The Beguines – The First Women’s Movement?

Beguines were women who chose to live together. The movement began over eight hundred years ago, mostly in the Low Countries – Holland and Belgium, but also elsewhere in Europe. Beguines were laywomen, not nuns, but they chose to follow a way of life in many ways similar to that of Jesus: voluntary poverty, care for the poor and the sick, and religious (Christian) devotion. They lived independently of men, earned their own money by finding work locally, and deliberately chose not to be a formalised movement.

Despite developing separately across many European countries, there were common elements that these medieval women shared, including their visionary spirituality, their unusual business acumen, and their courageous commitment to the poor and sick. Common to them also was their non-reliance on men, during a time when a woman normally passed passively from her father’s jurisdiction to that of a husband. Maybe the coincidence of the later Crusades, taking many men away from their home countries, allowed many women to grab some independence.

Beguines were essentially self-defined, and resisted the many attempts to control them. They lived in beguinages, which could be a single house for just a few women or even a solitary woman. But beguinages could also be much larger as in Bruges, Brussels, and Amsterdam, where hundreds of women lived together in walled-in groups of houses within a medieval town or city.

No men were allowed to live within the beguinages, though some permitted male visitors. Women were free to leave at any time and a number would leave, to set up their own households, to get married, or to go back home to care for sick relatives.

It would seem that the heyday of the beguines did not last long beyond the last Crusade. Suspicions swirled in some areas about what was going on within the walls of the beguinages. Marguerite Porete, for example, who lived in a beguinage in Paris, was accused of heresy and burned at the stake in 1310. Many others were accused of witchcraft.

Why these women were called Beguines is a mystery, and it may have originally been a pejorative term that the women decided to embrace. In colloquial medieval French, a beguin was a bonnet, and embeguiner was the verb – to wear a bonnet (it could also mean to have a crush on) The bequines certainly used to wear a fairly distinctive style of bonnet. However, it is possible that the origin was the other way around, with a beguine’s distinctive style of headwear becoming a new word for a bonnet.

In later centuries we have had Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, Suffragettes and Suffragists, and waves of feminism from the mid nineteenth century on, as women have always struggled to get and maintain legal, political and social rights on a par with, and independent from, men. But, in many respects, the beguines were there first!

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On Abers and Invers

Aberdeen is a port city in Scotland situated where the rivers Dee and Don flow into the North Sea. It is also the name of a global investment company, Standard Life Aberdeen. The company changed its name to Abrdn 2021. With a straight face, the company declared that their name should continue to be pronounced Aberdeen, but that the name change would bring a ‘clarity of focus’ to the organisation.

That may have been a reason for this no doubt costly PR exercise. But maybe it was also something to do with the fact that the domain, Aberdeen.com, had already been taken; and, for some inexplicable reason, the abrdn.com domain was still available. Whatever the reasoning behind the decision, the name change was met with widespread derision – ‘an act of corporate insanity’ – was one of the kinder comments. In response the company played victim and accused the media (and the rest of us) of ‘corporate bullying.’

But how did Aberdeen – the city, not the company – get its name? Aber is the Celtic (Brittonic) word for river. The Brittonic speakers inhabited the south of England but were pushed west by the invading Romans into Wales a couple of millennia ago. Some Brittonic speakers moved as far afield as Scotland, taking the language with them. Celtic / Brittonic words segued into Welsh and many towns in Wales situated by rivers retain the word aber, such as Aberystwyth, Abergele, Aberdare, Aberaeron, Abersoch … Many other places in Wales, best known these days by their English names, start with Aber in the original Welsh/Brittonic. For example, Swansea, the city by the coast in South Wales situated on the banks of the river Tawe, is Abertawe in Welsh.

Celtic / Brittonic died out in Scotland so there are fewer example of the use of aber in place names. It was replaced by Gaelic, in which language the word for river is inver – as in Inverness.

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The first bookshop

Not many people know about the link between shoes and the sale of books. Shoes have been made, sold and mended for thousands of years. Books have been sold since writers started writing them, especially after the invention of the printing press. Cambridge University bookshop, for example, is said to date back to 1581.

