Widow imagery on ‘The Gilmore Girls’
The Gilmore girls (of TV’s The Gilmore Girls) don’t have an awful lot in common with the thirteenth century Beguines. Paris Geller, on the other hand – Rory Gilmore’s nemesis, love rival, roommate, co-plotter and sometime editor – also attracts ridicule as a young woman who presumes on the privileges of widowhood.
Her affair with her professor, the novelist Asher Fleming, is treated by most people as a slightly tacky fling between a vain older man and a naive young student. Whilst Paris drops broad hints to Rory about her grand passion (“Mmm, I smell of pipe smoke…”) it is made pretty clear to the audience that Fleming regularly has casual affairs with young women who take his course.
When he dies suddenly (“When he…were you…?” “No, Rory. This great man was not laid low by my vagina.”) Paris goes into mourning, and is appalled that not enough notice is being taken on campus. She takes it upon herself to hold a wake for Fleming, complete with a stack of his last book and herself in dignified black, holding court on the sofa.
Though Paris is not treated as cruelly as Miss Havisham, her party is marked out as the culmination of her grandiose ideas about her relationship. Behaving as Asher’s widow is another one of Paris’ obsessive eccentricities, and the scene is undercut by the appearance of a beer keg in the background by two frat boys whom Rory hurriedly shoos away.
Paris may believe she is enabling the community to pay their proper respects to a great man of letters, whose loss she inevitably feels most keenly, but most of the people at the party think it’s a kegger thrown by some girl they’ve never heard of.
It’s a funny sequence, and Paris is given an unexpected emotional weight by Liza Weil, but the narrative makes it clear she is not entitled to widowhood, and no-one grants it to her. Apart from Emily Gilmore, admittedly, which does nothing to bolster Paris’ cause.
Funeral Blues
This tension between people who feel like widows, and the society which refuses to legitimise their view of themselves, is given another twist in the final example I’d like to discuss: the speaker in W.H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues.
Performed so memorably by John Hannah in Four Weddings and A Funeral, the poem has become one of the most famous and popular elegies in English. In its best known version, the poem runs thus:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
There’s a noticeable shift between the second and third verses in the treatment of the death and its consequences. From demanding exaggerated outward ceremonies to mark the beloved’s death, the poem starts to imagine in both more personal and more cosmological terms.
If the first two verses concentrate on the public and social sphere (the area in which widowhood is bestowed and validated, as we have seen), the latter two are concerned with the relationship of one individual to the whole universe, and how that has been dislocated by another person’s death.
In both there is an anguished hyperbole, an awareness of the discrepancy between the speaker’s own feelings and the way the rest of the world sees the matter. The irony of the lines about the pigeons and the sun are directed inwards, sketching the speaker’s recognition of their lack of proportion alongside a refusal to countenance the idea that proportion is possible any more.
In some ways, it captures Olivia and Paris’ situation from both their own perspective and that of the audience watching them.
That pivot didn’t always shift the poem in this direction, however. The verses were originally composed for a play called The Ascent of F2, about a climber who dies whilst attempting a famously dangerous mountain, having been persuaded by the prospect of public glory and national pride. His lover speaks the lines, which share the first two verses with the later version, but then veer off like this:
Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
Life, he pronounces, it is finally extinct.
Sergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!
Shawcross will say a few words sad and kind
To the weeping crowds about the Master-mind,
While Lamp with a powerful microscope
Searches their faces for a sign of hope.
And Gunn, of course, will drive a motor-hearse:
None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.
He’ll open up the throttle to its fullest power
And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.
The satire here is more obvious, and directly develops the first two verses’ slanted glance at the public commemoration of a death. They’re more clearly about the uselessness of marking someone’s funeral with great pomp, without being so specific about the internal emotional world which is being contrasted with those rituals.
Auden reworked the poem as part of a collection of cabaret songs for the singer Heidli Anderson. I find it difficult to read Funeral Blues, in the light of its earlier appearance (and alongside the other songs), without finding an implication that the singer is mourning a dead politician she had an affair with.
The pivot in the middle, from this angle, marks the shift between her satirical comments on the grandiose ceremonies accorded him, and her insistence that the person he really mattered to won’t be recognised during them.
The politics of widowhood
John Hannah’s performance of the poem during the funeral scene of Richard Curtis’ movie brings out this reading strongly. Putting Funeral Blues in the mouth of a gay man mourning his partner shows up the political dimension of the issue of who is regarded as someone’s “widow”.
The lines’ scorn for the rituals and regulations of public grief map provocatively across the character’s situation, legally barred from being recognised as the surviving spouse.
Anxieties around widowhood – and non-widowhood – are a recurring feature of literary history, taking various forms but often expressing the fears of a dominant group that they are losing the ability to define and control other people’s identities.
We might be tempted to mock the anxiety of medieval, early modern and Victorian societies who were so anxious to police the status of widowhood, and so strenuously exerted cultural authority stop people whom they imagined wanted to “play” at being widows. But there are articles and speeches being written right now in response to the prospect of equal marriage, which engage repugnantly in the same task.
]]>The Duchess at the centre of John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) acquires a lot of her edginess in the original play from the fact that her husband has died before the action begins. She is a young – and according to her brother Ferdinand, “lusty” – widow, whose combination of financial independence and sexual experience makes many in her vicinity nervous.
The equivalent man would be called “eligible”, and receive a lot of invitations from women with marriageable daughters. But a woman in the same situation becomes the subject of a campaign of surveillance and torture which ends in her death.
The more I worked on Webster’s play, the more I noticed that the Duchess was part of a much larger cultural anxiety around the figure of the widow in English literature. She’s an extreme case, admittedly: few other fictional widows end up eating apricots grown in horse dung, kissing the severed hand of their husband or being strangled on the orders of their lycanthropic and potentially incestuous twin brother.
But a continual low charge hums around widows, from the comic grotesque of Widow Twankey to the alluringly threatening Black Widows of gangster novels. Via the Wife of Bath, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham and Aouda from Eighty Days Around The World, to take a handful nearly at random.
