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Category Archives: Feminism

Of Books and Babies

Before you read this post here is a short film to remember all those pioneering women reporters:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2013/07-July/Anne-Sebba-The-Rise-of-the-Woman-Reporter.aspx

I am in the happy position of seeing a book that I wrote twenty years ago republished this month. Most excitingly, the book has been reviewed – a great surprise in these days of such tight space for reviewing even new books.  But then it wasn’t merely the old book in a new jacket. I had been allowed to add a whole new chapter, to update it – a rare treat as few writers get the chance to change an old book. It’s way too expensive and publishers aren’t keen on allowing anything more than dates and typos to be corrected; in other words nothing which requires resetting paragraphs or adding pages. I have quite a fat file of ‘Material that emerges after the book has been written,’ bulging with interesting information on all my other books. But what to do with it? Sadly, probably nothing. Yet often in the case of biography it is only after a book has been published that someone whose existence you may not even have known about approaches you with information they have been holding on to, not knowing what to do with it until your book appears. I have had some wonderful stories told to me (often in confidence) at an event when someone has approached me quietly, afterwards, and asked to share a story or a letter. It’s often a breathholding moment

 

But this time it was a history book that was republished –Battling for News  is an account of how women reporters have fought over the centuries for the right to report, not only wars but sporting and political events, or other danger spots normally left to men. I finished writing this book, heavily pregnant with my last child, a daughter, and was correcting proofs in the middle of the night at the same time as soothing or feeding her. Her early months were very much tied up with my thoughts about women’s progress in the world of work. As I wished this book on its way, I whispered sweet nothings to her, reassuring her she could be whatever she wanted to be. I really believed that to be the case. For this was in many ways the most personal book I had ever written.In 1972, twenty years before her birth, I had been hired by Reuters, the first woman they had risked on their prestigious graduate trainee scheme. I was sent to Rome as a trainee and had hoped to report on many danger spots around the world. But then I became pregnant for the first time and Reuters was not keen on foreign correspondents who were also mothers…unreasonably as I thought at the time. By the time I came to write Battling for News, which includes a historical account of the first women to report wars – women like Jessie White Mario who had to tend the wounded on the battle field before writing up her reports about Garibaldi’s progress in unifying Italy – I believed that all the barriers against women reporting wars on equal footing with their male counterparts were now torn down, that women reporters had achieved equality with their male counterparts. And so they had in many ways. After all in World War 2 British women were refused accreditation to the front line, hence their need to resort to ruses like dressing up as a hospital orderly or stretcher bearer in order to report on D Day landings as Martha Gellhorn did.

But now, another twenty years on, I saw that in fact women reporters, especially those on TV, faced different difficulties. They were expected to be young and pretty as well as brave and fearless and, if they were putting themselves in harm’s way, not to be a mother as well, as Yvonne Ridley learned to her cost when she was kidnapped and very publicly criticised for abandoning her daughter. I saw too that if women are passionately engaged in a story perhaps it makes them better reporters because they never give up but ferret out the details in a determined effort ‘to bear witness’. But that also comes with a cost. Marie Colvin was determined never to give up and was tragically killed in Homs in February, 2012. Several women reporters I have written about after facing relentless dangers and witnessing the carnage of bombs and IEDs finally succumb to post traumatic stress disorder. Some, like Christiane Amanpour of CNN, and Janine di Giovanni, now freelance, are very successful and offer a powerful role model to myriad young girls emerging from media college who want to emulate them. But, as I was repeatedly told, achieving that success has not been an easy ride and what may seem like a glamorous and exciting lifestyle is behind the scenes, dangerous, demanding and dirty. It is made tolerable by the support of colleagues and a solid media organisation. But even that can go wrong as when Lara Logan was attacked and brutally raped in Tahrir Square and came within an inch of her life. And she was one of the most experienced women reporters in the field. I know that twenty years on it’s a more complicated world and any young woman, not just a reporter, will face a difficult time in myriad ways getting a job, staying employed in that job, staying sane and – if she wants it – having a family.

As for my daughter I still tell her she can have anything she wants if she is prepared to work for it. But she is clever enough to know that is only half true.

