animula

[Michael Savage @michaelsavage]

The story of social media’s problem with news, in two posts

[HistoryisMadeatNight @Historyatnight]

Enjoyed reading Emma Warren's history of the youth club and got me thinking about my own Luton youth club times in the punk/postpunk period https://t.co/WsjJsDaAaG

[Luke Tryl @LukeTryl]

🧵There’ll likely be a rush to call British public ungovernable in the wake of Starmer’s resignation. But blaming the voters is a cop out, and imo the reason for 5 PMs in 6 years is that all of them stuffed up in avoidable ways. Going through them:

[Past Tense @_pasttense_]

Bit of a slog to get up here in this heat- but always great to return to One Tree Hill, Honor Oak, SE London.
Saved in 1897 by riots and a campaign to reopen the Hill from enclosure by a golf club. Allowing us to look out on this view still today.

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

Stained glass and driftwood sculpture by UK artist Louise V Durham #WomensArt #Solstice

[Jamie Reed @JamieFonzarelli]

…all while receiving an overwhelmingly relentless, calculated and coordinated right wing media assault and a consistently targeted misinformation campaign on social media. It was a mistake to never explain this to the public.

[Jamie Reed @JamieFonzarelli]

…rest relations with the EU, lifted thousands of children out of poverty, put the NHS on the road to recovery, handled a degenerate economic legacy well…

[Jamie Reed @JamieFonzarelli]

Keir Starmer will go down as a truly important Prime Minister, with significant record of achievement. He saves the Labour Party from ruin and delivered the second largest ever Labour victory in the space of a few years. Made the right calls for the UK on Ukraine and Iran…

[animula @diaphaneite]

@icod Ouch

[animula @diaphaneite]

@icod Very nice! Gorgeous tin and utterly fab nails

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

The French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi has died at the age of 56.

An outspoken critic of the Iranian government, she was best known for the book and film 'Persepolis', which recounted the story of her early life in Tehran, struggling under the restrictions imposed after the 1979 revolution. Her family said she died of "sadness" following the death of her husband last year.

[Feminist City @feminiscity]

"The history of London's squat cafes: Chaos in the Streets. Order in the Kitchen" !

Chris @56aInfoshop on squat cafes and their discontents 😍: https://t.co/2UwyJN21bV in @vittlesmagazine

[London Zoo @zsllondonzoo]

Meet one of the rarest primates at our conservation Zoo 💚

Come see them and help support our conservation efforts to save these beautiful primates 💪

[The Daily Mash @thedailymash]

Six emails to send at 5pm on Friday for maximum damage 👇️

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

In the late 1960s, Ann Oakley was a young sociologist working on her doctoral research. She wanted to study housework...

Her field would not let her.

Sociology in the 1960s did not consider what happened inside the home to be work. There were studies of factory labor, office labor, professional careers, and labor union politics. There were almost no serious academic studies of the unpaid domestic labor that more than half the adult population of Britain performed every day. Oakley would later write that the absence was not an oversight. It was, in her phrase, "the inbuilt sexism of sociology."
So she did the research anyway.
She interviewed forty London women. Working-class and middle-class. All of them mothers of young children. She asked them to describe their actual days. How many hours did they spend cleaning, cooking, shopping, doing laundry, and managing the household? Did they like the work? Did they find it monotonous? Did they feel autonomous or constrained?

The findings, when she compiled them, were not subtle.

The average woman in her sample worked 77 hours per week on housework alone. Some worked more than 90. This was a longer working week than almost any salaried profession in Britain at the time. Seventy percent of the women said they were dissatisfied with the work. Three-quarters described it as monotonous. The lower-paid the woman's previous employment, the more likely she was to find domesticity tolerable. The higher her former job status, the more likely she was to describe it as a kind of slow erasure.

The findings overturned the prevailing view that women were naturally fulfilled by domestic life.
Oakley published the data in 1974 as The Sociology of Housework — one of the first serious academic studies of unpaid domestic labor in any country. Two years earlier, in Sex, Gender and Society (1972), she had introduced a distinction that would reshape an entire field: she separated biological sex from socially constructed gender. The terminology had existed in scattered psychological literature, but Oakley was the one who placed it at the center of sociology.

The framework became foundational across women's studies, public health, anthropology, and policy in the decades that followed. Her argument about housework was sharper than people sometimes remember.

When work is described as natural — as flowing automatically from love, instinct, or maternal feeling — three things tend to happen to it. Its hours are not counted. Its skills are not named. Its absence is noticed only when it stops.
What is not named cannot easily be paid for.

What is not paid for cannot easily be shared.

What cannot be shared falls predictably on the same people, decade after decade.

The work Oakley studied has not gone away. The most recent OECD time-use surveys still show that women in nearly every country in the world perform about two to three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. The U.N. estimates that if global unpaid care work were valued at minimum wage, it would add roughly 9% of global GDP to the world economy — about $11 trillion a year. Career interruptions for care responsibilities remain one of the largest drivers of the lifetime gender wage gap, the gender pension gap, and women's higher rates of poverty in old age.

Other scholars built on what Oakley began. Arlie Hochschild later named the second shift — the unpaid labor women do after their paid workday ends and emotional labor, the work of managing other people's feelings on the job and at home. Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand economist, showed how national accounting systems were designed to exclude women's unpaid work from GDP entirely. Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement made the case that the invisibility was not an accident of economics but a feature of how economies extract value.

The pattern is the same one Oakley identified.

© Women Stories

#drthehistories

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

The four horsemen of the Tory-Lib Dem marginal.

[Hand-Coloured Election Maps @MapsHand2483]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🗳️2026 London Local Elections: DONE!

[Secret Carshalton 🗝 @carshaltonviews]

Feeding the birds on a spring day - a simple pleasure. Beautiful blossom in The Grove #springday #feedthebirds #springvibes #springblossom #Carshalton

[The Labour Party @UKLabour]

The Green Party want you to think that they care about housing.

But here’s the facts that Zack Polanski would rather you ignore.

[Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @MayorofLondon]

From unforgettable performances to inspiring grassroots projects, Wandsworth has had a truly fantastic year as my London Borough of Culture.