Of course it alters across the eras, but time and time again, the figure of the widow acts as a focus for drama.
Sometimes the charge seems to derive from the fact that she is no longer dependent upon any man, or socially “explained” via her relationship to a father or husband. Sometimes it comes instead from the way a widow is seen as over-defining herself in relation to a man no longer present.
Either way, widows in literature often hold the potential to disrupt social order in a variety of ways.
Widows and Pseudowidows
This article, however, is not about widows. It is about women who are not widows. Or rather, women who aren’t widows whilst still looking, sounding, or acting like them.
When considering famous widows in literature, it struck me that two of the names that sprang to mind – Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – don’t technically fit the criteria.
Miss Havisham’s veil is worn to mourn the marriage that never happened, whilst Olivia’s is to remind her of her dead brother, whose memory stops her from wanting to receive suitors. Nonetheless, they both look to me as if they’re trying to take on the role, adopting some of the characteristics associated with grieving spouses.
They wear specific clothes to mark their separation from other people (and from their previous selves), withdraw from normal social life, and refuse to put themselves under the jurisdiction of men. Neither are exactly successful in their attempt to construct themselves positively within the role of a widow.
Miss Havisham has become an icon of “frustrated” and “twisted” womanhood, unsuccessful within the novel’s plot and the butt of jokes in subsequent culture. She becomes a “tragic” figure in both the classical and slang senses of the word: an image of wronged heroism in her own mind, and a sad bitter spinster to the world outside.
Her veil, usually a temporary garment to mark her passing between two states, becomes a fixture, blending with the cobwebs which now cover her wedding cake. In Miss Havisham, Dickens created a figure who memorably combines the revulsion and anxiety felt by Victorian (and later) society towards women who refuse to play out the social roles ascribed to them.
Olivia from Twelfth Night is similarly associated with a veil, at least at the beginning of the play. The first thing we hear about her is that for seven years the world “Shall not behold her face at ample view/ But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk…all this to season/ A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh/ And lasting in her memory”.
When Viola (dressed as the male Cesario) manages to speak to her, Olivia prepares by putting her veil back on, setting up the comedy by-play in which Viola claims not to know who the lady of the house is, and the moment when Olivia pulls it back and demands “Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?”
Within the first act the grieving Olivia’s attempt to seclude herself is defeated by a combination of plot and Viola’s rhetorical skills. The play treats her mourning as one of the restrictive, self-imposed roles which so many of the characters are trapped in as the action begins. Orsino is locked into his schtick as self-obsessed Petrarchan lover, Sir Toby as the party knight who slinks home in the early hours of every morning, Malvolio as the image of Puritan rectitude and Olivia as the grieving veiled figure wandering inconsolably around her rooms as if her husband had just died.
These roles are all disrupted for the audience’s amusement and the characters’ correction during the ensuing scenes, with the play particularly conspiring to trick Olivia out of her image of herself as a grand widow. There’s an echo here of Miss Havisham, though in a very different key: women are not permitted to adopt the role of widow simply because they want to.
Both characters are diverted away from a successful performance as “pseudowidows” by the narratives in which they appear: Olivia to happy marriage and Miss Havisham to pathological bitterness and mockery.
‘A veil of wickedness’
In fact we don’t have to rely on my close-reading of these fictional texts to find anxiety around women “playing” at being widows. That harping on Olivia wearing a veil and walking secluded from men “like a cloistress” brings another group of women into play, whose apparent freedom from male jurisdiction has produced anger and revulsion in various eras.
I don’t have space to examine the way in which nuns in the Middle Ages navigated the rhetoric of “brides of Christ” alongside the reality that many entered the community after the death of a husband, or their social position. But one particular case stands out amongst the criticism of female religious orders: the bishop of Olmüt’s attack on the Beguines.
These women, who lived together in small self-governing groups, taking few vows and following the Rule of no specific order, were the subject of a lot of criticism in the later thirteenth century. Bruno, the bishop in question, wrote to the pope in 1273 to demand they be suppressed.
In R.W. Southern’s words:
he complained that…the women used their liberty as a veil of wickedness in order to escape the yoke of obedience to their priests and ‘the coercion of marital bonds’. Above all, he was indignant that young women should assume the status of widowhood against the authority of the Apostle who approved no widows under the age of sixty.
The bishop was referring to verses in the New Testament book of 1 Timothy, in which instructions are given for the way the “order of widows” should be run and who should be admitted. These women, who worked for the church and were provided with support, should all be over the age of sixty, have a good reputation and previously carried out pious works.
Obviously “widow” has a technical significance in this Biblical passage, but I was fascinated by Bruno’s line of attack: that the young women of the Beguines were setting themselves up as if they were widows, and thus escaping male authority.
His metaphor of a “veil of wickedness” once again acts as a focus for male anxiety over women who won’t accept their assigned role.
In part two of this post, I’ll delve into widow imagery in modern TV and film, including The Gilmore Girls and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
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The Rokeby Venus
In this rather hilarious report of the incident in the Times, the attack on the painting is described in almost human terms: ‘probably the most serious blow has caused a cruel wound in the neck’; there is ‘a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder’ and ‘other cuts […] cleanly made in the region of the waist’. The Keeper of the National Gallery, meanwhile, describes ‘seven distinct injuries’ and ‘a ragged bruise’ on the painting, in the language of a post-mortem.
Meanwhile, ‘prominent woman suffragist Mary Richardson’ (note that the noun there is ‘suffragist’, not ‘woman’) is said to have used an instrument ‘similar to [those] used by butchers’ – as if that somehow makes it worse than if she’d used sewing scissors or a hat pin. Clearly the writer considers the Venus as much of a piece of meat (albeit a sacred one) as Mary Richardson – who later said she ‘couldn’t stand the way the men visitors gawped at it’.
The Times counters by saying that this Venus is ‘absolutely natural and absolutely pure’ – a strange claim that implicitly contrasts this ‘marvellously graceful’ women with the ‘woman suffragist’ who attacks her, in the process making this about much more than the destruction of art.
