We need more HER-story
Martin Doyle27/01/2010 11:55:00 a.m.
PETER Jackson Airport never got off the ground.
All the same, the mere fact Mayor Prendergast aired the idea of renaming our aerodrome shows someone somewhere is starting to have ideas. And that’s good. It should be encouraged. But instead of weeping over the fate of this particular lead balloon, let’s remember there is a whole hangar-ful of dashing Wellingtonians that could have things named after them. Let’s take one example.
Some of the greatest women in English literature are the Brontë sisters. Tiny (under five feet), frail , with charming Irish accents, but somehow doomed, they were trapped in rural Yorkshire, but still wrote ground-breaking creative masterpieces . They yearned for freedom. Their characters seemed to dream of new lives. Was that possible?
The Brontë girls were totally inspired when their gutsy best friend, Mary Taylor, just upped stakes and emigrated with her brother in the 1840s to the foetal settlement of Port Nicholson [Wellington] in distant New Zealand.
Mary opened a general store in Cuba Street. She was actually living the life her Brontë friends only dreamed of. She later bought land. Inbetween times she maintained a rich, bare-all correspondence with Charlotte Brontë (so revealing that Charlotte’s rumpy-pumpy letters appear to have been destroyed here in Wellington to prevent scandals back home).
Charlotte Brontë even created a character in Shirley based on Mary Taylor: a tough-minded girl called Rose Yorke whose consciousness was “thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew”.
Mary Taylor wrote from Wellington to Charlotte joking about how she’d been portrayed in the novel. Mary Taylor is thus probably the only Wellingtonian described in a major work of international literature. Even Mrs Gaskell talks about Mary in her biography of Charlotte Brontë.
This trail-blazing fighter deserves a whole town named after her. What have we got? A street named after... her brother Waring. Yes, good ol’ Waring Taylor Street. What did he do to deserve this? For a start he was a man. And only men count (or did, back in the Corny Colony of early Wellington). And, yes, he too ran a shop and was well-regarded. I don’t want to knock the guy but... His sister lived a “new life” for women, broke into business in a new colony, had ideas, was honoured in the writing of literary giants, and allowed bonds of friendship to lead her back again to the other side of the world where her famous friends were dying like flies. That woman needs an airport named after her. Or something. Anything.
Mary Taylor symbolises the whole untold tale of women’s lives in early Wellington. As the feminists once noted, our history is really HIS-story. We need more HER-story. I can’t think of many womeny names round here: Wilde Walk, Mt Victoria, Jessie Street, Rona Bay... Are there any others?
For too long women have been invisible in our names. “Males Only” is the subtext of all our signs. It’s Waring thin.
All the same, the mere fact Mayor Prendergast aired the idea of renaming our aerodrome shows someone somewhere is starting to have ideas. And that’s good. It should be encouraged. But instead of weeping over the fate of this particular lead balloon, let’s remember there is a whole hangar-ful of dashing Wellingtonians that could have things named after them. Let’s take one example.
Some of the greatest women in English literature are the Brontë sisters. Tiny (under five feet), frail , with charming Irish accents, but somehow doomed, they were trapped in rural Yorkshire, but still wrote ground-breaking creative masterpieces . They yearned for freedom. Their characters seemed to dream of new lives. Was that possible?
The Brontë girls were totally inspired when their gutsy best friend, Mary Taylor, just upped stakes and emigrated with her brother in the 1840s to the foetal settlement of Port Nicholson [Wellington] in distant New Zealand.
Mary opened a general store in Cuba Street. She was actually living the life her Brontë friends only dreamed of. She later bought land. Inbetween times she maintained a rich, bare-all correspondence with Charlotte Brontë (so revealing that Charlotte’s rumpy-pumpy letters appear to have been destroyed here in Wellington to prevent scandals back home).
Charlotte Brontë even created a character in Shirley based on Mary Taylor: a tough-minded girl called Rose Yorke whose consciousness was “thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew”.
Mary Taylor wrote from Wellington to Charlotte joking about how she’d been portrayed in the novel. Mary Taylor is thus probably the only Wellingtonian described in a major work of international literature. Even Mrs Gaskell talks about Mary in her biography of Charlotte Brontë.
This trail-blazing fighter deserves a whole town named after her. What have we got? A street named after... her brother Waring. Yes, good ol’ Waring Taylor Street. What did he do to deserve this? For a start he was a man. And only men count (or did, back in the Corny Colony of early Wellington). And, yes, he too ran a shop and was well-regarded. I don’t want to knock the guy but... His sister lived a “new life” for women, broke into business in a new colony, had ideas, was honoured in the writing of literary giants, and allowed bonds of friendship to lead her back again to the other side of the world where her famous friends were dying like flies. That woman needs an airport named after her. Or something. Anything.
Mary Taylor symbolises the whole untold tale of women’s lives in early Wellington. As the feminists once noted, our history is really HIS-story. We need more HER-story. I can’t think of many womeny names round here: Wilde Walk, Mt Victoria, Jessie Street, Rona Bay... Are there any others?
For too long women have been invisible in our names. “Males Only” is the subtext of all our signs. It’s Waring thin.
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