JS Mill – The Subjection of Women

It’s been quiet on the cataloguing front in the last few weeks … I eased back on the editing I was doing, having acquired (happily-intermittant!) tendinitis in my mousing arm, which is little better with a trackball and heaps of anti-inflamatories, as yet. And I’m in the middle of lots of projects, none of which are anywhere near the catalogue stage. There’ll be a flurry in another few weeks, I’m sure.

So, the only two new entries are the Compare and Contrast of a chunk of Mill’s Subjection of Women and a little poem by Tennyson — The Miller’s Daughter. Mill I recorded a while back, and it fell due during the below-mentioned behemoth, so Starlite kindly edited it for me. I look forward to hearing the whole piece, because I start towards the end of Chapter 3, where Mill asks, and then answers, the question:

No production in philosophy, science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing that women are naturally incapable of producing them?

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/subjection_of_women_0807_librivox/subjectionofwomen_08_mill_64kb.mp3] (20:22min, 9.7MB)

As for Tennyson, I did that by way of a warm-up for a Lamda Grade 6 exam in the Speaking of Verse and Prose. Haven’t had any exam results back yet, though it was fun to do and I think it went well. The poem is in the catalogue as part of a Weekly Poetry set, and was also fun to do. One odd note — not how many women recorded it … but how many apologised for recording it. It is Tennyson being rather stalker-ly, but still. The non-gendering of any text is one of the nicest things about LibriVox. Sure, generally the major parts of plays are cast “appropriately”, and I think we’ve done a very tiny number of books with gendered casting for some reason or another — but the very vast majority of projects are run on the “you want it? you read it” basis. And even those that have been voice-cast would be open to another version being made with a very different voice. So much more fun than someone saying “sorry, you don’t sound old/young/masculine/feminine/english/welsh/canadian/australian enough” — and that being the end of the story.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/millers_daughter_0807_librivox/themillersdaughter_tennyson_cs.mp3] (1:09min, 1.1MB)