Sommaire pour February 2020 de Womankind

“As soon as I saw the house, I knew my life would be changed forever,” she says. The country farmhouse in England is bought and a new path is forged. This is an example of an unexpected find which spins life on a new axis. It’s these moments in life that we crave. The unexpected good news, the fortunate find, a sudden shift in perspective that makes everything clear and our future somehow predictable. “I know who I am, my purpose, and my path!” We read the biographies of such people who have an epiphany, and wish the same would happen to us. As romantic as this sounds, life is rarely this simple and peak experiences rarely come from out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning. Rather, as American…

When bad things happen, hope is sometimes all we’re left with, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like much. Hope, after all, is merely a feeling, there’s nothing guaranteed about hope. You can’t hang on to ‘hope’ like you can hold on to a positive diagnosis, a sunny forecast, or plain good news. For some, hope can feel rather pathetic, as though one should be bravely facing the worst not just ‘hoping’ for things to turn out alright. But, according to American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is an essential emotion we should be cultivating in our day-to-day lives. Snyder’s ‘Hope Theory’ posits that people with higher levels of hope create better outcomes across the board. An athlete training for a competition should be ‘hopeful’ of winning; a student working on an…

I was born in Bromley, Kent, South East of London in 1947. I was the youngest with two sisters, Christine and Patricia, five and 14 years older than me. My father was a wholesale greengrocer and my mother was a lovely lady who worked hard creating a happy family. One of my earliest memories was seeing my eldest sister, Tricia, drawing a face which she was copying from a fashion magazine. I thought then that I wanted to draw and be good at it. When I was about nine, I remember seeing Salvador Dalí’s painting Slave Market With The Disappearing Bust Of Voltaire. It was then that I realised that painting has no boundaries and is capable of transmitting strong emotions. My paternal grandmother kept sheets of blank paper at…

I was born in Nottingham; the youngest of two children. My dad was a lorry driver and my mum was a cleaner, working wherever she could to make ends meet. Without affordable childcare, my parents often had no option but to take me to work with them. Some of my earliest memories are of riding in my dad’s truck as he went to his deliveries, eating meat sandwiches packed for us by my mum. My brother was six years older than me, and a huge influence as I grew up. I would sit outside his bedroom listening to Madness, Adam Ant, Nirvana, and Prince blaring through his door. I have a lot to thank him for in terms of musical education! We still share the same music taste now. My…

“You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anyone else, you have to fill all the papers more than anyone else.” So said Emmeline Pankhurst to her audience in Hartford, Connecticut. It was November 1913, and she was on a lecture tour, discussing the women’s suffrage campaign back home in Britain. The American press were surprised that the notorious suffragette was so dainty. “Yes, this is what a hooligan looks like,” she used to smile, fully aware that she appeared completely genteel. It was a disguise, of course. The suffragettes were an army, and Emmeline Pankhurst was their commander in chief. Emmeline had formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester ten years before. At first, it consisted of…

Is the ballet world as cut-throat and competitive as suggested by films such as ‘Swan Lake’? When I watch Swan Lake, I have to remember it is a film. It is not a documentary. It is a thriller by a talented director. I think that’s why audiences are drawn in. But in reality, ballet is no more competitive than other professions or fields in art. The film is a manufactured drama. It’s what people want to believe about ballet dancers, but it’s not accurate. Ballet is competitive, because ultimately you’re wanting to achieve something, whatever your burning desire might be, but you also need to step back and watch other people have success too. In that way you can draw a lot from it - but it comes back to…

When you think of the English, you don’t usually think of ‘ecstasy’ - I mean ecstasy in the sense of surrendering control of your habitual self and feeling filled with a higher power or spirit. That doesn’t sound very Downton Abbey. And yet cultures are full of paradoxes. English culture - rational, empirical, commercial, and moderate - is also the culture that gave us Blake, the Beatles, Methodism, and acid house. Because we’re so uptight, we need to really let go; sometimes. No one illustrates this paradox in the English character better than Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World. He was a posh, cerebral, emotionally-repressed intellectual. And yet, ironically, this stiff upper lip Brit became a spiritual guru in California, and helped to shift western culture’s attitude to…

