The Gender Blog

Rocking the vote in Florida, 2004

Whatever you do,  wherever you are today,  please go and vote; a hundred years ago,  you wouldn’t have had the option.

A hundred years ago,  women died, were imprisoned, starved themselves in prison, so that we, their future daughters,  would have the right to go to a polling station and exercise our vote alongside our husbands, fathers and brothers. 

Voting,  particularly for women,  is not only a right,  it is a hard-won privilege. 

If you think that “politics doesn’t apply to me”,  as I have been told so many times by so many women – then think about all the things in your world, in your life,  which do apply to you:  the environment, education, hospitals, employment, medical care, crime.  By voting today,  you are  using your voice to make a conscious choice about how your country is run and by whom.

Please – make time to vote today, whether it’s because you want to have a say in how UK plc is governed for the next five years or in memory of the brave suffragette fighters who suffered so terribly so that we would have the rights which they were denied. 

Here’s an extract from the 1909 diary of suffragette Laura Ainsworth,  in which she describes being force-fed:

“They hold your arms and legs … You have a towel wrapped around you. One doctor kneels at the back of your right shoulder and forces your head back.  He forces your mouth and the other doctor pushes the tube down your mouth about 18 inches. You have a great tickling sensation, then a choking feeling and then you feel quite stunned.”

(For more on these brave women and the debt owed to them by 21st century women,  check out “The Ascent of Woman: a History of the Suffragette Movement” by Melanie Phillips).

As my friend CJ would say, it’s “very pleasing”  to see that PinkStinks’s campaign against supermarket giant Sainsbury’s has been successful; thousands of children’s dressing-up outfits have now been cleared from shelves after complaints (via a PinkStinks co-ordinated campaign) that they promote sexist stereotypes.

As reported here in the Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury’s (“Try something new today!” – indeed …) were merrily selling nurses’ outfits “for girls” and doctors’ kits labelled “for boys”, along with pilot and “superhero” costumes – but these have now been removed and will be replaced with a new range of gender neutral dressing up outfits.

Nice work, PinkStinks – and a great testimony to the strength of their pester power social media campaign (which I joined even though I don’t have children myself, let alone daughters or even nieces).

Whenever I hear stories like this, or read about manufacturers and retailers unwittingly promoting gender and/or inappropriate messaging and stereotypes (wasn’t it Woolworths – RIP – who hit the headlines a few years ago for launching a range of pink painted bedroom furniture aimed at little girls named the “Lolita”?), I remind myself of a small boy called John and how invidious and impactful gender images can be. 

John is the son of a female friend who works as a GP; she is evidently from a very smart family, because her sister is also a doctor. One day, returning home from a visit to his aunt’s house, where my friend and her sister had been talking medical shop, John, then aged five, asked his mother:

“Mummy – when I grow up, can I become a doctor too, or is it only ladies who are allowed to do that?”

I’ve just finished reading “Women of the Raj” by Margaret MacMillan,  purchased for the bargainous price of 1p from Amazon Marketplace (this second-hand book buying thing is my token nod towards economy whilst I’m on my sabbatical;  I’m still buying just as many books as before but I’m trying to pay less for them … but the volume,  no pun intended, continues).

“Hello”,  said the postman on Wednesday morning. “Here’s your daily Amazon delivery.”

So, “Women of the Raj” continues my fascination with all things from India,  telling as it does the story of some of the British women who were part of Britain’s involvement in India over three centuries,  but particularly between 1850 and the “end of the empire” in 1947. The role of the women of the Raj was to create a replica of British society and the book,  using source material such as letters, memoirs and novels of the period looks at how this was done and how British women from all walks of life adjusted to a country in which almost everything was “foreign” – described in the book as:

“The women … press on with their daily tasks, creating homes for their men, bringing up their children, and trying always to live the life of an English gentlewoman in the midst of an alien people.”

I’ll be going to India myself next month (more to come on this in a bit) and I know that I’ll mostly be packing lightweight clothing in loose, light fabrics … so try to imagine being in 80-100 degree F heat and yet being:

 “ … expected to dress as if you are still at Home [England]. Even on the hottest days, they wore stockings and dresses, which fell, until after the First World War, in heavy folds to the ground; and, until standards were relaxed during the Second world War, they never went out with their arms bare.”

I also liked this analogy, comparing the women’s’ clothing with the infrastructure of the British presence in India:

“Underneath, they wore petticoats and camisoles and, for much of the Raj, the inevitable stays [corsets] – the iron frame for the memsahib just as the Indian Civil Service was the iron frame for British India.”

And this bit also struck me as so very true; the likenesses between the British class system and the Indian caste structure had not previously occurred to me:

“In their love of rank and complicated social rules, the British were also influenced by their surroundings.  The Indian love of ritual, the whole elaborate structure of caste with its rules that governed how you ate, how you married, even how you dresses, seeped into their collective outlook.”

As well as providing a good overview of the history of the British in India in general,  and of the associated experiences of the “women of the Raj” in particular, MacMillan also tells the stories of a few specific women. I particularly enjoyed reading about Annette Akroyd, who, in 1873, with some help from her Indian friends, opened a school for Hindu girls.