But bookshops as we now know them did not come into existence until exactly 250 years ago when, in April 1774, James Lackington opened his first bookshop in London. Lackington was the son of an alcoholic West country (UK) cobbler (I told you there was a shoe connection) who impoverished his family to the extent that the young Lackington was apprenticed to a pie maker at the tender age of 10, so there was one less mouth to feed at home. Here he proved to be a very successful salesman in the making, his sale of pies on the street corner outstipping his master’s ability to cook enough of them.

At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a cobbler in Taunton, where he taught himself to read, developed his love of books, and spent all his money building up a collection of his own. When he married in 1770 he confessed to his wife that he had no savings, only a large collection of books. For many years Lackington made very little money as a jobbing cobbler and moved to London to try, unsuccessfully at first, to improve his income.

He was saved from poverty by a timely legacy left to him by his grandfather. This was enough for him to rent his own premises where he decided to combine mending shoes and selling books. Initially he sold his own collection, and several ecclesiastical books he had managed to pick up cheaply. He was so successful that within a year he abandoned cobbling and moved to larger premises to sell books. In so doing he opened the kind of bookshop we are still familiar with.

So, what was his unique selling point that made him so successful? In part he was lucky with his timing; in the late eighteenth century more and more people could read, had more leisure time, and more disposable income. Hence there was a pool of potential customers that were not currently being catered for. Lackington, remembering his own money troubles, deliberately sold his books as cheaply as he could, encouraged people to come in and browse, and only to buy one when they had the money to do so.

Previously, books had been for the well-off, who tended to run up credit (and be somewhat dilatory at paying their bills, often leaving poorer shopkeepers to go into bankruptcy). By keeping prices down, but insisting that people paid for any book before they took it out of the shop, he did not have a cash-flow problem so was able to re-stock with a constant supply of new books. He would also buy ‘remaindered’ stock from the posh booksellers (which they would otherwise burn to maintain their high prices) and sell them in his own shop for knock-down prices. He also invented book tokens that could be purchased in-store as a gift, and redeemed later.

His methods were so successful, that in 1794, he opened what was then the biggest book shop in the world (see picture above), complete with sofas in quiet areas where people could sit and read before making a purchase. The poet John Keats was among his regular customers and, indeed, met his first publisher in one of the shop’s lounges.

By the mid-1790s his annual catalogue ran to over 500,000 books and journals, he exported books to America as well as around the UK and Europe, and he had become a very wealthy man. He retired back to the West Country in 1798 to become a Methodist preacher (and read more books) until his death in 1815.

Lackington was no doubt quite an eccentric gentleman. But he was also a bibliophile and a business man, who understood both commerce and human nature. And the importance of books in people’s lives.

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Book Extravaganza, Coventry UK

The Proverbial Woman

It was too wet to go out so I started on some Spring Cleaning. I get the urge every year or so, but it doesn’t last long – just till the next sunny day. However, during last week’s little flurry of activity I found an old book tucked away at the back of a shelf. Small, scruffy, tiny print, and bound in a cheap, red coloured, cardboard cover, it could hardly look less inviting. It was part of Cassell’s Pocket Reference Library series, and was titled Proverbs and Maxims. First published in 1910 and reprinted 6 times before the edition now in my hands was put together (1931). There are probably many subsequent additions for, as the compiler John L Rayner quotes on his frontispiece, ‘a good maxim is never out of season.’

I glanced through it idly – thinking this would be marginally more interesting than dusting the shelf – and looked up husbands (half a page of quotations), men (one and a half pages), wives (two and a half pages) and women (over three pages). I can’t be sure, because the original authors were not cited, but the gist of each proverb/maxim suggests that in most cases, they were opined by a man.

Take those on husbands – ‘if a husband be not at home, there is nobody.’ ‘Husbands be in Heaven when wives scold not.’ And so on (mostly) in the same vein.

