Table of contents for May 2016 in Womankind

“WILLPOWER, LIKE A MUSCLE, BECOMES FATIGUED FROM OVERUSE BUT CAN ALSO BE STRENGTHENED OVER THE LONG TERM THROUGH EXERCISE...IMPROVING WILLPOWER IS THE SUREST WAY TO A BETTER LIFE.”Willpower, Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney On five acres of ground outside New York City, flower enthusiast Helena Rutherfurd Ely set to work on her creation, a cottage garden. It was an occupation, she believed, that should be taken up by all women, especially those suffering from ill heath or a nervous disposition. Gardening inspired Ely so much she wrote three books on the topic, including A Woman’s Hardy Garden (1903), which sold 40,000 copies. “I would make the strongest plea in favour of a garden to all those who are so fortunate as to possess any land at all,” she writes.…

If you’re someone who knows how to draw then you’ll be familiar with negative space. This is the bit that you’re not drawing - the space surrounding the subject, rather than the subject itself. In life, we too can focus on the negative space - or the areas in our life that are missing, or incomplete. For example, we mightn’t have found the love of our life, a career that expresses our true identity; we may be lacking financial security, good health, loyal friends, children, or time to relax. It’s often these missing areas of our life that we blame for our inability to find true happiness. But let us think of it another way. If the negative space is what forms the whole in a drawing, then for us…

Imagine being German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt the moment his destiny appeared before him. In 1912 he was excavating in the ruins of an ancient artist’s studio in Amarna, south of Cairo, a mission funded by the German Oriental Society in Berlin. Scattered around the workshop he uncovered 22 plaster cases of faces - some depicting lifelike women with wrinkled, sagging faces - a rarity in the idealised art of Ancient Egypt. Then he came across a well-preserved bust of a beautiful woman buried upside down in the sandy workshop floor. 44 pounds in weight and life-sized, the bust featured an immediately recognisable headdress identifying it as Nefertiti, the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaton’s chief queen and consort from over 3,000 years before. “Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our…

My parents are Egyptian, but they immigrated to Germany 38 years ago. I was born in Bonn, and Bonn is all literature and languages. When I graduated from school, art was my passion. So I thought, OK, I’m going to another country. And so I decided to study in Egypt. My first two years were awful, to be honest. Although Egypt is just four hours from Germany, they are entirely different worlds. All I knew of Egypt was the touristy world. In Germany I had never been confronted with poverty. Here, I felt helpless because I didn’t see anyone doing anything to address the poverty. I then met Raghda El Ebrashi, the founder of Alashanek Ya Balady. I told her I couldn’t stay in Egypt any more. I told her…

Look up into the night sky for the Dog Star, or Sirius. It is the brightest star in the sky and one of the nearest stars to us after the Sun. Sirius sparkles and can be mistaken, at times, for a plane, satellite or UFO. But don’t confuse the Dog Star for an even brighter spectacle, our sister planet Venus. In Greek mythology, two dogs - a big dog and a smaller dog - followed the constellation of Orion the hunter across the sky. The big dog is the larger constellation, Canis Major, the chief star in the constellation being the Dog Star. The smaller constellation or lesser dog, Canis Minor, includes alpha star Procyon, which is the eighth brightest star in the sky. An Arabic legend describes the two…

It’s called the ‘focusing effect’, meaning we think something’s important in life simply because we are allocating time and energy to it. If we are attending to things that bring happiness, it’s likely that we will be happier than if we surround ourselves with objects, people, and places that make us feel miserable. Over the course of the next month or so, write down those fleeting moments of happiness. Jot them down on the next page. They may feel inconsequential at the time but they are very valuable. And then decide to schedule more time and space to such moments in the future.…

On the plane my path is blocked by a derrière (bottom, bum, rump, butt). I’ll call it a derrière, the French equivalent, for nicety’s sake. The fleshy derrière is inches from my face as its owner lunges forward to grapple with her luggage. Now, its owner is a woman, of course, as no man would dream of exposing his cheeks on a commercial flight. Stripping down is the new norm for western women. Legs out, breasts exposed, tummies unveiled, the race is on to get it off. A denim version of the loincloth - a garb that was once peculiar to slaves in colonial times - has become the new women’s party uniform, just as monks wear robes and businessmen wear suits. To strip down is a regulation technique to…

