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.

Kickstarter

I like Kickstarter because of its pleasing by-the-people-for-the-people ethos and the fact it gives independent filmmakers, writers, musicians and artists a chance to make their ideas a reality. It’s all very ‘open’ as they say. In fact Open Source blog says this:

The beauty of Kickstarter is that it bypasses the traditional channels artists would need to navigate in order to fund a project. Here funding depends on community participation rather than closed-door gatekeepers. The individual investments can be small and spread among those who care about that project’s success.

What we have here of course is also a fantastic opportunity for political or minority groups to get unpopular projects off the ground, projects that would never be able to attract funding from traditional investors (who tend to be of the wealthy white male variety) because they can’t see the ‘market’ for them.

Some awesome feminist projects

Have a search on Kickstarter and you’ll find all kinds of socially conscientious and community projects about race, sexuality, disability, class and yes: gender. In fact Ms Magazine in the US have started a regular Feminist Booster Club feature on their blog to spotlight different feminist projects deserving of support.

And it works. One example is the fantabulous Womanthology project which has managed to fully fund itself in a matter of weeks:

Womanthology is a large scale anthology comic showcasing the works of women in comics. It is created entirely by over 140 women of all experience levels… The purpose of the book is to show support for female creators in comics and media. There will be multiple short stories, how to’s & interviews with professionals, and features showcasing iconic female comic creators that have passed, such as Nell Brinkley and Tarpe Mills. A Kids & Teens section will also be included, showcasing their work, and offering tips & tricks to help them prepare themselves for their future careers in comics.

Of course it helps that the project has the support and involvement of a number of big names (for geeks anyway) such as Gail Simone, Bonnie Burton and Neil Gaiman. But still: awesome.

A project I’d been following for a long time before it was at the Kickstarter stage is The Illusionists:

The Illusionists is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world.

The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.

Having followed its development over the last couple of years I think its going to be a corker. And it’s not quite at its funding target yet, so you know… *cough* stump up! *cough*

Microloans for women in the developing world

The idea of crowdfunding has taken off in a big way over the last couple of years, and it’s often linked to the microfinance initiative in development, particularly in relation to empowering women.

There is something quite thrilling about using Kiva or another platform to give funding directly to a woman in Kenya or Nepal to help her start a business. And of course you get your money back so you don’t have to lose any time worrying whether genuine altruism really exists.

However it’s worth bearing in mind that even though you may be helping one woman, her family and maybe her community (which is nothing to be sniffed at!) spreading capitalism to every corner of the earth isn’t necessarily the best way to help women as a group. Microloans don’t do much to tackle the structural causes of poverty and inequality. In fact they don’t always help individual women.

Don’t stop giving, but think about giving to projects that will also help women protect themselves from violence, disease and discrimination while they run their business.

Fausta and her mother in The Milk of Sorrow

There are times when I’m glad I live in such a blinkered cultural bubble, with only a dim grasp of global politics. Case in point: while I was enraptured by Mysterious Cities of Gold in the 1980s, the real-life land of the Incas – Peru – was being torn apart by a bloody internal conflict between communist guerrilla army the Shining Path and government security forces.

I was only five, of course. But when I watched it again at university (a rite of passage, surely?) only a year after the conflict had wound down, I was none the wiser. In fact, in some senses it hasn’t really ended. The latest reported attack by Shining Path rebels was in April 2010.

Between 1980 and 2000 some 70,000 people died, including huge numbers of civilians. Countless survivors are still in search of justice, including the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of soldiers.

Despite this, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a reluctance in many places to discuss the events of the war and what happened, and many women, especially poor and indigenous women in the Andean areas that were worst effected, struggle to voice the suffering they have endured, to access support and see justice being done.

The Milk of Sorrow

It is this situation that is addressed in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film, The Milk of Sorrow. The film is based on the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, which collected testimonies from women who had experienced sexual violence, including brutal gang rape (here’s an interview with Theidon). Many of the women Theidon spoke to reported a belief that the trauma they had experienced had somehow been transmitted to their children through their breastmilk. Llosa claims in this Birds Eye View interview that this is a genuine belief (hm…) but either way it is certainly a good expression of the severe psychological damage and lingering emotional distress caused by conflict to individuals and entire communities.

The film follows Fausta, a young woman whose mother was raped during the war, and who believes she has been fed on the milk of sorrow. Another character says that children like her have no souls; they have fled for fear. Fausta is so afraid of her mother’s fate she inserts a potato into her vagina as a guard against rape. Here’s the trailer for the film.

