Europe

British Open Ends Its Ban On Women.  [ Britain]  The Royal & Ancient Golf Club, the governing body for golf outside the United States, said Thursday that it was changing its entry rules to allow women to qualify for the British Open, the oldest of the four majors.  Next year's entry form for the British Open will no longer restrict the event to "any male professional golfer" or "male amateur golfer whose playing handicap does not exceed scratch."  The new rules state that entry "should be based on playing ability irrespective of gender."   The 135th edition of the British Open will be played at Royal Liverpool Golf Club from July 20 to 23.   The three majors in the United States - the Masters, U.S. Open and PGA - have no policy barring women.
Portraits of a Woman and Actress.  [ France ] France's woman warrior of the arts appears at a café by Saint-Sulpice Church without makeup - a rushed mother who has just dropped off her 8-year-old at music school.  Her face has clear planes that shift in the morning light, the nails are trimmed and her voice sounds richer, nuanced.  "Yes," she says, "my voice used to sound light, a tone that went with some of those early roles.  It's deepened since I played Madame Bovary, and that's nearly 15 years ago."  It is a fascinating collection of Hupperts - saucy, severe, tragic - by just about all the greats, from Richard Avedon, Lartigue, Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz and Bettina Rheims, with texts by Elfriede Jellinek and Susan Sontag.  "You could call it a collection of self-portraits," Huppert said.  "Each photographer has really photographed himself."
Romantic Rochas Salutes Genteel But Modern Woman.  [France ] With shows focused on women designers, including the debut of the Croatian-born Ivana Omazic at Celine, a new image of womanhood is emerging, especially as females tend to create for themselves.  Or as Loulou de la Falaise put it as she showed her collection: "I think most women designers think less abstractly about clothes than men."
Sister Jacques-Marie: The Dominican nun who sat for Matisse and inspired his final masterpiece.  [France] Sister Jacques-Marie, who has died at the age of 84, was the student nurse, later a Dominican nun, who tended Henri Matisse after a major operation in 1942, going on to pose for him and eventually to inspire the work he considered his last masterpiece, the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence.  She was 21 when they first met. Matisse, who was 72, had asked an agency in Nice to send him a young and pretty night nurse.  "Young I certainly was," she would say afterwards, grinning broadly whenever she retold this story. "But pretty? Hmmm."  A soldier's daughter, the eldest child of a strict and deeply conventional French family in Metz, Monique Bourgeois had had it constantly drummed into her at home that she was plain and good for nothing.
She Thinks a Woman's Place is in the Elysée.  [France ] Ségolène Royal is popular, experienced, a tireless campaigner and, at a time when a disenchanted French electorate is searching for novelty, among the youngest of the top politicians in her embattled Socialist Party.  But when Royal, 52, said last week that she was considering running for president in 2007, she unleashed an onslaught of attacks and ridicule from her own camp.  "Who will look after the children?" scoffed Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister with presidential ambitions himself.  "The presidential race is not a beauty contest," sniffed Jack Lang, a former education and culture minister, who also wants to run in 2007.
Let the Merkel Era Begin.  [Germany] Angela Merkel, soon to become the first woman chancellor of Germany, stands in striking contrast to the staid procession of males who have run the country, East, West or rejoined, since World War II - and not only in gender.  The 51-year-old pastor's daughter from behind the Berlin Wall shifted to politics from a comfortable life in science when the Wall fell because, as she said, they'd need people.  She rose through the ranks of the male-dominated and traditionally Catholic Christian Democratic Union through competence and hard work, and not the more common political routes of populism or party hackery.  Her ascent to the top of German politics is nothing short of remarkable, and if there were time to celebrate, she would deserve a grand bash.  But there is no time, as Merkel herself told reporters who tried to elicit a jubilant quote from her.  "I am in a good mood," she said, "but I know that there is a lot of work ahead of us."
Tennis: A Star Returns Home.  [Russia ] When the world's top-ranked women's tennis player tossed a ball high overhead, stretching her almost impossibly long frame backward before smashing the descending ball with such force that it briefly became a blurred yellow line, more than a tennis match had begun.  This was a homecoming, or at least what passed for one in a nation that has seen so many of its citizens wander away in search of better lives.  After a jealously watched ascent in the United States, Maria Sharapova on Wednesday evening made her professional domestic debut.
Swedish Feminism Put to the Test.  [Sweden] As one of the world's most gender-equal countries - a land where 80 percent of the women have jobs, where about half of the members of Parliament are female - does Sweden need a feminist party?  Many people thought so this spring, when a number of high-profile Swedish women began Feministiskt Initiativ, or Feminist Initiative.  Polls then showed that almost a quarter of the electorate would consider voting for the party in parliamentary elections next year.  Six months later, however, that backing has imploded as Sweden rethinks the politics of sex.  Feminist Initiative is in disarray with the loss of several founding members who abruptly departed over the radical direction the party was taking.  At its recent founding congress, for example, instead of tackling a mainstream platform as planned, the party presented proposals to abolish marriage and create "gender-neutral" names.  Support for feminism took another hit this summer with the airing of a Swedish television documentary called "The Gender War."  A wrenching debate was set off by the film, which showed militant feminism to be widespread, reaching into official circles: Ireen von Wachenfeldt, the chairman of Roks, Sweden's largest women's shelter organization, for one, was shown asserting that "men are animals."  Suddenly the belief that politics, business, even private life should be reformed to allow a more equal society - a belief that has permeated Swedish politics for several decades - is being openly questioned. In the latest opinion polls, a meager 1.3 percent of respondents said they would give the feminist party their votes.

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