prehistoric women ruled

While reporting on the revolutionary findings coming out of the sequencing of ancient DNA in the last two decades, I have occasionally come across the cases of buried bodies assumed to be male because they were associated with insignia of a warrior or a ruler, but then proven to be female by their DNA analysis. Which is always heartwarming but doesn't necessarily provide enough material to base a feature on.

Now the field progresses from individual genomes to systematically sequencing entire cemeteries and compiling family trees of humans who lived many millennia ago. Therefore we can now move beyond the stage of identifying single ancient women in apparent positions of power to looking at networks, such as matrilinear families, where the association with land and property appears to have been passed on in the female line.

Recent research into ancient genalogies has revealed several examples of such matrilinear groups (which may or may not have been matriarchies too), enough to base a feature on, which also highlights some of the unique women in roles previously assumed to be reserved to males.

My feature is out now:

Recognition for prehistoric women

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 22, 17 November 2025, Pages R1065-R1067

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

If I have crunched my numbers correctly, this is the 350th feature in this format, since I accepted the challenge to provide a feature for every issue, back in February 2011. I missed a couple of issues in the first few months, then one in 2014 and one in 2017.

The widespread use of ancient DNA sequencing to archaeological finds is now showing that women may have been more influential in some societies than hitherto appreciated. The photo shows excavation work at a burial site attributed to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe in southern Britain.
(Photo courtesy of The Durotriges Project and © Bournemouth University.)

on the origins of Femen

Some thoughts on

Oxana
France/Ukraine/Hungary 2025
Charlène Favier

The Ukrainian protest group Femen denounced the tyranny of Putin and Lukashenko long before it was fashionable, but has been widely ignored and belittled in the UK media. Even now, while everybody loves to hate Putin and love the Ukraine, we don't hear much about them. I have occasionally looked up their activities, if only because as a veteran of WNBRs, I have a cultural interest in naked protest activities, but without that, I wouldn't have heard anything about them in the last ten years.

So I was grateful to stumble over this biopic of Femen founder Oksana Shachko (1987-2018) and found it very enlightening in that it taught me a lot about the history of the organisation that I hadn't known.

In a nutshell, Shachko and two friends founded Femen in their home town of Khmelnytsky (western Ukraine) in 2008 to protest against the marketing of Ukraine as a destination for sex tourism. According to the film, a radio competition in New Zealand was about to send a man to Ukraine for a week's worth of free adventures with a local escort of his choice, and Femen's underwear protest succeeded in getting the trip cancelled. A year later, the activists moved to Kyiv and started using bare breasts as their main means of protest - and the space to write their slogans on.

They attempted protests in Belarus and in Russia as well, which led to violent persecution from the KGB. The three founding members fled to Paris to seek asylum there, and found that one of their members, Inna Shevchenko (who had joined the group in Kyiv in 2009), had set up a Femen training camp there and styled herself as the leader of the global Femen movement without consulting the founders (the film seems to suggest). Shachko returned to her career as an artist, combining the aesthetics of orthodox iconography with "blasphemic" content. The film sets glimpses of the last day of her life against flashbacks to her life in Femen.

All in all a very moving and tragic life story, and very timely too, as the issues haven't gone away. Released in Germany on July 24, 2025 (trailer). I don't have much hope for a UK release (therefore added it to the films not shown list), but would watch it again if it happened, if only because I had to put up with the dubbed dialogue in the German version.

Film poster for the release in Germany, X-Verleih.

PS: there's also a documentary with the real Oxana, called "Je suis Femen" (2014). Stop press, just found it on YouTube. This film gives the impression that as of 2014, the three founders were still ok with Inna Shevchenko's role as supreme leader. Separately, she talks about her art (in faltering French) here - and mentions that she left the Femen movement in 2015. This was filmed less than two weeks before she died.

Update 13.8.2025: My first attempt at catching the original version failed - it turned out that the cinema (in Germany) only had French or Ukrainian subtitles for it, and after it started running with the French ones, one of the five spectators complained. I'm sure the rest of us would have been fine, but the cinema insisted on switching to the dubbed version, so I left.

a bookish book

Some thoughts on

The bookbinder of Jericho
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2024

I loved Pip Williams's Dictionary of lost words, so kept an eye open for her follow-up novel, which has now crossed my path in a matching edition. (Faced with an ever-growing TBR pile, there is no point ordering books, I just let fate decide.) Although this is not quite a sequel, we are staying in the realm of Oxford University Press, and Esme's dictionary of lost words gets a cameo appearance here. In fact, this novel grew out of a discovery the author made when she researched the first one.

Williams found that in the early 20th century lots of women worked for the Press in the book binding process, but have been forgotten by written history. And this led her to a remarkable frontline between Town and Gown, and between the working folks and posh people. The line runs along Walton Street in Jericho - to the West of it the books published by the Press were typeset, printed, bound, etc., at that point still with lots of manual labour, and just opposite on the other side of the road, at Somerville College, the first generation of young women that had the opportunity to obtain degrees from Oxford University were studying the contents of those very same books. Even their exam papers were produced on the other side of the road.