Art Under Attack
Unfortunately, little has changed in the gallery notes to Tate Britain’s exhibition Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm. There’s a whole room devoted to women (after several focusing on those other Wanton Destroyers of Art, the Protestants and the Irish), with accompanying hand-wringing notation:
In 1913 and 1914 the campaign to win women the vote became more militant and turned from window-smashing to attacks on art. Paintings in public museums and galleries – the nation’s cultural heritage – were attacked in order to effect to effect political change. The militant women who carried out these acts of iconoclasm did so in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union[.]
It’s couched in the language of facts and neutrality but there’s a nasty undercurrent to the emphasis on ‘public museums and galleries’ and the little clarifying clause that this is ‘the nations’s cultural heritage’ (to which we will return). Together with the repetition of ‘militant’ and the rising pitch of hysteria in the movement ‘from window-smashing to attacks on art’, it’s clear that the writer is no friend to Mary Richardson.
‘Iconoclasm’ is, of course, the term used in the exhibition as a whole, although I find its application to the Rokeby Venus little better than the Times‘ assertion that the painting is ‘universally recognised by good judges as […a] masterpiece’ – it implicitly speaks from the perspective of a white, male, artistic elite, which has confirmed that this painting is ‘objectively’ of almost religious (‘iconic’) importance. In the process, the word comes close to justifying Richardson’s claim that an ‘outcry against my deed […] is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women’ – the elite cared more for a painted woman than a living one.
Interestingly, that very perspective appears once again in the next room, where we have Carl Andre’s brick sculpture on display. This was attacked by a member of the public who resented his taxes being spent to acquire it for Tate because it wasn’t ‘proper’ art. Whatever you think about the piece, you can see his point. Yet today, we are told in the gallery notes, ‘Carl Andre’s sculpture remains admired by some and misunderstood by others’.
Photograph of Mary Richardson in 1914
Conserving womanhood
I am by no means condoning the destruction of artworks, but the salient point for me is that the Rokeby Venus is ‘alive’ and well in the National Gallery to this day, and the other canvas victims of the suffragettes’ knives exhibited in ‘Attacks on Art’ are similarly unharmed.
In fact, while the gallery notes assert that paintings such as ‘In Prayer’ by George Frederick Watts (exhibited here) were selected for destruction by the suffragettes because of the problematic image of womanhood they presented, the effect of exhibiting them in their restored form is merely to reassert that complete, beautifully conserved image in the service of a narrative of ‘militant women’ attacking ‘the nation’s cultural heritage’.
About that ‘cultural heritage’. The next room but one in the exhibition focuses on Auto-destructive art, with examples from Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono, a fragment of whose Biba dress (destroyed during a performance art piece) is exhibited here. She bought that Biba dress, so she’s entitled to destroy it, is the implicit argument here (from this point on the exhibition is all about ‘good’ iconoclasts, such as Gilbert and George, who had the decency to buy the art before they destroy it). The suffragettes, by contrast (like the Protestants and the Irish) were ruining it for ‘the nation’.
Galleries as a model for citizenship
The National Gallery – where the Venus was hanging in 1914 – was set up in 1824 to provide a space for the poor to view art alongside their social betters. In its original conception, there was a moral reform impetus behind it – many spoke of how museums accessible to the broader public would reduce birth rates and crime among the poor (who would now have a gallery to go to instead!), and there was talk of how, through exposure to their ‘betters’ – including middle-class women, for whom the gallery offered a genteel and ‘safe’ public space – the working classes would learn to regulate their passions and behave in a more orderly (quasi-middle-class) manner. In fact, national galleries – set up throughout Europe during the nineteenth century – were described as instruments in which to learn better citizenship.
You know the punchline, right? Yup – the majority of the people museums were trying to entice in and train up as model citizens – working class men, all women – did not have the vote. That’s the problem. These works may have been the ‘nation’s cultural heritage’, but the nation in question was an incomplete one. The Rokeby Venus didn’t belong to the Suffragettes. It belonged to art-loving, nude-gawping middle-class men.
The most interesting thing in this exhibition, for me, is the admission in the Suffragette room that the Suffragettes prompted as much ‘iconoclasm’ as they enacted. A WSPU pamphlet is exhibited on which Mrs Pankhurst’s face has been so violently ‘de-faced’ the paper has torn, exposing the words on the next page. In this age of Caroline Criado-Perez and Anita Sarkeesian, that should make us think.
]]>Morbid stories
Regular readers will know that I love history, and that murder mysteries are just one of my many morbid interests. When I first started seeing my boyfriend, I took him on a date to Wilton’s Music Hall via Ratcliff Highway so I could tell him about the famous murder case there.
So I get it, I do. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are grimly fascinating, and the question mark over the killer’s identity is a magnet for myths and stories. The study of the murders and their legacy illuminate the historical and the contemporary context in valuable ways. One example is Judith Walkowitz’s superb book, City of Dreadful Delight. And Madame Guillotine has a great post exploring her interest in Jack the Ripper as a feminist.
But there are other tales we could tell. There are plenty of morbid stories to choose from (our other major historical export is the Krays) and it might even be nice to talk about some East London history that doesn’t involve murder. Although we know nothing about him, Jack the Ripper overshadows a cast of amazing East End characters, and the Whitechapel murders draw far more attention than any number of incredible events. Just one example: this year is also the 125th anniversary of the Matchwomen’s strike which launched the modern trade union movement. Thanks to the efforts of Louise Raw, there was a commemorative event at the Bishopsgate Institute and a bit of media coverage. But will we be tripping over Matchwomen walking tours in Bow?
Jack and his victims
It’s not just the extent of it but the tone. Jack the Ripper is everybody’s favourite mystery serial killer. There is endless speculation about his identity, his knowledge of anatomy and even admiration for his ability to evade capture. In contrast, the women he murdered are reduced to objects for study or criminal evidence for analysis.
For example: my local paper recently contained a special 12 page Jack the Ripper supplement including a page entitled “The victims: How women met their gory deaths”, featuring detailed descriptions of the last movements and mutilated bodies of five women who were murdered – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Lizzie Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly – complete with pictures of their faces taken after death.