Likewise, there is a complacency and tolerance about the proverbs on men: ‘Man, woman, and devil are the three degrees of comparison.’ ‘Man is a bundle of habits.’ ‘Every man is the son of his own works.’ A proverb about old men is a bit disparaging – ‘it’s hard to break an old hog of an ill custom.’ But this is nothing on the general gist of proverbs about women.

Wives in particular, get a raw deal. ‘He that has a wife has strife.’ ‘Wives and wind are necessary evil.’ ‘Wife and children are bills of charges.’ But women in general don’t fare much better. The most complimentary was, at best, patronising. ‘A good woman is worth, if she were sold, the fairest crown that’s made of pure gold.’ Which is better, I suppose, than ‘A man of straw is worth a woman of gold.’

Most however are plain nasty, and stress the importance of keeping a woman in her place. ‘Women are ships, and must be manned.’ Women are the devil’s nets.’ ‘When an ass climbs a ladder, we may find wisdom in a woman.’ And my all-time least favourite – ‘a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be.’

Well, it’s a booklet from a hundred years ago, you may say. Things are so much better these days. True.  When it was first published, women did not have the vote. And it is only in the last 50 or so years that women have been able to open bank accounts or take on a mortgage without permission from their husband or father, that the Football Association has graciously allowed women and girls to play football, and that athletics has permitted women to run in marathons. None of this has happened without a fight by women (and some men), so it’s great that Jasmin Paris, a young British woman, and the first woman ever to complete the Barkley ultra-endurance race in under 60 hours, has dedicated her achievement earlier this month ‘to woman everywhere.’

Because in other spheres, ‘progress’ is not always so evident. The NHS talks about ‘people with ovaries’ rather than acknowledge that these are bodily parts unique to women (though they have no problem talking about men getting checked out for prostate problems), and many UK politicians struggle to say what a woman is for fear of upsetting trans identifying males. The responses to women who object to this obfuscation are often crudely worded versions of the centuries old maxim ‘Let women spin, and not preach.’

Further afield, the situation is much worse, particularly in Afghanistan where women and girls have no rights and are not allowed to leave home without a male relative as a chaperone. No school, no work, no entertainment, no sporting activities – not even a walk in the park. Women out unaccompanied risk arrest, physical punishment, prison or even death (though the purity police, aka the Taliban, aren’t averse to a bit of punitive rape of such ‘loose women’ alongside these other measures). And allegations of adultery are now likely to end in death by stoning – just for the woman, of course. This in a country where 50 years ago young women dressed like me and, like me, were free to go to university and to work. No wonder the suicide rate among women and girls is so high there at the moment.

So well may we snigger at the old fashioned, misogynistic, attitudes evident in this little book of maxims and proverbs. But scratch the surface and many such sentiments are still around in western ‘civilised’ countries. And they are pretty much Government policy in some countries, notably Afghanistan and Iran.

And now the sun is out, and it is unlikely to rain for the next few days, so my spring cleaning has come to an abrupt halt. Long may the sun shine!

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Book Extravaganza, Coventry UK

Book Extravaganza is coming to the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry on April 6^th, thanks to the energy and hard work of Dexter O’Neill. He is also the power behind fantom publishishing and Rosie’s Retro Bazaar. He took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about what these, and Book Extravaganza, are all about.

Hello Dexter, can you tell me a bit about yourself, Fantom Publishing and Rosie’s Retro Bazaar.

Fantom was established 19 years ago, almost to the day! Over the past two decades we have published around 400 print and audio titles.

We have worked with lots of fantastic authors including autobiographies of actors Paul Nicholas, Julian Glover, Geoffrey Beevers, Jack Wild and Derek Fowlds. We have many more biography and Cult TV and Film related titles which are too many to mention.

Recently, we have published the novelisations of One Foot in the Grave by the series’ creator David Renwick, and a collection of scripts by comedy writing duo Marks and Gran.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been involved with the arts, working professionally for ITV as a youth, however it was my involvement with the television station at Warwick University – whist completing my degree – that demonstrated to me what was possible.

The venture and my previous experience inspired me to start an audio-visual enterprise which over the first couple of years developed into a publishing house and events company.