Llosa’s first film is also set in Peru, also deals with sexual violence, and stars the same actress, Magaly Solier. Madeinusa (2006) is on the one hand a bit of a fairytale, about an invented religious custom in a fictional Andean village. But on the other hand it deals with poverty, rape, incest, murder and child abuse. In the village in which 14 year old Madeinusa lives, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday Christ is dead, so there is no sin. Or rather, your sins don’t count. Beautiful scenery, gut-wrenching scenes. It’s bleak – there’s no wholly sympathetic character in the whole film, and even the everyman ‘good guy’ is happy to take advantage of Madeinusa’s teenage interest in him. She emerges triumphant, after a fashion. Here’s the trailer (in Spanish).

Explaining or exploiting?

While I think both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are stunning bits of cinema, they do make me uncomfortable, as both films and their director have been accused of racism in their portrayal of the indigenous population of Peru as superstitious, vicious and backward. Llosa belongs to the Peruvian white urban elite, and in fact now lives in Spain. The charge levelled at her is that she has used the stories and experiences of Andean women to turn a profit but without showing respect for indigenous communities or involving native people in the project in more than a superficial way. Carlos in DC sees this as emblematic of the inequality in Peruvian society:

I have witnessed the racial and cultural discrimination that our Indigenous peoples face in Peru, especially in the city of Lima where we are discriminated by our accents, ways of living and traditions. At the same time, Lima profits from our cultures and resources.

To me, The Milk of Sorrow symbolizes that racial and economical division exactly. A filmmaker from Lima and her producers from Europe are using the sad experiences and the suffering of our Andean women as a topic for their profitable film.

It’s that old chestnut again: by representing and discussing sexual violence and using real testimonies to inform your representation, are you reinforcing a message of victimhood and exploiting the women whose experiences you use? Worse still, are you at risk of producing something titillating? It’s a tough one even without the dimension of race, which clearly can’t be ignored in the Latin American context (or, well, anywhere really).

The Milk of Sorrow, more than Madeinusa, has served to raise awareness of sexual violence in conflict, and Magaly Solier has also supported an anti-violence against women campaign, so perhaps there’s the social good silver lining.

Lots of impatient IMDb reviews urge people just to enjoy the films as art and stop worrying about the politics. I think that is exactly the wrong approach. Whatever else Claudia Llosa’s films are, they are an opportunity to talk about things which don’t often get an airing; painful, complex things which need to be voiced.

Feminism in Peru

I’m trying to pay attention to things that are happening in the world wider than London, and especially learning about and learning from the women’s movement in other countries.

Happily, I got to meet women from two leading feminist organisations in Peru – DEMUS and Fepromu – at a Womankind Worldwide event in April, where they spoke about their work. You can watch subtitled films of their talks here and here if you’d like to know more about what it’s like working for women’s rights in Latin America.

There’s also this interesting article about the relationship between development, Western feminism and the grassroots women’s movement in Peru, centred around the network of comedores.

More here: thegirlsonfilm.com

What I like about the Girls on Film project is that it shows us how thoughts expressed by characters in fiction are in fact deeply coloured by our perceptions of gender – such as the idea of being unable to know yourself without having first been in a fight. In the original piece, which is very much an anthem to anxieties over modern male identity, we take it as read that it is through fighting that men can come to know themselves. This recasting expresses those same anxieties as something we all share and need to deal with, regardless of our ostensible gender roles.

• 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. Send your finds to [email protected]!

M

MARRIAGE

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2.24

So begins marriage. In this day and age, most people think of such ‘cleaving’ as kinda cute, an emotional commitment “’til death do us part”; and indeed the union matrimony represents (‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) begins with the word’s Latin ancestor, the double-gendered maritus / marita (= ‘husband / wife’). Ever-efficient, the Romans join husband and wife in one word, giving us, in miniature, marriage’s first definition: ‘the relation between married persons; wedlock’.

Ooh little darlin’…

I do... Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Image from http://www.halloweenweb.co.uk/

But before all our newfangled post-Romantic notions of individualism, marriage was much less dewy-eyed. It required nothing more than parental consent, and its functions were social, religious and legal. Firstly, it acknowledged a sexual relationship and those children born within it, thus easing the financial burden of bastard upkeep on society and oiling the cogs of inheritance. Secondly, it was a Holy Sacrament, an institution to prevent sin, though it did not sanction guilt-free sex – too much fun with your wife, and it became adultery (= ‘pollution of the marriage bed’).