Recently I was asked to give a talk at my old school. Think private. Think all girls. Think wooden banisters from the war years and dark, thick oil portraits of former female principals, and uniform hems worn at the ‘appropriate length’. Before I arrived, I was a bit like a snorty, nervous horse, not really wanting to go back into a stable after running so free (and feral) in the wild for so many years. But I made myself go because I wanted to ask the girls this question: “Who is aiming for a career in agriculture?” There was an uncomfortable silence. Only two girls out of a crowd of 150 senior secondary students tentatively put up their hands. My next question was a more hopeful one: “Who here eats…

Simple living celebrates the fact that very little is needed to live well. It’s a philosophy of living that involves voluntary downshifting, reducing unnecessary consumption, and seeking non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning. Womankind is pleased to showcase the winning photograph for Award VI: Simple Living, taken by American photographer Michael A. Wiggins. Wiggins’ charming photograph is titled It all boils down to being a good and meaningful person, in the ways I know how. One of the four runners-up is Out to dry by photographer Jessica Paullus, captured in Northeastern Indiana. “The Amish have always symbolised the concept of simple living to me,” Paullus comments. “I was drawn to their clothing as it hung out to dry, fluttering in the breeze.” Annette Liu’s detailed photograph The little things in…

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We can mistakenly believe that some things make us happy, when in reality they don’t. This may rest on an incorrect ‘image’ or ‘view’ of who we really are, formed over time by friends and family, movies and whatnot. For instance, you see yourself as an adventurer first and foremost, when in reality your happiest moments are at home with a book or on solitary weekends spent in the garden. The best way to find out what makes you happy is to be aware of this fleeting sensation. When you momentarily feel happiness during the day, jot down what you’re actually doing at the time. You may be surprised at what you discover - take note, and commit to prioritising more of these of activities in the future. “THERE'S A…

Self-help gurus love goals. “Success is goals, and all else is commentary,” says one guru. Self-help masters proclaim their love for goal setting in myriad places - books, audiotapes, box sets with titles like Write it Down, Make it Happen, and meditation exercises designed to achieve goals that really excite you, often involving hot property and fast cars. It’s true that knowing what you want - and writing it down - can help you to plan. You can write out a step-by-step action plan, for example, complete with boxes to tick. Goals can help stave off procrastination - and once specific goals have been ticked off, you can then replace them with even more goals, ensuring that your life journey is always on the straight and up. Up, up, up…

As a child, life was simple. I lived with my mother, played a lot, and laughed enormously. We didn’t have much - very few clothes and possessions. I was the youngest and my siblings were all working. When I was seven, I began helping my sister - learning the work of a maid at the house where she was employed. I’d come and go, come and go - watching how she worked and what she did. I really wanted to go to school like the other children my age, but we didn’t have the resources for it. I also didn’t enter school at the appropriate time, and then it was too late. I was too old. I cried a lot about this. I desperately wanted to go to school. Sometimes…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Why? Because according to the OECD a wife is a fabulous investment. She will spend almost double the time men do changing nappies, boiling pasta, whacking together costumes for library month, and sweeping up kitty litter (the precise figures for OECD countries are 273 minutes of housework per day for women compared to 141 minutes for men). Even better, if you’re a man in possession of a good fortune, you won’t need to feel guilty about your wife doing more work because as a society we have agreed that these chores are not labour, but love: natural, unpaid, and unnoticed. Happily, this then liberates the man of good…

Declaring the Valley of the Kings ‘exhausted,’ archaeologist Theodore Davis ceased his excavations. Davis had found artefacts bearing the name of the last undiscovered pharaoh. And if that pharaoh’s burial goods seemed paltry...well, it was to be expected: Tutankhamun was only a minor ruler, and the tomb had probably long been raided. Howard Carter disagreed. He thought Tutankhamun’s tomb was still out there, buried beneath centuries of sand. A Londoner, Carter was self-educated and artistically skilled. By seventeen, he was living in Egypt copying tomb paintings. After many years working on digs, the Egyptian Antiquities Service hired him to lead his own projects. It was Carter who managed to convince Lord Carnarvon, an English Earl, to finance the search for a tomb everyone presumed had been found. A LONDONER, CARTER…

