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The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens

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Nicola Clark

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“As a woman who is from a working-class background, I was aware, growing up, how little was expected of me in terms of achievement. It was assumed by my teachers that, like other girls, I too might go into teaching, or train as a nurse (not a doctor), or get a job to bide my time till marriage. Ambition was for others. It was not for the working class. It was not for working-class women. This has nothing to do with genetics. Nothing to do with individual attributes or interests. Nothing to do with what’s natural. It is about social circumstances. It is about socially engineered inequality. The unscientific lie that all women are inferior to men, that most men are inferior to other men, that non-whites are inferior to whites is a tidy but simple-minded way to avoid any kind of social justice. These are not ‘hard truths’. They are lies.”

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Book:One Aladdin Two Lamps
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“Always, in the bygone days, men would tell me with great certainty what I should do and then, if I hesitated, would tell me again, towering over me, smelling of cigars and mouthwash, superior smirks creeping over their huge-pored faces, and then I would, often, nearly always--well, I would do it. I would do whatever that man had asked me to do, within reason, seeing this as a form of kindness on my part, so as not to force the poor fellow, who no doubt had a lot on his mind, to, uh, raise his voice or otherwise become, well, frustrated. Frustrated with me. The Frenchman was frowning. It was always their disappointment that got me. Even more so than their anger.”

MenWomenAngerDisappointmentGenderObedienceMisogynySuperiorityServilityDocility
Book:Vigil
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“I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat! There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it, That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, Endlessly proceed—and the cold angels, the abstractions. I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels, And the man I work for laughed: 'Have you seen something awful? You are so white, suddenly.' And I said nothing.”

MenWomenWorkDestructionGenderAwfulnessFlatnessOffices
Book:Winter Trees
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“That mythical being, the most beautiful woman in the world, now has light skin chemically darkened with dihydroxyacetone, the chemical used in artificial tanner. (It is important that she begins as light before the darkening – she cannot simply be dark.) She has had her nose broken and reconstructed to be straight and small, and her lips injected with synthetic hyaluronic acid, whilst fat has been beaten out of her body and redistributed to her hips, bum and breasts to create a more exaggerated curve, not dissimilar to that of Sarah Baartman. Everywhere else she is athletic and lean – her stomach is flat and tight. She cannot simply be curvaceous or lean, she must be both and neither. She must be constructed. All of the hair on her body has been removed with a laser whilst her teeth have been filed down into fangs and replaced with porcelain, electric white. She wears the hair of an Asian woman sewn close to her scalp, and her eyes have been stapled up at the outer corner. Where is she from, people ask. Where does the most beautiful woman in the world call home? She laughs coyly, flashing her dazzling smile, but says nothing. She says nothing when women are murdered by their governments for showing their long, luscious hair. Or when dark-skinned women, the ones with no use for the chemical dye, are killed in their homes by those meant to protect them. She does not discuss the teeth knocked out of women’s skulls by their partners or the little girls sexualised for the same features she parades, created from artifice. She is quiet when girls are bullied for their body hair, for their belly rolls and their burdensome bodies. She does not comment on the women of colour calling out for somewhere to belong, a space that’s truly theirs. She claims nowhere whilst taking everywhere, and she says nothing. She has no politics, no culture, no real stance on anything. She consumes but she does not contend (unless it can be made into content). Why should she? She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

WomenBeautyBeauty StandardsBeauty Myth
Book:Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women
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“Before Mance, Varamyr Sixskins had been a lord of sorts. He lived alone in a hall of moss and mud and hewn logs that had once been Haggon’s, attended by his beasts. A dozen villages did him homage in bread and salt and cider, offering him fruit from their orchards and vegetables from their gardens. His meat he got himself. Whenever he desired a woman he sent his shadowcat to stalk her, and whatever girl he’d cast his eye upon would follow meekly to his bed. Some came weeping, aye, but still they came. Varamyr gave them his seed, took a hank of their hair to remember them by, and sent them back. From time to time, some village hero would come with spear in hand to slay the beastling and save a sister or a lover or a daughter. Those he killed, but he never harmed the women. Some he even blessed with children. Runts. Small, puny things, like Lump, and not one with the gift.”

LifeChildrenWomenMeaningVillage
Book:A Dance with Dragons
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