I met Woojoo in June in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
During most of the weekends, thousands of South-Korean women visit the beautiful gardens of the Gyeongbok Palace wearing colourful traditional dresses called hanboks, like their ancestors used to.
Looking around you could feel in another era, but the last generation smart phones, which are taking selfies all around, will remind you that you’re in one of the most modern places on earth. Still, it’s magical to see this bridge between past and present, in this atemporal garden, proving that progress and modernity can go hand in hand with traditions.
And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing.
“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“
She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.
A few years later, when she was 25 or so:
“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“
During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry. And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”
A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.
the most depressing quote from her diaries:
“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires – a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
dare i say that stuffed animals are one of the single greatest inventions of all time and im thankful every day for the fact that someone thought to make animals but in huggable plush form…..saved me from a lot of bad nights and nightmares as a kid, i love you stuffed animals
You may offer your thanks to Magarete Steiff
She lived in Germany and could be considered as the first person to sew stuffed animals merly for children to play with and to counter the common “hard” toys out of wood or metal wich were popular back then.
There is even so much more to the story, because she was as you can see paraliezed from polio, she couldnt walk or use her right arm, she had to fight all her life just to be accpeted as a human being, she wasnt even allowed to sit in the front row of church in her home village and had a pretty abusive mother. One time she and her brother almost drowned but the townpeople only attempted to save her brother because he was healty. Her father saved her from drowning in last minute.
Only her father and brother stood behind her, still she learned to accept her faith and make the best out of it. After a failed operation she said she had gone around living this way anyways. She started to sew, more importantly she started to sew with a sewing machine wich was realy new at this time. People would not buy from her at first but then she made a realy beautyfull dress for her best friend and suddenly everyone was crazy for her work.
Then she started to sew little elephants as pincushions, but when she attempted to sell them around christmas she quickly realized that for one children were crazy for them and wanted them as toys and also. this was what she wanted to do, bringing happiness to kids.
She expanded futher and gave work to over 20 women as sewers in her factory, her brother helped her to do so, and she started producing stuffed animals of all kinds (almost) their trademark was a button sewed into every anmals ear. It still is to this day.
Whit the economy crisis her factory, and she almost lost it, she already couldnt pay her workers, he factory was about to be forceclosed and the last hope was a toy fair they would attend,
and then she had an idea, she sewed a bear, the very first stuffed toy bear there was, with moveable head and limbs and realy soft fur and glass eyes, it was beautyfull, but at the toyfair most people thoght it was to expensive
most people because one american buyer fell in love with the bears, he bought them all and he ordered 3000 more, it saved the factory
you may ask why would anyone need 3000 stuffed toy bears easy, to support and
advertise the candidacy of
Theodore Roosevelt as the U.S. president, trough that the toy bear invented by Magarete Steiff became well known as the
Create a mess 