Where is the respect for these women? Poring over details like how drunk they were and how deep the gash in their throat was or how their intestines were arranged may be one thing in a history book, but why is it being printed in the Newham Recorder, along with photographs of their corpses? I don’t want these intimate and gruesome details exhumed for my entertainment.
Missing the big picture
Like almost all media coverage of the subject the article fails to connect the Whitechapel murders to any kind of context about violence against women then or now. Another article highlights the fact that six other women were murdered in the same area in the same year, three also working in prostitution and killed by punters (Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Rose Mylett), three killed by their husbands.
Sadly this article reads like a masterclass in how to subtly blame victims and excuse perpetrators when it describes the three cases of women killed by their husbands – Hannah Potzdamer, Susan Barrell and Elizabeth Bartlett:
“ordinary people driven to the ultimate crime by circumstance, a fit of anger or a desire for revenge” (this is a quote from author Peter Stubley, included in the article)
“her throat is slashed… in a jealous rage”
“Hannah had left him and moved in with a bootmaker”
“Robert, suffering from delirium tremens, also shoots himself”
“she refused to give him money for drink”
Over a century on it’s felt necessary to include details like this which serve to exonerate the killers. I wish I could afford to send every journalist a copy of this guide to responsible media reporting of violence against women (PDF).
Ripper chic
Whether blasé or breathlessly excited, the tone used to talk about Jack the Ripper almost everywhere makes me feel queasy. Have a look at this New York Times article about how All Saints clothing store makes use of “the romance of Jack the Ripper” and its location in “the Ripper’s hallowed stomping grounds”. Big stomper was he?
And did you know the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields (where one of the victims had been drinking before she was killed) was at one point called ‘Jack The Ripper’? They used to sell T-shirts, and a blood-coloured cocktail called Ripper’s Tipple. Tasteful. Obviously there’s a difference between the crimes of one serial killer and the carnage of the First World War, but that has an anniversary coming up too – can you imagine a WWI-themed bar serving ham and mustard gas sandwiches? Although I guess we’re getting close with ‘Blitz parties’, but that’s a rant for another day.
Ripperology
Many people do seriously study the Whitechapel murders without celebrating ‘Jack’, but as this brave article explains, unintentional sexism abounds in Ripperologist circles. The focus is firmly on the suspects and not the victims, whose suffering is silent or sensationalised. The LIFT campaign in Tower Hamlets have subverted this with an alternative Ripper tour which talks about the lives and the communities of the women who were killed. There are some interesting tweets from the walk in this Storify.
Here’s a classic response to criticism of Ripperology:
We do not celebrate, we commemorate. We do not idealise, but we condemn him. We examine the harsh realities of that world to allow us to understand where we came from, how society has changed and why we should be thankful for these changes, and recognise where it has not and strive to put this right.
While this may be the aim, and I fully admit I haven’t had time to research this post very thoroughly, I haven’t seen many examples of Ripperologists striving to end violence against women.
Violence against women
That is the issue at the heart of this, and the reason I can’t join in the fun: violence against women is epidemic, often lethal but frequently trivialised. The most uncomfortable parallel I found between Ripper fandom and damaging contemporary attitudes to violence against women was this, on the London Dungeons profile page for Jack the Ripper:
DOs and DON’Ts
DO look over your shoulder.
DO dress conservatively.
DO go unnoticed.
DO NOT flirt.
DO NOT walk alone.
DO NOT accept his offer to buy you a drink.
This is advice that is seriously but unhelpfully issued to women today in the guise of rape prevention. It is also a classic example of the victim blaming which prevents many women reporting violence let alone seeing their attacker convicted. Repeated in this context it’s ghoulish, and not in a good way.
Now, as then, women working in prostitution are particularly vulnerable to violence – especially trans* women and migrant women. A woman working in prostitution is 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. While I don’t want to be a party pooper, I can’t get that figure out of my head. I’ll sign off with this quote on ‘Jack’, from feminist academic Deborah Cameron:
The question for society is not which individual man killed, but why so many men have done and still do.
Some links
- End Violence Against Women campaign
- The excellent NHS Open Doors project
- International Union of Sex Workers
BadRep: Tell us a little bit about the series in your own words.
Kathrynne Wolf: The Scarlet Line is an action-drama about a secret lineage of female bodyguards who are, when on active duty, code-named “Scarlet”.
Our premise is that the Line started with the famous “Jujitsuffragette” bodyguard team in Edwardian London. In the world of our story, after the First World War the organisation – ‘The Scarlet Line’ – went international and Scarlets have operated ever since then, protecting people who need their help.
“We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.”
Our main character, Amanda, is a retired Scarlet whose very ordinary life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Details of the reasons for this disruption, the purpose, history and future of the line get revealed throughout the season.
BR: What gave you the idea to do this?
KW: I was literally falling asleep one night when I had the idea for a secret lineage of female bodyguards, quietly going about the business of making the streets safer.
This is the sort of story I wanted to see on screen. It’s an old adage that you should write the story you want to read, be the change you want to see, and so on. I had been distressed by the narrow representation of women – and the UNDERrepresentation of interesting roles and stories for women in media – for a long time.
Two issues I find particularly insidious are the tendency for any female protagonist driving the story to be called a “Strong Female Character”, where this adjective seems unnecessary for a male protagonist, and the tendency for “Strong Female Characters” either to a) be somehow supernaturally or technologically augmented, or b) have a tendency to cry, even when on the job.
I wanted to see a story of a woman who kicks butt and takes names as a matter of course. It’s her job. She does her job, she does it well. The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story – there’s a crisis that needs solving, there are obstacles, stakes get raised, we wrestle with issues of morality, trust, crime, betrayal…
“The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story.”
The other major factor that made me want to tackle this project is that I come from a background of what is generally referred to as ‘Chicago Storefront Theatre’. We have over 150 small theatre companies in Chicago, producing shows in all kinds of spaces that weren’t originally intended to hold a theatre, because they have stories they want to tell. It’s very much a ‘do it yourself’ mindset.
