BadRep: Tell us a little bit about the series in your own words.

Kathrynne Wolf: The Scarlet Line is an action-drama about a secret lineage of female bodyguards who are, when on active duty, code-named “Scarlet”.

Our premise is that the Line started with the famous “Jujitsuffragette” bodyguard team in Edwardian London. In the world of our story, after the First World War the organisation – ‘The Scarlet Line’ – went international and Scarlets have operated ever since then, protecting people who need their help.

“We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.”

Our main character, Amanda, is a retired Scarlet whose very ordinary life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Details of the reasons for this disruption, the purpose, history and future of the line get revealed throughout the season.

BR: What gave you the idea to do this?

KW: I was literally falling asleep one night when I had the idea for a secret lineage of female bodyguards, quietly going about the business of making the streets safer.

This is the sort of story I wanted to see on screen. It’s an old adage that you should write the story you want to read, be the change you want to see, and so on. I had been distressed by the narrow representation of women – and the UNDERrepresentation of interesting roles and stories for women in media – for a long time.

Two issues I find particularly insidious are the tendency for any female protagonist driving the story to be called a “Strong Female Character”, where this adjective seems unnecessary for a male protagonist, and the tendency for “Strong Female Characters” either to a) be somehow supernaturally or technologically augmented, or b) have a tendency to cry, even when on the job.

I wanted to see a story of a woman who kicks butt and takes names as a matter of course. It’s her job. She does her job, she does it well. The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story – there’s a crisis that needs solving, there are obstacles, stakes get raised, we wrestle with issues of morality, trust, crime, betrayal…

“The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story.”

The other major factor that made me want to tackle this project is that I come from a background of what is generally referred to as ‘Chicago Storefront Theatre’. We have over 150 small theatre companies in Chicago, producing shows in all kinds of spaces that weren’t originally intended to hold a theatre, because they have stories they want to tell. It’s very much a ‘do it yourself’ mindset.

That’s why I produced the web-series myself, rather than writing a screenplay and then sending it off to Hollywood, hoping it would catch someone’s eye and that it wouldn’t get lost in ‘option-land’… I wanted to see it happen.

BR: What made you decide to set the series in the US rather than Britain?

KW: The main factor is that I live in Chicago, and this is where I have connections, know the locations, and where it was, in fact, possible to produce the series.

That said, the ‘mythology’ of the Scarlet Line definitely lends itself to satellite stories. It would make a great CSI-style franchise. I would love to see The Scarlet Line: London, The Scarlet Line: Seattle, The Scarlet Line: Barcelona – I’d just need to figure out how to go about licensing the sucker.

BR: The lead Scarlet’s wig and makeup are very striking, and call to mind vigilante superheroes such as Catwoman, Silk Spectre from ‘Watchmen’ and Hit Girl from ‘Kick-Ass’. In other press, you’ve previously mentioned Wonder Woman in connection with the unusual ‘web’ weapon used by the Scarlets – are you inspired at all by comics, as well as martial arts and action cinema?

KW: I was raised on Wonder Woman and Kitty Pryde was my favourite X-Man. Like all storytellers, I can’t help but draw from everything I’ve studied, read and seen.

I would say the Scarlet character was drawn as much from The Equalizer and the Guardian Angels as from comic books and movies.

The lack of a current TV show like Wonder Woman is part of what goaded me into this. One of my oldest friends in the world had a baby daughter, and I had a “what will she WATCH???” moment of panic, as I considered the statistics that show that women’s representation in media has actually shrunk in the last few years.

I wanted to contribute to the ongoing development of a wider range of roles available to actresses and, therefore, role models available to young girls.

I don’t only mean morally upright ‘ideals’, I mean characters that represent the spectrum – that model all kinds of ways of being and behaving, living in the world, experiencing victories and consequences. The wider the spectrum presented, the more agency is given to young girls to figure out how they want to live for themselves.

The other major factor involved in the Scarlet wig and makeup is modern surveillance technology. The Scarlets have to keep their true identities secret, and research on the advances in facial recognition software led me to take the disguise angle to more extreme lengths than I’d originally planned.

It turns out that software has gotten scarily good at working around minor augmentations. Diana Prince’s glasses were NOT going to cut it.

BR: You perform quite a bit of realistic fighting in the episodes, as well as very kinetic movement with the Web weapons. Is it difficult to find film or theatre roles for women which showcase more realistic techniques?

KW: It is maddeningly difficult. For 13 years, I belonged to Babes With Blades Theatre Company, which is a Chicago company whose mission is to ‘place women and their stories centre stage’ using combat as a major part of their expressive vocabulary.

To do this, they’ve focused on developing new work, and they include an all-female-cast Shakespeare in every other season, as there simply are not many plays out there where women get to explore this range of human expression.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Don’t get me wrong – I love superhero stories, and am always happy for any opportunity actresses get to be that kind of hero. I just wanted to help open up the field so that they didn’t have to be somehow ‘other’ in order to do so.