Our fictional lead character, Peggy, has been working in the bindery since the age of 12 but harbours the ambition to cross the road into Somerville, to "read the books, not bind them". It looked like an impossible ambition in Victorian times, even more so for an orphan looking after her twin sister with autism, but World War I helps to stir the class system just enough to open a plausible path for her to achieve that.

Williams invents the characters standing in for those who were too unimportant to have been recorded by history, but the more notable people that pop up in the story are historic, including for instance the principal of Somerville, and the famous Somervillian Vera Brittain (author of Testament of youth), as well as the upper echelons at OUP.

Her local knowledge is amazing (especially for somebody normally living in Australia, but I assume she must have spent some time in Oxford). Just one thing occurred to me that she may have missed: People go to the cinema in her story, and I think the Electric theatre in Castle Street is mentioned as the place they go. In fact, Jericho got its own cinema during that time, the North Oxford Kinema, which is still standing and now known as the Phoenix Picturehouse. It opened in March 1913, so the characters in the novel would have walked past it and might have noticed a new cinema popping up in their neighbourhood.

Like the first novel, this one is also a heartwarming fairytale driven by social justice and feminist themes. Surprisingly, after the novel about words in dictionaries, the author managed to produce an even more bookish book.

PS re-reading the blurb on the back of my paperback edition after posting this entry, I noticed that none of the things that I discussed above and that are obviously crucial to me get mentioned there. The presentation there goes to great lengths to avoid the mention of books, Oxford, Jericho, education etc. Trying to sell it as a novel about what women do when the men are off to fight a war. Of which there are hundreds of others I suspect, so not at all what makes this book special.

Other reviews etc:

Here is an appreciation from Jericho Online

A Guardian piece about the author and the book

eight women

Some thoughts on

Sounds and sweet airs: the forgotten women of classical music
Anna Beer
One World 2017

In recent years I have been learning about some amazing composers who had fallen into oblivion because they happened to be women and didn't fit the composer cliche modelled on the male genius. In my orchestral adventures, I've enjoyed playing Louise Farrenc's third symphony and Emilie Mayer's overture, as well as Amy Beach's Maria Stuart. I'm hoping to learn chamber music pieces by Rebecca Clarke and by Rita Strohl one day. And have read about the life of Clara Schumann (Dieter Kühn's slightly novelised biography), as well as about those of Rebeccs Clarke, Ethel Smyth, Dorothy Howell, Doreen Carwithen in Leah Broad's recent book Quartet. Come to think of it, I even have a youtube playlist with works by some of these.

Adding to that, I now learned about a few composers I wasn't aware of from Anna Beer's book, namely
Francesca Caccini (born 1587),
Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677),
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729),
Marianna Martines (1744-1812),
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)
who are featured along with the more widely known (at least to me)
Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) (1805-1847),
Clara Schumann (1819-1896) and
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918).

The book is a chronological array of the eight short biographies, each around 40 pages long. I love the way these eight lives cover the four centuries from 1587 to 1994 almost seamlessly - there is only a small gap between 1729 and 1744. (A graphic timeline would be a helpful addition to the book, which doesn't even list the birth and death years, I had to look them up and have now scribbled them into the table of contents with a pencil.) It is fascinating how the challenges that female composers faced over the centuries mutated and evolved over the centuries. Notably, in the early parts of the book, things seem to be getting worse for women from the Renaissance to the Classical period, as 19th century notions of gender roles came up with additional barriers that didn't exist before.

In most cases, the chapters are based on existing full-length biographies, so people who have read those may not learn anything new except perhaps the chance to find out about contradicting claims from competing biographers, which exist in the cases of some of the more colourful lives, where a fair number of unresolved paternity cases are up for debate.

While I appreciate the book for the considerable additions to my musical knowledge I have gained, I would advise readers to mistrust all quotes translated from German or French - they often appear to be subtly wrong. The consistent misspelling of the name of Friedrich Wieck (Clara Schumann's father) is a further warning that some things may have been lost in translation here.

Looking up the book online I see it has been stickered as a "companion to the Classic FM series" which makes sense in terms of the format of the eight chapters - I expect they must each have been made into a one hour or so radio piece.

I've now added some of my new discoveries to my youtube playlist:

• Caccini: Altri gelati
• Jacquet de La Guerre, Violin sonata n.1 d moll,
• Martines - Overture ("Sinfonia") in C Major - sounds lovely and very Viennese.
• Maconchy, string quartet No. 1 - probably too hard for amateurs?
• Maconchy, The sofa (opening scene of her erotic opera)

PS Shoutout also to the tumblr blog Lesser Known Composers, which features quite a few women as well (I'm no longer on tumblr, but the blog appears to be freely visible without a login.) Just yesterday, it presented the works of Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940) such as the Piano Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7.