That’s why I produced the web-series myself, rather than writing a screenplay and then sending it off to Hollywood, hoping it would catch someone’s eye and that it wouldn’t get lost in ‘option-land’… I wanted to see it happen.
BR: What made you decide to set the series in the US rather than Britain?
KW: The main factor is that I live in Chicago, and this is where I have connections, know the locations, and where it was, in fact, possible to produce the series.
That said, the ‘mythology’ of the Scarlet Line definitely lends itself to satellite stories. It would make a great CSI-style franchise. I would love to see The Scarlet Line: London, The Scarlet Line: Seattle, The Scarlet Line: Barcelona – I’d just need to figure out how to go about licensing the sucker.
BR: The lead Scarlet’s wig and makeup are very striking, and call to mind vigilante superheroes such as Catwoman, Silk Spectre from ‘Watchmen’ and Hit Girl from ‘Kick-Ass’. In other press, you’ve previously mentioned Wonder Woman in connection with the unusual ‘web’ weapon used by the Scarlets – are you inspired at all by comics, as well as martial arts and action cinema?
KW: I was raised on Wonder Woman and Kitty Pryde was my favourite X-Man. Like all storytellers, I can’t help but draw from everything I’ve studied, read and seen.
I would say the Scarlet character was drawn as much from The Equalizer and the Guardian Angels as from comic books and movies.
The lack of a current TV show like Wonder Woman is part of what goaded me into this. One of my oldest friends in the world had a baby daughter, and I had a “what will she WATCH???” moment of panic, as I considered the statistics that show that women’s representation in media has actually shrunk in the last few years.
I wanted to contribute to the ongoing development of a wider range of roles available to actresses and, therefore, role models available to young girls.
I don’t only mean morally upright ‘ideals’, I mean characters that represent the spectrum – that model all kinds of ways of being and behaving, living in the world, experiencing victories and consequences. The wider the spectrum presented, the more agency is given to young girls to figure out how they want to live for themselves.
The other major factor involved in the Scarlet wig and makeup is modern surveillance technology. The Scarlets have to keep their true identities secret, and research on the advances in facial recognition software led me to take the disguise angle to more extreme lengths than I’d originally planned.
It turns out that software has gotten scarily good at working around minor augmentations. Diana Prince’s glasses were NOT going to cut it.
BR: You perform quite a bit of realistic fighting in the episodes, as well as very kinetic movement with the Web weapons. Is it difficult to find film or theatre roles for women which showcase more realistic techniques?
KW: It is maddeningly difficult. For 13 years, I belonged to Babes With Blades Theatre Company, which is a Chicago company whose mission is to ‘place women and their stories centre stage’ using combat as a major part of their expressive vocabulary.
To do this, they’ve focused on developing new work, and they include an all-female-cast Shakespeare in every other season, as there simply are not many plays out there where women get to explore this range of human expression.
Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.
Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.
Don’t get me wrong – I love superhero stories, and am always happy for any opportunity actresses get to be that kind of hero. I just wanted to help open up the field so that they didn’t have to be somehow ‘other’ in order to do so.
BR: There are more women in TV and film who are action heroines these days, but they’re still often lone figures. Already in the trailers for early episodes we’re seeing that relationships (such as the one between Amanda and Marcus) are a big part of the story – are the relationships between female characters also focused on, alongside the ass-kicking?
KW: Most of the major characters in the series are women. We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.
The relationships are very important, and they’re explored much more deeply in Season 2. Season 1 is very much the set-up – it’s where the ball gets rolling. We introduce the major players, the major conflicts, the major themes, and some things get resolved by the final episode, but not all.
BR: What were the challenges of creating a web-series? Did the format give you more freedom to pursue feminist themes?
KW: The fact that we’re doing it all ourselves means we have no one to answer to. There’s no studio executive or marketing department saying ‘You have to include a male authority figure! She has to cry or it’s not believable!’ or any such nonsense.
The challenge, of course, is that we do not have studio resources. The good side of that is that no one is working on this project for any reason other than that they want to.
BR: What do you hope the series will achieve?
KW: I would love to inspire other folks with good stories to stop waiting for permission and MAKE THEM. I think the online short-form potential is evolving rapidly. The democratization of access to technical production capability is an amazingly wonderful thing, if you’ve got a story to tell.
I’d also like to help raise some awareness of some of the ass-kicking women of history – in fact, that is the subject of a panel I am doing at GeekGirlCon in Seattle in October – drawing from history to find inspirational stories of “non-super” superheroines.
If the series reaches some young (or not so young) folks who hadn’t yet realised that they’re allowed to take charge of their own stories and get them out there, and maybe some who hadn’t considered that there might be more roles for women than eye candy, damsel in distress or obstacle, even better.
The Scarlet Line Trailer 1 from Wolf Point Media on Vimeo.
- Huge thanks to Kathrynne Wolf for the interview, and we wish her all the best with the series! There’s a kickass trailer for Season 1 over here, and more info on the Facebook group and Scarlet Line website.
- Thanks also to Kathrynne’s husband Tony Wolf who wrote the book about the life of Edith Garrud, which prompted the original piece in our 2011 ‘Revolting Women’ series. Tony is currently working on a three-part graphic novel series inspired by the Ju-jutsuffragettes titled Mrs Pankhurst’s Amazons, due in 2014.
Dr Mae Jemison
What do you call a female astronaut? These are some of the ingenious words that journalists invented in the early 1960s to avoid having to say ‘astronaut’ when describing Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to pass NASA tests and qualify as an astronaut, although she never had a chance to go into space.
I’ve been thinking about astronauts recently for two reasons. Firstly, a friend of mine lent me this absorbing book about the ‘Mercury 13′ – women including Cobb who were trained as astronauts but never went into space because America wasn’t brave enough.
Secondly, I discovered a pile of my old school reports in my mum’s flat the other day and was astonished to read that my stated career ambition at age 11 was ‘astronaut’. I mean, I loved space and stars and rockets – are there any kids that don’t? And I do remember wanting to be an astronaut. But at 11? It makes me wonder how old I was when I gave up wanting to be a knight of the round table…
A dream for boys?
