Awesome Ladies - Tumblr Posts
No woman in recent time has combined her qualities – her taste for arduous and dangerous adventure with her scientific interest and knowledge, her competence in archaeology and art, her distinguished literary gift, her sympathy for all sorts and condition of men, her political insight and appreciation of human values, her masculine vigour, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit.
- D.G. Hogarth on Gertrude Bell, explorer, archaeologist, diplomat.
No one was more qualified than distinguished Oxford archaeologist than David G. Hogarth to pass judgement on the life of Gertrude Bell.
D.G. Hogarth was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1909 -1927), but during the First World War as acting Director of the Arab Bureau during World War One he roped in both T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell to undertake arduous British intelligence missions in the desert.
Both Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence (of later Arabia fame) had attended Oxford and earned a First Class Honours in Modern History, both spoke fluent Arabic and both had travelled extensively in the Arabian desert and established ties with the local tribes before World War One. Hogarth recognised the value of Lawrence and Bell’s expertise and upon his recommendation first Lawrence, then Bell, were assigned to Army Intelligence Headquarters in Cairo in 1915 for wartime intelligence service.
Bell became the only female political officer in the British forces during the war. She was St. John Philby’s field controller, and taught him the finer arts of behind-the-scenes political manoeuvering - St. John Philby was a close supporter of the Ibn Saud family and the father of the future British spy traitor, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby.
After the war, Bell sought to help the Arabs. She wrote “Self-Determination in Mesopotamia,” a paper that earned her a seat at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. While Lawrence was frozen out, Bell became the architect of re-drawing the maps of the new emerging post-war Middle East.
Bell continued to explore related political and social issues in her 1920 work Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia. She was involved the 1921 Conference in Cairo with Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, that established the boundaries of Iraq. Bell also helped bring Faisal I to power as Iraq’s new king. She is widely recognised as the founder of modern Iraq. For her work on their behalf, Bell earned the respect of the peoples of Mesopotamia. She was often addressed as “khutan,” which means “queen” in Persian and “respected lady” in Arabic.
Bell helped establish what is now the Iraq Museum. She wanted to help preserve the country’s heritage. In 1922, Bell was named the director of antiquities by King Faisal and she worked hard to keep important artifacts in Iraq. Bell aided in the crafting of the 1922 Law of Excavation. A few years later, the museum opened its first exhibition space in 1926. She spent the final months of her life working on the museum, cataloguing items found at Ur and Kish, two ancient Sumerian cities. Bell died on July 12, 1926, in Baghdad.
The Gotham City Sirens →
Rinko Kikuchi as Catwoman
Samira Wiley as Poison Ivy
Rihanna as Harley Quinn
I love this <3
Awesome ladies
Finally finished my Hidden Figures print! Another one you can find at ECCC! Which I need to remember to make a map of my location lol
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’re realizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
SO TODAY I was walking to college down a main road, it was really windy (as you might imagine with all the cars) and I was preocupied with keeping a grip on my beanie when I saw these two women walking a little way ahead of me on the other side of the road. One of these ladies was a bit taller than the other and they were holding hands (aww), the taller kinda butch lady had a flannel shirt on (double aww) and her partner/friend was wearing a cute cream and beige hijab. Now I swear to God this is relevant, wait for it.
A massive gust of wind suddenly comes tearing along the main road. I nearly lose my backpack, to give an idea of how bad it was. I look up and see the wind rip off this poor girls hijab and send it spiriling away down the street. (She had an undercap on so no major crisis but still, right.)
Before. You. Can. Blink. Our taller flannel-wearing girlfriend of the year TEARS off her flannel like lesbian Clark f***** Kent, throws her shirt over her partners head, and BAM she sprints off LIKE A SHOT after the hijab.
like 10/10, damn son, holy cheesits burrito, that is the very definition of chivalry and romance right there.
Rose and Holt are basically my reasons for watching this show.
get to know me: favorite fictional characters → rosa diaz (brooklyn nine-nine)
IT’S ALMOST 1:00 AM AND I GOT THE BEST WRONG NUMBER TEXT EVER.
I loved this book and this is absolutely gorgeous.
“But the world I wanted wasn’t the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.” ― Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver
My stage career began when I was a little under two months old, when I took the spotlight as Baby Jesus in a Christmas pageant. I’m told that I did a wonderful job and slept calmly through the whole thing, which can only speak to my talents as an actress, because I was 1. the wrong gender 2. a colicky screaming demon of a baby and 3. about as far from divine as it’s possible for an allegedly-human child to be.
I continued to be actively involved in theater as a kid (and frequently played roles of various small animals, because I was tiny for my age). Around the age of ten, I was cast as the lead character in a musical about cowboys that I no longer remember the name of. It was my first real lead role, and I took it very, very seriously. And because I am myself, that means I maaaaybe went…a little overboard.
