Can I interest you in a brief biography of this absolute icon?
I know. I know. It’s the hat, isn’t it? You need to know more. You simply must. And if that doesn’t do it, then perhaps this rather striking profile will:
Elizabeth “Amy” Dillwyn was born in Swansea in 1845, the eldest daughter of a prominent family. She was related to the photographer Mary Dillwyn, the abolitionist William Dillwyn, and the astronomer Thereza Dillwyn, and her father was the Liberal MP for Swansea. Upon his death, she inherited her father’s spelter works in 1890, as well as his debts of £100,000 (£8mil today.) She lived in relative frugality while she worked to save the business, renting lodging rooms and refusing to pay herself a salary in favour of keeping 300 people employed, until the debts were recouped 7 years later and she was able to buy her own home.
Dillwyn was also an author, and her 6 novels often touched upon class issues. She was a supporter of the Rebecca Riots, in which local Welshmen dressed as women to destroy tollbooths in protest against unfair taxation, and also supported the strike action of local seamstresses. Her novels also often included lesbian themes, most prominent in Jill, which tells the story of a gentlewoman who disguises herself as a maid and moves to London, falling in love with her mistress. Dillwyn herself wrote about her sexuality in her diaries, writing about her love for her friend, Olive Talbot:
My own belief is that I’m half a man & the male half of my nature fell in love with her years ago & can’t fall out of it again. I care for her romantically, passionately, foolishly, & try as I may, I cannot get over it.
Dillwyn referred to Talbot in her diaries as her ‘wife’, and never married. She was considered something of a beloved social eccentric, often wearing men’s attire, smoking cigars, and turning up to her father’s funeral in a purple skirt with a yellow flower in her belt as a protest against Victorian mourning conventions. She was a staunch suffragist and supporter of social reform. She died in Swansea at 90 years old, and her house now bears a blue plaque to commemorate her.
Currently, there’s an ongoing research project about her and her diaries led by Professor Kirsti Bohata of Swansea University, who also wrote her entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Some of her novels are available from Honno Press, which champions Welsh women’s writing. An edited selection of her diaries has just been published by the South Wales Record Society, and is being prepared for open access. Images sourced from David Painting, the biographer of the Dillwyn family.
It was never about Tone-deaf Tammy. It was always just about me. I was looking for answers in somebody else, but.. I had all the answers. I just needed to stop being so goddamn scared. Scared of… who I really was.
There are gonna be people who won’t like hearing this but if you want to live in a world where mixed marriages, families, and adoptions (particularly POC adopting outside their “race”) aren’t maligned and discriminated against, then you have got to get more chill about seeing someone partaking in something cultural that you don’t think fits the “race” you perceive them as.
It’s a vague memory now, it was a vague memory even at the time I made this post, but I think what sparked this was remembering stupid comments I saw about a Chinese-American cookbook that were complaining about it being written by a white woman and then I looked the white woman up and the briefest research showed she was adopted as a child into a Chinese-American family and just….
*pinches nose*
Fellas, is it cultural appropriation to inherit your family’s culture but you don’t pass the blood quantum test?
All of you are literally just racist. You’ve come full-circle. You’re working under the belief that people are supposed to “keep to their own kind” and that means the socially invented concept of “race”, and “race mixing” of any sort is unnatural.
Putting this in a separate reblog because it involves fictional media but it was still implying a messed up worldview….
This reminded me of a post I saw about someone theorizing what MCU Morgan Stark’s middle name was because we just knew her middle initial was “H” and they considered that the namesake might be Yinsen Ho but they didn’t want to believe that because it would be, quote, “cultural appropriation”.
Cultural appropriation. To name your child after someone you personally knew and was very important to you.
Don’t you know it’s unnatural for someone of a different race to be important to you? The races are not supposed to mix!
It’s literally just racism. Why do people think they’re being anti-racist activists by being some of the highest level of racist?
Yeah this trend has been gaining strength for years of “the races shouldn’t mix (but in a Marx honoring way)” and it’s seriously fuckin concerning.
Cultural appropriation is stealing something from another culture that they’re not happy to share and then passing it off as your own (and generally benefiting from it in a way that diverts those benefits away from the source culture).
Cultural appropriation is NOT enjoying things from other cultures that they’re happy to share, it’s NOT mutual cultural exchange between friends, and it’s DEFINITELY NOT inheriting your own culture no matter what you look like you absolutely fuckwaffles
acquaintance dropped into the group chat to request we try out out he/him pronouns for him and the response was a string of “yes sir” “sure king” “we got u bossman” . local discord server turns into a gang of gender affirming henchmen.
