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Kate Iles Croft

~ Librarian, Researcher and Lunar Lady

Tag Archives: women

Books, Bras and Birthday Buffy

10 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, women

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feminism, librarians, libraries, media, women

Buffy is twenty years old. Or at least the television series that re-launched the teenaged vampire slayer on the small screen, after the disastrous feature film outing, is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. This landmark has caused a small ripple of media based reminiscences about its impact on popular culture, which has brought it back into mainstream consciousness.

I was, and am, a big Buffy fan. I am also happy to admit that I wasn’t the target audience in 1997, when the show was first broadcast, in so far as I wasn’t a teenager. I was ten years beyond that, although when I first encountered Buffy in 1999, I was enjoying a sort of second youth, because I was back at university, studying to become a librarian, which turned out to be part of the attraction.

Back home one evening, after a day of getting to grips with the Dewey Decimal System, idly channel-hopping, I stumbled across a conversation between several teenagers and a tweed-clad, bespectacled librarian, in which they were discussing the finer points of vampire slaying. My attention being doubly caught by the discussion of vampires on BBC 2 on a Wednesday evening and the fact that it was taking place in that most hallowed of ground – a library, I ceased channel-hopping and started watching. At first I was ready to be irritated by the stereotypical portrayal of a librarian, but soon realised that I was more intrigued than irritated. Yes, stereotypes appeared to be right there on screen, but they were quickly and decisively overturned, including that of the librarian, gloriously embodied in the form of Anthony Stewart Head.

There are many reasons why I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its advocacy of the power of books, libraries and librarians was the first. Buffy might be the Slayer, but book learning and research underpin her success. Scoffers of experts beware – in the fight against demons, literally and figuratively, knowledge is power.

But there were many other reasons; Buffy was smart and witty, funny and poignant. High school was, literally, hell and the blond girl was no longer a victimised plot-point. As a girl who had grown up watching and loving The Dukes of Hazard, The A-Team and Knightrider, to have a female kick-ass lead, was joyous. Until then, I’d had Wonderwoman (brilliant, but problematic, a bit like her 1990s incarnation, Xena) and my personal favourite, Princess Leia (the ultimate kick-ass female lead, even if she did have to function without a space-bra).  For me, one of the crucial aspects of Buffy was its celebration of the fact there is no one way to be either, a feminist, or a woman. For all her strength and power, which was without doubt a feminist statement, teenaged Buffy was still interested in clothes, make-up and boys. Being a strong woman doesn’t preclude wanting to look your best (after deciding what that might mean for you) or wanting meaningful relationships with members of the opposite sex (ditto). The show explored what female strength might mean, and that it and femininity might not be mutually exclusive. When the adult Buffy acknowledged the wider seriousness of her powers and the importance of what she does, she doesn’t stop wanting love. (Side bar: no, being a feminist does not automatically preclude wanting, needing and loving men).

But the other female characters are just as important as Buffy and gave the show an added resonance: Willow, clever and bookish, who comes learns the depth of her own power, made dangerous by hate and saved by love; Cordelia, the cheerleader pulled from her safe but shallow world by a grudging acknowledgment, first of Buffy’s heroism, and then all the pain in the world she can no longer ignore; Tara, gay, shy but with a quiet, calm inner strength; Anya, the disarmingly literal capitalist, and Faith, at first damaged and solitary, but redeemed, and then strengthened by solidarity. All of these women demonstrated the blindingly obvious reality that there are as many ways of being female, being feminine and being a feminist, as there are women.

Equally, in Buffyworld, men are important. Buffy’s relationships with them offered positive examples of how men and women can relate to one another. Buffy’s friendship with Xander might begin with his boy-crush on her, but it never descended into stalkerishness, coercion, or revenge. Instead it blossomed into a meaningful friendship, part of the support system that ultimately gave Buffy her true strength. But it’s Buffy’s relationship with Giles that is, for me, the most powerful. Buffy might drive Giles crazy with her choice of music, clothes, and eventually boyfriends but he saw her potential. Giles is Buffy’s teacher and guide, authoritarian at times, but committed to nurturing her strength and ability. Ultimately Giles, as Buffy’s spiritual father, resigned from the Watcher’s Council, refusing to sanction their belief that they have the right to dictate how a woman should behave, even if she is a Slayer. Giles put his trust in Buffy, just as she put her trust in him. And when she needed him, needed his guidance to develop and deepen her powers, she openly asked for his help, not because she was weak, but because she was strong and could be stronger with his support.