Recently on an inner-city street I came across a cluster of elderly men standing around a little table topped with sunlit jars of honey. The men were laughing and talking to the young honey seller, remembering the past and giving advice. Beekeeping talk. I stopped to listen. The seller kept a hive or two in his small garden, his bees roamed the neighbourhood, and he filtered the honey himself. Those few minutes connected us all: to nature, memory, community, and history reaching as far back as the Ancient Egyptians. It was a shock on the way home to pass a van crawling with representations of insects and spiders and promises to kill them all. I wondered what Ancient Egyptians would have thought. Reverence for nature and awareness of its cycles…

How did you become a photojournalist? I began photography while I was in college studying fine arts. I started taking photos of people from marginalised societies, as well as teaching photography to kids. But two years after I graduated I started my internship at Al-Shorouk newspaper and then the Revolution happened. How did the Revolution affect you? I was very passionate about documenting the Revolution. I slept in my office for eight of the 18 days. I couldn’t go home because of the curfew, and I also needed to stay to document everything that was happening in Tahrir Square. Many times we worked 15-hour days, because there were so many assignments, so much happening. We moved from here to there, covering everything. It was an emotional time on so many…

We are looking for photographs that depict the concept ‘pastime’. In which activities do you - or people you know - engage to pass the time? A pastime can be a pleasant means of amusement, a recreation, sport, a manic obsession, and even a distraction. Modelling shots are not appropriate. We do not accept any sexual or violent images, or images depicting nudity or semi-nudity. Open to all readers. Details Closing date: 31 August 2016 Format: One photo per entry. Entries must also include a separate photo of an edition of Womankind. Applicants: Open to both amateur and professional photographers. File size: Please send large file sizes (larger than 3,000 pixels wide, 300dpi). Entries must be provided in file sizes suitable for publishing. Win $500 and get published in the…

TATE MODERN London Georgia O’Keeffe 6 JULY – 30 OCTOBER 2016 A century after her New York debut, Tate Modern presents a retrospective of modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe. She is recognised as a foundational figure of American modernism and an important pioneer by feminist artists of the 1970s. Charting the progression of her practice from her early abstract experiments to her late work, this exhibition will re-examine her entire career, her development, her trajectory west, and the profound influence and legacy of her work. THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM Cambridge, UK Death on the Nile: Uncovering the afterlife of Ancient Egypt UNTIL 22 MAY 2016 The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition on its collection of Egyptian coffins. Golden yellow, and covered from head to toe in bright hieroglyphs…

Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of the shade,And yet the menace of the yearsFinds, and shall find me, unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.…

Let us place your heart on a scale to measure its weight. Figuratively speaking, would your heart, regarded by Ancient Egyptians as the seat of intellect and emotion, be light or heavy? Have you lived a noble and righteous life, or have you been mired in vicious wrongdoing? For in Egyptian religion a heart weighed down by grief, sorrow, and regret would not be welcomed into the underworld (afterlife). In Ancient Egypt, the weighing of the heart ceremony took place at the entrance to the underworld. Here, the heart of a person was placed on a pan; at the far end of the balance was a feather, representing the goddess of truth, Ma’at. Crouching nearby, the monster Ammut would await the verdict - was the heart heavier than the feather?…

I am watching a child claw at a smart-phone. She is sliding her finger across the screen, over and over again. Her eyes can see the flower inside but her fingers fail to touch the object she so desperately seeks. “Where is the flower?” asks her brain. She paws at the screen in search of the real thing but no flower can be found. There are floatation tanks that promise respite from the shrill and clatter of daily life. Overstressed city-types book in to lay in a salty tank for a moment’s peace - no sight, smell, sound, touch or taste - the five senses tune out for an hour or so of ‘relaxation therapy’. Naked, blind, hearing impaired under the weight of water, floatation tanks are like being set…

I grew up different from the girls at my school. I didn’t have many boundaries or restrictions. I looked up to my mother. She was a very strong character who didn’t care what people thought of her. She was also a working woman. I figured out later that she struggled, working and taking care of me and my dad at the same time. But she never made me feel like she was struggling. She made sure I felt that everything was natural and together. From a young age, I was pushed away from the girls’ group at school. I found that I just didn’t fit in at all. Mum would always tell me, “Don’t worry about what other people think of you - as long as you’re doing what you…