Finally – then as now – marriage linked families, dynasties, and countries together ‘in-law’, in a way that could be personal, symbolic, or world-changing: new money meeting impoverished aristocracy; the Venetian Doge annually ‘marrying’ the sea; Catherine of Braganza bringing England £300,000, Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. In extension, it helped negotiate the legal exchange of worldly goods, including a dower for the bride should she survive her groom, inheritance for the children, and the resolution of all money matters under the auspices of the pater familias. So it was impossible for a wife to run up debt, to own property, or, in any sense, to exist independently of her husband. In consequence, marriage became the Holy Grail for 99.9% of young women, who dreaded remaining financially dependent on rich relations or married sisters should the marriage-market reject them (as it did, if you were the wrong side of one in three aristocratic women).

…if U ain’t busy for the next 7 years…

Phew. In its second definition marriage takes up the legal challenge, becoming ‘the action, or act, of marrying; the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’.

Dearly Beloved... Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.

The non-specifics here are no accident: to the irritation of the early modern church, ‘contract marriages’ and Dodgy Marriage more generally (Scotch Marriages or Fleet Marriages) endured for centuries before the Marriage Act of 1753 put paid to such shenanigans and demanded a public service or none at all. Previously, ‘the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’ could be an exchange of bent or halved coins, the presentation of a ring, or a declaration (‘I make you my wife’). There were certain caveats to this last, of course – you had to use the present tense (no conditionals), unless you used the future and then tumbled into bed: present consummation is present consent.

All very neat, in theory, although such marriages generally took place on the hoof between impetuous couples and only became of real significance once the bride fell pregnant or one or both of the parties got into difficulties. Then you get into semantics: what does ‘will’ mean, exactly? It’s an uncooperative word, conflating what you ‘want’ and what you ‘will do’. Church courts agreed, and many of those marriages that were challenged were dissolved, with an inevitably skewed impact on the would-be wife.

So marriage is as much about speech and silence as ‘cleaving’: moreover, much of its value depends on the weight society gives how you live (today, you can lose your state benefits if you ‘live with another person as if you are married‘). It also creates interesting problems if you are physically silenced before you can assert your consent (as happens in Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed), or if your marriage is explosively interrupted, as in Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun. Conversely, Renaissance actors wondered what God thought about marriages carried out on stage as part of a performance: valid or not? Why not? This whole idea is, in essence, the premise of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2004), where nobody questions the legality of Victor’s (clearly accidental) declaration to the bride of the title, despite trying every other conceivable method to get him out of it.

…Let’s pretend we’re married and go all night.

The word marriage reflects this in a now-obsolete sense, as ‘intimate union’, antonymic to virginity. And here I nearly tripped up on another little tradition: breach of promise, a common law tort allowing a partner to sue their long-fled lover for damages based on the impact of such ‘intimate union’ but also on the value of language – ‘Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die? Well you’re still alive…’

This tort was overwhelmingly used by women, although originally payable to the father of a seduced girl, who had lost ‘services’ (make me a cuppa, love) because of her pregnancy. Later on, it became a means of quantifying waste of time, reputation and trousseau-money in a marriage market competitive enough that such things mattered. Although the tort was abolished in the UK in 1970, a version is still in use elsewhere: a jilted woman in Chicago is currently suing her fiance for the costs of her cancelled wedding, and ’emotional distress’. Whether or not she will succeed is unclear, but her early-modern precursors inevitably triumphed:

See my interesting client
Victim of a heartless wile!
See the traitor all defiant ,
Wears a supercilious smile!
Sweetly smiled my client on him
Coyly wooed and gently won him….

W.S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (1875)

Trial By Jury explains why the tort was so useful to jilted women, but also why it declined: by 1875 female financial options were expanding enough to change the public perception of such cases from ‘poor innocent maid vs. base seducer’ to ‘I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…’ So what began as a way to compensate gender inequality itself ended as a vehicle for misogyny, with stories of pretty girls luring men in and then threatening to do the legal equivalent of ‘thcreaming and thcreaming until i’m thick‘. What God has joined, let no man put asunder.

Further Reading:

• Check out Lawrence Stone’s The Road To Divorce: England 1530-1987, which tells you everything you need to know about everything.

• Sadly finished now, but keep an eye out for Amanda Vickery’s At Home With The Georgians, should it ever return to TV.

NEXT WEEK: N is for Nanny