How does clothing affect behaviour? Are we what we wear? If we’re wearing something that we feel confident in, it makes us more able to achieve whatever we’re aiming for, and this positive behaviour is reciprocated by the people we’re interacting with, so it’s an upward spiral. There has been a lot of research into this - for example, we know when we wear a suit that we’re likely to behave more professionally, whatever that means. The enclothed cognition study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky tested two groups of people; one who had been told that a white lab coat belonged to a painter, and another who were told the same coat belonged to a doctor. Both groups were given an attention span test while wearing the coat, and…

What attributes or skills do you have that make you a leader? I’m passionate about what I do, and I believe that if you’re passionate about something and have clarity about why you’re passionate about it - and you can communicate that passion to other people - that makes you a good leader. I’m very certain about what I do, and why I do it, and this can be communicated to others. I was also brought up to trust my instincts, so I do things quite instinctively. For me, leadership is very much about making others feel empowered to do their best, and to create a really positive environment. Everybody thinks I’m a good leader, but actually they’re doing all the work. I don’t want to come to work and…

I grew up in Birmingham and am a ‘Brummy’ born and bred. My family were very religious, and I went to church twice every Sunday, for Sunday school and then again for mass. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but I have never been very religious myself. I spent a lot of my teen years rebelling against this lifestyle. I struggled with my weight and body confidence from quite an early age and was bullied due to my size during high school. I became the class clown - I loved being funny and quickly learned that making people laugh was a good way to distract them from my weight, and stop them from picking on me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I left…

I’m a born and bred Londoner, from Ladbroke Grove. The first place I was ever allowed to go shopping without parents was Portobello Road Market. Dad used to take me and my brother to Queens Park Rangers football matches near home and we would often go to Shepherd’s Bush Market before or afterwards. I’ve always loved the eclectic mix of things there and finding cheap, tacky bits and bobs and finding a way to make them special. My mum makes and sells lots of things from all over the world and has studied soft furnishings. She too used to take me down to Goldhawk Road as a kid when she needed to buy fabrics for clients or projects and so the guys in my favourite shops have all known me…

When I was nineteen years old, I was living in a student squat, sleeping on an old mattress on the floor, walking everywhere to save on the bus fare. I was starved of beauty. One day, I saw a poster of a painting hanging in a shop window that stopped me in my tracks. A woman with heavy dark hair and a sorrowful face, loosely dressed in blue-green silk, holding a pomegranate in her hand. The fruit had been split open to show the red pulp within. Behind her, a faint glimpse of light. In the lower left-hand corner of the painting was a scroll inscribed with “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”, a name I had never heard before. In the upper right corner was a square of poetry written in Italian.…

In his poem Thyrsis, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold called Oxford “the city of dreaming spires”. Those stunning spires have inspired writers for generations, and today it is calculated that there are more writers per square mile in Oxford than anywhere else in the world. The rich history of novel writing is ingrained in the DNA of the city. It would be difficult not to let the imagination fly in a place where you could be walking in the footsteps of King Henry VIII or crossing the spot where The Oxford Martyrs were burnt at the stake. Today many tourists are on a pilgrimage to such places as the Bodleian library, New College and Christ Church where Harry Potter was filmed. The Eagle and Child pub, owned by the oldest…

Susan Wakefield Mornington Peninsula, Australia Day one: To perambulate or not to perambulate? I love that word: perambulate. It sounds so serious, so important. I put earplugs in my ears before I set off in perambulation mode: hmmm, now what should I listen to when I walk? I guess I am reasonably fit for a freelance writer who spends more hours a day on her gluteus maximus than the Brooklyn bus driver that does sixteen-hour shifts day and night. I leave the house. Keys down, shoes on, ear plugs: in or out? I stick the ear plugs in to listen to Drake and at the last minute decide to take my furry four-legged beast with me. Suddenly I feel a pang of guilt for being the dog owner that never…

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”Marcel Proust Middlemarch By George Eliot Often named as one of the best English novels of all time, George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, is set in a fictitious Midlands town from 1829 to 1832. Dorothea is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon. Middlemarch is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. To the Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. Time passes, bringing with it war and death, and the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, when the family…