Your photographs are very powerful. How do you achieve this? At the very beginning I made a promise to myself: I would create images even if they were very few. The most important thing is they ‘must have meaning’. I take my time and free my imagination totally. In every photograph I’m trying to get a certain sense or feeling; its visual message reaches directly to the heart of the audience. From where do you source your ideas and inspiration? I believe that inspiration is everywhere. Part of my religion provokes me to meditate and find a story behind everything. In life, if we look for something very carefully we will find it. I might never have another amazing idea that will hit me again, but if I train myself…

Paired figures in Ancient Egyptian art symbolise duality, or the acknowledgment that there are competing forces in life. Egypt itself is conceived as a duality - the lands of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, the black land of the floodplain and the red lands of the desert. Duality features in Chinese philosophy (yin and yang), as well as in universal concepts - order and chaos, life and death. There are competing forces in life, and sometimes we find ourselves tipped off balance. Here we consider duality from three different life perspectives. One Sigmund Freud called it “repetition compulsion”, and it’s what keeps people trapped in a life that they know could be better. The term refers to life patterns that are repeated over and over again, a cycle of behaviour.…

Lara James I spend much of Sunday afternoon wandering around my small Edwardian home (I mention this, as in 1915 storage wasn’t a priority) looking at my vast collection of things, known to my family and friends as ‘The Lara James Collection’. I come from a family of collectors; I spent my childhood roaming through op shops, auction houses, and tip shops. I am also engaged to a collector. So as you can imagine we have a problem at our house. It’s overflowing with our diverse collection, otherwise known as clutter, and it’s getting us down. Day One: It falls on the first day of my working week. So at the end of a long day, I race home and put some fish fingers in the oven. In the time…

Anubis is the Egyptian god of the dead, concerned with burial and the afterlife. Anubis is depicted in canine form or as a man with the head of a dog, jackal or fox. The tomb of Sennedjem - an artisan who worked on the tombs of the pharaohs - was discovered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1886. A mural in the burial chamber depicts the jackal-headed Anubis tending to Sennedjem’s casket. Anubis was the god of mummification, and priests carrying out mummification may have worn Anubis masks. Anubis also played a key role in escorting the newly deceased to the weighing of the heart ceremony. New genetic evidence suggests that dogs may have split from wolves 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. Throw a stick into the water and…

Once, on a sunny autumn afternoon during my early undergraduate years, a good friend mistook astronomy for astrology. “I’m studying the lunar cycle in my astrology course,” she told me earnestly during a Friday afternoon tea (the college took ritual very seriously). Behind us, a fellow student was plonking on the house piano. The 2008 election cycle blared from the common room’s television. Both noises crashed into one another, filling the air around us; I thought I misheard her. “Astronomy, right?” I asked, dunking a cookie into my mug of tea. “Don’t you mean astronomy?” “No,” she smiled, ever cheerful. “It’s an astrology course. I thought maybe I should take one class that’s not ecology.” We sipped our tea. A minute passed. I made a joke about Aquariuses. She leaned…

King Ferdinand of Spain once famously said: “Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards - get gold.” The Aztecs named it the “excrement of the gods” and the Incas, to whom silver was the tears of the Moon, saw it as the sweat of the Sun. Gold, across millennia and cultures, has commanded a place in the heavens, a glinting incandescent reminder of power, riches, and otherworldly rapture. But, on Earth at least, this precious metal has ensnared the humans that lust after it. Rare, luminous, dense, and malleable, gold has been used for decorative objects for more than six thousand years. As early as 2600 BCE it was mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the world’s oldest surviving geographical map, the Turin Papyrus scroll, drawn around 1150 BCE,…

“You can tell whether a person is clever by their answers. You can tell whether a person is wise by their questions.” Naguib Mahfouz Queen Nefertiti - Greatest Mystery of Ancient Egypt The ‘Great Royal Wife’ of the renegade pharaoh Akhenaten, Nefertiti was a mother of six who helped lead a religious revolution that changed Egypt and the world forever. Yet after her death, her enemies destroyed all evidence of Nefertiti’s life. Now, drawing on 13 years of research, a team of experts bring Nefertiti’s turbulent reign to life as never before. The Worm is Turning Revealed through historical archival footage, this is the story of how corporate agribusiness is taking over the world’s food production. It shows how this system is affecting people’s health and the ecology of the…