I’m not a fan of stereotypical femininity, so when my sister decided to organise a trip to see the stage version of Dirty Dancing for her hen night – with compulsory “prom dress” costumes – it sounded like my idea of pink, fluffy hell.

But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that when you get past the neon pink advertising and the frilly dresses, there are some surprisingly serious and complex themes woven into the plot. By the time we reached the interval I had been converted, but since it can be difficult to find anyone to discuss intersectional feminism with you on a hen night pub crawl, I’ve had to save my observations for the internet.

In case it’s been a while since you’ve seen the 1987 film, here’s a quick recap of the plot: in the summer between high school and college, Baby spends a few weeks with her well-off family at a holiday resort in the Catskills, where she meets Penny, a working class dance instructor who has recently become pregnant and then been dumped.

Penny desperately wants to have an abortion, but it’s illegal and therefore expensive and risky. On top of that, she can’t afford to take time off from her second job, performing at a neighbouring resort with her dance partner and platonic best friend Johnny.

Baby steps in to help her, first talking her father into lending her the money to pay for the abortion, then learning the dance routine so that she can take Penny’s place on stage. In the process of learning to dance, she has to spend lots of time with sexy dance instructor Johnny, in situations which conveniently provide excuses for him to be wet and/or shirtless, and they end up having a hot summer fling.

Although it’s easily overlooked in favour of her romantic relationship with Johnny, it’s Baby’s friendship with Penny which sets up the film’s feminist credentials: the main catalyst for the plot is one woman helping another woman to obtain an abortion. Unlike more recent American films about unplanned pregnancy, such as Juno or Knocked Up, Dirty Dancing approaches abortion from an openly pro-choice perspective. At no point does Penny face any moral judgement for her decision, but there’s plenty of criticism for the man who abandoned her, and the abortionist who charges her hundreds of dollars for a procedure that leaves her seriously ill.

But even before she makes her grand gesture of sisterly solidarity to Penny, Baby is presented as a feminist character. When she is first introduced, we learn that she is about to go to college (it’s later explained that she plans to study economics at a prestigious women’s college) and wants to join the Peace Corps after graduating. This stands in stark contrast to her sister Lisa, whose main ambition appears to be finding a husband. Lisa and the other female guests at the resort demonstrate the kind of comfortable yet uninspiring lifestyle that Baby has decided to reject in favour of having adventures and trying to save the world.

Baby’s determination to make a difference could have been presented as a straightforwardly positive trait, but her ability to help Penny is closely tied to her family’s wealth, and the writers use Johnny’s reaction to comment on her privilege. Johnny initially resents her involvement, and makes the scathing comment “it takes a real saint to ask Daddy” when Baby hands over the money for the abortion.

As they grow closer and Johnny begins to talk about his life and his precarious employment situation, Baby looks naïve and sheltered in comparison, but by the end of the film she has started to understand her own privilege and question her father’s assumptions about Johnny.

Baby’s class privilege affects the dynamic of her relationship with Johnny, giving her power and agency that goes against traditional gender roles. As a guest at the resort, Johnny relies on Baby’s cooperation for his continued employment, and he feels further indebted to her because she is paying for Penny’s abortion.

Baby’s background means that she’s used to getting her way, so she isn’t shy about talking back to Johnny during their early dance lessons, and she remains assertive when they grow closer, eventually being the one to initiate the sexual aspect of their relationship.

Women’s sexuality is a major theme in the film, and it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a film address women’s interest in sex without trying to dress it up in a desire for True Love. There are frequent nods to the female gaze, whether it’s through the blatant fanservice of Patrick Swayze’s shirtless scenes (set to music like Hungry Eyes), or the resort owner, reminding the nice, respectable college boys he has recruited as waiters that part of their job is to provide holiday romances for the younger female guests.

There are also comments about the “Bungalow Bunnies”, middle-aged women who stay at the resort all summer and are only joined by their husbands at the weekends, who use Johnny for sex in a reversal of the older-man-exploits-young-woman trope.

As a coming-of-age movie, the script also touches on the idea of sexual awakening, contrasting Baby’s experience with her sister Lisa’s. In one very brief scene (which starts at 0:50 of this clip), the two women discuss when they should lose their virginity, and Baby tells Lisa that it should be with “someone you sort-of love”; not necessarily the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, but someone you like and are attracted to.

Lisa sees sex as part of a long-term plan to persuade Robbie – who the viewer already knows is the sleazebag that dumped Penny when he got her pregnant – to marry her, while Baby, who isn’t deliberately looking for a husband, ends up with the better man and the more rewarding relationship. This might not be much of a revelation to many real women, but it’s unusual to see a chick-flick where the romantic happy ending doesn’t involve marriage and babies.

Dirty Dancing isn’t without its flaws: the Bungalow Bunnies fit what we would now call a cougar stereotype, and Johnny’s final speech about how Baby has taught him to be a better person might be kind of dodgy from a class perspective, but it’s a little unrealistic to expect a low-budget romance film from the 80s to be totally right-on.

It stands out, not because it’s perfect, but because the writers address class and gender issues at all, and as a result has been sneaking a little bit of Trojan horse feminism into teenage sleepovers and girls’ nights in for the last 25 years. It’s the feminist sleeper agent of chick flicks, and deserves a bit of recognition for that.

• Alyson Macdonald is an admin worker by day and a writer the rest of the time, blogging mostly at Bright Green and tweeting from @textuallimits. She wouldn’t normally be caught dead watching chick flicks, and hopes that her reputation as a scruffy geek survives this encounter unscathed.

One reason behind how badly the Vagenda article was received was, I think, the authors’ attempt to address a relatively specific issue (‘Leave Caitlin alone, she’s working-class and hardly anyone else in the UK media is!’ – as if that isn’t in itself a whacking great elephant in the room, on which more later), and to address it in the more or less specific context of the kind of feminism they’d seen and experienced in the UK, without recognising that, well, feminism is really fucking big.

As explained in this post, ‘feminism’, even just within the UK, is not and never has been exclusively ‘a white, middle class movement’. The history, theory and practice of feminism is diverse, multiracial, international, and takes in issues of class, age and sexuality among others. Throughout feminism’s development there have been, as noted here, tension, discussion and conflict within the movement over how this diversity is represented, and, as noted here in 2008, there continue to be.

The concept of intersectionality is, in part, a way of helping to articulate this diversity. This was the very term Vagenda identified, oddly, as an example of unhelpfully academic language, when in fact, as the vast majority of responses to their article have pointed out, it’s one that’s relatively simple to explain by reference to lived experience. It’s also a term whose practical relevance is easily proved; in the immediate fall-out from Caitlin Moran’s failure to question Lena Dunham on the racial diversity of Girls, her fellow journalist Bim Adewunmi did a comprehensive and accessible job of clarifying why this mattered, both explaining intersectionality and making a positive case for it:

I am a woman, a black woman born in London to Nigerian parents, a Muslim woman (who does not wear a hijab or veil). I am educated and self-employed but relatively low-earning. These things, as standalones or collectively, define how I see the world. One often bleeds into the other so comprehensively, they seem almost interchangeable. This is, in its most basic form, what we call intersectionality: the idea that we wear a lot of caps, and often in challenging one wrong, we are challenging many. In reading that Moran tweet, my first thought was: “I cannot afford to take off my ‘race cap’ and focus just on the plain ol’ sexism that plagues the television industry; and nor do I want to.” – Source

Intersectionality allows the integration of systems of oppression – patriarchy, capitalism, racism, among others – to be identified, analysed, and challenged, and it provides a means of transcending and critiquing single-issue politics. The theory may be obscure, the practice surely is not.

There is an identifiable, and to some extent understandable, urge within some pop-feminist platforms to crusade against a feminism which they describe as too theoretical, remote and academic to gain mass appeal. The idea of a divide between academic and populist ways of promoting progressive politics is not unique to feminism; a similar debate periodically engulfs much of the left. How can ‘ordinary women’, or indeed ‘ordinary people’, be appealed to in language which will resonate with their everyday concerns and not alienate them by using words of more than two syllables?

