Now it looks to me as if, without the women, we couldn't carry on at all
1. The Gentle Sex (1943) is a less graceful propaganda effort than the similarly encouraging Millions Like Us (1943), but I think I may have found it more interesting. It's Leslie Howard's last film, even though he's glimpsed only briefly at the outset of the story, the omniscient narrator surveying a crowded railway station from his God's-eye catwalk, choosing his subjects and commenting on them with an amused tolerance that it will be the film's entire business to refute. "Women! Women all over the place. This station's seething with women. They think they're helping, I suppose . . ." Like the male gaze personified, he assembles his cast with such teeth-grating condescensions as "Now there's a dear little thing. Oh, we must have her!" or "Good, is she? Well, let's have her by all means," but he is part of the same irony that picks out the opening credits in demure needlepoint with a sampler-like verse about the frailty of women before bringing up the writers' names, all female—indeed, the longer the film follows its seven new recruits to the ATS through their early training and into their various stations in the field, the more like a running joke the narrator sounds, admiring but clueless and crestfallen by his own expectations of women's places in war. Observing a young flying officer bidding his mother farewell, the narrator sententiously begins to quote Kingsley—"Well, men must work and women must weep"—and then, finding the scene abruptly cut to a convoy of lorries all staffed by female drivers and about to leave on a top-priority mission, has to finish halfheartedly, "At least, that used to be the idea." Yes, the leather-jacketed despatch rider on the Triumph is a woman, too. Don't forget the anti-aircraft spotters. That marching band and those radio operators know what they're doing.
A recruitment ad at the time, the documentary-style film now makes a striking record despite the fictionalization; it boasts that it was "made with the co-operation of the War Office and the Auxiliary Territorial Service" and a number of the boot-camp scenes especially look as though the camera simply followed a season of real-life recruits with a smattering of actors in speaking roles. I just can't decide whether I think it's more interesting for what it does or what it doesn't do. It passes the Bechdel test so naturally that the viewer actually notices when the topic of men is raised, because the expected love-in-the-time-of-war angle has been so far absent from the narrative. Some of the characters have romances, some don't. There is no suggestion of them being torn between their feminine desires and their military duties; that having a boyfriend or not defines their femininity. (We are treated to a pleasing moment of female gaze when the most forthright of the seven catches sight of a handsome Highlander at a dance: the camera lands first on his lean, fit legs in their piper's stockings and lingers its way up to his face, which is John Laurie's, dark-browed and beaky and bent in a matchingly appreciative smile. The film is not trading in stereotypical reversals of behavior, though. A boyish, generous joker of a Tommy on a crowded train at first looks like the lightweight contrast to the efficient women, but when he drops off to sleep we see the commando badge stitched on his sleeve: he mutters and twitches in his dreams, mission nightmares. This is not a film which wants its audience to underestimate anyone.) It was probably inevitable that one of the protagonists should lose her lover to enemy action, but it is explicitly not the be-all, end-all of her story any more than a marriage would have been: "You won't forget," the narrator says, for once understanding. "But you won't go under." There are no catfights. The character who clashes the worst and most often with her fellow-recruits is stiff-necked, standoffish, inclined to hold insufficiently thought-through political opinions, and—as her cabmate finally diagnoses—shy; she is not a bitch. And the film is not complacent; it acknowledges and endorses the social sea-change of the war, but it doesn't erase earlier contributions. When a newly promoted driver, herself the daughter of a professional soldier, declares proudly that "For the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men," her prospective mother-in-law quietly reveals that she met her husband while recuperating from injuries she sustained in the last war, when she was an ambulance driver hit by shrapnel and he was a flyer like his son. The only real down note is unintentional: the egalitarian future all the characters assume they're moving toward, straight on into peacetime when the contemporary viewer knows it wasn't—isn't—as painless or as reasonable as that.
Honestly, rare as it shouldn't be, it's nice to see a story where women are competent without being flawless, funny without being ridiculed, and allowed to hold a variety of opinions and attitudes, even if it's all in service of getting more women into uniform so that more men can join up. They're still living in a man's world—the narrator doesn't mention that women in the ATS could expect two-thirds the pay of their male counterparts in the armed forces. The film's intended audience is a little confused, as it seems sometimes to appeal to women who might worry that operating heavy artillery is beyond them and sometimes to men who might doubt their wife/sister/mother's right to give it a try at all. But it is never saying, look how neatly they drill for girls, look how impressive it is when a woman changes a gasket. Maybe it's just the optimism of propaganda, but it is taken as read that the protagonists are not exceptional: they are simply doing their bit. And not subserviently, either: "The world you're helping to shape is going to be a better one," the narrator muses as our seven heroines share sandwiches in the aftermath of a successfully repelled air raid, "because you're helping to shape it."
