Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} MADONNA AND CHILD TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD by Melissa Benn MADONNA AND CHILD : TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD by Melissa Benn. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #a665a3f0-cdd1-11eb-b037-bbeb73e6988b VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:03:08 GMT. Melissa Benn. Melissa Benn is a writer, journalist and campaigner. She was educated at Holland Park comprehensive and the London School of Economics where she graduated with a first in history. Her early jobs included working at the National Council for Civil Liberties as an information assistant for Patricia Hewitt, later Secretary of State for Health, and as a researcher, under Professor Stuart Hall, at the Open University. Benn worked on the co-operatively run London magazine City Limits and her journalism has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Marxism Today, the London Review of Books, Cosmopolitan, Public Finance and the New Statesman. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and a columnist for Public Finance magazine. Benn has written six books, including two novels: Public Lives (1995) – described by writer Margaret Forster as ‘remarkably sophisticated’ for a first novel – and One of Us (2008) which was widely praised and shortlisted for Waterstone’s New Writer of the Year award at the British Book Awards in 2008 and chosen by Richard and Judy as one of their best reads of the year. Her non-fiction works include Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood (1998); Education and Democracy, co-edited with Clyde Chitty (2004), a collection of essays on education, and A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality For All Our Children, a specially commissioned pamphlet for the influential pressure group Compass co-written with Fiona Millar (2006) which provoked widespread discussion and political controversy at the time. She is a regular speaker and broadcaster. She has written and presented several Radio Four programmes including a series on the history of divorce, a three part study of forgiveness in personal and political life and a one off programme on the historic Grunwick Strike. She has spoken at the Hay, Edinburgh, Bath and Cheltenham literary festivals, among many others. In the last couple of years Melissa has been a guest on the Today programme, Woman’s Hour, Saturday Live, A Good Read, RIchard and Judy, the Sky Book Show and Sky news programme, and was one of several writers featured in a one hour special on the representation of politics in the arts and fiction on Radio Four presented by Mark Lawson. In 2011 she published School Wars: the Battle for Britain’s Education, which has been widely reviewed and provoked much discussion. In the months after publication, she travelled around the country discussing the book’s arguments with various audiences; an account of this ‘road trip’ was published in the New Statesman. In September 2013 she published ‘What should we tell our daughters? The pleasures and pressures of growing up female’ – a discussion of young women’s lives today. MADONNA AND CHILD : TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD by Melissa Benn. Melissa Benn attended Holland Park comprehensive and the London School of Economics where she graduated with a first in history. She has a long record of campaigning for high quality comprehensive education and the benefits it brings to society as a whole. A writer and campaigner, her journalism has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and she has written five books, including two novels: Public Lives (1995) and One of Us (2008), for which she was shortlisted for Waterstone’s New Writer of the Year award at the British Book Awards in 2009. Her non-fiction works include Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood (1998); Education and Democracy, co-edited with Clyde Chitty (2004), a collection of essays on education; and A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality For All Our Children co-written with Fiona Millar (2006). Some of her education journalism can be viewed on the Guardian website or on Melissa’s own site. She is a regular speaker and broadcaster. Melissa is an active and involved parent at Queen’s Park Community School (QPCS), the local comprehensive that her daughters attend, one of the founders of an award-winning writer’s project at the school and a committed member of the parent teacher body. In early September, Verso will publish her latest book, ‘School Wars: the Battle for Britain’s Education.’ During the early autumn she will be doing a number of meetings around the country, putting the argument for a different, fairer educational system, based on the idea as education as a public good not a private advantage. Please contact Melissa, via the LSN website, if you would like to set up a meeting in your area. The Diaries of Tony Benn and Chris Mullin. No politician in history has left such a comprehensive account of himself and his times as Tony Benn (1925- 2014) From his mid-teens until almost the end of his life, he kept, with one short break, a detailed daily diary of the events he took part in, the people he met and the thoughts that ran through his mind. The full archive runs to an estimated 20 million words. They reveal a man who’s devotion to political life – as both insider and outsider – was only matched by that for his family. The British Library recently announced that it had acquired Tony Benn’s archive for the nation – including many hours of audio as well as paper diaries and associated documents. MP Chris Mullin’s diaries are a recent classic of the genre. Sharp and insightful, they cover the ‘New Labour’ years from 1994 to the 2010 general election. At this event exploring the personal documenting of political life, the editor of both diaries for publication, Ruth Winstone, is joined by Tony Benn’s daughter Melissa and by Chris Mullin himself. Chaired by Peter