But the first half of that question doesn’t automatically imply the second. Being ‘ordinary’ doesn’t mean being stupid. It doesn’t mean not having been to university either. Politics predicated on the assertion of an academic/middle-class versus populist/working-class divide are, at best, disingenuous, presenting as mutually exclusive what is surely more a question of priorities.

There is a difference between wishing to focus on ‘ordinary’, material concerns – the gradual erosion of living and working standards under the present government; closures and funding cuts to women’s refuges and childcare services; the removal of housing, child, and disability benefits – and assuming that the people affected by these concerns cannot recognise, analyse and talk about them for themselves, in language which can be sophisticated as well as rudimentary.

Too often, in debates within feminism – often valid and necessary debates – over how best to engage ‘ordinary women’, these women are implicitly othered, there to be appealed to and won over by more enlightened middle-class feminists rather than considered capable of engaging in the debate on their own terms and by themselves.

In such narratives, liberal commentators often employ presumptious ideas of what ‘a working-class girl’ might think of feminism, without having any meaningful direct experience of this on which to draw. Back in March, by contrast, the Camden New Journal writer Pavan Amara produced an excellent piece for The F-Word in which she interviewed a variety of working-class women and recorded their opinions and attitudes towards feminism. Her conclusion – that working-class women face preoccupying problems of poverty and inequality, and frequently regard mainstream feminism as remote and irrelevant – is the same kind of thing that Vagenda’s post was trying to get at, but far more plausibly expressed and empirically grounded. My problem lies not with that argument itself, but with the patronising ideas about class which seem to inform so many presentations of the argument.

It’s particularly galling to see an assertion with which I agree – that class is an aspect of identity too often left out of debate – being used in ways which can actually shore up negative assumptions about class. From Vagenda’s article:

Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse (what are they going to do? Protect or feed themselves with theory? Women cannot dine on Greer alone.) “This woman does not represent me”, they will think of their well-meaning lecturer, because how can she, with her private education and her alienating terminology and her privilege, how can she know how poverty gnaws away at your insides and suppresses your voice? How would she know how that feels?

(I assume there’s been an unintended elision between secondary and university education made there, since in my state comprehensive we had teachers, not lecturers, and I’d be frankly astounded if any of them had been privately educated – they’d been educated, yes, but by the state, exactly as I was being. ‘State-educated’ shouldn’t be used as a synonym for ‘stupid’ either.)

Generalisations like this are often in danger of buying into narratives which see working-class parents, schools and communities as unable to impart education or instil political consciousness in the same way as their middle-class counterparts, and which present working-class girls as the helpless inhabitants of some kind of neo-Victorian netherworld, a perspective which is, again, less helpful than it clearly wishes to be.

What this perspective also neglects is that Women’s Studies, at least in the UK, was rooted to a large extent in attempts by women of generally less privileged backgrounds to question and critique the privileges of existing academia and to draw attention to neglected perspectives and experiences, including those marginalised by virtue of class, race, age and sexuality. That feminism in academia is now considered middle-class and irrelevant perhaps says more about the squeezing out of attention to and discussion of class-based analysis within it; the erosion of empowering traditions of adult education and of self-education through libraries and community colleges; and the pricing out at postgraduate and increasingly at undergraduate level of poorer students, than anything about education’s intrinsic appeal to and suitability for anyone outside the bourgeoisie.

The unhelpful aspects of these well-intentioned arguments are compounded by the fact that those who find themselves in the position to make them to a mass audience are hardly ever working-class themselves. The restriction of access to politics, media, arts and entertainment to those with the parental support or independent wealth to get them through unpaid internships, or maintain them in precarious freelance work, is referenced increasingly often as it becomes more glaringly apparent, but hardly ever with a view to how the situation might be changed. Caitlin Moran is frequently held up as a representative of The Real World on the grounds that she had it tough once upon a time, as though her current individual high profile makes up for the fact that there is hardly any mainstream media or political platform for those who continue to have it tough right now. To their credit, it’s not as if Vagenda don’t recognise this:

What feminism needs is more voices – a whole chorus of them. By all means, we can criticise those already at the top, but we should be combining that with a real desire to listen to women from all walks of life and their experiences: to actively seek them out, rather than waiting for the lucky few to claw their way into our ranks. Giving them jobs on newspapers so that they can write movingly and persuasively about the inequalities they suffer.

But what should also be recognised is that an intersectional perspective is vital in facilitating these developments, and that intersectionality affects the very focus on ‘ordinary’ concerns which these arguments advocate. The political climate since the banking crisis of 2008, and the imposition of economic austerity, has only sharpened the need to prioritise issues of material inequality and financial stability – especially for women. Much of the burden of analysing and opposing the impact on women of rising unemployment and the erosion of the welfare state is being shouldered by women whose identities mean they are under attack from several intersecting angles: as low earners, as mothers, as women of colour – very often, all three. Here for instance is Ava Vidal interrogating the myth of reliance on benefits as a ‘lifestyle option’ (and doing so, incidentally, in highly accessible language):

The promotion of a multiplicity of voices within feminism is surely better done in ways which challenge alienating ideas of what ‘feminism’ is, rather than in ways which risk entrenching these ideas by presenting feminism as an intrinsically white-normative and middle-class-normative movement which should benevolently open its gates to ‘others’.¹ I believe that a lot of working-class awareness of disadvantage and oppression is already informed by what we may as well call a feminist impulse, even if the women in question wouldn’t necessarily call themselves feminists.

Equally, while there’s nothing wrong in seeking to engage ‘ordinary’ women in feminism through using ‘accessible, populist’ language, it’s also not too much to ask for this language to be conscious and sensitive, free of condescension and stereotyping, and seeking to be inclusive through attention to race, ability, age and sexuality as well as class. The problems of the ‘ordinary’ working class are inherently intersectional: material inequality is intersected by racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, all experienced as real and immediate issues rather than matters of abstract theory. It’s just that this generally takes place outside a media and political mainstream which is increasingly the preserve of a homogenous and insular elite. Liberal condescension which pays lip service to issues of race and class is less meaningful than attempts to address the many failings in cultural and political representation which make it increasingly difficult for non-privileged voices to be engaged with on their own terms.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: I think it should be noted that Team BadRep, who are (among other things) predominantly white, wouldn’t seek to claim that we always avoid falling into this trap in everything we do – almost certainly we don’t. But it’s important to try.

This post was mostly inspired by the complaint of my fellow BadRep member Sarah J that, when the subject of Elastica comes up, the band are frequently dismissed outright as flagrant copyists led by Britpop’s version of Lady Macbeth. In fairness, I spent most of the 90s thinking the same thing. God, I used to hate Elastica. Wilfully amateur slack-jawed rip-off merchants whose over-privileged frontwoman seemed to exist only as a drawly amalgam of her indie boyfriends (hair by Brett, boots by Damon), whose competency in snagging the catchiest bits of post-punk couldn’t disguise how irritatingly thick and bland they were in all other respects. Right? Right. Now that I’m no longer a chippy thirteen-year-old convinced that people with trust-funds can’t make good music, I’ve been reassessing Elastica.

Elastica are a band it’s probably easier to appreciate in retrospect and in isolation from their era, especially if you weren’t actually around for it. They weren’t a great fit with Britpop, their music drawing more on the punk revivalism of New Wave of New Wave, one of several burgeoning movements which Britpop left steamrollered in its wake. This 70s-rooted recycling was also ahead of its time, being more of a piece with the early-2000s bands also inspired by post-punk: like Karen O, or Jack White, Justine Frischmann now just looks like a cool-as-fuck frontperson. I mean, she was posh, of course. If she called her dad, not only could he stop it all but in 1989 he could also buy her a Kensington townhouse. Not that she ever tried to hide this, or to claim any kind of gritty authenticity. (Given that the British music press, and music in general, was and remains riddled with posh girls and boys, I do wonder how much of the media focus on this aspect was some kind of overdefensive deflection on their part, back in the insulting and appropriative days of poor-is-cool.)