All right, he still salutes them as "you strange, wonderful, incalculable creatures." But he's kind of an ass. And at least Leslie Howard knew it.
(Since I'd taped it with the other two, I also rewatched The First of the Few (1942). It's still the least of Howard's war movies, but it has wonderful footage of the Supermarine S.4. Not so good on gender, though.)
2. Speaking of women, I forgot to mention that I received my contributor's copies of The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Science Fiction Poetry, containing my poems "Madonna of the Cave" and "Matlacihuatl's Gift" and work by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin. Nice, nice book. You should get one.
3. I said
derspatchel had taken a picture of me which I didn't hate. Proof below the cut.

I don't like most pictures of myself. I don't like them even (or especially) when I'm smiling; I think most of my expressions are funny-looking, which I blame on the basic structure of my face. The two best pictures I've ever taken of myself were in rear view mirrors; one was by accident in Italy and in the other you can't so much see me. That said: I'm smiling in this one and I think I like it. Maybe the sparkler helps. The photographer didn't hurt. That's my brother in blur behind me, apparently doing his best Vulcan impression.
4. Goodbye, Ernest Borgnine. When I was in seventh grade, I had to read a scene from Marty opposite a boy whose name I can't remember now; I didn't watch the movie then, but I think I should. And then The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), because you're in that and I'll take any excuse.
5. A character in today's Skin Horse used the acronym TARFU. It is my favorite of that family of acronyms and the one that gets the least airplay. Huzzah.
A recruitment ad at the time, the documentary-style film now makes a striking record despite the fictionalization; it boasts that it was "made with the co-operation of the War Office and the Auxiliary Territorial Service" and a number of the boot-camp scenes especially look as though the camera simply followed a season of real-life recruits with a smattering of actors in speaking roles. I just can't decide whether I think it's more interesting for what it does or what it doesn't do. It passes the Bechdel test so naturally that the viewer actually notices when the topic of men is raised, because the expected love-in-the-time-of-war angle has been so far absent from the narrative. Some of the characters have romances, some don't. There is no suggestion of them being torn between their feminine desires and their military duties; that having a boyfriend or not defines their femininity. (We are treated to a pleasing moment of female gaze when the most forthright of the seven catches sight of a handsome Highlander at a dance: the camera lands first on his lean, fit legs in their piper's stockings and lingers its way up to his face, which is John Laurie's, dark-browed and beaky and bent in a matchingly appreciative smile. The film is not trading in stereotypical reversals of behavior, though. A boyish, generous joker of a Tommy on a crowded train at first looks like the lightweight contrast to the efficient women, but when he drops off to sleep we see the commando badge stitched on his sleeve: he mutters and twitches in his dreams, mission nightmares. This is not a film which wants its audience to underestimate anyone.) It was probably inevitable that one of the protagonists should lose her lover to enemy action, but it is explicitly not the be-all, end-all of her story any more than a marriage would have been: "You won't forget," the narrator says, for once understanding. "But you won't go under." There are no catfights. The character who clashes the worst and most often with her fellow-recruits is stiff-necked, standoffish, inclined to hold insufficiently thought-through political opinions, and—as her cabmate finally diagnoses—shy; she is not a bitch. And the film is not complacent; it acknowledges and endorses the social sea-change of the war, but it doesn't erase earlier contributions. When a newly promoted driver, herself the daughter of a professional soldier, declares proudly that "For the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men," her prospective mother-in-law quietly reveals that she met her husband while recuperating from injuries she sustained in the last war, when she was an ambulance driver hit by shrapnel and he was a flyer like his son. The only real down note is unintentional: the egalitarian future all the characters assume they're moving toward, straight on into peacetime when the contemporary viewer knows it wasn't—isn't—as painless or as reasonable as that.
Honestly, rare as it shouldn't be, it's nice to see a story where women are competent without being flawless, funny without being ridiculed, and allowed to hold a variety of opinions and attitudes, even if it's all in service of getting more women into uniform so that more men can join up. They're still living in a man's world—the narrator doesn't mention that women in the ATS could expect two-thirds the pay of their male counterparts in the armed forces. The film's intended audience is a little confused, as it seems sometimes to appeal to women who might worry that operating heavy artillery is beyond them and sometimes to men who might doubt their wife/sister/mother's right to give it a try at all. But it is never saying, look how neatly they drill for girls, look how impressive it is when a woman changes a gasket. Maybe it's just the optimism of propaganda, but it is taken as read that the protagonists are not exceptional: they are simply doing their bit. And not subserviently, either: "The world you're helping to shape is going to be a better one," the narrator muses as our seven heroines share sandwiches in the aftermath of a successfully repelled air raid, "because you're helping to shape it."