I’m not going to rant about how being an astronaut shouldn’t be a distant dream for a girl. Let’s face it, astronauting isn’t an easy line to get into – it’s a distant dream for most people. Apparently there have been 512 humans in space, of which 10% have been women (Wikipedia has a list of space travellers.) Unimpressive, I agree, but when you bear in mind that we can scarcely get women into the House of Commons (around 20% of MPs are women) getting them into space seems like less of a priority.
What really interests me is that women into space doesn’t really go even as a dream. Of course, there’s been an astronaut Barbie, but the gender stereotypes that so confused journalists back then are still very much in evidence in the aisles of toy shops today, as this post on Sociological Images neatly shows. Being an astronaut is a childhood dream for boys only.
A dream for men?
In fact, even in adult culture it seems we’re not totally cool with the dream of female astronauts. Here’s a brief, interesting article by Marie Lathers from Times Higher Ed about women astronauts in films, which takes in Alien, Contact, Apollo 13 and even I Dream of Jeannie (astronaut husband).
Lathers sees an identification of the feminine with mother earth and nature, setting them in opposition to space and even to science. Given this conflict she suggests that women in space are more frequently aligned with the alien (our old friend the Other) than with the human space adventurer. She sez:
Popular culture representations of women in space reveal a need to “ground” women by keeping them bound to Earth. Woman grounded is woman subjected to the weight of gravity; bodies in space defy gravity. Feminist theory needs to assess the possibilities that rethinking women in space affords. “Extraterrestrial” feminism may provide a way out of the essentialism that bottles us up.
It’s an interesting notion, and one that the arts student in me would like to pursue. However, I wanted to talk about some of the real female astronauts as well as the dream. I’ll just give a few examples from their stories – I couldn’t bear to pick just one of these incredible women.
‘A woman’s place is in the cockpit’
I mentioned poor Jerrie Cobb and the Mercury 13 who so narrowly missed being the first ‘feminauts’. Another fascinating woman is linked to the US Women in Space Program. Without beautician-turned-aviator Jackie Cochran – who held more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history at the time of her death in 1980 – it may never have happened at all. Check out Right Stuff Wrong Sex for the story of a serious political operator at work.
Russian Valentina Tereshkova made it to first woman in space, in 1963 (beating the US by an appalling TWENTY YEARS) and launched skywards from a suitably proletarian background – she was a textile factory worker and an amateur parachutist who left school at 8 and continued her education through correspondence courses. She spent three days in space, and went round the earth 48 times.
Physicist Dr Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, in 1983, and one of our own (feminists, that is). Ride reportedly:
… refused to be seen in television downlinks doing food preparation or toilet cleaning, even though these were shared crew responsibilities. She refused to accept a bouquet of flowers from NASA after completing her first space mission. She pasted a bumper sticker to the front of her desk: “A woman’s place is in the cockpit”.
Ride went on to found science education organisation Sally Ride Science, which pleasingly promises to be “all science, all the time” and encourages girls to learn about and enjoy science and maths.
In 1992 scientist, doctor and peace worker Dr Mae Jemison became the first woman of colour in space. After her retirement from NASA, Jemison has led work supporting research into the use of technology in developing countries and science education for teenagers. AND she wins pop culture points by being the first real life astronaut to appear on Star Trek. Which is especially neat as she said that Lieutenant Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) was one of her early heroes. Look at this awesome picture of them together.
Women to look up to
I think it’s particularly because I’m not from a tech or science background that female astronauts are like superheroes to me. That’s why I love this Flickr set of loosely inspired portraits Philip Bond has done. Obviously they’ve lovely things in themselves, but I like them because they look like collectible playing cards, or stickers. I want Tereshkova on a t-shirt. I want people to ask me who she is so I can tell them.
Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009 (philipjbond on Flickr)
You know when I said earlier that getting women into space wasn’t really a priority? Not compared to getting women into Parliament, for example. Well, in a way that’s not true. It’s all a priority. Because real life role models give you the permission to have the dream.
Every girl who dreams of being an astronaut won’t become one. But she may become an engineer, or a physicist, a mathematician, a pilot, an athlete. She might teach science to other girls. She may be a leader.
There are exceptional individuals who blaze a trail, like the women above. But I think I can safely speak for most of us when I say it’s nice to have someone to look up to.
Why was I so keen on being an astronaut? I think it was as much to do with Helen Sharman, who became the first British person in space when I was 8, as it was to do with my love of stars.
You’ve probably deduced that I didn’t become an astronaut. But I did become a feminist, and it’s women like these that inspire me.
]]>Sponsored by the US-based Viscera Film Festival, WiHM has really taken off since we covered it in 2011, and we’re very proud to be WiHM Ambassadors – check us out on the list!
We recently kicked off a set of posts on Women in Horror with a return to our soapbox by Irish horror author Maura McHugh, who returned to BadRep Towers to spotlights some women she admired working in the genre across a range of media.
Before we go further, though, we’d like to share the Women in Horror Month Mission statement.
This Mission Statement is taken from the Women in Horror Recognition Month website. They’ve asked that it be shared, quoted and spread about as much as possible, so we’re giving it the spotlight in itself for a moment, before we get down with our horror-nerdy selves in these pages.
***
The Mission
Women in Horror Recognition Month (WiHM) assists underrepresented female genre artists in gaining opportunities, exposure, and education through altruistic events, printed material, articles, interviews, and online support. WiHM seeks to expose and break down social constructs and miscommunication between female professionals while simultaneously educating the public about discrimination and how they can assist the female gender in reaching equality.
The Vision
A world in which all individuals are equally given the opportunity to create, share, and exploit their concept of life, pain, and freedom of expression.
IT’S THE YEAR 2012, NOT THE 1950s. IS THERE REALLY A NEED FOR WiHM?
Absolutely. Otherwise, WiHM would not exist. Women are still not offered the same pay and opportunities as their male colleagues in many industries, particularly the arts. Discrimination runs rampant in Hollywood and it’s very difficult for females (even well-known actresses) to get their films funded by major studios.