Elastica’s potted biography reads like a Britpop potboiler – or, in accounts like John Harris’, an ‘indie soap opera’. Frischmann founded Suede with her fellow UCL student Brett Anderson in 1989, hawking the embryonic group around Camden as their de facto manager before leaving both Suede and Anderson for her iconic power-coupling with chancer extraordinaire, Blur’s Damon Albarn. In 1992 she formed her own group with former Suede drummer Justin Welch, adding enigmatic Brightonian bassist Annie Holland (who ended up with her own theme song) and south Welsh urchin Donna Matthews as Frischmann’s musical foil on guitar. In 1993 they released Stutter, a crushingly cool eyeroll of a single that, having something to do with male sexual dysfunction and something to do with female sexual frustration, was one of the most playfully frank songs I’d heard since Orgasm Addict. The next year, as Britpop was decisively yanked into the mainstream, Frischmann’s relationship with Blur’s lead singer gained her lasting notoriety in the music press and beyond as a kind of Britpop Dr Girlfriend.

I’ll come to the fuss made over Justine’s sex life later. The other Thing That Everyone Knows About Elastica is that they stole all their best riffs. Well, yes, Elastica settled out of court with both Wire (Line Up, a song I’m still happy to hate, rips off the chorus of Wire’s I Am the Fly; the synth in Connection rips off the guitar in Three Girl Rhumba) and the Stranglers (Waking Up rips off No More Heroes pretty much wholesale) – but let’s think about this. Britpop itself was incredibly derivative, backwards-looking, insular and self-referential, as were its exponents. The entire exercise was a cultural and aesthetic rip-off of the late 1960s, and more particularly of the Beatles-Kinks-Jam tradition of white-boy guitar rock. Musical, lyrical and sartorial rip-offs (or ‘tributes’, or ‘homages’, or ‘cheeky nods to’) abounded, as indeed they do in any period and genre. In music as in any art form, it’s what one does with it that counts. I still rate Cigarettes and Alcohol, for instance, despite its massive musical debt to T-Rex’s Get It On, and despite Oasis’ massive debt in general to, oh, let’s start with the Beatles, Status Quo, Slade and the Glitter Band.

If it were simply a case of, to misquote an unknown wit, ‘Your album is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’, that would be one thing. But there is a reason why 1995’s Elastica became the fastest-selling debut in UK history at the time. Even in the throes of my irritation with Frischmann herself, I found the music slickly derivative, sure, but also annoyingly listenable. The songs on the debut – which it took me about three years to grudgingly buy and listen to in full – are sharp, snarky and unadorned gems strung together by that snide, campy Sprechgesang that was probably Justine’s best musical asset. The songs range from little flash-bangs of sex-positive brilliance (Stutter, All-Nighter, Blue, Vaseline), to vaguely sinister languor (S.O.F.T, 2:1, Waking Up), to the archly anthemic (Car Song, Line Up, Connection). The album’s stripped-down, angular art-punk, its odd, listless mix of sleaze and melancholy, and the band’s Last Gang In Town fronting in photographs and on record sleeves, anticipated the revival (or the ripping-off, perhaps?) of such stylings almost a decade later by the Strokes/Libertines axis of hipster. And when thinking back to the bands who came to be regarded as luminaries towards the tail-end of Britpop – The Bluetones, Shed 7, Northern Uproar, and no doubt I’ve repressed many more – you can only wish they’d ripped off something half as interesting themselves.

At a point in the 90s where the dominant female aesthetic revolved around ladette football shirts or twee tea-dresses, Elastica adopted an atypical New Wave uniform: black leather, drainpipe jeans, hair boyishly cropped or bobbed. For Frischmann at least, her androgynous aesthetic was a deliberate choice linked to self-consciousness, a protective effacing or subsuming of femininity which will make sense to anyone who’s tried to negotiate the disputed territory of being socially independent while aware of one’s relative vulnerability. In an interview with Simon Reynolds in 1995, Justine referred to her choice of look as ‘Nineties urban camouflage’, and, interestingly, associated the process of growing up with learning to step away from a conventionally feminine presentation rather than accepting it:

[JF]…When you’re in your twenties you feel more confident about what you are, you don’t feel like you necessarily have to dress up for boys. When I was a teenager I had really long hair and felt like I had to wear make-up. But now I feel a lot more comfortable with short hair. It’s something I discovered with leaving home and going to college. In a way, it’s Nineties urban camoflage. It came about when I was coming back from college really late, getting on the last tube. If you’re wearing long hair and make-up, you’re gonna feel a lot more vulnerable than if you’ve got short hair and big boots…

[SR] So there’s a sense that you sartorially avoid the things that signify vulnerability or ‘availability’?

[JF] It’s just expecting to be treated as one of the lads. You don’t want to deliberately remove yourself from being able to be a good bloke.

– Source.

NB I like Reynolds’ idea, in this interview, of women artists in the 90s ‘taking on played-out male traditions, tweaking and reinventing them’, but I’m not altogether sure how helpful it is to dub it ‘stylistic transvestism’ as he does, rather than simply problematising ‘feminine’ identity itself. (He’s on steadier ground when he mentions Buzzcocks, who Elastica remind me of especially in songs like Stutter and All-Nighter, with Justine’s nonchalantly transgressive blurring of gender norms suggesting a southern female mirror-image of Pete Shelley, but maybe that’s just me.)

On ‘stylistic transvestism’, she seemed similarly doubtful:

[SR] Drag kings rule: Polly Jean Harvey with her hoary blues-man posturings; Courtney Love as Henry Rollins if he’d only remove his ‘Iron Man’ emotional armature and let his ‘feminine side’ splurge’n’splatter; Liz Phair and her feminised/feminist take on the geeky garage punk of Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. And there’s Justine Frischmann, who’s somehow miraculously found imaginative space for herself in the Stranglers’ gruff, fake-prole belligerence and ‘who wants the world?’ cynicism. That said, Justine’s pretty phazed when I ask if she ever feels like she’s in drag onstage.

[JF] Well, I sometimes feel like Meatloaf, when I’ve got hair all over my face and I’m really sweaty. Which is a bit depressing. But no, I don’t ever feel like a woman in drag, to be honest.

[SR] So there’s no sense in which you play-act a tough-guy?

[JF] I think lots of women do that these days. And there’s always been girly girls and non-girly girls. There’s girls who have really high voices and like wearing dresses, and others who don’t. I don’t think I’m exceptional, it’s just that most of my mates haven’t been very girly. There’s lots of young women in London who look and dress like I do.

– Source.

Even when I was forcing myself to dislike her on grounds of class chippiness, one of the things I couldn’t help liking about Justine was the casual confidence, the superiority even, in so much of her lyrics and delivery, and their emphasis on female sexual agency. All-Nighter is, like Stutter, a self-assured and playful song about sexual frustration, and there’s an archly objective approach to sex in Car Song and Vaseline and many more. There’s ‘just’ sex in these songs – little sentiment and less romance – but equally there’s little angst, no judgement and no self-reproach. Never Here is a heartfelt, simple and incisive anatomy of a defunct relationship, just as well-crafted and moving as, say, Blur’s Tender, but terse and economic where the latter is overblown. Frischmann’s protagonists are thinly drawn but invariably assertive and self-possessed, frustrated or impatient with their hapless, thoughtless or less self-assured partners, sure of what they want and feeling no guilt about taking it. They never make a point of being Bad Girls, they just happen to be girls.