Update 29.5.2025: From the always interesting Zeitzeichen podcast of the German radio station WDR, I discovered Pauline Viardot. She wrote no symphonies or quartets, sadly, but quite a few operas.

Update 26.11.2025 Just discovered Dora Pejačević thanks to a Mastodon post that was tagged with #cello. Loving her cello sonata in E minor (sadly Youtube doesn't allow me to add this video to my cello playlist as it is "made for kids" so I had to bookmark it here).

Update 29.6.2026 New video from Sarah (Team Recorder) introducing some female composers from the Renaissance and Baroque, including Strozzi and Caccini.

women and the blue rider

Some thoughts on

Malerinnen und Musen des »Blauen Reiters«
by Hildegard Möller
Piper Verlag 2007

I am definitely going to see the current exhibition on German expressionists of the "Blue Rider" group at the Tate Modern (Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, until October 20), but as I haven't quite made it yet, I read this book in preparation, which is a joint biography of five women associated with the group, namely the painters Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, and Maria Marc, and the muses and wives Lisbeth Macke and Lily Klee. We have had the book since it came out in 2007 but I hadn't read it yet. Partially, I presume, due to the misguided feeling that there wasn't much left to discover in it, as the four core members of the group (Marc, Kandinsky, Macke, Klee) represent the art I grew up with. (Funnily enough, these are also the ones that are represented in the compact art books series from Taschen.) Jawlensky is the one rider I am less familiar with - strangely the one work I associate his name with appeared on a postage stamp in the 1970s. Of the women I was aware of Gabriele Münter as a painter but not so much of the other two.

So, well, although I was familiar with the art of the Blue Rider, I did learn a lot about the lives behind it, and it was an interesting experience to follow these lives from the perspectives of the women involved. Ironically, although I perceive many of the very colourful paintings of the group as joyful, the lives weren't all that much fun, seeing that Marc and Macke died young in WW1, while Münter and Werefkin had rather troubled relations with their more famous painter boys, and Klee only lived to age 60 and a half. So in significant parts this is the story of three widows and two women abandoned by the artist partners they supported to the point of self-sacrifice. Although the roots of the Blue Rider are in the Schwabing district of Munich, there is a lot about moving out of the city to remote farm houses, eg at Murnau, which I find a bit scary. The painters in the story shared the dubious honour of being branded "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) by the Nazis, which obviously has become a badge of honour since but didn't help the careers of those who were still alive when it happened.

Considering all the very exciting (to me at least) and brightly coloured art that is being created in this story, I find the author's writing style a bit subdued and grey. I realise she's obviously striving to stay neutral, not to make any feminist statements in support of the women wronged one way or another, but still I find this neutrality clashes with the revolutionary nature of the art in question and of some of the lives being lived as well.

It was interesting too to meet some of the marginal figures of the Blauer Reiter, including August Macke's less famous cousin Helmuth Macke, who hailed from Krefeld, so I will have a look at his art the next time I'm there, and will also have a look at his family history in case his maternal ancestry throws up anything connected to my Krefeld clan.

It was also interesting to learn that the one and only almanac "Der Blaue Reiter", which gave the group its name and identity, was published in 1912 by a young man called Reinhard Piper - whose publishing house survives to this day and has indeed published this very book as well. A paperback edition came out on the centenary of the almanac's publication. I'm surprised it hasn't been translated ahead of the Tate Modern exhibition - could have sold well there.

PS I'll take the opportunity to list here the relevant exhibitions I (may) have seen (the childhood ones still need research:
22.8.-12.9.1969 Museum Folkwang, Essen
Paul Klee, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen. No memory of this whatsoever but I found the catalogue of the exhibition among my possessions so assume I will have seen it as a 5-year-old.
1970s: Pretty sure I saw a generic Blauer Reiter exhibition at the Museum Folkwang as a child. Definitely sure I saw one about Karl Schmidt Rottluff a bit later (maybe ca. 1980). May have seen exhibitions featuring Campendonk and/or the trip to Tunisia undertaken by Macke and Klee.
1980s: Visited Lenbachhaus in Munich with the Jaenicke research group in 1989/90?
1.8.-19.9.2004 Von-der-Heydt-Museum Wuppertal,
Wassily Kandinsky: Der Klang der Farbe 1920-1921
2.11.2013 Tate Modern
Paul Klee
2014 (ab 25.9.) Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
August Macke und Franz Marc: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft
25.2.2024 Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster
Brücke zur geistigen Welt: Meisterwerke des Expressionismus
17.5.2024 K20 Düsseldorf
Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky: Träume von der Zukunft

Updates and additions:

8.2.2026 Mackehaus Bonn
Macke and friends
11.2.2026 Stadtmuseum Mülheim (Sammlung Ziegler)
Marc, Macke, Heckel, Jawlensky
exhibition coming up
23 Okt 26 — 21 Feb 27 Museum Wiesbaden
Die Blauen Reiterinnen,

finding Rita Strohl

After bringing up a young cellist and spending quite some time obsessing with cello music myself, it was a bit of a shock to discover a couple of truly amazing cello pieces from a composer I never heard of before.