New Zealand Women

Photography by Bev Short part of her All Woman exhibition

Photography by Bev Short part of her All Woman exhibition

In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote. After two decades of campaigning by women such as the Liverpool-born Kate Sheppard, who was also a temperance campaigner, politicians believed that empowering all women in this way might have a positive effect on morality in politics or even controlling men’s drinking habits. It was another twenty five years before Britain gave its female population – and then only those over 30 – the right to vote.

So, no surprise then that the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington has just opened a striking exhibition of photographs called All Woman * by another British immigrant, Bev Short, a Plymouth-born mother of two daughters, who came here ten years ago and says her aim is to create a debate about what it means to be a real woman today.

Her exhibition was opened by Melissa Clark Reynolds, once an impoverished, teenage single mother who struggled to finish her education, became a millionaire aged 35, and now works as an entrepreneur, philanthropist and climate awareness evangelist. It features women as disparate as a tattoo artist, sheep shearer, violinist, lance corporal in the NZ infantry, fire fighter, electrician, orthopaedic surgeon and a former Miss Zealand, mostly in unexpected poses not necessarily related to their work.

According to an introduction from Helen Clark, New Zealand’s first female Prime Minister who served from 1999 to 1980 and is currently administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, the UN’s third highest position:  “The show is a celebration of Kiwi women in the 21st century, some of whom … are redefining our idea of family and society, while others are making New Zealand proud on the international stage.” In 2006 Forbes Magazine ranked Clark 20th most powerful woman in the world yet few people outside New Zealand have heard of her.

Bev Short said the most shocking thing she discovered while working on the exhibition was the high incidence of domestic violence – against women and children. “I think that says something about the men in this society and it’s not just lower socio-economic groups or non-whites.”

Among the most powerful images is former international equestrian Catriona Williams, who represented New Zealand until she fell from her horse aged 30 in 2001 leaving her a tetraplegic. Yet instead of picturing her in a wheelchair, Short has her fully made up, with jewellery, wearing a magnificent red ball gown lying on a white sheet, her beautiful face radiating courage to her audience. “My ambition is to be able to dance with my husband once more,” she says. On the adjacent wall is Barbara Kendall, a retired windsurfing gold medallist now a motivational speaker, posed with curlers in her hair,  a phone in one hand, iron in the other, laptop open and child’s dress on the ironing board… a portrayal of multi-tasking with universal resonance for women.

*****

New Zealand is also famous for having relatively more book buyers per capita than any other country and this week The Forrests, the eagerly awaited novel by prize winning New Zealand author, Emily Perkins, was published and immediately needed to reprint.  The Forrests  has already been tipped as a likely winner of the Man Booker prize – at least by the Hay Festival where she is coming to speak in June. The last New Zealander to win the then Booker prize was another woman, Keri Hulme,  in 1985 with The Bone People .Perkins, who after living for eleven  years in London now teaches creative writing at Auckland University, is following in a powerful tradition of female New Zealand writers from Katherine Mansfield,  who  believed that power, freedom and independence were more exciting than love, to Janet Frame  (Angel at my Table)  and my own favourite, Margaret Mahy, whose brilliantly imaginative Lion in the Meadow I read night after night to my children .

Birthplace of Katherine Mansfield

Birthplace of Katherine Mansfield

Apparently this is precisely what Rudyard Kipling predicted when he came to New Zealand on a brief visit in 1891, according to his biographer, the New Zealand-based writer Harry Ricketts. Ricketts discovered a short story Kipling then wrote for the New Zealand Herald in which his narrator says, thinking of the future of Colonial literature, “Hark to the women now. They tell the old story well.”

*****

I am here to give a series of lectures about American women who shocked the British establishment including Wallis Simpson, Jennie Churchill and the so called Dollar Princesses, women who married into the British aristocracy trading money for titles. These women did not have careers and were often at the mercy of their parents who used them for their own social advantage. Katherine  Mansfield, born in 1888, certainly shocked the establishment. She wrote to friends of how she loathed the idea of  marriage as “The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of a great many girls…” Perkins told me that although Mansfield and Frame were a major influence on her writing, “I see New Zealand’s female literature in the 21st century as a constellation rather than a linear tradition. It has opened up dramatically in the last twenty years.”

Anne Sebba is the author of That Woman A Life of Wallis Simpson (Phoenix £7.99)

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…