(Further reading led me to the discovery that her son, William Beveridge, was the author of the report which became the foundation of the British Welfare State in the late 1940s).

So, a recommended read;  well worth a penny of your cash and a few hours of your reading time.

… and all the men and women merely players.”

And this link to a Vanity Fair article on the difficulties experienced by female writers trying to break into the closed circle world of writing for the US male chat show hosts shows that the issues faced by women in corporate life are no different.

October 2009: Nell Scovell on David Letterman Hollywood: vanityfair.com

This bit particularly resonated with me; swap “late-night-TV” for “investment banking” and “writers” for “executives” and the identikit situation is more than clear:

“One frequent excuse you hear from late-night-TV executives is that “women just don’t apply for these jobs.” And they certainly don’t in the same numbers as men. But that’s partly because the shows often rely on current (white male) writers to recommend their funny (white male) friends to be future (white male) writers.”

OK. I do concur that perhaps male investment bankers may not be as funny as the guys who knock out the gags for Jay Leno’s monologue. But apart from that … same scenario, different dress code, yes?

Here’s Victoria Wood, on death:

In India, if a man dies, the widow flings herself on to the funeral pyre. In this country, the woman just says: “72 baps, Connie; you slice, I’ll spread.”

Thanks to Ms Wood and also, to a lesser extent, her fellow Lancastrian, comedian Peter Kay, I can now no longer utter the name “Connie” other than in a Northern voice; it somehow sounds completely wrong in my BBC English accent.

(As did asking for an “Alfred Hitchchocolate cupcake, please” in San Francisco earlier this month … but that’s another story.)

A couple of years ago, I picked up a copy of “New York” magazine when I was out there on a business trip, and instantly found myself enthralled by its mix of news stories, political commentary (John Heilemann’s election campaign coverage during 2008 kept me very well informed), TV and movie reviews and, perhaps best of all, the now-on-the-back-page “Approval Matrix”, which divides the page into quarters and dubs news stories and events as “Highbrow/Despicable”, “Highbrow/Brilliant” and the “Lowbrow” equivalents.

Always good to know, for example, where a woman alleging that she was asked to leave an IKEA store in Brooklyn for breast-feeding sits on the moral compass, I think.

Because I am married to he who is officially the World’s Nicest Man, TLS, I am now a happy recipient of a massively overpriced but much loved by me subscription to “New York” magazine, which hits my London doormat at annoyingly sporadic intervals but which is always pounced upon and read immediately.

The most recent edition arrived yesterday, mid way through my as previously mentioned “Mad Men” marathon so I hit pause and opened it up … only to discover that the on-the-pulse editorial team had not let me down and were running a couple of “Mad Men” stories.

Here’s a link to a good interview with Christina Hendricks who plays Joan – and also a typically (but wittily, in classic NYM style) episode summary of the first two seasons.

I am so envious of all those based in the US who get to see the first episode of season three tonight. To quote from Monty Python: “you lucky, lucky bastards.”

This, from today’s Observer newspaper:

“I’m voting for Hillary. I think bitches get things done.”

(2008)

That may well be true, Jerry, but I do tire of seeing somebody who I’d describe as a “strong woman” also being described as a “bitch”.

Since when did the words become interchangeable?

I so hope that the news stories of a week ago about the potential closure of the Observer newspaper don’t come to pass; it’s been my Sunday newspaper of choice for my entire adult life and always amuses (see last week’s brilliant David Mitchell column for a classic example), educates and makes me think.

An article today about a midwife in Afghanistan , as quoted in today’s blog post’s subject line, is the perfect reminder of how great a newspaper this is.

(So great, in fact, that today’s Sunday Times actually carries a letter, signed by a multitude of well known names, making a plea for the paper to be saved).

I was reminded of this (in)famous quote on feminism yesterday, when having lunch with some friends; they are a married couple, with two small children. He works outside the home, she is at home with their boys, aged 5 and 8.

Although I said nothing to prompt or provoke what followed, I can only imagine that, for whatever reason(s), her “at home” status is perhaps preying on her mind, because she commented that: “I suppose, because of your job, you think that I should go back out to work now that the boys are at school”.

Not at all, I replied; my job is about ensuring that women who are already in the workplace, have the opportunities once there which are afforded to their male colleagues, ie to be promoted, to lead, to manage, to work in a flexible way – and that the lack of those opportunities does not then make them wish to leave. There’s nothing about my job in gender diversity which is about forcing women to go to work unless they want to do so, or, economically, have to do so.

But it’s clear that, even in 2009, there’s still confusion over what we mean by “feminism” – so this 1913 quote from Rebecca West does still hold true:

“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

For what it’s worth … feminism to me is about choice, opportunity and flexibility; it’s not about “having it all”, but it is about having the opportunity to choose what form and shape your life will take, be that working inside the home, outside the home, having children, or not – or making any other of the myriad of choices now available to twenty-first century women.