BR: There are more women in TV and film who are action heroines these days, but they’re still often lone figures. Already in the trailers for early episodes we’re seeing that relationships (such as the one between Amanda and Marcus) are a big part of the story – are the relationships between female characters also focused on, alongside the ass-kicking?

KW: Most of the major characters in the series are women. We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.

The relationships are very important, and they’re explored much more deeply in Season 2. Season 1 is very much the set-up – it’s where the ball gets rolling. We introduce the major players, the major conflicts, the major themes, and some things get resolved by the final episode, but not all.

BR: What were the challenges of creating a web-series? Did the format give you more freedom to pursue feminist themes?

KW: The fact that we’re doing it all ourselves means we have no one to answer to. There’s no studio executive or marketing department saying ‘You have to include a male authority figure! She has to cry or it’s not believable!’ or any such nonsense.

The challenge, of course, is that we do not have studio resources. The good side of that is that no one is working on this project for any reason other than that they want to.

BR: What do you hope the series will achieve?

KW: I would love to inspire other folks with good stories to stop waiting for permission and MAKE THEM. I think the online short-form potential is evolving rapidly. The democratization of access to technical production capability is an amazingly wonderful thing, if you’ve got a story to tell.

I’d also like to help raise some awareness of some of the ass-kicking women of history – in fact, that is the subject of a panel I am doing at GeekGirlCon in Seattle in October – drawing from history to find inspirational stories of “non-super” superheroines.

If the series reaches some young (or not so young) folks who hadn’t yet realised that they’re allowed to take charge of their own stories and get them out there, and maybe some who hadn’t considered that there might be more roles for women than eye candy, damsel in distress or obstacle, even better.

The Scarlet Line Trailer 1 from Wolf Point Media on Vimeo.

• Huge thanks to Kathrynne Wolf for the interview, and we wish her all the best with the series! There’s a kickass trailer for Season 1 over here, and more info on the Facebook group and Scarlet Line website.
• Thanks also to Kathrynne’s husband Tony Wolf who wrote the book about the life of Edith Garrud, which prompted the original piece in our 2011 ‘Revolting Women’ series. Tony is currently working on a three-part graphic novel series inspired by the Ju-jutsuffragettes titled Mrs Pankhurst’s Amazons, due in 2014.

My choice of subject for our Revolting Women series was decided the moment I saw the picture below, an event which caused me to loudly shout “GET IN!” and do an air-punch with great abandon.

The lady in this image is Mrs Edith Margaret Garrud (1872-1971), and she appears to have a policeman in an armlock.

It turns out that it’s only an actor playing the hapless bobby, because Edith is the person responsible for teaching the Suffragettes jujutsu.

Before we ask how a middle-aged woman in a respectable hat was able to learn the (then barely discovered) Japanese martial art, let’s look at why she’d bother:

We have not yet made ourselves a match for the police, and we have got to do it. The police know jiu-jitsu. I advise you to learn jiu-jitsu. Women should practise it as well as men.

We have got to have [military] drilling in the East End. If there is any man who has been in the Army or who knows anything about drilling, will he please communicate with me, and we will start drilling.

You should all go out with your sticks [Indian clubs which were popular for exercise at the time, and easily hidden in clothing]. What is the use of demonstrating for freedom and going unarmed? Don’t come to meetings without sticks in future, men and women alike. It is worth while really striking. It is no use pretending. We have got to fight.
– Sylvia Pankhurst, quoted in the New York Times on Aug 12th 1913, shortly before she was arrested.

With the recent practice of police using “kettling” to contain students during anti-cuts protests, and any (very predictable) resulting violence against police by the protesters subsequently being loudly criticised in newspapers, it’s refreshing to see the sentiments above. ‘Well, we have to learn jujutsu too, or the police might be able to stop us. And obviously we can’t have THAT. This is a protest! Get someone who can make it happen and have him report to me immediately. Next?’ While the actions may cause debate today, the sheer ‘nothing will stop us’ attitude is amazing.

But Sylvia is not the focus of this post, much as we love her here on BadRep. It’s Edith who is less well known but also truly remarkable. She taught PE at a school and married William, also a PE instructor, when she was 21 and he 22. They moved to London and met the intriguing Edward William Barton-Wright, who in 1899 started to teach them both jujutsu.

I have to pause again and talk about Barton-Wright, because England produces a unique brand of truly bonkers things and he was definitely responsible for one of them which is of great importance to this narrative.

Stances from Bartitsu, and in the centre E.W. Barton-Wright and his terrifying moustache. (Image = Public Domain from Wikipedia)

Sherlock Holmes, as well as being a boxer, was written in a later story as knowing the gentleman’s martial art of “Baritsu”. This was a mis-spelling of Barton’s invention, “Bartitsu” (Barton-jujitsu). Asian martial arts weren’t very widely known in the West before 1900, and he was one of the first instructors in Europe. It was a time when… well, when men had moustaches and hats like those in the accompanying image. Barton-Wright had learned Shinden Fudo Ryu jujutsu and judo, and developed a new system for English people of ‘class and bearing’ to use with dignity (and often a walking stick or umbrella).