As a woman who has been lucky enough to have overwhelmingly positive relationships with men, including my own father, to see a young woman develop such a strong bond with a father-figure on screen, was equally as joyous as seeing Buffy, Willow, Cordelia and Faith there. Because while I believe in the power of women, and in the right of every woman to live their own lives, make their own choices and choose what sort of woman they want to be, without reference to men, I also believe that women and men can, and do, have strong relationships as daughters and fathers; sisters and brothers; wives and husbands; friends; partners and lovers. When those relationships are truly reciprocal, based on mutual respect and trust, they have a power that strengthens women and men equally. For me, that message remains important, maybe today even more so, twenty years on.

Plus, what’s not to love about a guitar-strumming, demon-slaying, hell-mouth closing librarian?

The Eye of the Bird and the Worm

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

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feminism, history, women

Leo McGarry, the fictitious White House chief of staff from The West Wing, observed in the episode Five Votes Down, “There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em: laws and sausages.” For some reason this quote popped into my head recently, as I was travelling to work and happened to catch a glimpse of the front page of the Metro. I don’t remember what the headline was. It could have been referring to any number of stories that are dominating the news cycle at the moment: the American Presidential election; Brexit; ISIS; the migrant crisis; Syria. Regardless of how I feel about any one of these stories (one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; one woman’s sexual predator is another woman’s saviour – apparently) I got the feeling that, at the moment, the making of history has become visible.

History is made every day and it is as much a process as an event. It’s in the history of small things and the accumulation of the every day that historians can, with hindsight, piece together the stories of the past, providing a narrative, or more accurately, narratives of what went before and how we ended up where we are now. The people whose present became our past, passed through the every day, so enfolded and enmeshed in the various events, and in the immediacy of their own lives, that history is usually formed unseen. But sometimes there are events so dramatic that they push through the fabric of the present and we become aware of their significance, not just for us but also for the future.

Looking back at the past gives you, with the privilege of hindsight, a bird’s eye view that allows a bigger picture to emerge, but it also hides the grim and gritty reality of the everyday. The trend in recent years for historical recreation programming is still healthily alive if the latest BBC offering, The Victorian Slum, is anything to go by, and while these programmes can be jolly good fun and poignantly revealing, they cannot truly recreate the smelly, noisy, hungry, dangerous and painful reality. Nor should they, because if they did, several centuries of progress, supposedly embodied in legislation and changed social attitudes (hello Health and Safety laws and several anti-discrimination acts), would disappear in a puff of a nineteenth-century coal fires smoke (cue redtop headline: Child forced up chimney for BBC-funded entertainment shock!!)

But right now, it’s not a bird’s eye view we have, it’s that of the worm and with it comes a grim and gritty reality that we can’t avoid. Not only is history being made, but we are witnessing a regression, when old conflicts open up, old attitudes reappear and old ideas are resurgent; reconfigured, but still resurgent.

The results of these events are still unknown. We have no idea what the outcome of the vote by 52 per cent of the British population to leave the European Union will be; if Hillary Clinton will become the first female American President or Donald J. Trump will become one of the most ill qualified. I don’t know when or if we will see peace in Syria; if ISIS will be defeated or will strengthen; if the thousands of displaced men, women and children will ever feel safe enough to return to their homeland, or find peace and acceptance in a new country. For millions of people, their every day has changed forever with the loss of their home, their family and country. For millions more, the consequences of their actions, of exactly in which box they choose place a simple cross, has and will change their future. The accumulation of small things is coinciding with the massive shifts in the geo-politics of nations. In each of these events, history is being visibly made; and like the making of laws and sausages, it ain’t pretty.

The Shadow of Eve

26 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

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feminism, history, women

Once all the wittering and twittering over the Tim Hunt affair has died down, what are we left with? Ill-judged comments that deserved to be ridiculed, a glimpse into the sexism that female scientists and academics encounter on a daily basis and a well-respected Nobel prize winner’s career clouded in controversy.

As the storm in a test tube begins to abate, what remains is a simple but wearisome idea – women really, REALLY shouldn’t have a presence in spaces that men self-identify as theirs. In the Lab, opined Hunt in his subsequent non-apology, it’s TERRIBLY IMPORTANT that people are on a level playing field. The implication being that scientific playing fields which are made up solely of chaps, will always be level and that class, education, sexual orientation, experience, personality, personal and professional allegiances will make not a jot of difference. No, its the GIRLS that are the problem. Girls (not women) are distracting, they cry if you criticise them and oh, you would not believe the sexual tension that arises over a Bunsen burner. With so many chemical substances already flying around the lab, the introduction of oestrogen into the mix is just too much and it is the poor innocent science that suffers!