Like her fellow Stranglers aficionado Gaye Advert twenty years previously, Frischmann’s drop-dead charisma got in the way of her stated intention to be ‘one of the lads’. Her sexually confident persona and Elastica’s pleasure-centred, borderline-selfish lyrics, despite their matter-of-fact delivery, tended to be treated as ‘naughtily’ deviant departures from feminine convention rather than just another way in which women might happen to view themselves and their sex lives. That the music press and wider media insistently framed Justine in relation to the men she chose to sleep with was part of a wider sexualisation where, in the post-Britpop 90s, female sexual agency had increasingly to be presented within a Lad frame of reference. I remember, specifically, there being a weird concentration by the music press on whether she would or wouldn’t pose for Playboy. It’s tempting to conclude that Frischmann’s ostensibly aloof and independent approach, her chilled assertiveness, her androgyny, and perhaps her background, attracted a reductive emphasis on her sexuality and sex life as a way of rendering her comprehensible, less of a threat and more of a ‘regular’ girl.

Women weren’t absent from 90s indie, but as I’ve written elsewhere, there is a sense in which they were squeezed to the margins by the elevation of ‘lad bands’, the testosterone-heavy dominance (with some honourable and dishonourable exceptions) of the music press and mens’ magazines, and the focus on male key players and kingmakers, from Anderson, Albarn and the Gallaghers to Alan McGee. The received wisdom of Britpop as a male concern and male preserve obscures how highly-rated Elastica were at the time – notably, they came closer than either Oasis or Blur to cracking the lucrative US market – and it also overlooks the contribution made by Frischmann to Britpop’s originating impulse. Love or hate it, Frischmann’s influence on and creative partnerships with (or, if we’re going with the Lady Macbeth angle, her bewitching and manipulation of) Britpop’s main men was instrumental to the movement but goes more or less unsung. Instead she now gets frequently relegated to a minor player, an accessory or at best a ‘muse’ to the more famous and credible men in her life, and her band are remembered as, in Sarah J’s words, a ‘Blurgirlfriend novelty act’. Her break-up with Albarn in 1997 was partly the result of a reluctance to accept what she perceived as the restrictions of domesticity and motherhood:

“Damon was saying to me, ‘You’ve given me a run for my money, you’ve proved that you’re just as good as I am, you’ve had a hit in America – now settle down and let’s have kids.’ He wanted me to stop being in a group, stop touring and have children. I wasn’t very happy, and he kept saying, ‘The reason you’re unhappy is because you really want children but you don’t know it.’ It did throw me: I thought about it quite seriously.” – Source.

After 1996 Elastica were gradually subsumed by smack, angst and inter-band acrimony, with an endless parade of members leaving, being replaced and returning. Their second album, 2000’s The Menace, was more firmly anchored in post-punk experimentalism, but lacklustre, anticlimactic and accordingly less than commercial – although I had by this point got over myself enough to admit that I liked it, an epiphany which I’m sure was a source of extraordinary comfort for the band, who announced their amicable break-up the following year. Since then, Frischmann has been a bit of a Renaissance woman: collaborating with M.I.A. on songs including 2003’s Galang; moving to Colorado to study visual arts and psychology; dipping into abstract painting; and, as shown here, fronting a BBC series on modern architecture.

Justine Frischmann’s rise against a Britpop backdrop, and her subsequent infamy or dismissal, raises several issues relevant to feminism: the denial or marginalizing of women’s contributions to artistic and creative moments; the relegation of women to the accessory of whichever man they happen to have slept with; the idea that women in bands are automatically amateur or derivative, or just not as good at being amateur and derivative as the boys are. However short-lived Elastica’s fame and drawn-out their dissipated demise, their career remains more edifying than watching the Oasis juggernaut run slowly and embarrassingly out of steam, or indeed whatever Alex James is currently up to.

If you’ve got a guest post brewing in your brain, pitch us at [email protected].

Last night, I was drawing away at my desk with Radio 4 on in the background and idly chatting to my boyfriend, who is in Poland at the moment.

A Moral Maze came on the radio, aiming to address the moral challenges around the government’s Troubled Families initiative, in the wake of the government’s ‘Broken Britain Tsar’, Louise Casey, suggesting that women in these families should be financially discouraged from having more children if they are struggling to cope at present. This comes off the back of Eric Pickles saying we’re too politically correct to lay blame where it belongs, which is with the troubled families where recidivistic criminality and truancy endures across several generations.

It is, they suggest, a moral failure of the families who languish on benefits that they do not lift themselves out of antisocial behaviour and state dependency.

In this Moral Maze, it was said more than once “we all know who these families are” when panel members asked for clarification on whether they were discussing troubled or troublesome families.

The criteria for being regarded as a Troubled Family are that a family has five or more of the following seven traits:

• Having a low income
• No one in the family who is working
• Poor housing
• Parents who have no qualifications
• The mother has a mental health problem
• One parent has a longstanding illness or disability
• The family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes

Source: they’re outlined in this Independent piece.

However, the Moral Maze‘s panel also discussed some very loaded terms like “serial fatherlessness” which seemed to point quite firmly to where they apportion the blame for this supposed crisis.

Of course, like most government statistics, the figure of 120,000 families in the UK meeting this definition is disputed, with most attempts to replicate the research finding far, far fewer families than in the initial research.

The panel didn’t seem to pick up on what seems to be glaringly obvious to me as a major issue with the defining traits, focusing instead on whether poverty caused families to struggle to the point where adhering to social norms was difficult or whether the families themselves were essentially lazy or immoral enough to drive themselves into this situation. There are obvious echoes to the description of “feral youths” we had a year ago when the country was ablaze with rioting.

To me, the most pernicious aspect of the definition is the bias against disabled people, particularly against disabled women. Since it’s far harder for disabled people to find decent education or well-paid employment, and since depression and other mental health challenges are incredibly common among disabled people (perhaps because we’re being told that our problems are our own moral inadequacies?), it seems like a given that most families where one or both parents are disabled are automatically well on the way to being labelled as problematic.

In fact, if you examine a family where neither parent is ill, disabled or has mental health problems, they must meet all five of the remaining criteria, but a disabled family where the mother has mental health issues need only meet three of the five non-health-related factors to be labelled as problematic.

If you then add in the idea that the mothers in troubled families should be discouraged, perhaps financially, from having more children than they can afford or cope with, we’re worryingly close to a programme of eugenics that disproportionately targets disabled and mentally ill women.

The discussion on Moral Maze didn’t pick up on this point, seemingly assuming that it should be taken as read that ill-health and impairment, whether physical or mental, constitutes a problem for society.

It’s a disturbingly regressive idea that in order to end poverty, you end the poor, and one that should be challenged with passion at every turn.

Reading through earlier government documents relating to this, however, paints a different picture to the one now being presented by ministers. The definition there ran:

• First, examine families where either there is proof of the child having committed a crime or where a member of the family has an ASBO or similar charge around social conduct.
• Secondly, identify families where a child has been regularly excluded from school, has 15% or higher unauthorised absence or where the child is regularly truanting.
• If families meet one of the two, then examine if no-one in the family works or is in post-compulsory education (one of those NEETs – Not in Employment, Education or Training).
• After examining these identifying factors, local considerations may be applied where families meet two or three of the above factors exist and there is cause for concern.

These local considerations can include:

• Where a family member has been in prison in the last year, where the police have been called out regularly, where the family is involved in a gang or where they are prolific offenders.
• Where a child is on the child protection register or where the local authority is considering taking the child into care.
• Where a family member has long-term health problems, particularly:

  Emotional and mental health problems
  Drug and alcohol misuse
  Long term health conditions
  Health problems caused by domestic abuse
  Under 18 conceptions

Now, this list of issues seems problematic, but less so when you take into account the idea that these should only be considered once it’s established that there are problems with criminality or where the child is not attending school often enough. Worklessness is given less priority than these and health problems such as alchoholism are even less relevant.

Source: this Troubled Families Programme PDF from March 2012.