All right, he still salutes them as "you strange, wonderful, incalculable creatures." But he's kind of an ass. And at least Leslie Howard knew it.
(Since I'd taped it with the other two, I also rewatched The First of the Few (1942). It's still the least of Howard's war movies, but it has wonderful footage of the Supermarine S.4. Not so good on gender, though.)
2. Speaking of women, I forgot to mention that I received my contributor's copies of The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Science Fiction Poetry, containing my poems "Madonna of the Cave" and "Matlacihuatl's Gift" and work by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin. Nice, nice book. You should get one.
3. I said
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)

I don't like most pictures of myself. I don't like them even (or especially) when I'm smiling; I think most of my expressions are funny-looking, which I blame on the basic structure of my face. The two best pictures I've ever taken of myself were in rear view mirrors; one was by accident in Italy and in the other you can't so much see me. That said: I'm smiling in this one and I think I like it. Maybe the sparkler helps. The photographer didn't hurt. That's my brother in blur behind me, apparently doing his best Vulcan impression.
4. Goodbye, Ernest Borgnine. When I was in seventh grade, I had to read a scene from Marty opposite a boy whose name I can't remember now; I didn't watch the movie then, but I think I should. And then The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), because you're in that and I'll take any excuse.
5. A character in today's Skin Horse used the acronym TARFU. It is my favorite of that family of acronyms and the one that gets the least airplay. Huzzah.
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Thank you! Yes, in my parents' driveway in Lexington. I hope they still are . . .
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Oh: this is so much what I desire from movies and books, and so often not what I find. Either the traditionally belittled/stereotyped groups (whether societally, like, say, dorky scientists or overbearing Asian parents, or narratologically, like characters brought up to contrast with the protagonist) are still belittled, or else, in strenuous reversal, their opposite numbers are.
her prospective mother-in-law quietly reveals that she met her husband while recuperating from injuries she sustained in the last war, when she was an ambulance driver hit by shrapnel and he was a flyer like his son. The only real down note is unintentional: the egalitarian future all the characters assume they're moving toward, straight on into peacetime when the contemporary viewer knows it wasn't—isn't—as painless or as reasonable as that --cheers for the first part! And grimacing at the second part.
So glad you taped this one, too.
And what a fantastic photo! (And I like your other favorite too)
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The narrator is sent up because he's (whether the writers would have identified him this way or not) the voice of the patriarchy; he's a well-meaning, privilege-hampered everyman, but he's not every man in the film. For every embarkation officer who grouses about an incoming convoy, "I bet half of them stopped to have their hair waved" (explicitly unfair, because the women have been driving all night), there's a sergeant-for-life who gives out career advice at an all-ranks dance or a nosy parker in a pub whose unwelcome interest in the drivers isn't the novelty of their sex, it's their obviously hush-hush mission that he wants to know all about. A senior officer cuts in at the dance, claiming the privileges of rank, and the young pilot and the colonel's daughter leave the canteen together to talk out the kind of society they want after the war. The train guard played by Miles Malleson is old-fashioned, telling the soldiers to watch their language around ladies, but movingly appreciative of the ATS and the work the exhausted drivers have done: "As far as I'm concerned, you can have a first-class carriage each. The whole train if you like—and the engine. There's nothing I wouldn't do for you." The gun crews at the anti-aircraft battery are all mixed-gender. The overall picture of women's integration into military life is upbeat—it's propaganda, after all, it has to be. All the men are very firmly secondary characters; that is appropriate, too. But it could easily have been all unexamined acceptance or all turnabout (which is just another way of sabotaging an apparent statement of equality, because it says that women's competence is only possible when men are themselves incompetent) and instead it's a range of attitudes, none at anybody's expense except the outmoded idea of the "dear little thing." The woman so designated by the narrator in the opening scenes is played by an almost unrecognizably young Joan Greenwood, an overparented only child who despairs at first of being able to keep her own boots polished. By the end, she's helping to bring down German bombers, no less petite, but quick and fearless—and a good hand with mechanical things. It's a surprise only to herself. And by the time the cordite is lighting up the sky, she's gotten over it, too.
So glad you taped this one, too.
It should be on DVD! Maybe it is in the UK . . .
(Only in Castilian? I'm so confused.)