The composer is Rita Strohl (1865-1941)

source

As was the case with many other female composers, her music was played during her lifetime, but forgotten after her death as there was nobody willing to champion it. Some of her works have been rediscovered, published and recorded in recent years.

The pieces are

Grande Sonate Dramatique "Titus et Bérénice" (1898) played by Hermine Horiot & Hélène Fouquart, Youtube

It does have a story to tell, based on the eponymous tragedy by Racine, but on the first couple of hearings I was so blown away by the music I didn't pay any attention to texts between the movements. By the day I first watched this, the video had only around 5860 which is just scandalous.

Solitude for cello (or violin) and piano played by Hermine Horiot, cello & Hélène Fouquart, piano, Youtube

Sheet music for this one is available on IMSLP and it does sound as if it might be playable for mere mortals (unlike the sonata which is pushing the limits of cello technique). On closer inspection, the cello part reaches a couple of quite high notes that I don't use very often (up to the F just over 2/3 up the A string), but the violin version of the solo part fits the instrument range more easily, and it is also very handy for the flute without any alterations. Actually great fun to play on the flute alongside with the cello video.

Here's cellist Sandra Lied Haga raving about Strohl's work in Strad magazine, April 2023. She has released a recording of Titus et Bérénice together with César Franck's sonata in A.

Oh and I've added the two videos to my youtube playlist with female composers.

Thanks to lesser-known-composers on tumblr.

menopausal mammals

I knew about orca females enjoying a post-reproductive lifespan (ie going through menopause), but in recent years the number of non-human mammalian species doing this has grown to five, and all of them are toothed whales, which is intriguing. So I took a new paper on the evolution of this trait in whales as an occasion to write about the menopause of whales an women. (I recently had Of elephants and men, so I'd better give poor old John Steinbeck a rest now.)

The feature is out now:

Of whales and women

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 7, 8 April 2024, Pages R261-R263

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) typically spend their lifetime in family groups led by a matriarch. (Photo: Courtesy of Dr Brandon Southall, NMFS/OPR (CC BY 2.0 Deed).)

an asynchronous quartet

some thoughts on

Quartet: How four women changed the musical world

Leah Broad

Faber & Faber 2023

I’ve been a huge fan of Rebecca Clarke’s sonata for viola ever since I first heard a student playing part of it at the Oxford Music Festival quite a few years ago. Which is why I pounced at the opportunity to hear this and more music by her at the Jacqueline DuPre Music building on International Women’s Day this year, performed by Rosalind Ventris (viola), Laura van der Heijden (cello) and Libby Burgess (piano).

There was a pre-concert talk held by Leah Broad, who was there to promote her brand-new book, a group biography of four female English composers, including Clarke. It was all really lovely and inspiring so I bought a copy of her book on the spot and started looking for further female composers to add to Cowley Orchestra's music library. When I got the chance, I started reading Quartet at chapter 3, where Rebecca Clarke comes into the story. The four composers are different generations, and Clarke is the second to make her appearance. One could object to the title giving the misleading impression of four musicians performing simultaneously.

To give a brief overview, we’re talking about

• Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): known for her operas in her lifetime
• Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979): best known for her chamber music
• Dorothy Howell (1898-1982): piano and sacred music
• Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003): prolific film composer

I was a bit sceptical of the whole concept of a group biography where the lives concerned span very different times, but I came around to acknowledging that it kind of works in this case, seeing that as rare “woman composers” in the fairly limited scene of English classical music, they were all handled as curiosities, and their works were sometimes billed together in concerts or radio broadcasts. And they faced similar dangers of being forgotten as soon as they were no longer able or willing to fight for their music to get airtime. So in the end, I returned to reading the bits I missed at the beginning, and learned a lot about the other composers too, of whose work I had been entirely unaware.

In a way, it was interesting to see Rebecca Clarke’s life woven into the lives of other women who have faced similar challenges before and after her, and I’m a sucker for everything about the Bloomsbury set, to which Ethel Smyth was connected through Virginia Woolf, and I was pleased to learn that Doreen Carwithen played a cello called Perky. However, at the end of the day, I’m sticking with the Rebecca fandom and would like to see her autobiography published (and/or a full-scale biography). I should really learn some of her cello work, and perhaps also the viola sonata (of which the composer also prepared a cello adaptation).

