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.

I

INFANT

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

LinkedIn.

Have you ever noticed how many I-words have the in/im prefix? These clarify what something is not.

Thus, in-nocent, in-nocuous = not harmful (the same root as ‘noxious’), im-potent = not powerful, in-capable = self explanatory; &c.

Infant is one such, but cleverly concealed by an unexpected etymology. Along with its archaic variants (enfaunt, infaunt), it derives from the Latin infans, which is the Greek ‘phemi’ in its plundered Roman form, ‘femi’, plus the Latinate negative (in- = ‘without’).

And phemi / femi? ‘To make known one’s thoughts, to declare’ or, simply, ‘to speak’.

Don’t Speak.

So an infant is ‘without speech’; or, as its first definition clarifies, ‘a child during the earliest period of its life (or still unborn)’ – Shakepeare’s ‘Infant, Mewling and puking in the Nurses Armes’.

Mew.

Newborns / kittens must indeed rely on ‘mewling’ for their day-to-day needs, but paradoxically such speechlessness gives them a symbolic potency that rings in the ear.

Indeed, they (babies, not kittens) have ‘spoken’ throughout history, from whistleblowing on promiscuous parents to confirmation of marital fidelity.

But hold on just one gosh-darned minute: that’s female fidelity, of course. The maternal connection is the only one you can prove, sans DNA testing. Male extra-curricular activity is neither here nor there.

And history is full of those awkward occasions when ‘speaking likenesses’ gives rise to speculation about what the child’s mother was up to nine months previously.

Mother’s Ruin.

Strangely, the infant’s own inevitable silence simply compounds the seeming power of what ‘they’ are saying: you’re hearing with your eyes rather than your ears. Or just reading.

Indeed, Paulina, the faithful lady-in-waiting in The Winter’s Tale would prove her mistress’ daughter legitimate by pointing to her book-like qualities: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father…’

Well into the seventeenth century, the village gossip could also deduce parental naughtiness through something as seemingly random as a child’s constitution: weakness or disease suggested either that the parents had been having too much sex to copulate at their full vigour, or else that conception had happened during menstruation. You slags.

And it didn’t stop there: infants could also tell tales through the very time of their arrival. It was commonly believed that young’uns entered the world nine months to the day after their conception. Consequently, no child born on a Sunday could be christened until its parents had made a public apology for their desecration of the Lord’s Day. Busted.

Even a child’s existence could be disastrously significant.

To sea, To sea…

In 1741, the retired sea-captain Sir Thomas Coram set up London’s first Foundling Hospital, whence came unfortunates from all walks of life to ensure that their screamingly ill-begotten infants would be cared for and kept from incriminating them (not necessarily in that order).

In many instances, such abandonment was the alternative to killing the child or leaving it to die. So Coram was hardly acting on a whim: the social repercussions of Sin were severe, poverty and gin dependency rife (a woman’s problem, and also a means of inducing abortions – why else ‘Mother’s Ruin’?) and the streets covered with child corpses.

Infantine... 'The Angel In The House', photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron

So Coram’s critics accused him of fostering sin, by giving it a Hospital wherein to hide: to offer succour to bastard infants was to shield the sinful and encourage further debauchery. Let the wages of sin speak loud and clear.

Speak Now, Or Forever Hold Thy Peace.

In its second meaning, infant becomes more defined: it does not simply signify a speechless-screaming babe-in-arms, but also ‘a person under legal age; a minor’ (someone who has not ‘completed their twenty-first year’).

Here it is law-based, in reference, for example, to all those boy-kings of our early royal history (how many can you name????) – whose legitimacy is the most important thing of all, taking priority over minor considerations such as… oh, I don’t know, BEING OLDER THAN SIX.

Infant in this sense connotes something like having yet to earn freedom sui juris; the legal understanding that a person is fit to govern themselves (and, in royal cases, a country), and consequent emancipation from the rule of parent, guardian or Lord Protector.

Among Spanish royals – to this day – children who are not the direct heir to the throne have the title Infante / Infanta; presumably giving us English our third definition for infant (‘a youth of noble birth’), these are princes of the blood, but they ain’t ruling nothing.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

It is also worth considering the more direct fate of infants’ mothers: ‘The very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during marriage’ wrote William Blackstone in 1765. A financial, legal and social dependent – like the children she bore – a wife could be ‘infantine’ through her official speechlessness, than which there is no more perfect example than Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854-62):

He’s never young nor ripe; she grows

More infantine, auroral, mild,

And still the more she lives and knows

The lovelier she’s express’d a child.

Yet, like the screaming infants littering Coram’s Fields, the silent appendage speaks vicariously: dress, jewellery and inactivity declare her husband’s wealth and status; ‘mildness’ and ‘loveliness’ (like youth and innocence) embody the ideals men battle to protect, with smatterings of the overpowering Rightness of the domestic sphere.

She remains, of course, firmly on her pedestal, and statues, as we know, do not speak (unless they are late Shakespearean and have the rather badass Paulina fighting their corner).

So being infantilised does not mean saying nothing; rather, it means saying what those around you choose to hear.

NEXT WEEK: J is for Jade