I think that the shift from what this document describes to the seven traits of unsuccessful people defined above and communicated by ministers more recently is incredibly telling in determining the underlying ideology at play here. Rather than say that criminality and absence from school or the structure of employment, education or training are the main challenges facing families and requiring intervention, we’re left with the impression that there are wickedly immoral, lazy people, primarily the poor, disabled people and single mothers, who are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

The original notion – that families who are troubled and troubling through antisocial or criminal behaviour, where children are being denied the life chances that education provides, could do with additional support and intervention to assist them in re-introducing structure to what can often be a chaotic and fraught existence – seems sound. To turn this into yet another attack on poor people, disabled people and women just seems like a moral failure of government, and that, I think, is far more likely to tear the country apart.

• Described as ‘suave’ by Simply Knitting Magazine, Howard Hardiman is a writer and artist who makes comic books about lonely badgers, dog-headed escorts and disabled superheroines. He lives on the Isle of Wight and collects jigsaw puzzle pieces he finds in the street.

www.howardhardiman.com
www.thelengths.com
www.thepeckhaminvalids.com

It’s an interesting article, and well worth a read, but there’s more to this than wheeling out the tired old saw of “Wow! A woman doing a man’s job!”. However, I do want to offer some heartfelt congratulations to Joanne especially for her signature product Bloom, which is made with notes of chamomile, pomelo and honeysuckle. Chin chin, darling.

Gin for Victory!

For the UK gin is a rather relevant beverage, with its history steeped in that of the Empire (not unlike tea).

Hogarth's famous print "Gin Lane" hardly strikes a classy note

Gin arrived on our shores in around 1690. By the eighteenth century it had become very popular, culminating in The Gin Craze. Put simply, gin was cheap, strong and easily available, particularly for the urban poor. A lot of gin was drunk, and a lot of poor people got drunk. As is often the case when poor people take drugs, gin was linked to crime, and in the case of poor women, it was linked to promiscuous behaviour and infertility, earning the sobriquet Mother’s Ruin.

Reformers of the time, including William Hogarth, focussed on how gin consumption might be affecting women. This sort of thing is still the case today – with excitable press articles over binge-drinking “ladettes“, the idea of a drunken woman is treated very differently from that of a drunken man. Given that women were supposedly exemplars of correct social behaviour, their bad gin drinking behaviour was treated with something akin to political hysteria, and we all know about the history of that word. In fact, gin’s image was such that the 1751 act of parliament introducing taxation on alcohol was known as the Gin Act and for a while, at least, gin did not touch the lips of any woman who wanted herself to be thought well of.

The Martini Comeback

Why don’t you slip out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini?

– Robert Benchley

The rise of gin can probably be attributed to the gin martini. Not the vodka heresy as drunk shaken-not-stirred by 007 (who eschewed the womanly gin connection), but the real deal, made with gin, vermouth and either an olive or a twist of lemon (I recently found out that those slivers of peel are pleasingly known as “dead goldfish” in the bar trade).

With the invention of the cocktail - and the cocktail dress - gin became a premium product for women

Gin martinis were invented at some point in the mid-19th century, and they oozed class and sex appeal. Gone was the downtrodden image of gin, and here to stay was the limey note (although the martini is an american invention, gin remains very, very British) of superiority in cocktail form. My favourite anecdote is over  Noel Coward‘s recipe for the martini: “filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy”.

With sexy gin came sexy ladies, of course. In popular culture, the gin-drinking lady had shaken off her working class shackles and exchanged them for high heels and a form-fitting cocktail dress. Yet the phantom of criminality still lingered, especially in the States, where during Prohibition cheap, illegal gin was widely available due to the relative ease of making the spirit, giving rise to bathtub gin, so called because you could make it in your bathtub.

And as we know from Hogarth, criminality + gin + women = political difficulties over female sexuality. This time, there are tales to be told with women on both sides of the bar.

The case for Prohibition was being made by the Christian campaigning group known as the Women’s Temperance Movement. On the other side of the fence, we have gin-drinking flappers adorning the aisles in Speakeasies. These women were both working towards different kinds of freedoms, which perhaps have reached their pinnacle in the sex-positive and anti-porn camps of today’s feminist movement.

The anti-gin temperance faction were looking for a way of getting their household money out of the hands of the barkeepers and into their cupboards to feed their children (this from a time when men were the primary breadwinners and their wives were given an allocation of salary to spend on the home and family). The glittery girls in their cocktail dresses were living a lifestyle outside of traditional notions of “home and hearth”.

Gin and I

Now, I’m partial to a gin and tonic, having been brought up to think of it as a “grown up” drink, unlike the fizzy gunk in a bottle presented to us as teenagers in the form of alcopops. Being able to sit down and enjoy – not just drink, but actually enjoy – a well-made gin and tonic was one of the ways in which I knew my tastes had changed from those of a sweet-craving teen into something more adult.  I’m now a bit of a gin aficionado, and gin, in return, is cool.

There’s lots of different sorts of brands, with their own mix of botanicals. There are gin clubs, and many of the beautiful London pubs are reclaiming their heritage as gin palaces. These buildings, with their wood panel divisions and separate entrance ways, marked a time when it was unseemly for a lady to be in a public house, and the ability to drink with discretion, and away from the riff-raff, was valued.

Yet there is still the spectre of Gin Lane hanging over womankind:

The most dangerous drink is gin. You have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs. Because gin isn’t really a drink, it’s more a mascara thinner.

“Nobody likes my shoes!”

“I made… I made fifty… fucking vol-au-vents, and not one of you… not one of you… said ‘Thank you.'”

And my favourite: “Everybody, shut up. Shut up! This song is all about me.” 

– Dylan Moran

Gin remains a tricky drink, known for its tendencies to make one tearful, and crying is still sadly a girlish subject, although there are ongoing attempts to make the drink more manly, as seen in the macho advertising for Gordon’s Gin featuring sweary chef Gordon Ramsay.

Now, whilst seeing Captain Shouty pelted with ice and limes is quite entertaining, the obvious message is “gin is a MANLY DRINK for MANLY MEN” with a side note of “take it seriously, this is a foodie subject” to reinforce the quality of the product. Gordon was recently dropped from the campaign, following a decline in sales, which may or may not indicate that, for the time being at least, gin still remains a ‘female’ tipple.

Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

Mary Fields was born into slavery in Tennessee sometime around 1832, the exact year being uncertain. Not too much is recorded about this phase of her life, other than, apparently, a fondness for physical altercations and bad homemade cigars. (Let’s just stop and consider what a badass figure Fields must have cut, standing six feet tall, well muscled, and puffing away on a cheap cigar.)

It’s a few decades after the abolition of slavery in the US that the really interesting part of Fields’ story begins. Around 1884 she moved to Cascade, Montana and sought employment with a group of Ursuline nuns there. She signed on to do the heavy labour – hauling freight, stone work, carpentry, that sort of thing. She stayed here for a while, eventually becoming forewoman.

One somewhat apocryphal story from this era tells of Fields’ freight wagon being overturned and attacked by wolves. Fields holed up in the wagon overnight, keeping the wolves at bay with her rifle and revolver, bringing the cargo in safely the following morning. Whilst this story may or may not be accurate what is undeniable is that the Great Falls Examiner (the only paper in the area) records Fields as being the cause of more broken noses than anyone else in town. She had little patience for the often inappropriate ways of men in frontier towns, and no problem with defending herself.

Why did she leave? Well, remember that fondness for fights? Yeah, she ended up having a gunfight with a coworker. He had complained that she earned $2 more than him, despite her being black and female. She dealt with this the way all sensible people deal with workplace disputes – she tried to shoot him. She missed on the first shot, a gunfight broke out, the bishop’s laundry was damaged, and Fields found herself out of a job.

So Fields moved on, applying for a job with the United States Postal Service. She was around 60 at this point, and being a mail carrier was not an easy job. Riding between frontier communities, living on the road in all extremes of weather, dealing with outlaws and wild animals; this was not a job for the faint of heart. But Fields impressed in the interview, being the fastest applicant to hitch a team of horses, and so the job was hers. This made her the second woman and the first African American woman to work for the Postal Service.