Through fantom we have organised over 200 events – which is amazing! Prior to lockdown I developed Retrospective Ltd and the Rosie’s Retro Bazaar brand through my love of Mid-century design. This is principally a retro and village market, but this has recently expanded to include heritage themed events.

I was inspired into producing audio books by my grandmother, who after going blind relied on them for storytelling and entertainment. If she enjoyed an audio book or play, she would pass me the cassette and I would take a listen.

It was this that gave me the opportunity to learn about the industry and inspired me to move into print – egged on by one of my audio book readers (actress Mary Tamm) who said she was looking for a publisher for her autobiography First Generation.

So, what is a Book Extravaganza?

It is an event like no other, we are bringing together a variety of independent and small businesses which have a connection to books and the art of storytelling.

Across two floors of the Belgrade Theatre, we have a collection of authors with a plethora of styles and subject matters – from local interest to children’s fiction and true crime to science fiction!

We have themed stalls from audio books to LGBTQI+ as well as antiquarian and second handbooks.

Joining this, will be a host of stalls inspired by the history of books, associated crafts, and tools. For example, cards made from ladybird artwork and beyond. Journals, stationery, pens, and bookmarks!

If you are an aspiring writer, and looking at routes to market, we have printers and author services to give you more inspiration and ideas. We have Illustrators and comic creators.

There are also talks and performance work including Coventry’s Young Poet Laureate Aamani Kanda who will be reciting some of her poetry – you will be able to find out more on our website.

Why did you decide to hold the Book Extravaganza in Coventry?

Coventry is my home city and community, culture and developing the local economy is a big motivator for me. I want to give local authors and businesses a new shop window to display their talents in the hope it enhances the image of the city and the opportunities within.

It will be in the Belgrade, Coventry, 10am – 4pm – is that right?

That’s correct, the event will run from 10am until 4pm. The talks and performance schedule will be announced online and via social media this week.

How much will it cost to take part or to attend?

The event is FREE to attend, however if you are an author or small business related to the book or storytelling industries you can apply for a stall via our website. But hurry we only have a couple left!

Who will be there and who do you hope will attend?

The event is open to everyone whether you are an avid reader, budding writer or just browsing. It is an ideal opportunity to find that unique gift or unusual title.

How will people get in touch with you if they want to be part of it?

You can message us online via any of our social media channels or through our websites www.fantompublishing.co.uk and www.rosiesretrobazaar.co.uk

Do you see this as an annual event in Coventry?

We are hoping this becomes a biannual event, the positive response talking to book groups and people online gives me the confidence that this will be a different event which can continue to grow! Watch this space!

What do you see happening afterwards in Coventry (or elsewhere)?

We have been approached by a couple of other locations in the Midlands who are keen to host a Book Extravaganza; and we hope to have another in Coventry in the lead up to Christmas.

On 8th June we have our next Twentieth Century Market, which is moving from Drapers’ Hall to the Belgrade Theatre. This event is a retro and vintage fair which encompasses fashion, furniture and homewares.

Fantom run approximately a dozen Doctor Who conventions and events across the country including locations in Sheffield, Bristol, Milton Keynes and London. We did our first convention in Coventry last year and plans are afoot for the next!

The Belgrade is keen for us to continue and present more events for them, so again watch this space! Who knows what will happen next.

Anything else you want to add?

We are supporting Listening Books charity at this event; a national audiobook charity providing an online audiobook service for the print impaired.

40% of revenue from our audio book stall will go direct to the charity and there will also be a raffle to win audio books signed by the writers and readers.

It’s a charity close to my heart as the art of audio can bring a new world of storytelling, knowledge, and entertainment whether that’s due to a physical impairment or age. It brings me full circle as I saw firsthand with my grandmother and what difference audio can make.

Our inaugural Book Extravaganza is FREE to attend, however if you pre-register your interest at www.rosiesretrobazaar.co.uk you can be entered into a raffle to win £75s worth of books!

Sounds like a definite date for the diary. Thank you so much for your time, Dexter, and look forward to seeing you on the 6^th April at the Belgrade.