Blackwells

Update 8.3.2025: There are another eight woman composers in the book "Sounds and sweet airs" by Anna Beer (2016), which I discovered recently and haven't read yet. Watch this space.

female composers wanted

After hearing an excellent concert with chamber pieces of Rebecca Clarke on Women's day, I realised we probably don't have any female composers in the otherwise excellent music library of Cowley Orchestra with around 400 pieces (there is a small risk I may have overlooked one hiding behind an initial or an ambiguous name). This embarrassing situation is easily explained by the fact that most sets date from the 1950s or earlier, but I think we should do something about it. So the search for orchestral music from female composers starts here. Ideally not too difficult and available as PDF to print for free or in affordable editions.

I'll list whatever I find here, in case other ensembles want to play these as well:

Chaminade, Cecile (1857-1944)

Suite Challirhoe Op 37 IMSLP YouTube

Farrenc, Louise (1804-1875)

Overture No.1 in E minor YouTube

Overture No. 2 in Eb major YouTube

Hensel (Mendelssohn), Fanny:

Overture in C major, H265 (1832) Parts from HenselPushers (We played this in March 2026. It's her only orchestral work, unfortunately)

Mayer, Emilie (1812-1883)

Symphony No.1 in C minor IMSLP YouTube

Symphony No.2 in E minor IMSLP YouTube

Symphony No.3 in C major IMSLP YouTube

Ouverture No. 2 in D major IMSLP YouTube UPDATE 27.4.2023: we've now played this one and added it to the music library. We do need some brass players to make the most of it though.

I've also started a YouTube playlist with works of these composers (also including eg chamber music and concertos).

Rebecca Clarke. I do love her chamber music, but I'm afraid she hasn't left us any symphonies or orchestral suites. (There is an orchestration of her famous viola sonata, but that of course would require a soloist.) She is also one of the four composers starring in the joint biography "Quartet" by Leah Broad, who gave an introduction to the concert I mentioned above. See my review here.

Added 21.8.2026, but also not much use for our orchestra:

Jaëll, Marie (1846-1925)

Cello concerto IMSLP YouTube

String quartet in G

threads and patterns

O club de calceta
María Reimóndez
Edicions Xerais 2006

This book has been translated into Spanish, Italian and French, but apparently not into English. If it was, I would call it the knitting circle, rather than club, as I imagine the six protagonists sitting in a circle and knitting, but more importantly each telling the story of her life. As we go round the circle, the joint story also advances, as it becomes clearer what connects these women and how they can help each other, so while the movement is circular, it is also going forward. Like knitting a sock, I suspect. Threads and patterns are important, too.

The cast makes me think: Why hasn’t Almodóvar made the film yet? We have a prostitute fed up with the profession she inherited from her mum, a one-legged woman who wants to become a bus driver, a secretary with the ambition to be her own boss, a cleaner haunted by the ghost of her aunt, a political activist (communist?) in remission, and an old lady who spent her life looking after the local church (dressing the saints, as I think they say in Galicia).

Six women on the verge of a major breakthrough, because knitting does change the world. Six lovely stories with convincing voices that we would not normally hear. In the final chapter the whole thing is tied together maybe a little bit too neatly, but never mind. You don’t want to have any loose threads dangling when you’re knitting a masterpiece.

PS The Galician edition of Wikipedia tells me there has been a TV adaptation, but I still want to see Almodóvar’s take on this. Wiki also reveals that the story is set in the city of Vigo (whose literary fame was secured by Martin Codax in the 13th century).

radium girls

My review of

The radium girls
Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster 2016
ISBN 978-14711-5387-7

is out in Chemistry & Industry, issue 2, page 43, with the very fitting headline:

Death watch

restricted access via SCI (premium content).

very scary stuff but also an inspiring story of women fighting for their rights and winning in the end, thereby saving hundreds of lives:

snippet:

Young women who had worked as dial painters during the war and then moved on to other things started dying of mysterious symptoms, but it took years before the dots were duly joined. In June 1925, the first male employee died and gained a dubious honour: His post-mortem marked the first time that radioactivity was detected in a human body.

a cellist lost

I came across Alfonse Mucha’s lithograph of Zdeňka Černý, “The greatest Bohemian violoncellist”, on tumblr and wondered why I had never heard of her. Although the artwork is dated 1913, Google found no recordings of her or reviews of performances, so by the time I reblogged the image I was slightly worried about her and included a question about her further fate in my reblog.

Within 24 hours a helpful follower pointed me to a recent memoir published by Zdeňka Černý’s daughter, Jetta Marie Vasak (My Bohemian Heritage), which I ordered and which answered most of the questions I had. The simple answer to the main question: she married a banker (and non-musician) who wanted her to give up her musical career, and she obliged. The book uses Mucha's lithograph (without the text) as cover art:




The book is a charming collection of vignettes with a catastrophic lack of editing or structure of any kind, so I’ll try to extract from it what I learned about Zdeňka Černý’s life and put it into a short biography (may revise and add to it later):


Zdeňka Olga Černý was born in Chicago 26.8.1895 as the second of three children of Albert Vojtech (“AV”) Černý (* 1.5.1872 Jilove, immigrated to USA in 1888, + 14.6.1964) and Frances (Fanny) Engelthaler (* 5.4.1873 + 24.2.1918). Her father was a successful music teacher (piano, cello, violin, voice) and the founder of the first Bohemian Conservatory of Music in Chicago .