And what a fantastic photo! (And I like your other favorite too)
Hah. Thank you!
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(Which is totally not true, Tiny Lucien Ballard.)
I feel like I should do a poll: does anyone like the way they look in photographs? If not, why not? If so, where can I get some of that?
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I don't think anyone I know can stand to look at photographs of themselves. It's a thing.
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I don't even remember your chin hairs!
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I'm going to go fling myself from a tower.
P.S. I thought you went and got your brother back from the people under the hill years ago. Hadn't you noticed the ears?
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Most of the time I think I look so very awkward. And I blink too fast, so my eyes are almost always closed or nearly so. (Plus, it doesn't help that I've never thought of myself as being particularly attractive, but I guess that's a different problem)
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I think it's related. If you don't like how you look to begin with, you won't like being reminded of it.
Also, I love the photo of you.
Thank you.
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What should I know about being photographed?
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If you're in the habit of tilting your chin up, tilt it down so the camera isn't looking up your nose. Never face the camera straight-on; it will make you look flat and fake. When we look at people in real life they're always moving, so give the camera an angled view that looks more like what someone might see in a moment of sitting across from you, as you move while talking or thinking or reading a menu.
If you're looking at the camera, look at the camera: not the photographer, but the center of the lens. If you're looking away, look fairly far away so it looks intentional.
Put emotion in your eyes and on your face, as though the camera were your friend or your lover or some other person you feel strongly about, someone who cares about your feelings and would want to know what you were feeling from looking at you, someone you want to emote for. Have some phrase or concept in mind for the feeling that you're projecting: "We share a secret" or "I love that hat" or "How wonderful to see you! I didn't know you were going to be here" or "I tolerate you photographing me only because I love you" or "I'm sad and trying not to show it" or whatever. It can be complex or simple, but whatever it is, feel it strongly and do your best to make it shine out of you.
Talk with the photographer as they're taking photos. Have the most interesting conversation you can, and let it go where it will. The camera is a reporter, scribbling down note on the interview the photographer is giving you (or you're giving the photographer). You are a story that the camera is telling. Laugh, grin, smirk, frown, ponder. Feel things. Be who you are in that moment, as hard as you can.
I am not doing a very good job of this at all, but maybe you get a little bit of the idea.
(If you pull up my very lengthy userpic page and look for photos taken by
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No, it's useful information. I'm not sure how much it helps me for candid-camera moments where it feels like whatever angle I've been captured from is the wrong one, but in more formal set-ups it's certainly something to remember. Thank you.
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2. Yay!
3. That is a good picture of you; you are emphatically NOT funny-looking. No offence to your brother, but: blimey. I had to take a couple of looks before I noticed.
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It's not easy to tell from the opening sequences, especially since Howard was one of the reassuring voices of the war, tirelessly broadcasting, lending narration to documentaries for the BBC and patriotic mainstays of the cinema like In Which We Serve (1942); I have read that his last peformance before he died was offering up Nelson's prayer before Trafalgar on the steps of St. Paul's. He was an extraordinary focus of Englishness. Anything he says, you're afraid the film will take him at his word. It doesn't. The girls have voices, too.
Probably another thing that isn't on DVD.
Not even in your country, it looks like! Who do I write to and complain?
That is a good picture of you; you are emphatically NOT funny-looking.
Thank you.
I like my alien brother.
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2. I think that's a lovely picture. Hi, face! I like to see you.
3. That movie sounds lovely. I have a trio of cousins who ran off to France to drive ambulances during WWI and then all moved home to Vermont, which is why my family now has a house there. I think of those women often and wish that they had left diaries.
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That's interesting. Like hearing your voice played back if you're not accustomed to it. (I know the sound of my singing voice; I've been listening to it since I was twelve. Speaking, I still think I sound incredibly weird.) That's not a bad theory.
I think that's a lovely picture. Hi, face! I like to see you.
Hah. Thank you. Hello.
I have a trio of cousins who ran off to France to drive ambulances during WWI and then all moved home to Vermont, which is why my family now has a house there. I think of those women often and wish that they had left diaries.
Do you have letters, anything? Seriously!
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You sure did hit the Scrappy on the head with that one, Owlet. We all have a mental image of ourselves, a constant self-reference, right? You can't see the expressions you're making without the benefit of a mirror, but you've got a pretty good mental approximation. You can imagine them all right.
Over here in this brain, which is the only one I can speak for, the mental image is largely influenced by the way I look in the mirror. I can go over, look in the mirror, say "Damn, Mirror Self, you lookin good", then have some portraits or candids taken and get angina over how they look. Especially the ones that catch half blinks and doofy grins-in-progress. "Dear lord, that's how people see me. All the time. The camera can't lie. Welp, let's fetch another paper bag and remember to cut eye holes in this one."