Some pictures from Dexter’s album to whet your appetite

The late June Brown – reading a copy of Jack Wild’s autobiography It’s a Dodger’s Life. One of my favourite photos!!

Authors Catherine Schell & Derek Fowlds swapping books! Catherine was a bond girl!

The late Peter Vaughan (Porridge, Game of Thrones…) signed copies of his autobiography Once A Villian. 

Ken Farrington at a book signing – he was best know for being Billy Walker in Corrie.

These last three are of Mary Tamm – she was Tom Bakers companion in Doctor Who. There are photos of her with my first book, and reading the audio book.

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Collocations

You may not be familiar with the term, but when speaking and writing we use collocations all the time. The word is closely associated with the verb, to collocate – to group or place items together in some system or order (like, if you still have them, your DVDs, CDs, cassettes or records). It can also mean the way we group together words in a sentence.

So, linguistically, what is collocation?

Collocation is ‘a predictable combination of words.’  For example, we can say ‘heavy rain,’ but not ‘strong rain’ because it does not sound right. Likewise, we tend to ‘do exercise’ but not ‘make exercise’. We talk about someone’s ‘cute little puppy,’ not her ‘little cute puppy.’  

Collocations can be made up of any kinds of words such as verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives. Although people have attempted to draw up rules – adverb before adjective (or is it vice-versa?) – there are no hard and fast rules for collocations. They are just combinations of words that we become familiar with, and then use correctly without thinking. Because there are no rules, people who have not been immersed in the language since birth will sometimes get it wrong, giving us native English speakers a completely unjustified (and often very temporary) sense of superiority over foreigners.

Linguists also use the term, collocation, to refer to the regular association of one particular word with another. Several people I know can never be frank, they are always ‘brutally frank;’ many optimists are said to have ‘rose-tinted spectacles,’ English landladies in seaside towns will offer you a ‘hearty breakfast’ before you set off for a ‘bracing walk.’ What is ‘fish,’ without ‘chips’?

New collocations spring up regularly – is there now any other intelligence than artificial intelligence? Or fade out of use – who worries about addled eggs in these days of refrigeration?

Sometimes, the difference between a collocation and a cliché is pretty blurred – are ‘a time bomb,’ or ‘a ticking clock,’ happy collocations or irritating, over-used, phrases that slide into many articles on, for example, climate change / the economy / the crisis in the NHS ….?

NB: Collocation – from Latin – collocare (co – together, plus locare – place)

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Fan fiction, Slash fiction – What Next?

Fan fiction, sometimes spelt fanfiction, is the sort of stuff afficionados write about the characters in their favourite books. Not surprisingly, there is a huge volume of fan fiction written about the Harry Potter characters and the author, JK Rowling, is said not to mind – so long as the writers do not try to sell their work.

Fan fiction is rarely authorised and is technically illegal as the writer uses copyrighted characters and settings, and encroaches upon the intellectual property rights of the original author. Copyright law grants the holder the exclusive right to control how their work is used and identified.  Many authors, like JK Rowling, are aware of the fan fiction their work inspires but see it as largely harmless, maybe even of benefit to any young person trying their hand at it as it develops their imagination. Established authors will rarely, if ever, read any of it though; partly because they have better things to do with their free time, partly through fear of being accused of ‘stealing’ an idea from a fan for a future book.

One of the worst examples of Fan fic, I am told, is My Immortal, which is based on Harry Potter books, but shows scant regard for the actual characters and is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes. Many other works aren’t much better, and some developments in fan fiction are increasingly giving the genre a bad name.

Slash fiction is a sub group of fan fiction. It focuses on same sex romantic/sexual relationships between characters that was neither intended nor implied by the original author. It is so called because the slash (/) is used to indicate that the relationship is sexual (e.g. Noddy / Big Ears). Friendship is indicated by ‘&’ (Noddy & Big Ears). The sexual relationship is usually between 2 male characters (m/m). If it is between two females (f/f) it is called femslash or femme slash.