It’s all utter nonsense, but perhaps the reason his comments touched a nerve and the whole incident spiralled into Twittermob meltdown is that they typify both the anti-female zeitgeist of our current times and the age-old misogyny that has proved to be remarkably cockroach-like in its ability to evolve and survive.

From Gamergate to Twitter, from campaigning for Jane Austen to be on the £10 note to presenting BBC history programmes, from a presence in the boardroom, laboratory or lecture theatre to any sort of online presence, women are currently being horrendously abused and threatened simply for being there and participating. Since Hunt’s now-notorious speech, we’ve had London’s Garrick Club voting to remain a male-only enclave and Ellen Pao forced out of her job with Reddit due to vicious online abuse, to name but two recent examples of the desperate desire of some men to colonise various places and spaces.

Why? Because of the simple contention that men and women are different and within that difference lies inequality. This is nothing new and the shadow of Eve hangs over us still. For millennia female subordination was predicated on the outcome of the most ill-fated garden stroll in history, and for some, it still is. Even when Enlightened science and philosophy began to undermine the old, long held prejudices, Eve’s legacy lived on in the new ways people found, and continue to find, to justify the subordination of women. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, science began to replace God as the reason for female inferiority and it was biology, rather than sin, that justified women’s submissive role. Women have children and for that reason, their own reason is subordinated to their womb. To produce and raise their husband’s children is both the only, and supreme, role of women.

“The whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honoured by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make the lives agreeable and sweet – these are the duties of women at all times and they ought to be taught from childhood,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1764, summing up the new attitude of a world which was no longer quite so sure of the validity of the old religious truths, but desperate not to allow women to think all the chatter around the new and exciting concept of ‘rights’ could apply to them.

Trouble is, women were already thinking exactly that: “If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” asked Mary Astell in 1700, beating Rousseau’s revelation that, “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains” by sixty-two years and signalling the beginnings of the intellectual debate about the basis on which male superiority was built.

Women have always challenged the idea that there are spaces, physical and metaphorical, into which they should not enter and for it they have been sneered at, abused and too-often killed. They have been branded heretics and witches; infuriated the sour-faced John Knox into blasting his first trumpet against their monstrous regiment; likened to hyenas in petticoats, and dismissed as unsex’d creatures. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea summed it up in verse:

“Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to inquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our outmost art, and use.”

The vitriol directed at these women has always revealed more about the insecurity on which the gender hierarchy has been based, than the women themselves, and has largely been based on the notion that there is a naturally ‘right’ way for women to behave, and the natural space in which they should exist is the domestic one. If they should they have ambitions beyond it or don’t behave in the way sanctioned by society as feminine, then they should be made to know their place. They should be threatened, harassed and intimidated back into the dark places of subservience and submission.

Today, after the first, second and third wave feminisms which has fought for and won many victories for the notion that women are, in fact, rational creatures and not children of a larger growth, we find ourselves once again facing the vitriol of gender insecurity. The language is different, but the arguments are the same. Women shouldn’t intrude on the rights of men. Whether it is the right to science, business, politics, the digital space or the public space, somehow we are still labouring under the notion that these are spaces that are presumptively gendered and that gender is male.

Glimmers of hope exist. The Garrick Club’s vote to continue to exclude women didn’t pass without controversy and many of its members were infuriated not that women should be allow in, but that they continue to be kept out. But they are glimmers only, and they are lost in a culture still saturated by a petulant sexism; a sexism that ultimately hurts both men and women in its continued desire to draw rigid and uncompromising lines of demarcation between the genders.

So maybe the real significance of Tim Hunt’s comments is that they have no significance; they are simply a continuation of Eve’s legacy, reminding us of the battles still ahead. But history tells us that too much progress has been made by too many people, men and women alike, for us to sink beneath its shadow now.

Fifty Shades of Subtlety

05 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in feminism, history, women

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feminism, history, women

Labour MP Chuka Amunna recently commented during BBC’s Question Time that when it comes to politics, people want only black and white answers. As disconcerting as it is to find yourself agreeing with a politician, this echoed a thought that has been bothering me for some time.  If anybody wanders into the public domain and offers an opinion or observation that isn’t bombastic in conviction and absolute in content, they get lambasted or ridiculed. It seems that, unless they come complete with a blindfold, leather whip and incredibly dodgy prose, we really do not like shades of grey.