Statistics prove that women are still not offered the same opportunities as men due to an array of reasons, from discrimination to female professionals accepting less than they are worth in order to receive the same opportunities as their male colleagues.
In other parts of the world, women are still stoned to death for speaking their minds, excommunicated when they are sexually violated, and not offered proper education. Atrocities continue to happen that force the female gender to be subservient to a patriarchal system that tells them how to dress, who to marry, and what they should do with their lives. All discrimination must be exposed and obliterated for the female gender to truly achieve equality.
WiHM focuses on supporting the achievements of women who utilize the most extreme mirror available in storytelling: horror. We encourage women to explore and represent these horrors constructively, in positive environments.
WHAT ARE THE INDUSTRY’S STATISTICS?
- In the 1920s there were no more than 10 women working in Hollywood in leadership positions.
- In 2009, the mainstream film industry’s ratio was 16% women to 84% men.
- In 2011, women made up only 5% of directors working in Hollywood.
- www.womeninhorrormonth.com
- www.viscerafilmfestival.com
- www.facebook.com/WomenInHorrorMonth
- womeninhorrormonth.tumblr.com
- Ed’s Tiny Note: Our team are in full support of this; given the diverse make-up of our own team’s, we would likely expand this phrase where it occurs to “all genders” and “all gender identities, presentations and expressions”.
SO WiHM IS ALL ABOUT WOMEN. WHAT ABOUT MEN?
WiHM was created with no exclusion. Men play a vital part in the female gender reaching equality. There are many male WiHM Ambassadors and artists who choose to assist and work with professional and talented underrepresented female practitioners. Be a guiding example of a man who respects both genders equally.1
WHAT CAN THE PUBLIC DO TO ASSIST WOMEN?
Personal Responsibility
We all must take personal responsibility for our beliefs, values, and actions. Participating in positive, constructive environments that encourage and provide a safe platform for women to share and explore is vital.
Education
Education is essential. Knowledge is power. Understanding history and where that puts us today, politically and socially, demonstrates how we are interpreting each other and ourselves.
Work with Women
Finding professional women to work with in leadership positions is one of the most important actions you can take to assist the movement. Don’t just work with a woman because of her gender, work with her because she has a lot to bring to the table.
Banish social constrictions
Stereotyping, judging, cattiness, competitiveness, comparing, and gossip – all of these actions hurt men and women. We are all on our own path in life, careers, and personal relationships. We are encouraged to play into these cultural expectations when we are young, which can create judgment of those who are different. Stop it.
Be a WiHM Ambassador
Every February, WiHM Ambassadors host charity events (blood drives, film screenings, art shows), write blogs and articles, conduct interviews, and create videos and podcasts for mass consumption. All of these events and content specifically represent and assist the underrepresented female genre artist and are for philanthrpopic reasons only. No profit is made from WiHM, or the Viscera organization.
Participate
Go to the events, read the articles, watch the videos. Be conscious of the fact that you are consuming different perspectives of a movement that is assisting a struggle that women have experienced for at least the last four thousand years: equality. We have incredible potential right now to destroy discrimination. It deserves your attention.
Donate
Donate to WiHM. All funds go directly into the organization to improve the events, materials, and outreach. WiHM needs the support of the public.
Support other organisations
Organisations such as CARE, Women for Women International, RAINN, and WIF. All these organisations work hard all year round to assist women in achieving equality. Visit their websites and educate yourself.
The Board
The Board of Directors for WiHM is comprised of women from all facets of the horror film industry, including WiHM founder Hannah Forman, Debbie Rochon, Jovanka Vuckovic, Heidi Honeycutt, Jen and Sylvia Soska, and Shannon Lark.
The Organisation
WiHM is a service provided by the Viscera Organization, a 501(c)3 non profit organization expanding opportunities for contemporary female genre filmmakers and artists by raising awareness about the changing roles for women in the film industry.
Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.
“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.
Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.
The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.
Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.
That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.
The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.
Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.
At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.
The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.
An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.
As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:
Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.
The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.
One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:
Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.
And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.
Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.
Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.
And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.
Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.
He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?
This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.
Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.1
Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.
Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.
Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.
There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.
“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.
If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.
Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.
Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.
So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.
Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.
- Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
- Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular
- Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications.
Not a hotbed of radical political lady-times, and yet it’s been home to not one, but two awesome women. Briefly, it was also frequented by our editor Miranda this autumn, so technically that makes it three, and the temptation to create Bad Reputation plaques, possibly as stickers, is actually quite strong.
Anyway, here’s the street…
Pelham Place, Hastings. Most feminist street ever?
…and here are the plaques.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891, Educational pioneer and campaigner for women’s rights and artist. Lived here 1830-1853.
Muriel Matters-Porter, 1877-1969, Adelaide born activist and first woman to ‘speak’ in the House of Commons. Lived in this house 1949-1969.
The two women in question, Barbara Bodichon and Muriel Matters, are not only pleasingly alliterative but also both very cool people in their own way.
Barbara was a formidable lady. Born out of wedlock to a reasonably wealthy and very forward-thinking father, she had an “unusual upbringing” by all accounts (well, here’s an account that says that).
Bodichon was an artist who travelled Europe, and she was heavily involved in women’s suffrage. She is credited with helping campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act, a step towards independant financial security for women which allowed them to own and control their own property.
She also set up the English Women’s Journal to discuss issues pertaining to womens’ rights, and founded Girton College, Cambridge.
As an aside, her family is related by marriage to the Bonham Carter family which contains both Florence Nightingale and, eventually, Helena Bonham Carter, a BadRep Towers favourite, so there’s clearly something going on in this family and they deserve watching.
Muriel Matters, meanwhile, was born in Australia, moving to the UK to participate in the suffrage movement, where she became known for being somewhat militant and outrageous in her attempts to gain publicity for the cause (including hiring a dirigible).
She was also a campaigner against slums and poverty and an early teacher of the Montessori Method. She stood as a candidate for the Labour Party in 1924.
Matters lived in the house on Pelham Street, which was a nursing home, until her death, the later part of her life focusing on what is coyly described by Wikipedia as “the local community”, and spending time being a pretty great lady of letters.