So reliable was Fields, living up to the postal service’s unofficial motto of being stayed by “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” that she picked up the nickname ‘Stagecoach’. Along with her mule, Moses, she spent the next decade or so carrying mail out to frontier outposts and remote mining posts.

In the winters Montana gets some serious snow. On more than one occasion the trails would become impassable to horses because of the depth of snow drifts. When you’re pushing 70, there’s snow too deep for horses to pass, and miles to the next outpost, you stay at home and drink by the fire, right? No, of course not, not when you’re Stagecoach Mary Fields you don’t. She pressed on through with the mail over one shoulder and her rifle over the other, walking up to 10 miles between outposts and depots to ensure the mail arrived on time.

Everything has to end eventually though, and around 1902 she retired from the Postal Service to settle down in the town of Cascade. The nuns helped her buy a laundry business, but she never really enjoyed working there. Her two loves by this time in her life were the local baseball team, for whom she often grew flowers, and drinking in the town bar, still smoking those homemade cigars.

Just because she’d settled down, though, doesn’t mean Mary Fields lost any of the grit and pugnacity that had served her all her life. One customer, according to stories, failed to pay his laundry bill on time. Fields, drinking in the bar, heard him talking outside. Excusing herself from her drinking companions she stepped outside and decked him with one solid blow to the jaw. She may have been in her mid 70s by this point but Stagecoach Mary Fields was not a woman with whom one messed. The satisfaction of seeing the guy laid out, so she said, was more than worth the price of the laundry bill.

In 1914, after a hard-lived life, Fields’s liver finally gave out. Her neighbours buried her in Cascade’s Hillside cemetery, and for a while her birthday was an unofficial holiday, with the town’s schools being closed to celebrate her.

For further reading on the West’s toughest postal worker you can check Robert Miller’s The Story of Stagecoach Mary Fields (though be aware that it is a short piece aimed mostly at children, and can be horribly expensive to find). She’s also mentioned in Cheryl Smith’s Market Women: Black Women Entrepeneurs Past, Present and Future and Jessica Ruston’s nicely illustrated Heroines: The Bold, The Bad And The Beautiful.

I want to think about icons, and how activists use them, particularly how protest movements – satirically or seriously – “borrow” figures from previous eras – art, history, legend – and recast them for current ends. On the one hand, as a post on the F-Word nearly a year ago outlined with feeling, this can create frustration, particularly around the idea of setting up individual “heroes” – even when they are rooted in metaphor – within a protest dynamic, which will usually derive much of its force from sheer collective whump. On the other hand, like any exercise in comparing bits of art, looking at the feminist movement’s choices of icons and allegories paints an invigorating kind of conversation down the centuries.

Let’s start with Joan of Arc, resurrected forcefully by the suffragettes in the early 20th century to grace more than a few posters … and an impressive spate of parades.

Yes, parades.

Deeds, Words, and Military Martyrdom

Check this out.

This is Elsie Howey in April 1909 – the month Joan of Arc was beatified by the Catholic Church – preparing to ride a white charger through the streets of London in armour as part of a parade to celebrate noted suffragette Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence’s release from prison.

Two years later, in June 1911, Marjorie Annan Bryce (seriously, you have to see this next pic) led WSPU members through London the same way as part of a procession organised a week before George V’s coronation. (The horse was led by a young woman dressed as Robin Hood.) The Women’s Coronation Procession was one of the largest WSPU demos, and it marched with Joan of Arc at its head.

Three years later, in Baltimore, Ida Baker Neepier also climbed onto a horse whilst clad in armour. Earlier that same year, English Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan had expressed his consternation in a speech that the suffragettes wanted “to make Joan of Arc one of [their] patronesses”.

Joan – canonised in 1920 – was a central icon for the women’s suffrage movement in Europe and North America. The WSPU in particular, with its emphasis on militant tactics, were especially enamoured of her, and Hilda Dallas designed a poster featuring her, wearing a tabard emblazoned with the word JUSTICE, to promote their magazine.

Oh, and here’s the thoroughly don’t-mess Nellie Van Slingerland with a load of “Joan of Arc Suffrage League” flags in NYC. (Would you mess with this hat? I thought not.)

Joan was a perfect fit for the suffragettes, personifying militant force and virtue simultaneously. For context, Victorian literary culture allowed plenty room for female heroism of a certain kind; for example, Grace Darling was idolised. But the demands of heroism, when they force the heroine of a Victorian novel out of the domestic sphere, often spring from a moral imperative (the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Law And The Lady, for example, defies the men around her to save her man from himself). Adopting Joan as patroness – a woman who had abandoned domesticity for battlefields only to act on imperatives sent to her in divine visions – gave the suffragettes’ cause similarly pressing moral overtones.

Joan herself was something of a hot topic at the time; Sara Bernhardt had appeared as her on stage in 1898 and publically endorsed women’s suffrage after the Joan of Arc Suffrage League welcomed her to the US in 1910. The tragic events of the 1913 Derby saw Emily Davison cast as a literal Joan in WSPU eulogies; they were quick to capitalise on the acquisition of a contemporary martyr-narrative to go with historical ones. In the US, when Inez Milholland, who famously asked the President how long women should wait for Liberty, died of pneumonia in 1916, she was directly represented as Joan by artists.

These days, however, we’re not falling over Joan of Arc button badges (although I do own this pretty natty sketchbook from the Museum of London) and Joan is not the Twitter avatar du jour for fully half your feminist mates, because that honour belongs to another female icon…

The Return of Rosie the Riveter

We still can’t get enough of her. Clasped to the bosom of the women’s lib movement in the 1970s, Rosie’s been a staple on flyers, books and posters ever since.

The woman from the We Can Do It! poster – known colloquially as Rosie the Riveter, although she was not, unlike Norman Rockwell’s poster, which was far more widely circulated, ever officially given that title – has, like Joan in the 1900s, been embraced by feminist campaigners as a a key visual figure. Minimally circulated in the war itself, rediscovered as the women’s movement gathered speed, “Rosie” is arguably as famous in her capacity as a feminist pop culture icon as a piece of WW2 propaganda; having borrowed her, we can’t stop remixing her, making her more bluntly feminist, more cheekily self-aware, undercutting the patriotic feeling of the original, or just because, from under a pile of retrokitsch retouches, she gives many of us a more direct sense of legacy than Joan. Although many feminists claim emotional kinship with the suffrage movement, it is Rosie that they totemically hold on to.

Fridge magnets, wall clocks and coasters, many replacing “We Can Do It!” with “Feminism!” populate Cafepress in mushroom clouds of pouting and elbow-baring with a regularity that is by turns reassuring – look how far we’ve come – and galvanising – and we’re not done yet – but also carries a ring of predictability, mainly because I often find myself hoping we’re all still considering which “we” we’re talking about who “can do it”.

Rosie’s enduring popularity with feminists is good-ironic or hmm-ironic depending how you look at it. Sociological Images produced an excellent article earlier this year, Myth-Making and the ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster which ably demonstrates her limitations as a feminist icon, particularly in terms of her original status as a possible anti-trade union figurehead – we can do it (if you guys don’t ever strike, so better not!).

On the other hand, the persistence and force with which feminists have held fast to Rosie has created a new cultural space in which she exists beyond WWII as a feminist symbol in her own right – we discovered just how often she appears on Google for “feminism” in this post.

There’re many images are out there of real-life Rosies, who often aren’t as primped, glamorous or white. To your right is one such worker in 1943; many women (and men) of colour who did not feature on the war’s posters at all, played a crucial role in winning it. The many Rosie remakes on the market, all of which are uniformly white, have so far not engaged this issue. The more amusing ones include Buffy going retro and Princess Leia following suit. Meanwhile, celebrities including Pink have posed as Rosie. And on the explicitly feminist media front, the cover image of Cath Redfern and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming The F-Word also references her with a knowing wink.