Thing is, both the camera and the mirror are telling the truth. The camera just has a bad habit of catching the truth when it doesn't look so hot. A screengrab taken when a newsreader is in the middle of a word, for instance, can become a hilarious image macro/LJ avatar.
In animation terms, your mental self images are key frames, the clear poses with clean expressions, while photographs mostly catch the in-betweens, the weird stretching and squashing bits needed to get to those poses. A good photographer can help and there are some really good tips in these comments here indeed to keep you from stretching and squashing, but for a large gang of folks I think it just comes down to luck.
We can form a club. Call it [No Picture Available].
So when the fates collide or collude or do whatever the hell they do and you find yourself with a pretty decent picture, you go right ahead and cherish it. Oh, and the really nice thing? People remember you and think of you in key frames too. That's what the brain does, and that's why it's so nice when you see a good picture of someone looking good. (Vindication of memory! Hoorah!)
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And a look of mischief, like one of Oberon and Titania's court.
I am pleasantly startled by how well the film got it. Not perfectly, of course--but what a downfall waiting for those women with the peace!
Somewhere Leslie Howard is still on his God's-eye catwalk with his Higgins notebook, taking us all down.
Nine
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Huh. Maybe that's where my Hermia/Puck fic went.
I am pleasantly startled by how well the film got it. Not perfectly, of course--but what a downfall waiting for those women with the peace!
I was hopeful, because it had been positively written about and Leslie Howard had not previously impressed me as an idiot, but I wasn't sure at first whether the credits and the narration were part of a conceit that wouldn't have held up with the years: I think they function exactly now as then. The film is smarter than its narrator and assumes its audience is too. I think you would like it.
(The hindsight is disheartening. Even the BFI thinks so.)
Somewhere Leslie Howard is still on his God's-eye catwalk with his Higgins notebook, taking us all down.
He's a ghost I haven't written about. Or I write about him often, but not in that way. Hm.
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Many of us would love to read that!
He's a ghost I haven't written about.
Hmm. One for that book of ghost poems?
Nine
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If he turns up.
I need to write the title poem, but it would be called Ghost Signs.
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Oh yes, please!
Back a ways:
I think you would like it.
I'd love to see it!
Nine
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Thank you.
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When a newly promoted driver, herself the daughter of a professional soldier, declares proudly that "For the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men," her prospective mother-in-law quietly reveals that she met her husband while recuperating from injuries she sustained in the last war, when she was an ambulance driver hit by shrapnel and he was a flyer like his son.
I do like this.
I'm glad for your contributor's copies.
That is a very nice photograph. I have to say I've not seen a bad one of you; then again, I suspect most of us have similar feelings about photographs of ourselves. The only ones I've ever really liked have people I care for in them.
That's my brother in blur behind me, apparently doing his best Vulcan impression.
Lucky him! I've always wished for pointed ears. (Do his normally not look that way?)
It is my favorite of that family of acronyms and the one that gets the least airplay. Huzzah.
I don't believe I'd seen it before that strip. I like it, and I suppose that's another thing for which I must be grateful to Skin Horse.
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Thank you. Sadly, because I really liked the other film, I think this is a much better writeup than the one on Stand-In (1937).
That is a very nice photograph. I have to say I've not seen a bad one of you
Yes, and consider how many photographs I actually post to Livejournal!
(Thank you.)
(Do his normally not look that way?)
No, it's pretty normal. I'm just not sure I've ever seen them captured so convincingly.
I don't believe I'd seen it before that strip. I like it, and I suppose that's another thing for which I must be grateful to Skin Horse.
It's from the same family as SNAFU and FUBAR: Totally and Royally . . . I've always thought of it as the stage between the two.
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It's a military acronym of the same vintage of SNAFU and FUBAR: Totally and Royally [effed] Up. I see it used much less often and therefore encourage it wherever I can.
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I don't see why not. Or FTF.
(Yesterday's strip:
"Quite. GODOT is a SIGINT DoD AI, formerly of the DLIS."
"An ex-military AI? What was its job?"
"Thinking up acronyms, mostly."
"Dude, that's TARFU right there.")
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"For the Loss" would be a good title, though.
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*The Gentle Sex * sounds so interesting! Does not appear to be available anywhere online, but reading your review is almost as good.
How pleasantly jarring to hear that "dear little woman" narrated intro and then to have it put back in context by the realisation that all the writers were women.