Jonathan Jones, ‘Who says David Cameron’s no oil painting?’, The Guardian, 18 December 2013.
‘He was gloomy, abstracted and joyous’: Lecture by W.M.H. Herndoe, quoted in The New York Times, 31 December 1865, p.3.
‘all young people now believe that she was a huge heap of a woman’:George Bernard Shaw, ‘The ugliest statues in London’, Arts Gazette, 31 May 1919, p.273; cited in Stanley Weintraub, ‘Exasperated admiration: Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria’, Victorian Poetry, vol.25, no.3/4, published on the centenary of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (autumn–winter 1987), p.131.
Plutarch wrote that her beauty: Plutarch, Antony and Cleopatra, from the ‘Lives of illustrious men’: Translation of John Dryden and Arthur Hugh Clough, https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/4099.html.
Elizabeth Jolley described female anxiety about appearance: From The Orchard Thieves, Penguin, 1995, © Elizabeth Jolley. Reproduced with permission.
‘Beauty is essentially meaningless, and it’s always transitory’: Carolyn Mahaney and Nicole Mahaney, True Beauty, Crossway, Wheaton Illinois, 2014, p.19.
‘like an aging female Dead Head with alopecia’: Meredith F. Small, ‘Mummy reveals Egyptian queen was fat, balding and bearded’, Live Science, 6 July 2007.
‘a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things’: Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, Tuttle Publishing, Vermont, 2003, p.51.
‘We do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance’: Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translated from the Japanese by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, Vintage Books, London, 1991, pp.11–12.
she knew that she didn’t look ‘fine’: Zadie Smith, On Beauty, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2005, pp.197–198.
happiness is being ‘busy and lively and unconcerned with self’: Spoken by the character Willy in The Nice and the Good, Random House, 2009, p.179.
‘such a great example [in] how she carries herself’: Alexander Mallin, ‘Obama says he’s not worried about his daughters dating: “They have secret service”’, abcnews.go.com, 4 November 2016.
Chapter 9: Seeing the Whole Person
a book for children, based on his own life story: Robert Hoge, Ugly, Penguin Random House, Sydney, 2017.
‘No one is only just one thing’: Ibid.
‘Knowing I’m aging physically’: Wlada Kolosowa, ‘Ten questions you always wanted to ask an ugly person, Vice, 5 January 2017.
Recent research has overturned the myth of the ‘beauty premium’: Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary C. Still, ‘Is there really a beauty premium or an ugliness penalty on earnings?’, Journal of Business Psychology, 2018, 33, pp.249–262.
‘profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man’: Debra Nails, ‘Socrates’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2018 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/socrates/.
‘ugly as sin but utterly charming’: Andy Martin, The Boxer and The Goal Keeper: Sartre Versus Camus, Simon and Schuster, London, 2012.
Chapter 10: Let Yourself Go
‘I don’t like lamb; but mutton dressed like lamb!’: See www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mutton-dressed-as-lamb.html.
‘The worst thing you can do is to dress younger than you are’: Cynthia Nellis with Kim Johnson Gross, ‘The best fashion tips for women over 40’, liveabout.com, 10 January 2018.
a survey by isme.com suggested: Bianca London, ‘Carol Vorderman dishes out style advice for older women as it is revealed that most females change their wardrobes when they hit 50’, Daily Mail, 4 July 2013.
a maxi skirt can also add ‘ten years’: Shane Watson, ‘The 40 things every woman should know about fashion over 40’, The Telegraph, 4 September 2018.
‘Are you a middle-aged fashionista who just doesn’t know when to quit?’: ‘Top 10 items you’re too old to wear’, Everyday Health website, 15 November 2017.
The answer? ‘Perk it up’: Shane Watson, ‘The 40 things’.