A section of Judith F Baca’s mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles features a panicked Rosie being swallowed by a television, titled “Farewell to Rosie the Riveter”:

The inference is clear – the reminder that after the war, women went, in droves, back to homemaking. And it’s this that partly sits behind Rosie’s continued resonance; the War is still such a milestone, representing simultaneously the power of a female workforce and the limitations placed upon it.

And what about now?

Everything Old Is New Again (Again?)

… And it’s only in the last century that women have got the vote, women have had the right to go to university, and this government cannot be responsible for taking hard-won women’s rights away from us, ‘cos the damage they’ll do if they pass this bill… will undo decades…

– student protester dressed as suffragette speaking to the Guardian, December 2010

The suffragettes themselves, who once dressed up as Joan of Arc and declared her their cultural totem for the age, are now totemic in their own right. The women who held a woman who died in the 14th century up as their patroness have now inherited their own set of legendary laurels. What do we think about this? How useful is it? I’m honestly not sure.

LibDem Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone’s office was picketed last December by student protesters dressed in the WSPU’s signature colours of green, white and purple. Whilst on the 26th March 2011 landmark anti-cuts demonstration spearheaded by GoingToWork, I spotted replica pieces of suffragette propaganda being carried down Whitehall.

Meanwhile, feminist climate change pressure group Climate Rush have resurrected the entire apparatus of Edwardian propaganda aesthetics. Their promotional material, which is replete with obvious references to the imagery of the suffrage movement – big hats, button boots and sashes – that dominates the public consciousness, uses slogans such as “In the Name of the Suffragette”.

I doubt this would faze the WSPU leadership, who were adept self-mythologisers even in their time. They knew they were making history, and the Pankhursts particularly were anxious to dispense with self-effacement in the face of what they saw as the pressing need for deeds over words. I admit I’m not sure what I think of the Rush’s implied assertion that the WSPU’s goals, aside from their slogans, would necessarily marry up with those of climate change activists in 2011 (Emmeline Pankhurst did, after all, stand as a Tory candidate, when all was said and done, and the upper echelons of the WSPU did little to help working class women such as Dora Thewlis).

Perhaps the most interesting of these modern takes on early 20th century protest propaganda is Climate Rush activist and artist Cordelia Cembrowicz’s lithographs which feature a more diverse range of women than the many iterations of Rosie.

I do wonder what will be on our posters next. Are we done yet, in these trying times of savage cuts that themselves remind of past eras, with suffrage and sainthood, with rivets and rolled curls? Should we be? I’m not sure.

I’ll be on some of the demos, finding out.

One of the 19^th century’s best-loved stereotypes is that shivering waif, the Match Girl. Standing in the snow in a tattered shawl and starving to death in a picturesque way, she is well known to all of us thanks in large part to Hans Christian Anderson.¹ In Victorian Britain her colleagues worked only slightly less prettily making the matches in factories under horrific working conditions. Many of them were girls too, teenagers and children who started work well before the age of 10.
But is there another side to this charming picture of honest suffering? I’m not saying for a moment that life wasn’t hellish for the matchgirls, and the rest of the Victorian working classes. But I welcome any attempt to dig a little deeper than the hand-wringing waifporn of many contemporary accounts to uncover the experiences and agency of actual persons.

One famous event which lends these pathetic characters another dimension and a bit of agency is the Bow Bryant & May match factory strike of 1888. The broadly accepted chain of events is this…

Annie Besant

Outspoken socialist, women’s rights campaigner and general lefty do-gooder Annie Besant heard a lecture by Clementina Black about the terrible working conditions in Bryant & May factories. She discovered that the women worked 14 hours a day for less than five shillings a week, and didn’t often receive this thanks to a system of fines for offences including talking, dropping matches or going to the toilet without permission.

The Bryant & May Factory on Fairfield Rd, Bow in the 1920s

Besant also learnt that the women’s health had been damaged by the phosphorous used to make the matches, which caused yellowing of the skin, hair loss and ‘phossy jaw’, a jolly name for a particularly gruesome kind of facial bone cancer.

Appalled, Besant went to the gates of the factory in Bow the next day and interviewed some of the women as they were leaving. Having the stories confirmed, she wrote an article for her newspaper The Link with the incendiary title ‘White Slavery In London‘.

In response to the bad PR, Bryant & May cleverly attempted to force their workers to sign a statement that they were happy with their working conditions. When a group of women refused to sign, the organisers of the group were sacked, and the rest of the workforce reacted: 1,400 of the women at Bryant & May went on strike.

Cue national uproar. Besant gathered support for her campaign from a number of prominent figures who all seem to have had their own newspapers, and they used them to call for a boycott of Bryant & May matches. The women at the company formed a Matchgirls’ Union and Besant agreed to become its leader. After three weeks the company announced that it would re-employ the dismissed women and bring an end to the fines system. The sacked women returned in triumph.

Matchwomen

According to this version of events, Annie Besant encouraged and led the factory workers to strike for better conditions. Certainly the identities of the girls and women involved in the strike have been obscured by her fame.

The Matchgirls Strike Committee, and Annie Besant. I don't know who is who I'm afraid (except Besant, standing, centre)

But a new book by Louise Raw claims that the impetus and leadership for the strike came from the women themselves, and Annie Besant got most of the credit because she was already notorious. And because she was middle class – there were doubts in many circles that the matchwomen themselves could have organised their way out of a paper bag without the help of a learned socialist.

This Times Higher Ed review of <Striking a Light: The Truth About the Match Girls Strike and the Women Behind It explains that the matchwomen “have not been hidden from history but hidden by history” because the standard account of events very early on became the go-to example of women’s industrial action, even to the point of cliché, so historians have avoided revising it. Until now:

In a careful reconstruction of events, Raw exposes inaccuracies in the standard accounts which, while petty, suggest a lazy acceptance of a chronology that fits the conventional story. Not only was Besant not the first mover, and she was probably neither sympathetic to strike action nor optimistic about its outcome, preferring instead a boycott of Bryant and May… Raw’s revised account has the match women themselves deciding to strike, generating leaders and possessing a solidarity usually denied to unskilled workers of this era, especially female ones.

BBC History magazine recorded an interview with Raw, which is available as a podcast. If you’re at all interested I recommend it. In the interview she names the five ‘ringleaders’ identified by Bryant & May – Kate Slater, Alice Barnes, Jane Wakely, Eliza Martin, Mary Driscoll – and describes newspaper accounts about their charisma, inspiring speeches and popularity with the other factory workers. Rather wonderfully, Raw was able to find out more about these women after three of their grandchildren approached her at her talks at the Museum in Docklands and the Ragged School Museum. Local history events FTW!

The Matchgirls’ Strike is a landmark in the history of women and protest, but also in labour history. It famously inspired the Dockers’ Strike: the organisers sought advice from the Matchgirls Union and continually referenced them in their speeches.

BUT WAIT! Where is the pop culture link?

• Well, I reckon the story about the ‘troublemaker’ Eva Smith who leads a factory strike in An Inspector Calls may well have been inspired by the matchgirls. Here’s a YouTube clip of the relevant bit.
• Secondly, in the course of my researches I discovered that there is a MUSICAL version of the matchgirl’s story, called, er, The Matchgirls. It looks appalling. Here’s one of the songs from it.
• Then I found out that lovely East London history music project Songs From The Howing Sea have done a song about the strike! Listen here.

1. I am being flippant here but in fact the story reduces me to a crying mess of sentimentality and socialist idealism. There’s also a good recent Disney / Pixar animation. For a horrible moment I thought they were going to happy-end it a la The Little Mermaid and The Hunchback of Notre Dame but they let her die.

Chav, n. British slang (derogatory).  In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.

