Wimmin’s History

In case anyone doesn’t know (I didn’t until I looked it up just now) “wimmin” is a plural spelling of women created by feminists to avoid having “-men” in the word. How Alice Thomas Ellis would have felt about that is probably clear from her reply to the question:

“What is the most important event in women’s history?”

 Appropriately for today, 25 March where I am, this was Ellis’s reply:

“The Annunciation.”

(Here are a couple of passages from Ellis’s novel Pillars of Gold that particularly amuse me:

In the first, the book's main character is assaulted by absurd [but, to me, not completely unfamiliar] media-induced anxieties as she tries to decide what is the best thing to do with some courgettes (zucchini to Australians) she is cooking for her daughter:

"... if she immersed them in water, their vitamin C content would dissipate. She could cook them now and reheat them, but that, she believed, would be deleterious to their nutritional value: it would perhaps be best to entrap them, with their vitamins and trace minerals, in a china bowl enveloped in clingfilm in the coolness of the fridge, taking care that the film did not touch them lest some cancer-inducing chemical should migrate from the one to the other.
Next she considered the potatoes: in the past she had always cooked them in their skins, but recently it had been suggested that potato skins, if not carcinogenic, were yet harmful to the system, perforating the bowel or preventing it from absorbing the vital vitamins. She scraped them carefully and put them in a steel pan ... Scarlet had thrown away all her old aluminium pans since she had learned that they might cause Alzheimer's disease ... The chicken, which she next drew from the fridge, had, so the label proclaimed, ranged freely over a district of France before being hygienically and humanely slaughtered and packed. It somehow gave the impression that the fowl had led such a delightful and pleasurable existence that it was a positive act of virtue to eat it."

In the second, the trials of this woman continue, as she tries to engage with her teenage daughter:

"Do I look all right?" asked Scarlet. She was wearing what she considered to be an ageless garment - a hip-length coat of black watered taffeta; the shoulders were rather too narrow and too sharply defined to be precisely fashionable, but the material was of most superior quality. Underneath this she wore black cotton trousers - ideally these should have been made of silk, but she felt sure no one would notice.
"You look wonderful," said Camille without raising her eyes from the television set. She had eaten her supper" [which included the pristine courgettes, I think] "and was beginning to feel hungry again.
'No, really,' said Scarlet.
Camille fell to her knees from the sofa and gave her mother's leg a patronizing pat. 'You've got a sweet little face,' she said. Scarlet, though not reassured by her words, was touched by her gesture until she saw that Camille was merely reaching for the crisp packet and had patted her in passing.
'Do these shoes go with these trousers?' she asked.
'Yes,' said Camille, her fingers deep in the crispbag.
'You didn't look,' said Scarlet. 'Are they too old-fashioned?'
'No,' said Camille. Scarlet gave up. Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely conerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.")