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Category Archives: Feminism

Don’t blame the women

Reading about the horrific sexual attack on war reporter Lara Logan gives me a certain sense of deja vue. In 1972 – almost 40 years ago – I was interviewed for a job as a foreign correspondent at Reuters. I was 20 and knew nothing of the world. The then managing director of Reuters, Gerald Long, after a pleasant half hour chat in his fine suite on the top floor at 85 Fleet Street turned to me and asked: And er Anne, how would you feel if you were raped by an advancing army?

Whatever I mumbled, and I have no doubt it was both fatuous and naive, clearly didn’t matter since I got the job as a graduate trainee at Reuters – the first woman on whom they chanced their arm, or more appropriately perhaps, leg. Although I didn’t speak Italian I was quietly despatched to Rome because it was thought women might have ways of getting a story, Italian style.

A couple of decades later I wrote a history of women reporters called Battling for News (just republished by Faber Finds as Battling for News: from the Risorgimento to Tiananmen). So I know this is not the first time women reporters have been attacked. I know that women, just as men, have always been prepared to use tricks – or good looks – to get a story. And I know that sometimes (ok, often) it’s the male editor who is to blame, especially where television is concerned, for exploiting a pretty woman in a flak jacket who appears on a screen in your own front room. Talk about vicarious thrills!

Nobody today has heard of Hilde Marchant but in 1936 when she was sent by Daily Express Editor Arthur Christiansen to cover the women’s angle of the siege of Madrid she was dubbed the best woman reporter that ever worked in Fleet Street. Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles were already there. Women and how they reported a war had become the story.

Anne Sharpley, accused by male rivals of sleeping with a police chief to get a story, was quite open about sex being a weapon in her armoury and her habit of pulling out telephone wires after she had dictated her own story. She took the view that men with their natural clubbiness had other advantages.

And as one example among many don’t forget Yvonne Ridley kidnapped by the Taleban in 2001 and pilloried by fellow journalists, including other women, who told her she had responsibility as a single mother. But are men ever asked the same question? Famously John Simpson not only dressed up in a Burqa to get himself smuggled into the Nangarhar Province, near the border with Pakistan but he was a father and since then also has a young child. It’s a decision each journalist has to make for his or her self and whether or not Lara Logan once modelled swimwear is irrelevant. Don’t forget men get attacked and tortured too. Men have babies and children at home. And men sometimes cry. Don’t blame the women for being there and certainly don’t blame them for being attractive.

Cat’s Paws at Work again

I finally caught up with the justly praised centenary exhibition devoted to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the Victoria and Albert Museum and drooled over the fabulous costumes remarkably preserved with all their brilliance and sparkle intact. I loved the fascinating commentaries on the music of the ballets by Howard Goodall and restored footage of Karsavina showing what dancing was like before the Ballets Russes when dancers had some flesh on them. And I consumed a host of mini biographies of such key artistic figures of the early twentieth century as Stravinsky, Bakst, Nijinsky, Fokine, Lydia Lopkova and my namesake – the wild and beautiful ballerina, Ida Rubinstein. For 25 years I was a Rubinstein, too, but in those days only knew about Anton and Arthur not Ida.

But I was reminded of one story which was not told here: on June 21 1911 Nijinsky made his debut on the London stage largely thanks to the support patronage and organisation of the beautiful society hostess, Gladys de Grey by then Gladys Ripon. Each performance of the Ballets Russes was a personal triumph for Gladys none more so than the one given four days after the coronation, in front of the new King and Queen, at which she swept up and down the aisle of the Opera House personally greeting as many members of the audience as she could.

This public and dramatic success worked like a knife in and old wound for Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie (by then Mrs Cornwallis West). Jennie could never forget how her late husband, Lord Randolph had admired, wooed and perhaps even bedded Gladys. Jennie decided to pursue an even more ambitious goal of promoting a Shakespeare Memorial and a National Theatre largely out of rivalry with Gladys. Actually Jennie’s was a brilliantly imaginative idea to raise funds for a National Memorial Shakespearean Theatre. She recreated a Shakespearean world at Earl’s Court with buildings designed by Lutyens, Elizabethan taverns and jousting competitions. But her event flopped and yet again Jennie lost money. Soon after she lost her husband too, George Cornwallis West. Jennie died in 1921 after a fall down stairs Diaghilev eight years later in 1929.

Wimmin’s Work

I have just been to see Made in Dagenham. It’s a film about 187 women machinists who went on strike at the Ford Motor Company in 1968 initially when their work was down graded from skilled. Slowly the issues broadened out into an all out strike for equal pay for women and one of the best moments in the film is seeing the idea dawning on these brave, if rather too well dressed and coiffed women, that equal pay is not only a right it’s an achievable right. It’s a beautiful film and when the men turn against them, very moving. At least, it made me cry.

It reminded me of how, ten years later in 1978, I too faced the power of my own union, the NUJ, or at least a small part of it. I wanted to take maternity leave and come back to my job at Reuters in Fleet Street. But, as the Father of the Chapel reminded me, I was just one woman with one problem and they were in the middle of fighting a pay claim for all five hundred or so journalists. To support me in my battle to keep my job open until after the baby’s birth would divert energy and risk weakening the fight for more money for us all…surely I understood that?

I understood enough to resign from the NUJ and realise I lacked the courage of the Dagenham women. I resigned from Reuters, paid back my maternity leave and became a freelance journalist and member of the ever-supportive Society of Authors. Later that year the law changed but I had produced my baby too early. It’s hard to believe these antiquated ideas are so recent, until you see the bouffant hairstyles, black rimmed eyes and fabulous Biba dresses. I remember wearing them! Discrimination against women in the workplace still exists but not quite like it did in the sixties and seventies before the law changed. The film started from a Whistledown Radio programme in 2003, The Reunion, in which the Dagenham strikers were brought back together to share their experiences and at the end you get to meet the real women…

Amazing mother fighting for justice

I interviewed Sheila Blanco for The Times last month. She is an extraordinarily brave and courageous woman, absolutely determined to get Justice for her son Mark, who was 30 when he died in mysterious circumstances after attending a party with Pete Doherty and friends. Today Sky News is delving even further into the story determined to find out the truth about how he died. Listen to it and make up your own mind. It won’t bring Mark back but he deserves justice.

Walking Between the Raindrops

The most important moments happen in kitchens, says David Grossman the Israeli novelist in London briefly this week explaining why he wanted a mother as the main protagonist of his new book. I needed someone who would NOT collaborate with the machinery of government nor with warfare, he said. A man would not run away from the notifiers but a woman could and does. Listening to him talk about his characters in The End of the Land at Friend’ House on Thursday night, and then later Henrietta Foster’s film on Newsnight – (well worth watching on iplayer)- I could feel his own raw agony and how, as he said, war radiates into the bubble of family destroying whatever it finds there.

So why a mother not a father? Grossman says the appeal of being a novelist is to become the character he’s creating. I love the idea of being invaded by so many people who are different from me. Tragically Ora was not so different from him. His own son, Uri, was killed in the Lebanon War in 2006. Mother or Father, war anywhere is the most brutalising form of existence contrary to every form of nurturing creativity that a mother and a father can make together. How long can anyone in Israel keep walking between the raindrops without getting splattered, Mother or Father? Grossman has not yet embraced despair but he is not exactly full of hope either.