Category: Uncategorized
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Types of Power
“Do not quote laws to those of us with swords.” -Pompey When I first started thinking about women and power, I started thinking about power in general. What does having power mean? How do people exercise power? French and Raven defined the ways in which people exercise power back in the 1950s & 1960s: Royalty…
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What am I even doing here?
God only knows. I started The Royal Purple in a fit during the pandemic because I was cranky that there weren’t more portrayals of women in power. Like, real women who had held power doing actual things with their power, hopefully for good. (In reality, it wasn’t always for good. It never is.) But the…
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Germaine de Staël and Jane Austen
I have been reading about Germaine de Staël to write more about her on this website. She often seems to be characterized as not a proper woman – certainly Napoleon hated her because she was an intellectual who dared to influence current events. And in Mistress to an Age, Christopher Herold points out that Fanny…
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Sugarcoating Medieval Misogyny
Alice Evans writes a great newsletter about women, equality, and the differences around the world. Right before Christmas, she published an issue on just how unequal medieval Europe was for women. The stats she draws on are quite startling: And those are just the easily quotable statistics. I haven’t posted here for the last three…