This is still pretty harmless, you may think. But some writers of fan fiction go further – Angst fic, or even Dark fic where the plot lines become increasingly violent and sexual – rape, incest, murder, torture, suicide ….

The journalist and women’s rights campaigner, Dr Helen Joyce, first wrote about fan fiction in The Economist in 2016 when her editor asked her to look into the potential impact of pornography on young people. She had not paid any attention to fan fiction before, and had never heard of slash fiction, but in her initial research she found a link between them and porn. She included in her article her concern about the impression this could be making on the many young female readers who like reading fan fiction.

Subsequently she was contacted by a number of parents who agreed with her, but also felt that slash fiction was creating, or compounding, their daughters’ feelings of gender dysphoria – initially starting with the girl identifying as one of the gay boys in a fan fictional relationship, rather than a female character from the original book.  However, in most of the slash fiction of that era (remember, this is less than 8 years ago) the relationships were not explicit, and the romance element virtually sexless. Ostensibly, many storylines seemed relatively tame – for some girls a temporary haven away from the anxious realities of first periods, developing breasts, and boyfriends in real life.

Helen Joyce has recently gone back to research the topic, and found, in keeping with modern angsts, a plethora of fan fiction characters were now in therapy of some form or another. She has been shocked, too, to find that the fan/slash genre has become much more pornified, violent and explicit than even a few years ago, with anal sex, choking, spitting and slapping seen as ‘normal,’ even on a first date (and a million miles away from the behaviour of the characters in the original books). These degrading porn storylines however do correlate with recent research done with young people about the impact of porn on their lives. It appears that many have had access to explicit and violent porn from a young age, and that girls understand this behaviour to be what they could expect from boys in real-life sexual relationships, or be seen as prudes. Certain strands of fan fiction, that to the uninitiated sounds like an innocent, adolescent,  vehicle for fandom in regard to a favourite author, seem to have become very dark indeed.

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Celebrity Authors

What is your opinion of celebrity authors? Those like Katie Price (a.k.a. the model, Jordan), and another model, Naomi Campbell who ‘wrote’ the easily forgettable novel Swan, are easy to disparage. Their relationship with pen and paper is similar to Dolly Parton’s relationship with her hairdresser: when asked how long it took her hairdresser to concoct such a mass of curls Dolly allegedly replied ‘I don’t know, I’m never there.’ But at least she was open about the contrivance, unlike Price and Campbell whose creations were brought into this world by faceless ghost writers.

It’s not so easy to dismiss the work of some of the other people who became famous for something other than writing before succumbing to the urge to pen their memoirs or take a foray into fiction. Stephen Fry was an intellectual who first came to our attention as a comic actor and was well capable of writing a novel about the holocaust, Making History, and many others. Around half a century earlier, Dirk Bogarde wrote six well received novels as well as being a film star.

Today we have TV personality Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, which appears to have struck a chord with the general public and I, for one, certainly enjoy reading his books. And there’s rumour of a pending novel from Taylor Swift, which I may pass on.

There’s no doubt that celebrities get an easy ride when it comes to finding a publisher, as the publisher knows the name alone will guarantee sales. Often, enough sales to make it worth their while to give them a generous advance (think Prince Harry and Spare). But a famous name doesn’t guarantee sales. The actress Celia Imrie was promised a contract for a novel she was thinking about writing – a novel she did in fact complete, but it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.

Those of us who write without the luxury of fame, struggle to get an agent’s or publisher’s attention. After 20 or so rejections, it is easy to feel a bit aggrieved that one’s hidden masterpiece is destined to remain just that – hidden. But the commentator Charlie Connolly has pointed out that publishers who take on celebrity authors and go on to sell thousands of copies of their work(s) keep those publishing houses solvent. They are therefore in a position to offer contracts to a few unknowns too, who may or may not bring in a return on their investment. There would, he argues, be fewer publishers if there was a ban on celebrity publishing (which would be impossible to enforce anyway).