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

What are you wearing today? Take a look. And then take a look at your immediate surroundings. You are an actor on stage, standing within a setting - and what you wear, the setting, props, your gestures and speech are all interpreted by others around you, just like in a play. The audience is watching you perform, and they will use these inputs to form a narrative about you. In the 1956 sociology book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday life, Erving Goffman put forward the idea that we guide and control the impression others have of us in everyday life, much like an actor on stage. And we do this through a range of inputs. Are you wearing a fancy green business suit, or gym pants and t-shirt? Are…

“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”— Charlotte Brontë When Patrick Brontë died at age 84, he outlived his wife and six children by decades. Born ‘Brunty’, Patrick changed his surname in adulthood to the more intriguing ‘Brontë’ complete with the diaeresis over the letter ‘e’. The motivation, thought his biographer, was to associate himself with the Duke of Brontë, who he also liked to emulate by way of dress. The name change served his daughters well, three of whom became famous writers, Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë, who wrote Jane Eyre, and Anne Brontë, the lesser known of the threesome but no less talented, who wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne…

I was born in Karachi, the biggest city in Pakistan. It’s a real city - huge and vibrant and cosmopolitan. I was an only child raised by my father and his side of the family and honestly, I just had the most amazing childhood. I was so close to my family - my uncle, aunt, my grandparents - and my dad. I was very privileged, and they gave me a wonderfully nurturing environment. I’ve been doing art for as long as I can remember, and they were very supportive of that, not in a ‘kiddy’ way by saying, “Oh, you’re colouring like every other child,” but in a way that showed they were genuinely interested in what I wanted to create. My childhood life in Pakistan was, to me, perfect.…

Recently, I passed a colleague in the hallway and greeted her by saying, “How are you?” She responded with a sigh and a smile, “Too busy. You know, it’s just life in the modern world.” Her honest comment jolted me awake, and led me to think more about the tremendous pressures of contemporary society. Take, for example, this shift. A few decades ago, a common greeting in China was, “Have you eaten?” This was not an invitation to dinner, but a reflection of a value system - both care about food and concern about whether you have enough. As China catapulted into a modern market economy, the common greeting changed to, “Are you busy?” This shift echoes in the hallways of our work, family, and social circles throughout the world…

We are pleased to announce the winning entry of Womankind’s Photographers’ Award XX on the theme ‘Portrait’. In first place is photographer Bev Pettit who beautifully captured legendary rug weaver and Navajo Elder, Suzie Yazzie, standing outside her childhood home in Utah, Arizona. In second place is Kristine Heykants who has photographed Cousin Joan in Aunt Leona’s Kitchen. In third place is the exquisite Sisters by Françoise Holtzmacher. And in fourth place is Hero, by Maria Colaidis (the sitter’s name is Hero Minogue). Finalists include the stunning Ruth Baig, by Kate Atkinson, Night’s Eyes, by Lucy Cawood, and the dreamy Anything Can Be, by Jax Mennenoh.…

English people are deeply proud of their gardens. Gardening has even been described as a (or even ‘the’) national art form; we may have got literature, music, and painting from continental Europe originally, but gardens - particularly garden design - are our own. Gardens occupy a very special place in the national psyche. We can see this pride in various ‘national’ events: The Queen, now in her 90s, still turns out every year for various events - the State Opening of Parliament, The Remembrance Day wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph in honour of our War Dead, the Trooping of the Colour (The Queen’s Birthday Parade), and The Chelsea Flower Show (more correctly the Royal Horticultural Society Great Spring Show). Every year the Queen also hosts a series of Garden Parties,…

I die but when the grave shall pressThe heart so long endeared to theeWhen earthly cares no more distressAnd earthly joys are nought to me Weep not, but think that I have pastBefore thee o’er a sea of gloomHave anchored safe and rest at lastWhere tears and mourning cannot come ‘Tis I should weep to leave thee hereOn the dark Ocean sailing drearWith storms around and fears beforeAnd no kind light to point the shore But long or short though life may be‘Tis nothing to eternityWe part below to meet on highWhere blissful ages never die…