Very pleased yesterday (but sorry I’m behind the times, it was announced on the 12th and I missed both the announcement and the party!) to find I have been listed in the WISE 100, a list of 100 women working in Social Enterprise.
All lists are silly, I might say in another mood, but this was one I was glad to have made, not so much for myself as for my work at The Reader, not a women-only organisation though many of our readers are women. And many of The Reader’s staff members and volunteers are women. And all of our leadership group at The Reader are (currently) women.
This interests me, as in my twenties I spent some time living in a women-only commune and strongly identified as a feminist. Being that feminist helped me become a woman in my own right and I’d recommend some feminism for all beginner-women – you want to be able to knock your own nails in, lift heavy things, play in your own band, fight your corner, learn to knit, read books by women, stand on your own two feet, know your own experience and live without a lover for as long as necessary.
These days I wouldn’t describe myself as a feminist, though I still get bothered about the problems of a male world view as the norm and the resulting problems women (and some men) face. And though I wouldn’t use the word (or any sort of classification ending in ‘ist’) for myself, yet I have built or accidentally stumbled into or attracted a woman-only senior leadership team. If I was a man this would be called ‘unconscious bias’ (you pick people like yourself whether you mean to or not). It is more practical than that, I hope.
As someone who has struggled to get toddlers and pushchairs and bags of shopping on and off the bus, if I were a designer I’d design buses and pushchairs and shopping bags to work differently. If I were the Prime Minister, parents of new babies would be issued with 3 camo-boiler suits and encouraged to wear them until after their children start school. What time and energy that would save, what smears, what slarts would go unnoticed. How quickly you could get dressed each day. Maybe the babies and children could also have the same kind of overalls! Dirt-hiding, food-concealing, coveralls – just pull ’em on and start the day. Massive savings to the economy/new industry developed in the design and manufacture of the suits. Get them made from some self-composting green fabric and we have an eco-solution to the problem of some laughing child chucking mushy weetabix at you at 7.10 a.m. Etc.
Ok, but I do know the practical problems posed by pushchairs and shopping and buses and getting up in the morning . As someone who has had children and a job, I’m naturally trying to design work differently. There are five of us in The Reader’s Director Group: we all take advantage of flexible working, and the majority of us are not full-time. (I haven’t worked in the camo-boilersuits yet but give me time). At The Reader, since our staffers started having children, we’ve had a bias towards making a sympathetic environment for working parents. As Benedict cries in Much Ado , ‘The world must be peopled!’ We’ve also tried to make a flexible working environment for those of us who live with physical and mental health conditions. These are basic matters, which any organisation dependent on people must face, and which help us retain brilliant staffers, if we can get it right. Utilise what we’ve got. Make the most of our talents. Create workarounds.
But does this go further? I mean, into the actual work of The Reader?
Is Shared Reading, and the reading and Social Enterprise community we are building at Calderstones, influenced by woman-experience? Thinking of some of the men I have worked with over the years, I know it is not just a woman thing. Ah, this is all too complicated for an hour’s thinking.
These are horribly crude generalisations, but I’ll go on with them for a moment.
I’m thinking about feeling and access to the emotions, and whether – generally, roughly, crudely speaking – women are closer to their own feelings, and to expressing them, than men. That’s not necessarily a given, it is just the way we’ve worked it over the last few million years. Some of us got muscles and hunted meat for weeks on end, others stayed on the trail, picked the daily berries and roots, looked after the children and held the tribe together.
Of course this is not fixed – it is learned and cultural, but learned and cultural is a powerful inhibitor. Yet, what is learned and cultural may be changed, is changeable. I think Shared Reading helps to change it, both for men who don’t speak much of their emotions, and for women who struggle with them, too.
There are three elements here :
- feelings themselves as they exist in our hearts, guts, brains – wherever they are
- consciousness of feelings or the willingness to allow consciousness
- the ability to get feelings into words.
Of course this process is dependent on getting emotion into the reading room. That’s not an easy ask – much easier to stay with talking about the ‘characters’, the ‘poet’, the ‘Victorians’ ‘Shakespeare’s time’ and other distancing measures. But this is a mistake. Dangerous as it may seem, we have to make feeling happen.
This morning I have been back-searching the blog to see if I’ve written about Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Buried Life’, which came to mind because Helen commented yesterday on my absence here for the past two weeks saying ‘we’re all human, wander off our line and back on to it’.
It was the idea of everyone having a line they were on (or off) that reminded me of ‘The Buried Life’.
While I was searching I came upon an old post, from 2012, back in the days when we still called Shared Reading ‘Get Into Reading’. It’s about what can go wrong (or is it right?) in a Shared Reading session and I think it is worth a look because it talks about one of the key things about Shared Reading: the need to get emotion into the room. (‘Trust and the Risk of Reading’, find it here).
Feel as if I have wandered into dangerous and spouty territory today.
Here’s The Buried Life, by Matthew Arnold, which I’ll start reading tomorrow.
The Buried LifeLight flows our war of mocking words, and yet,Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,We know, we know that we can smile!But there’s a something in this breast,To which thy light words bring no rest,And thy gay smiles no anodyne.Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,And turn those limpid eyes on mine,And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.Alas! is even love too weakTo unlock the heart, and let it speak?Are even lovers powerless to revealTo one another what indeed they feel?I knew the mass of men conceal’dTheir thoughts, for fear that if reveal’dThey would by other men be metWith blank indifference, or with blame reproved;I knew they lived and movedTrick’d in disguises, alien to the restOf men, and alien to themselves—and yetThe same heart beats in every human breast!But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumbOur hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?Ah! well for us, if even we,Even for a moment, can get freeOur heart, and have our lips unchain’d;For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain’d!Fate, which foresawHow frivolous a baby man would be—By what distractions he would be possess’d,How he would pour himself in every strife,And well-nigh change his own identity—That it might keep from his capricious playHis genuine self, and force him to obeyEven in his own despite his being’s law,Bade through the deep recesses of our breastThe unregarded river of our lifePursue with indiscernible flow its way;And that we should not seeThe buried stream, and seem to beEddying at large in blind uncertainty,Though driving on with it eternally.But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.And many a man in his own breast then delves,But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.And we have been on many thousand lines,And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;But hardly have we, for one little hour,Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—Hardly had skill to utter one of allThe nameless feelings that course through our breast,But they course on for ever unexpress’d.And long we try in vain to speak and actOur hidden self, and what we say and doIs eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true!And then we will no more be rack’dWith inward striving, and demandOf all the thousand nothings of the hourTheir stupefying power;Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,From the soul’s subterranean depth upborneAs from an infinitely distant land,Come airs, and floating echoes, and conveyA melancholy into all our day.Only—but this is rare—When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours,Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,When our world-deafen’d earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.And there arrives a lull in the hot raceWherein he doth for ever chaseThat flying and elusive shadow, rest.An air of coolness plays upon his face,And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.And then he thinks he knowsThe hills where his life rose,And the sea where it goes.
readerjanedavis 