I can only imagine what it must have been like to campaign so ardently for change and to see it realised in your lifetime, then to go on and survive through the war, all the way to to the revolutions of the 1960s. It’s only when presented with those dates that I can begin to appreciate the scale and speed of the feminist project, that so much happened within these two overlapping lifetimes. It’s inspirational to think about what could be achieved within our lifetimes.
The two didn’t overlap when they lived at Pelham Place, sadly, and my Google-fu doesn’t reveal any evidence they actually ever met, but that’s certainly a Fantasy Dinner party guest list to think about.
I like the Blue Plaque project. I like any kind of history you can pick up just by looking up whilst you’re walking along. It’s nice to be able to put things in context and to see the past as places with real people rather than objects in a museum.
But this combination in particular strikes a chord with me, possibly because it is so unusual. And it’s the standout element here that makes this a Found Feminism.
Let’s face it, most commemorative plaques are about men – English Heritage is working to tackle this issue – and the coverage of women’s rights is often a late addition to the table. The Pankhursts didn’t get their plaque intil 2006, for example, so to have two together is impressive.
So here’s to Pelham Place, and to Hastings!
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day, or made you stop and think? Share it here, tweet us, or send your finds to [email protected]!
Well, it’s maybe not surprising that Mrs Garrud’s guides were written from a feminist standpoint, but I wasn’t expecting quite the same level of realism from the very military William E. Fairbairn in a book I stumbled across this week.
A policeman and soldier, Fairbairn knew a LOT about combat. I mean, really. No, REALLY. As the ever-excitable website Badass of the Week put it:
Fairbairn was stationed in Japanese-occupied Korea from 1903 to 1907, and he spent the majority of those four years learning everything he possibly could about the long-lost art of epically kicking the fiery rainbow-living sh**fire out of every living thing on the planet until the only things left inhabiting Earth are multi-colored protoplasmic bags of liquefied organs and bone shards.
What made him unique was that he didn’t mind fighting very, very dirty if it meant you won. And so he did win, usually against street gangs and organised crime rings in Shanghai, where he served with the police. And he then taught that to the commandos, and special forces, the pre-CIA, he invented the SWAT team and tactics still being used today, had a black belt in judo certified by the guy who invented judo, and allegedly held a six-week training course in ‘silent killing’ which included using only a normal stick. He is an enormous figure in Western close-combat history.
In 1942, Fairbairn wrote a book which was marketed in the US as HANDS OFF! Self Defense for Women. Where the feminist interest comes in isn’t that he wrote it at all, or that it contains full-strength combat moves while being aimed solely at women, but that he included paragraphs like this:
It frequently happens that you meet a person who is very proud of his gripping powers and takes great pleasure, when shaking hands, in gripping your hand with all his strength, apparently with the idea of convincing you that he is a real “he-man”.
It is a very simple matter for you to take the conceit out of him – place the point of your right thumb on the back of his hand between the thumb and index finger, as in Fig. 27A.
The cover of the book, featuring a young woman and her trusty umbrella.
The thing which struck me about the whole book is his attitude, which coincides completely with Edith Garrud’s where she wrote “Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.”
Fairbairn assumes that the male attacker in his examples – who grabs, threatens or harasses a woman – deserves no mercy from the terrifying array of STONE-COLD KICKASS which she is then encouraged to perform in return. And he does so not with a tone of patriarchal protectiveness, but of dismissive contempt for the man and righteous calm practical advice for the woman.
In some places, he qualifies his including the more extreme moves with a ‘should you need to’, but it always seems to be cushioning language for civilians frightened at the thought of personal combat, not at all because the reader is a woman. In his introduction, the only differences he cites for women are in typical averages of height and muscle strength, never some imagined intrinsic weakness of will or emotions. That stuff was rampant in 1942, and not including a word of it is impressive.1
What’s also nice to see is that he classes any unwanted touching – such as a man stroking a woman’s knee when sitting next to her at the theatre or cinema – as serious enough to warrant a physical response. Damn right. Also, ouch. (He calls the resulting arm-lock ‘The Theatre Hold‘ and notes that while his photographs show just two seats together, if it was done when there is a row in front, ‘the opponent’s head would have been smashed onto the back of the front seats‘.
The opponent. For a knee-stroke. YES.
Sadly our attitudes to the public groping of women have relaxed a great deal, but it’s nice to find a manual with no condescension, a frank regard for the dangers women face, and the emphasis placed on a woman’s right to her own body. In 1942.
At no point does he even begin to discuss the idea of victim-blaming, that the woman could have ‘brought it on herself’ through dress or actions. It doesn’t come into it.
I’m currently developing self-defence classes for women and have to always keep in mind a level of force which will seem very reasonable in law, and frankly, the attitude in this book is a breath of fresh air. Because I didn’t have to go any farther than the partner I’m demonstrating moves with to find a woman who has had her knee stroked creepily by a stranger in public in the last six months, as well as her boob grabbed in the last week and frequent close approaches by strangers, the temptation to step things up to Fairbairn’s level is mighty high. (But then, I think the appropriate legal response to street harassment should be the sound of a woman drawing a sword).
So well done to Col. Fairbairn for producing a work with a respectful tone and the rare inclusion of harassment scenarios aimed solely at empowering women. If you’re in need of some (eye-wateringly violent) advice on how to fend off attackers, check out his book here. Just bear in mind that the suggested responses might be viewed as legally off-the-scale today!
(And don’t do the thing with the umbrella in Fig. 34, because seriously, sheesh.)
- Readers will note that this is not the first time one of us has found an artefact from the past and gone on a little feminist history adventure. We like old books! And history adventures! Have you had an adventure like this? Do you have recommendable artefacts we should investigate? If so, SAY HELLO TO OUR INBOX. We’re nerds for that stuff. It is one of our favouritest things.
- Ed’s Tiny Note: For some more context, this post has some history of sexist media treatments of women’s boxing. Since, uh, we’re on the subject of gendered perceptions of who does and doesn’t do martial arts.