– Oxford English Dictionary

Chav and other C-words

If ‘cunt’ is reportedly losing its power to shock or offend, don’t worry, other c-words are available. ‘Class’, for instance, appears to have become unsuitable for use in polite society these days, while ‘Chav’ has become commonplace in the respectable parlance of those who would never dream of using any other c-word so blithely. Owen Jones’s book Chavs, a welcome and necessary analysis of the latter phenomenon, identifies it as a culture “created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists”. Chavs examines the word’s place in current political and cultural discourse in the context of a simultaneous narrowing of socio-economic opportunity and an erasure of traditional working-class identity.

Before we begin, it’s worth heading off a few preconceptions at the pass. ‘Chav’ is a multivalent and unstable signifier, and the word’s origin and evolution shows it meaning different things to different people. It’s been around a relatively long time: a 2005 study described ‘chav’ as a strange subculture which, unlike its predecessors, lacked any association with a particular musical movement or political ideals. 2004 saw the rise of ‘chavertising’, a marketing strategy targeting ’chavs’ as a subculture with spending power, whose members ‘wore their wealth’ and prioritised consumption. At the tail-end of 2004, I attended a gig in Chatham by the former Libertine Carl Barat, whose dubious supergroup, in deference to the town’s history with the term, and with who knows what degree of irony or self-awareness, styled themselves ‘The Chavs’ for the evening. And the (working class and Welsh) novelty rap crew Goldie Lookin Chain were satirizing various aspects of ‘chav’ culture as far back as 2001.

Jones’s book, however, focuses on a particular and relatively recent variation in the word‘s meaning, one which is concentrated in political and media discourse and which is overwhelmingly used about the working class rather than by them. This hasn’t always been, and isn’t always the case – Lynsey Hanley’s review of the book locates the idea of ‘chavs’ within the complexities of working-class communities, where the word can be used to differentiate between ‘those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it’. Back in my 1990s comprehensive-schooled childhood, the latter group were certainly distinguishable, known with varying degrees of contempt, amusement or nervousness as ‘neds’ or ‘townies’. But these terms were localised, used within a community to delineate internal hierarchies, rather than to section off an entire community by those at one socio-economic remove from it.

Regardless of the tortuous relationship between the term and the demographic it describes, the use of the word in 21st century political discourse has developed a peculiar, specific and politically-loaded edge. Jones outlines how the word has been stripped of its previous meaning and reapplied in government and media rhetoric, almost invariably being conflated with ‘lower socio-economic group’ by those of a higher one, without reference to or cognisance of the lower socio-economic individuals being tarred with the same brush.

An equal-opportunity stereotype?

At first glance, ‘chav’ is a term tied to class rather than gender. Chav stereotypes are remarkably even-handed: for every lager-swilling lout there’s a single mother, for every Wayne Rooney a Waynetta Slob. The sports gear and leisurewear prominent in ‘chav’ uniform is a type of dress which makes it possible to efface one’s femininity with shapeless tracksuits and scraped-back hair. The baseball cap which graces the cover of Jones’ book is a gender-neutral accessory. Is the female ‘chav’ a recognisable figure? A google image search for ‘chavette’ brings up images of relative deprivation and degradation rather than the upwardly-mobile targets of ‘chavertising’ – the ubiquitous Croydon facelift, tracksuits, pregnant stomachs and yards of bare skin. Many of these are self-conscious or pastiche portrayals by those not identifying as a permanent part of the subculture – a kind of chav drag. There’s also a Newcastle fancy-dress company selling a ‘Super Chavette’ costume, as well as several ‘chav babe’ sites – the straight, and no less curious, counterpart of the numerous gay male chav-porn sites discussed here by Jack Cullen. And the ‘chav’ icon extraordinaire is of course female too – Little Britain‘s Vicky Pollard, one of the oddest fictional stereotypes to be fixed as a moral standard since George Bush Senior instructed America to be ‘more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons’.

The types of women stereotyped as ‘chavs’ make an interesting point about the particularly virulent strain of misogyny which chav-hatred can contain. Anti-chav commentators reveal a disquieting obsession with the presumed sexual precociousness and promiscuity of young working-class women, as well as their aggressive lack of deference and their status outside traditional family and community hierarchies. The behaviour for which ‘chavs’ are criticised includes being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and too disrespectful towards their ‘betters‘. Is this particularly problematic behaviour when observed in women?

The tendency for anti-chav rhetoric to thinly veil both misogyny and class hatred reached an eyebrow-raising pitch with James Delingpole’s spittle-flecked rant that Vicky Pollard embodies:

… several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye…

Here an anti-chav stance allows a thoroughly unpleasant perpetuation of damaging stereotypes of the working class female (sexual promiscuity, sexual precociousness, a thoughtless or scheming lack of protection resulting in pregnancy) as well as a proscribing of non-traditional behaviour (women existing outside traditional family roles, deriving financial support from the state rather than a husband). All this with barely a glance at context or circumstance. Imogen Tyler’s 2008 study ‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum’ found not only that the word ‘has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor’, but also that “the figure of the female chav, and the vilification of young white working-class mothers, embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, fertility, and ‘racial mixing.'”

This gendered and class-based disgust has become particularly prevalent in UK comedy, as identified in Barbara Ellen’s wrecking-ball swing at Little Britain:

Rewarding middle-class, educated, comedy workaholics for lampooning people without any of their advantages, struggling on the margins of society – was this where we’d come to, a boorish festival of exploitation and contempt? … Vicky Pollard alone gave certain sections of the media a label for the disgust they love to express towards young girls spiralling downwards, due to poverty, illiteracy and teen pregnancy…

While the comedies in question do not exclusively portray working class and female characters, the unedifying sight of Oxbridge-educated male comedians sticking it to underclass female grotesques does form part of a disconcerting trend in contemporary comedy towards punching downwards. Pace Kathy Burke as the proto-chav Waynetta Slob, the only recent mainstream female comedian to draw on this stereotype has been Catherine Tate as Lauren Cooper, a character who compared to Pollard is relatively nuanced and sympathetic. (One of Cooper’s appearances has as its pay-off her unsuspected and incongruous knowledge of Shakespeare, rather than a further display of the depths of her blissful ignorance.)

Are we bovvered, though?

Apart from the latent misogyny informing some chav-hatred, then, why is ‘chav’ a feminist issue? The ‘chav’ stereotypes which have gained media prominence and cultural currency are those which are politically useful, being amenable to adoption for narratives which draw on the idea of a semi-criminal, scrounging, feckless underclass to justify political attacks on all of us lower down the socio-economic scale. Many of these stereotypes are female, just as many of the targets of these attacks will be. The current government’s rhetoric repeatedly plays on the stereotype of the idle and recklessly promiscuous single mother, whose ‘irresponsibility’ must be punished, to validate the wider reduction or removal of state support from benefits claimants – even though over half of single parents are in paid employment, a figure rising to 71% for those with a child over the age of twelve. The Daily Mail, happily conflating fact and fiction, used a picture of Waynetta Slob to illustrate an article on the increased number of women claiming sickness benefit, accompanied by the headline ‘Rising toll of ‘Waynettas’. As the smoke cleared after last month’s riots over much of the UK, the single mother was again in the firing line, along with the moral decline, sexual depravity, and social disintegration she is held to represent.

There is still a frustrating lack of attention to class paid by mainstream feminism, whose academic and theoretical focus is often divorced from practical considerations of material inequality, with the result that feminist analysis can seem off-puttingly remote and attuned only to middle-class concerns. Far from having vanished as a vector of political identity, class remains a stubborn and strengthening line of social division. The concept of the stereotypical ‘chav’, and its expansion into a term covering an entire externally-defined and already disadvantaged group, can make socio-economic differences appear insurmountable barriers, erasing the potential for solidarity over the common problems we face. Acknowledging that the discourse around ‘chavs’ can be disingenuous, and can provide a cover for denigrating the social agency and sexual autonomy of working-class women, as well as for wider political attacks on the unemployed and working poor, would be a significant step forward.

• Chavs is available from Verso Books now

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.