Powerful women: Mary W and St Catherine

I had dinner at a friend's house a while ago. Fred and I met in a literature class we took at university. I get on incredibly well with his mother. We were gossiping in the kitchen (ouch - female cliche. Mary Wollstonecraft, forgive me) and she told me this hilarious story of when Fred was 2. He was in the bath with his mum, his dad was shaving. Fred shouts out in alarm, 'Daddy! Mummy doesn't have a willy! We have to go to Harrods to buy her one!'

Have been reading Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, finally. Another university friend who lived on the same corridor as me used to leave books, including this one, in the loo. I never managed to get very far, so am finally settling down to it. One passage, in particular, resonates:

Weakness may excite tenderness ... but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind ... that deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

This severely reminds me how pathetic it is of me to long for lordly caresses rather than genuine friendship. And do some men really find weakness appealing? Some of her reflections on male and female relationships are really disturbing. She writes that gentleness, which she equates with insipid softness, is a particular characteristic of women, developed with the aim of ensnaring men. Without it, woman would then lose many of her peculiar graces... For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex:
Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create,
As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.
I went round the Uffizi and the Accademia recently, and was very taken with St Catherine. In
pictures she is often painted with the Wheel (instrument of torture) somewhere around her robes, and is often arguing with pagan philosophers. According to various legends, Catherine of Alexandria declared to her father that she would only marry someone who surpassed her in beauty, wisdom, reputation and wealth. (I love her already) After refusing the advances of Emperor Maxentius, he threw her in prison. When she began converting all those around her to Christianity, she was condemned to death on the wheel. However, the wheel broke at the crucial moment.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg/456px-Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg

A little list of favourite children's books:

• Charlie and Lola
• all Eva Ibbotson books, especially her less well-known monster and witches books (Monster Mission, Dial-a-Ghost, The Haunting of Hiram)
• One Ted Falls Out of Bed (Julia Donaldson)
• Jellybean (Tessa Duder)
• Journey into War (Margaret Donaldson)
• Anastasia (Lois Lowry)
• Tom's Midnight Garden (Phillipa Pearce)
• Midnight is a Place (Joan Aitken)
• Gemma and Sisters (Noel Streatfeild)
• The Steps up the Chimney (William Corlett)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (Mildred Taylor)