In 1905-6 the artist Alfonse Mucha stayed several months with the Černý family in Chicago and painted several pictures of the older daughter Milada (1892-1973), who was famous as a child prodigy on the piano. Zdeňka asked him to paint her as well, and he promised to do so once she became a virtuoso cellist. At that point, she had only recently started to take an interest in the cello and take lessons with her father.

In March 1913, Mucha visited the family again. By this time, Zdeňka had become an accomplished cellist and played a recital for Mucha with her father accompanying her on the piano. After the performance, she reminded the artist of his earlier promise, and he agreed to start immediately. A photo of Zdeňka with her cello was taken at a studio. Mucha mainly worked from this photo, which he divided in squares. He made a drawing which he then coloured in gouache.

As Zdeňka and her father were preparing for a European tour planned for the following year, Mucha took the drawing to Prague to have the lithographer Neubert print posters under his supervision. For these, Mucha also designed the lettering underneath: “Zdeňka Černý, The greatest Bohemian violoncellist”.

On 29.6. 1914, AV and Zdeňka Černý were on the train to New York to catch a ship to Europe when they read the news of the Sarajevo assassination the day before. They still travelled to London and onwards to Prague, although I’m not sure how many (if any) concerts they actually played and where.

By the time they reached Prague, AV was worried that he might be called up for military service in the Austro-Hungarian army and thus started to plan the return. In March 1915, AV played a recital in Prague, but soon afterwards they took the steamship St. Louis from London and by the summer they were back home in Chicago.

During the 1915 summer holiday Zdeňka spent with her father on the shores of Bear Lake near Haugen, Wisconsin, they met Otto Vasak (14.7.1882- 23.6.1961), then 33 and a bachelor, with whom she fell in love. After he returned to the city while the Czerny family still stayed in the summer cabin, they exchanged love letters via a helpful neighbour.

After a night staying out longer than allowed and fearing corporal punishment, Zdeňka eloped, which appeared to be the normal way for daughters to leave the house in that family. She broke off a previous, secret engagement to violinist Jiri Hruso and married Vasak at Chicago on 11.3.1916.

Jetta Vasak reports that Otto forbade her to pursue her musical career or indeed any teaching. A planned performance of the Saint-Saens cello concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock is cancelled. There is no mention of any discussion or resistance (apart from AV who sulked for two years). There is a small hint of a controlling relationship, as the author mentions that Otto did the family shopping at one point to keep Zdeňka indoors, but no indication of any trouble whatsoever. The next time Zdeňka is mentioned touching her cello is after her second husband dies in 1977, when she is already 82 years old.

They had two sons in quick succession, Otto (* 22.5.1917) and Francis (* 25.2.1919)
and then Jetta (* 26.1.1927). Otto played clarinet, Francis trumpet and Jetta French horn, but Zdeňka appeared to be restricted to the role of appreciative audience.

In 1955, Zdeňka and Otto moved from Berwyn to La Grange Park, a suburb of Chicago. Otto died suddenly on 23.6.1961 aged 78. After Zdeňka reported her loss to an old family friend, Robert Dolejsi who lived in California, it emerged that he, too, had become a widower almost at the same time. The two found more common ground and married in 1963.

Zdeňka moved to California to live with Robert. There she came in contact with artists and academics interested in the Mucha lithograph of her, which thus was rescued from oblivion. After Robert’s death, the above-mentioned attempt to reconnect with her cello failed. She died in 1998, aged 102. Sadly, “the greatest Bohemian violoncellist” appears to have spent around 90 years of her life not playing the cello.

Update August 2020 - I only now discovered that there is an obituary of Zdeňka's son Otto online. He also published a memoir. And I was pleased to learn that he continued playing the clarinet throughout his long life until he died at the age of 97. I'm not sure whether it's worth buying his memoir as well, as it seems to be mostly about his time in WWII, but from the preview pages available at Amazon, I learned that his grandfather, AV Cerny, returned to Czechoslovakia between the wars, stayed five years and served as the principal cellist at a Prague orchestra. (That's also mentioned in Jetta's book but I may have overlooked it at the time.)

feminist utopia

Book review:

El país de las mujeres

Gioconda Belli

(2010)

In a small Mesoamerican country called Faguas, a volcanic eruption has enriched the air with an antidote to testosterone, turning its macho men into kind and docile human beings who don’t put up too much resistance when the feminist Partido de la Izquierda Erótica (PIE) sweeps to an election victory and its charismatic leader, famous for having exposed prominent sex traffickers in her TV show, becomes president with an all-female government promising to “clean up” the country.