Major celebrities who want to see their words in print are snatched up by the big-name publishers, but there are plenty of other publishers that an unknown would-be author can try. Reputable ones don’t charge to publish, but they will expect you to do all the leg-work in regard to marketing and promotion, and buy your own copies to sell at launches etc. Alternatively, some authors choose to pay an often quite hefty fee to a publisher to get their book out – and still find they have to do their own marketing, with the promised support evaporating after their last payment.

It’s not surprising therefore that writers turn to self-publishing. Some of the more enterprising ones set up their own publishing business for their own books and maybe a few friends who write in the same genre. There are some famous precedents: Virginia Woolf couldn’t get a publisher, so her husband set up a publishing house for her, Hogarth Press, that is still going strong – as are her books.

Galling as it may be that the works of the celebrities make a seemingly effortless rise to the top of the pile of manuscripts by a publisher’s desk – and then sell in numbers that often far outweigh their true worth – it is unlikely that they really are the reason why it is so hard for most of us to get published. And yes, that is a green-eyed monster perched on my left shoulder.

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The Secret Schools for Afghan Girls

There was no World Wide Web (WWW) when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and I took shamefully little interest in what was going on in Afghanistan and Iran (then called Persia).

But trawling the Internet now I see photographs of young women dressed pretty much as I was, both when going to school / university / and even – bikini clad – on the beach. Now Afghan females risk stoning and worse if they do not go out covered from head to foot, and with a male relative as chaperone; and Iranian women are also getting beaten up, or even killed, just for showing too much hair beneath a hijab.

How silly we were to believe that all women across the world were – at last – making progress in breaking free of male oppression. Ayatollahs (Iran) and the Taliban (Afghanistan) have put paid to women’s freedom in both their countries. Afghan girls over the age of 11 cannot go to school now, let alone university.

And yet, despite all the terrible repercussions if discovered, a number of Afghan girls are still getting an education. In underground schools (often a back room in someone’s house), with the assistance of volunteers and supportive family members – and the Internet – girls and young women are coming together to study.

Some of the volunteer teachers are Iranian, as well Afghan. In fact, in one new organisation – ShiftLand, founded by an Afghan called Ershad and his wife – nearly all the teachers are Iranian. Many of the lessons are provdied online, and the teachers participating are volunteers who live across the world, including in Iran, the UK, Germany and India. Between them they are teaching around 300 girls. And there are a number of other such secret schools, including those run by organisations such as LEARN. Many of the on-line teachers are male – making it even worse for the girls involved, if the Taliban authorities find out about them.

You would have thought Iranians had enough of their own problems without being bothered by the troubles in Afghanistan, but the two countries share a common language, Farsi, and there are many Iranians in the UK and elsewhere who have fled from the oppression in their own country but want to be doing something positive without attracting the attention of the secret agents of the Iranian authorities that have infiltrated Iranian communities in other countries. Teaching on-line is one way they can act in relative safety for themselves and their families back in Iran.

Teachers were originally recruited for their knowledge of Farsi, but it quickly became clear that many of the Afghan girls have surprisingly good English and are desperately keen to improve their written and verbal skills in this language – English being a possible escape route out of a country that is so determined to ignore their potential contribution to society.

Lessons are short, so that the girls don’t attract the attention of the authorities by being away from home for too long, and are often interrupted by power cuts, or unstable Internet access. Homework is set, however, and sent as pdfs to the father’s phones (obviously the only girls who can participate in this secret education system have to have supportive fathers or older brothers).

In the West, we take our education and relative freedoms for granted – still plenty to moan about: we don’t have full equity, the glass ceiling, the integrity of single sex sports and services etc. etc. But in Afghanistan, women and girls are not even, as one of the underground school students said ‘treated like human beings.’ Women,’ she went on, ‘must have the right to decide, study, and live freely.’ Or, as women and girls chant in Iran, even as the Iranian guards violently break up demonstrations, ‘Zan. Zendagi. Azadi.’ (Women, Life, Freedom.)

NOTE: Farsi – the modern Persian (Iranian) language, also spoken widely in Afghanistan. It is an Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages and dates back many thousands of years. Unlike ancient Greek compared with modern Greek, very little in the language has changed over the years.

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