GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CEMENT COULD TOTALLY CHANGE HOW WE LIGHT CITIES

(via The Magic Swan Geese, Russian folk tale illustraton, E. Polenova 1956, – Soviet Postcards & Vintage Finds)

Dance cooler!

Hot foot!

Princess Ileana of Romania (also Mother Alexandra) (5 January 1909 – 21 January 1991) was the youngest daughter of King Ferdinand I of Romania, and his consort Queen Marie of Romania. She was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and of Czar Alexander II. She was born Her Royal Highness Ileana, Princess of Romania, Princess of Hohenzollern. After marriage she was known as Her Imperial and Royal Highness, Ileana, Archduchess of Austria, Princess Imperial of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia, Princess of Tuscany, Princess of Romania, Princess of Hohenzollern.

Ileana was born in Bucharest on 5 January 1909, the youngest daughter of Queen Marie of Romania and King Ferdinand I of Romania. Although it was rumored that Ileana’s true father was her mother’s lover, Prince Barbu Ştirbey, the king admitted paternity. Ileana had four older siblings: Carol, Elisabeth – later Crown Princess of Greece, Princess Maria – later Queen of Yugoslavia – and Nicholas. Her younger brother Mircea was also claimed to be the child of Prince Ştirbey even though the king also claimed to be his father.

In January 1991, she suffered a broken hip in a fall on the evening before her eighty-second birthday, and while in hospital, suffered two major heart attacks. She died four days after the foundations had been laid for the expansion of the monastery.

Oceania Week / Feminist Friday!

Indian women on the beach at Suva Fiji (before 1906) [Source]

Women in working clothes as indentured labourers Fiji (undated) [Source]

Students with teachers at the Dudley School Fiji (undated) [Source]

When we talk about Asian immigration to Oceania, the predominant narrative is male. Women didn’t go on long voyages to do hard manual labour and make their fortunes, they say…

But they did. Not many, in some cases–an 1861 survey of Australia counted 38,337 men and only eleven women–but in other cases, plenty. 

When I wrote about the Indo-Fijians, I noted that the Brits encouraged women as well as men to immigrate to stabilise the Indian population. These women were young widows, sex workers–and, according to writer Suresh Prasad, victims of kidnapping, some of them children.

And yes, they were abused in their labour. But, as journalist Gaiutra Bahadur has documented in her book Coolie Woman, they sometimes fought back:

Another immigrant, indentured in Fiji in 1906, recounted what happened to an overseer who told an Indian woman that he wanted her: “She asked him to wait till the next day. This woman, with two other women, devised a plan. When he came the next day, two of the women remained at a distance. When he approached the one he had spoken to the previous day, she asked him to take off all his clothes; when he lifted his shirt to take it off, all three women jumped on him and beat him up and threw him into a drain.” In 1916, a male schoolteacher who ended up indentured in Fiji told the tale of how he attacked an Indian driver who procured women for a European overseer. The ex-schoolteacher described what happened when the overseer came to the driver’s defense, with a gun: “The women of the lines, whom I called mother or sister and who treated me well, took up their hoes. He retreated, pleading to the women not to hit him, moving backwards he landed in a sewer pit. The women then threw shit on him. The overseer ran away.”

Women typically worked together in the same gang, plucking weeds in the cane fields, so they were already organized in a group by the plantation. Examples abound of overseers who took liberties being set upon by the women’s gang. According to the Fijian historian Vijay Naidu, “they would strike him to the ground and thrash him as well as do other more nasty things. In one incidence, they pinned the overseer to the ground and took turns at urinating on him. On another occasion, they made a line and walked over the overseer until his excreta came out.”

There’s a graphic account on that page of an overseer named Walter Gill, but the male gaze is a bit overblown there so it reads weirdly.

Of course, the road to gentrification had already started–in fact, I was originally going to do this post about Hannah Dudley, a British missionary who founded girls’ schools in the Indo-Fijian community from 1897 onwards.

Hannah Dudley with students Fiji (c. 1900s) [Source]

But rebellious coolie women makes for a much more interesting story. :)

It’s (eventually) happening!

In Namibia, dogs such as the Anatolian Shepherd are helping to save the lives of hundred of cheetahs. They are part of a cheetah conservation program that began in 1994. When a cheetah attempts to attack a farmer’s livestock, the dogs are there to ward them off and are doing such a good job that farmers no longer try to kill the cats to protect their herds. As a result, the wild cheetah population is stabilizing for the first time in decades.

#Husky, Stuffedtoy, Bff, Cute