In a time when much of the more imaginative writing goes in the dystopian direction and the state of the real world may also be headed that way, it is unusual and refreshing to find an unashamedly positive utopian novel. Especially for me with a political background that has quite a few connections to the author’s, the general idealism feels like home and the protagonists the PIE committee are very sympathetic characters.

I’m not entirely sure if the novel would work for anybody who doesn’t experience this huge political feel-good factor. The postmodern structure which mixes different kinds of testimonies and documents is at first a bit confusing until you’ve worked out who’s who. Until about the middle of the book it appeared gratuitously random to me and I would have appreciated a frame, maybe set in the distant future, such as the work of a future historian who explores these developments. Belli has used distant times to great effect in The scroll of seduction as well as in The inhabited woman, and it might have improved this effort as well.

As it stands, this is an interesting book and a heart-warming story for those who still have a heat-conducting heart, but maybe not quite as spectacularly brilliant as the two earlier novels mentioned above. Depressingly, there doesn’t seem to be an English translation at all, although it has been translated into German (Die Republik der Frauen), Dutch (Het land van de vrouwen) and Portuguese (O País Das Mulheres) among other languages.

communication breakdown

les femmes du bus 678 (original title: 678)

director: Mohamed Diab
starring Nahed El Sebai, Boushra, Nelly Karim

This film based on real events in Egypt describes the intersecting lives of three women who had been exposed to sexual harassment in public (only one of them on public transport, so the French title is misleading!) and who strike back in different ways. One of them, apparently, was the plaintiff in the first-ever harassment case in the history of the country, resisted immense pressure to withdraw her accusations, and went on to win the case. Another holds self-defence lectures for other women, but gets frustrated when none of the women attending ever admits to having experienced harassment. And the third, after attending these lectures, takes to using sharp objects against the offending males.

The fourth significant person in the story is the (male) police detective who investigates the sharp object episodes. To me the most significant observation that the (male) film-maker makes about the relationships of these four people with their significant others is that in three of the four couples the communication about important issues fails completely. Incidentally, in the one couple that does communicate successfully, both partners work as stand-up comedians in their spare time. Surely that’s telling us something …

The film is, of course, very timely and important given the things we hear about not just in Egypt but everywhere else, and covers the difficult issue sensitively (as far as I can tell from the French subtitles on my DVD from France – I can’t vouch for the quality of the Arabic dialogue which I don’t understand). Not easy to watch and maybe not exactly a date movie, but worth the effort.

(IMDB entry)

the male-only prize for science books

The shortlisted titles for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books this year are:

Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead
The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change That Shape Life by Enrico Coen
Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory by Charles Fernyhough
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts

Notice anything strange? Hint: look at the first names of the authors. All six of them are men. Surely some coincidence? Well, I went through the list of winners for the last 26 years and the shortlists for the last 14 years. The prize – with its many renamings and reincarnations – has never been won by a woman, which becomes less surprising when you consider that out of the last 14 shortlists, only 5 contained a woman (and none had more than one). That’s 5 / 84 or 6%. (Funnily enough, I seem to remember the fellows of the Royal Society have about the same gender ratio?) In other words: since the year 2000, nine years have produced all-male shortlists.

Taking a quick look at my popular science shelves, I acknowledge that the majority of authors are male, but not an embarrassingly large majority. Some of my all-time favourite popular science books are written by women, including Woman, by Natalie Angier, and Deadly companions, by Dorothy Crawford. The latter title was published in 2007, so could have been shortlisted for 2008. As it happens, 2008 was one of the years without a woman on the shortlist. Plastic Fantastic, a very important book about how science is done these days (using a famous recent case of misconduct), by Eugenie Samuel Reich was published in 2009 – again there was no woman on the 2010 shortlist.

I suppose this is due to an accumulation of bias over the many selective steps involved, from an author drumming up the confidence to make a book proposal, via a publisher accepting the proposal, a publisher suggesting the book to be considered for a prize, through to the longlisting, shortlisting, and prize-giving process.

In any case, it’s clear to me that the prize has consistently failed to reflect the contribution that women make to writing about science, so it should either be scrapped or fixed. Fixing would require positive discrimination – from my experience with “zipper” style gender alternation rules in Germany’s Green Party in the 1980s and 90s I can confirm that very simple measures can work miracles not just for the representation but also for the way things are done – if every committee has at least 50% female participation, the management style is improved dramatically.

Similarly, positive discrimination at the top of the science book prize, making sure that women are visible in the shortlist (e.g. by widening the shortlist), could feed back to the previous selection levels, such that more women are inspired to write about science, more publishers commission them, and more publishers put them forwards for prizes. It shouldn’t be difficult.