Hennessey. Melissa Benn is a writer and a campaigner, especially for equality and quality in education. She is currently a regular contributor to The Guardian and New Statesman and many other publications and the author of eight books, including novels Public Lives and One of Us . Her non-fiction works include Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood; School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education and What Should We Tell Our Daughters? The Pleasures and Pressures of Growing Up Female. Peter Hennessy , Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, is a historian, author, academic, journalist and broadcaster specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London. Chris Mullin is an author and journalist who was Labour MP Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010, a minister in three departments and chairman of the Home Affairs select committee. His books include three highly acclaimed volumes of diaries, A View from the Foothills, Decline and Fall and A Walk-On Part; also the novel A Very British Coup which was made into an award-winning television series. His most recent volume of memoirs is Hinterland . Ruth Winstone worked for many years as a senior clerk in the library of the House of Commons and for Tony Benn from 1985 until his death in 2014. She edited his diaries for publication in three volumes and one single compilation, and also edited Chris Mullin's published trilogy of diaries. She is the author of Events, Dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain 1921 to 2010 , which retells Britain's history through the great diarists of the last century. Part of the British Library’s Diaries and Memoirs Season, February – March 2019. Before the revolution. For some strange reason, British liberals have often preferred to learn their radical lessons from glamorous Europeans, argumentative Australians or appealing young North Americans called Naomi. Equally oddly, they have tended to overlook many of the home-grown, plain-speaking dissenters dwelling on domestic turf. Hilary Wainwright is one such sensible radical who, even after several decades of activism and political writing, continues to plod the streets in pursuit of her political dream of true grassroots democracy. In recent years, Wainwright has been an enthusiastic observer of and participant in the worldwide anti-corporatist movement, and this book opens with images of explosions of popular energy - from a gathering of young Norwegians in Oslo debating system issues to a meeting of trade unionists and environmental activists in Taiwan. As Wainwright justly observes, when old forms of political power fail, people need to invent new ones. Reclaim the State is her attempt to speed that invention. It is a rather misleading title in one sense: all that is most forceful and interesting about the new democratic movements comes from outside official structures. However, as she says, this explosion of antiestablishment energy will have little lasting resonance if it cannot harness the powers and resources of the state in order to secure a fairer redistribution of resources, both worldwide and locally. Wainwright writes acutely about the failures of modern nation states. She takes as her starting point Tom Paine's argument that there resides in all populations a "mass of sense lying in a dormant state - which good government should quietly harness", particularly, he somewhat darkly hints, if it wants to avoid a revolution. For Wainwright, the modern social democracies are too deeply entangled with global corporate power. Political apathy is simply a reflection of an understanding that the vote alone cannot shift entrenched inequalities, despite Gordon Brown's covert programme of redistribution through indirect taxation and New Labour's ultimately centrally controlling notions of community and participation. So what does Wainwright want? She offers us four eyewitness reports of local democracy in action: participatory budget making in Port Alegre in Brazil, neighbourhood renewal in east Manchester, the story of an innovative community project in Luton and, finally, the successful bid by public- sector workers in Newcastle to win an in-house contract, beating off corporate giant BT in the process. In the final chapter, Wainwright tries to draw some general lessons for democracy from these scattered experiments. Unfortunately, this central portion is the hardest to digest, while the more theoretical sections make for a more satisfying read. Describing the world of delivery plans, funding bids, trade unions and the rest, Wainwright's writing is thick with acronyms and technical detail, a difficulty which dogs many a contemporary political writer. And while it is heartening to read of people coming together at a local level, one too easily feels despair at the continuing corrosion of local authority power and the invasion of private companies into every sphere of the public sector under New Labour. But Wainwright is an earnest, almost dogged optimist. She sees everything, from local projects to the anti-capitalist movement to the recent worldwide swelling of anti-war opinion, as evidence of the emergence of Paine's "mass of sense", an ever-growing pressure for radical change. Refreshingly, her sights are set on the producer and the public-sector worker rather than the consumer and purely private citizen. She is also honest enough to state that her ultimate vision is not clear, and that the exact forms of the new participatory democracy remain fuzzy. But her book contains an important warning for the social democracies, engaged in showy public debates about progressive governance. Should the polarisation between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, become too great, those in power might take note of her suggestions on how to deepen democracy, ways to deploy that dormant mass of sense among the growing ranks of dissatisfied citizens. Melissa Benn's Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood is published by Cape.