Medieval Europeans regarded embroidery as an art, much as we today consider painting. It was considered a female task, and even chambermaids were expected to be competent in it. Yet it was a coveted line of work, as one early Irish law tract stated that "the woman who embroiders earns more profit even than queens." Embroiderers could find employment with professional clothing makers or in tapestry workshops.

By the thirteenth century, given that embroidery was held in high esteem and could bring in money, the field contained plenty of men as well. In England, over time women come up less frequently on the lists of embroiderers than men and more often in conjunction with a husband, even when their work was exceptional. In May 1317 "Rose, the wife of John de Bureford, citizen and merchant of London," sold "an embroidered cope for the choir" to the French queen Isabella (ca. 1295-1358), who gave it as a gift "to the Lord High Pontiff." Rose was clearly a very skilled artist, since she was commissioned by the queen, but was not skilled enough to be named as an artist in her own right. We don't know how many other working embroiderers were subsumed into their husbands' workshops with even their first names lost to us. Once a field became truly profitable, men nudged women out of it. It was all well and good to let ladies have fun with a needle and thread. But if there was cash to be made, men suddenly showed up front and center and excluded women from the role.

-Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society

"So there's the kiss and cry, let's hope there's more kissing than crying"

Sir, we all know there's gonna be more crying 💀

the men and boys are innocent too.

we cry "the innocent women and children" to appeal to the masses, to try and force their sympathy, but the men and boys are innocent too.

I have seen sons crying out for their mothers, their fathers, their siblings. I have seen them break down at the loss of their families. I have seen them cling to their dead and grieve.

I have seen fathers cradle their dead children, seen them kiss their faces and hold their little hands. I have seen them faint with grief when asked to identify the dead. I have seen them carry their sons and daughters. I have seen them fasting to provide what little they can for their families.

I have seen men and boys digging through the rubble with just their bare hands, I have seen them comforting strangers, playing with children, rocking them, hushing them, even if the face of such imminent danger. I have seen them cry, seen them grieve, seen them break down into each other's arms, seen them be selfless, beyond selfless, becoming something I don't have a word for.

I have seen the men who are doctors refuse to leave their patients, even when they have no medicine or supplies to give them, even when they're threatened with bombings. I have seen fathers who have lost all their children pick orphans up into their arms and proclaim them their child so they are not alone. I have seen men and boys digging pets out of the rubble.

the men are innocent too. the men and boys are being hurt and killed too. the men and boys are grieving too. the men and boys are scared too. the men and boys are fighting to save their people too. the men and boys deserve to be fought for too.

Lord of the Rings fanart! I watched for the first time recently and loved it

trying to get through the day.

this fucks

“lmao imagine liking men” OK!!! ON IT BOSS 🫡🫡🫡 it’s beautiful here

reject rizz. stare them down with big doe eyes and off-putting allure as god intended

Over a 100???? It was just the guy in the photo a couple days ago djsjdjks

In the silent-film era, Hollywood's film industry grew quickly to meet audience demand, and thus it was more pragmatically welcoming to women writers, editors, directors, and producers than it would be at any other time afterward. Directors like Dorothy Arzner, Lois Weber, and Alice Guy-Blaché (the latter widely considered to be the first true "auteur" of cinema), and actor-producers like Mary Pickford (founder of United Artists studios) and Clara Bow created films that weren't the escapist fantasies Hollywood would come to prize, but human stories that included complex relationships and forward-thinking subject matter: Weber's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, for instance, was about the need for legalized birth control. At one point, women headed up dozens of production companies. But, as film journalist and historian Melissa Silverstein notes, "As it became more about money, the women behind the scenes disappeared." The expensive technology that turned silents into "talkies" beginning in the 1920s necessitated the involvement of Wall Street, which invested in young studios and became the big bosses of directors and producers, imposing a masculinized and increasingly sex-segregated workforce as part of the burgeoning corporate studio system. Women in powerful creative and decision-making roles were suddenly seen as amateurish and unprofessional; for the male-dominated financial forces that took charge of the Hollywood economy, and with larger and larger amounts of cash at stake, they were simply too much of a risk.

Onscreen, representations of women followed a similar trajectory. In what's now known as the pre-Code era of Hollywood films, women were smart, professional, ambitious, forthright, opaque, tricky, even criminal. They blackmailed bosses, had babies out of wedlock, seduced other women—and the thrillers were even steamier. Jean Harlow's Red-Headed Woman was a brazen social climber more than willing to seduce any man to get what she wanted; Barbara Stanwyck, in Baby Face, was an exploited young woman who used sex to move from penniless to paid ("She had IT and made IT pay" leered the film's poster). And, of course, there was Mae West, the bombshell vaudevillian, playwright, producer, and model for every one of Samantha Jones's Sex and the City single-entendres, whose winking catchphrases—"Come up and see me some-time"; "When a girl goes bad, men go right after her"—have long epitomized pre-Code Hollywood's sassy repartee. It's not that the heroines essayed by these dames were like men; they weren't. They were simply as human onscreen as the men, as full of appetite and humor and stubbornness and fallibility. And that was part of the problem that the Hays Code was enacted to fix.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once

who cursed the ice

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

Truck comes first and if there is any money left over the kids may eat. - Modern Consumer Patriarchy

Source

"Isn't it exhausting being someone you're not?"

"No! Isn't it exhausting being the same?"