The winner of this year's prize will be announced on Monday 25th. We already know the winning author will be a man. Maybe they should rename it the male-only prize for science books.

wrong gender?

fun with chemistry

Since April 2000, I've been publishing a humorous column called "Ausgeforscht" (vaguely: all done with research - the launch coincided with the end of my research career) in the magazine of the German chemical society (GDCh), Nachrichten aus der Chemie, every even-numbered month. As of this month, the column will begin to appear in every issue, and it has moved to the very end of the magazine, i.e. to the inside back cover. Easy to find, easy to rip if you want to collect the pieces like I do.

Columns until October 2010 are collected in my book 9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums - hopefully with the higher frequency I won't have to wait quite as long to build critical mass for another book ...

Oh, and this was also the round-up of the September pieces, as there is only this one:

Ausgeforscht: Chemie nur für Jungs?
Nachr. Chem. 2013, 61, 991.

The piece features the Let toys be toys campaign against gender stereoptypes in the marketing of toys - several large retailers in the UK seemed to think that chemistry kits were toys for boys, until the campaign started poking them.

9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums, Wiley-VCH 2011.

PS (7.9.) latest news from the toys front: LEGO is releasing its first minifigure of a female scientist, and she's a chemist, more info here.

chocolat in lebanon

film review:

Where do we go now? (Et maintenant on va ou?)

I am getting increasingly paranoid about films that I would like to see but which aren’t shown in cinemas around here. So when I found out that Nadine Labaki, whose first film Caramel (2007) I had enjoyed very much when it came out, had a new film out, but it wasn’t showing up at our local independent cinema, I poked them via twitter and was told they’d show it “off-date.” Which they really did, a few weeks later, in a grand total of four showings. So having stuck my neck out, I really had to go and see it, and make some appreciative noises about it.

It’s received very little attention around here and I read a lukewarm review from Germany, but I really liked the film. The very obvious formula is, of course, to concoct fairy-tale solutions to real-world problems. A bit like in Chocolat, just that it’s set in Lebanon, and comically remote villages in Lebanon have a different set of problems from comically remote villages in France profonde. For instance, instead of one religion we have two. And instead of river pirates (or whatever Johnny Depp was playing in that film) we have Ukrainian burlesque dancers (though they are already part of the solution, not of the problem).

Anyhow, the peace of the village is severely threatened, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the crafty women of the village manage to save it, though their tricks and twists weren’t quite as predictable as you may think. The film has gorgeous images (some might say too beautiful, but it works for me), including some landscapes at dusk that really need a big screen to work. Altogether it’s a feelgood fairytale that isn’t going to solve the problems of the Middle East, but who or what is going to solve them?

PS Mark Kermode's review in the Observer is quite enthusiastic as well, though very short. I'm wondering if the fact that the dialogue is in Arabic makes a difference compared to European movies, in terms of explaining the poor showing and uptake (I was in an audience of 3). It would be surprising as most people here would have to read the subtitles even for the French and Spanish movies as well, but maybe these languages have a viable support group of speakers and fans here, while Arabic hasn't?

dancing about science

My feature article about science-inspired dance, and Aesop's fable -inspired science is out in today's issue of Current Biology:

Dances with magpies
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 22, R905-R907, 22 November 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.008


Summary and free access to PDF file

A European magpie (source)

Rambert Dance Company

emanuela de paula

I took this photo of a large NEXT ad ages ago in London (see reflected balconies for scale), but didn't know who the model was:




Following a chance encounter with a NEXT catalogue, I have now figured out she's called Emanuela de Paula, and she has a blogspot blog too, so go visit her.

european women in chemistry

I wrote a "long essay review" on the book European women in chemistry, which, by definition, is more of an essay than a review. I've conjured up a book review variant of the time traveller's paradox (the one about going back in time and killing one's grandmother): If my grandmother had pursued a career in chemistry after her degree, she might have ended up in this book, but I wouldn't be here to review it ... You can find my essay review in Chemistry & Industry issue 8, p26 or online here (restricted access). Some critical remarks about the book itself: I love the idea of compiling these biographies in a volume celebrating the year of chemistry and centuries of women’s contribution to chemistry, but I think the editors could have done more to provide some added value, seeing that the bare-bones info is easy to find on the web these days. For instance, a simple thing that someone could have done during proof-reading would be to cross-reference the names of women who have a chapter of their own, but are also mentioned in other chapters, such that readers have the option of navigating the network of the female chemists. Then, somebody should have checked the references. Those at the end of Marie Curie’s chapter include German translations of biographies published in English and French. Where a full-length biography exists, it should definitely be mentioned, but I noticed that Brenda Maddox’s tome on Rosalind Franklin has been omitted. I suspect there must be a dedicated biography of Irene Joliot-Curie as well, which we aren’t told about. The uninspiring prose doesn’t really invite the reader to read the book from cover to cover, which is a shame. However, what I hope the chapters will achieve is to tickle people’s curiosity sufficiently to ensure that they go and find out more about those of the chemists they find interesting.