My character’s introduction was early in the play, accompanied by the crack of a bullwhip. This was more-or-less pre internet (or, at least, our director was not tech-savvy enough to find sound effects online) and we didn’t have a sound effect track for that noise. There were plans to acquire the appropriate sound effect before opening night, but I rapidly tired of making my entrance during rehearsals to the sound of someone yelling “BULLWHIP NOISE!”
This, I thought to myself, is a problem I can solve.
I learned early in life that it’s good to be friends with people who have skills; they always come in handy eventually. After rehearsals one day, I put on my cowboy boots and biked a couple miles over to my friend Grace’s house. I went down to their basement and knocked on her older brother’s door.
“Hello,” I said. “I need to learn how to use a bullwhip.”
“….Okay,” he said. It did not seem to occur to him that he might ask further questions about why I, a tiny horrible munchkin composed exclusively of rage and pointy elbows, needed to be weaponized any further. Clearly, I had come to the right person.
My friend’s older brother would have been an SCA nerd, if SCA was a thing where we were. Instead, he was one of those unsupervised 4H kids with weird hobbies, largely oriented around ancient forms of combat. He was somewhere in his late teens at this time, and he liked to make stuff. It was an urge I, even at age ten, could sympathize with. His name was Aron.
Aron got out his bullwhip (which I had noticed hanging on his wall on a prior visit, and had filed away mentally under a for future use tab) and we went to the backyard.
“Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron began, “Swinging the bullwhip.”
We rapidly discovered that since I was god’s tiniest, angriest creation, a full-size bullwhip was way too long for me to use. Aron’s shins suffered for my attempt.
“…Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron said, “Making a bullwhip.”
So we went back inside, found a tanned cowhide (that he just…had? I don’t remember if there was a reason for this.) and some razor blades, and I learned how to cut and braid a bullwhip. It took a few tries, and I wound up coming back for a while, because I kept getting frustrated with the bullwhip-braiding process and Aron kept distracting me with bait like: “Hey kid, wanna learn to make some chainmail?” and “Hey kid, wanna fletch some arrows?” and “Hey kid, wanna try doing horseback archery?”
Obviously the answer to these questions was “BOY, WOULD I EVER!” Some delays are necessary to the artistic process.
(At one point my mom asked me “Hellen, what are you doing over at Grace’s house all the time?” And I, perfectly innocent, said, “Making weapons!” and my mother, who never understood why I was like this, but accepted that a girl has needs and those needs occasionally involve stocking a personal armory, said “Okay! Have fun!”)
Soon, the bullwhip, size extra small, was finished. The lessons on actual bullwhip use commenced.
It should be noted that Aron was self-taught, and really had no idea what to do, so this was mostly an exercise in the two of us standing twenty feet apart and flailing wildly with our respective whips until snapping noises happened. And then we figured out what we’d done to make the snapping noises. And then we kept doing that. Extremely vigorously. So vigorously that at one point one of the bullwhips launched into the air and caught on a tree branch and we hand to drag the trampoline over so Aron could bounce me high enough to grab it. But we persisted!
Eventually we reached a point where we could line up pop cans on a fence rail and hit them off three times out of five.
Feeling extremely accomplished and like I finally understood method acting, I packed my bullwhip into my backpack for the next play rehearsal. Soon enough, it was time for me to make my entrance.
I leaped on stage in my cowboy boots and cracked the bullwhip as hard as I could, immediately launching into the song despite the fact that the sound of five feet of braided leather breaking sound barrier had startled the accompanist so badly she’d keysmashed on the piano.
The director shouted something she probably shouldn’t have shouted in a room full of small children, and then demanded, “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT!”
“I made it!” I declared proudly. “I’m a cowgirl! I can make my own bullwhip noise!”
“You…made it?”
“Yes! Because we needed a bullwhip sound effect. And bullwhips are where bullwhip sound effects come from!”
This was, of course, impeccable logic.
It is apparently difficult to argue with a gleeful ten year old who happens to be armed with a bullwhip longer than she is tall. After some negotiation, the director agreed that I could use my bullwhip for my opening song, provided that I didn’t pop it while anyone was anywhere near me on stage and I didn’t let anyone else play with it. These terms were acceptable to me.
Somehow, no one was injured and the play went off without a hitch. We can only chalk up these things to the magic of the theatre.
Nearly a decade later, an unsuspecting college classmate asked me, “Hellen, wanna take a class on bullwhip combat with me?”
And obviously I answered, “BOY, WOULD I EVER!”
my grandparents have taken over my laptop so i can’t do work so..........a lil kel from the other day, mostly colored :)
Ah, le donne… sempre impareggiabili!!!
Ah, women … always unmatched !!!