It was his academy that Edith and her husband attended, and they both went on to become students of Sadakazu Uyenishi who taught there. When Uyenishi left his own dojo a few years later, they took over as teachers of that club in Soho. (Their daughter, Isabel, also assisted them in running the dojo from 1911 onwards, at the age of fifteen.)

Edith was almost certainly the first female jujutsu instructor in Europe. She and her husband continued teaching until 1925 – but from 1908 she alone ran some classes which were only open to suffragettes.

And if you thought that Sylvia was a straight-talker in the quotes above, Edith didn’t hold back either. There is far, far too much awesomeness going on to fit it all into this post, so I strongly recommend you read the pages on the other end of these links:

In her article “Damsel Vs Desperado” for Health and Strength magazine in 1910, Edith said that jujutsu was not just for protesters to use against police (as the newspapers were gleefully retelling) but that

Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.

She then goes on to write a short story (with illustrations!) about a woman being attacked while “returning home along a lonely country road.” It contains lines such as:

Believing that he has had enough by now and that she has shown him what she can do, she gives him a severe twinge that makes him fairly squeal, and throws him off as a “thing” beneath contempt.

It was this magazine which came up with the title “Ju-jutsuffragettes”, one which Edith seemed to quite like, and in 1911 they printed another article describing a short sketch also written by her, in which a wife defends herself against her violently drunk husband. The headline proudly announced
“Ju-Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer: A Suffragette Play with a Moral“(!) The photos are brilliant (I am all too familiar with the wrist-lock in no.4, ouch) and the short script contains some comedy:

“I’ll learn this ‘ere jucy jujubes, Liz, for I could do for you if I was sober,” he says.
“No,” answers Liz; “you’re a good husband to me then, and wouldn’t want to, but when you’re drunk I’ll always be a match for you.”

The reminder that domestic violence was (and is) widespread enough to make the play relevant to the audience is chilling, however.

What makes Edith of particular importance to the protest movement she was part of is not just that she was a suffragette, or taught others to take on police during protests, but that she trained the 30 women known as “The Bodyguard”. This group was set up to prevent the frequent arrest of top suffragette protesters (the police would release those who were on hunger strike and then quickly re-arrest them). As well as pitched hand-to-hand fighting between ladies and Her Majesty’s constabulary, the Bodyguard used disguises, decoys and all sorts of other tricks to get the known leaders away after a protest. For many years, she was their chief trainer.

I ordered a copy of a charming book by Tony Wolf called “Edith Garrud: The suffragette who knew Jujutsu“. It’s one of the most fully-researched works on the woman and her deeds, but is written for children, leading to sentences such as ‘The Police, of course, didn’t like the idea of the Suffragettes’ new Bodyguard society one little bit.’ It also provides some amazing quotes and stories: during one public demonstration, a reporter from the Daily Mirror was invited to attack the 4’11” Edith on stage. After trying several attacks and being roundly thrown or wristlocked each time, he wrote of his experiences in an article for the newspaper:

I rose convinced of the efficiency of Jujutsu, and, aching in every limb, crawled painfully away, pitying the constable whose ill-fortune it should be to lay hands on Mrs. Garrud.

Again and again in her story we see parallels to the student and anti-cuts protests earlier this year. The suffragettes knew that property damage meant headlines, but there were generally strict boundaries – no people were to be hurt, and no factory or other workplace was to be damaged where people’s jobs would be affected. One incident Edith was involved in was a gathering of women on Oxford Street, who, when Edith blew a whistle, pulled hammers and rocks from under their clothes and threw them through shop windows. This was seen as a logical, necessary and entirely justified action which had a place in protest, not just empty vandalism, and she defends it eloquently. Newspapers and blogs are still having that debate today.

She presented a suffragette petition to Lloyd George, who started to argue with her. Edith replied “Now then, you are dealing with a fellow countrywoman from the Welsh Valleys. Be sensible, man!” (She was born in Bath but grew up in Wales). They then had entirely civil conversations on more than one occasion, although never agreed on ideals.

Edith depicted in the July 1910 edition of Punch magazine.

In an interview for Woman magazine when she was 94, she said that self-discipline had been the key to jujutsu and protest – discipline of the body, but much more of the mind. Even at that age she presented as someone with unbending levels of determination. Reading about women’s voices in protest then and now, the difference comes over as a directness in attitude: of being entirely sure that your cause is just and that you must therefore do everything to help protest succeed. The conversation in those circles would be “So the police are using kettling and ‘pre-emptive arrests’ to suppress dissent. How do we make sure those techniques never work on us again?”

Edith Garrud died in 1971 at the age of 99. She was instrumental in teaching the suffragettes the skills they used to evade capture and speak in public for longer. She also broke new ground in being a woman who taught martial arts only recently discovered in Europe to women. This year, Edith will be honoured with a permanent memorial by Islington council – an ‘Islington People’s Plaque’ – because she won a public vote to be one of the five people or places thus celebrated.