The problem with this is that most of life is exactly that – grey.  Life is nuanced, problematic and shifting. The issues we face every day, both personally and collectively, often require a thoughtful and balanced response and do not have black and white answers. Yet as soon as you look at the debates around those issues you find strident voices telling you black and white is all you have. Problems with the NHS? Blame the immigrants, No jobs? Blame the immigrants (again), Too many immigrants? Blame the EU, Don’t like the EU? Leave and all our problems will be solved. Society breaking down? Blame anybody – immigrants, schools, working mothers, single mothers, feckless dads, feminism…

And so we come to feminism. Most of the most ridiculous blacknwhite rhetoric I’ve ever come across revolves around feminism; what it is and what it isn’t – its aims, its impacts, its history, its winners and its losers.  The debates into which feminism, both ideologically and practically, can be brought are many and varied, but in all of them it doesn’t take long for blacknwhitism to surface.  At one level the statements, on both sides, are so crude they are laughable; feminism is a Marxist plot (or a capitalist one) to destabilise society; housewives are stupid; feminists hate men; men can’t be victims and so on. But as crude as these statements are, they pose a problem for those of us who do accept and embrace the grey, because they block positive, healthy debate. In this sort of debate, we accept not every one will agree and people may draw different conclusions from the same source. This type of debate, where we have the possibility of gaining insight and change, can only occur if we step into the grey. In the grey, we can discuss why, and if, we needed feminism and where it came from historically. We can explore that history (or histories) and it’s various alliances with other political ideologies, while seeing it as a diffuse and developing idea. We can acknowledge that, while feminism is celebrated by some, others including both men and women, view it only as a negative and argue for its reversal.

As a feminist historian the grey is important to me, because if there are those who argue that feminism has made things worse (a common contention), then you have to accept the past was somehow better. And that is a tricky argument to make, precisely because of the grey. Not only is life nuanced, problematic and shifting, it always was and trying to unearth the historical reality of people’s lives is a complex task. More than that, it is a task that will rarely uncover hard “facts” about those lives from which can be drawn the blacknwhite statements so beloved of contemporary commentators.  “Facts” are notoriously slippery things.  So no, history doesn’t tell us all women were desperate for feminism nor does it tell us all women were blissfully happy under patriarchy, it tells us something far more difficult and subtle; that the truth (another problematic concept, but one for a different time) lies somewhere in the middle, in the grey.

In the grey, the observation can be made that both patriarchy and feminism have a checkered past, but only by looking to that past and the lessons it teaches us can we move forward and try and meet in middle.

So this is a call to arms for those of us who understand that life is not black and white and that it is in the shades of grey that understanding, change and progress is to be found. We will never stop those who revel in blacknwhitism, either because they can’t see the grey or don’t care too. But those of us who appreciate the grey can try and find it in our debates and discussions, and by doing so can make life a little more colourful. Step into the grey and you just might find the rainbow.

And on that note – who wants to discuss religion?

Mistress Narrative and the Underpants of History

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by kateilescroft in historiography, Lunar Society

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historiography, Lunar Society, women

Women have no history. Apparently. Now while I’m happy to nail my colours to the feminist mast, and accept that I am naturally going to guffaw and growl at such a statement in equal measure, it is the ahistoricism of this opinion that worries me. In dismissing the historical existence of (over) half of the world’s population, you end up with bad history. Not history I disagree with, but BAD history because but it actually compromises the history of the other half of the world’s population – the men.

Not for one moment am I going to pretend that the male half of the population weren’t the most active players in the wars, the politics, the nation building, the industry, the innovations and all the other stuff of big history – the Master Narrative. But Master Narrative would have got nowhere without his Mistress. Or to put it in another way, would it have been possible to invent the steam engine without clean underpants?

In case it appears that I am reducing the role of women in history to a rather banal and fatuous contribution, let me assure them I am not. The women who followed their husbands into war, or supported their menfolk in high politics or grass roots agitation, or kept accounts as their husbands developed new and exciting kinds of industrial alchemy, or toiled beside their husband on the land or in small workshops, or did the exact same work as their male contemporaries for less remuneration merely because of biology, these women are just as active as the men and their contribution was far from banal.

What I am actually saying is that you cannot pretend that women were not there, in whatever capacity, as part of the narratives of the past that have been constructed as history. Going back to the underpants and steam engine metaphor, the men of the Lunar Society, Boulton, Watt, Priestley, Wedgwood and Darwin all had wives, who to a greater or lesser extent played a part in the ground-breaking activities of their husbands. Maybe Boulton, Priestley and Wedgwood would have become the trailblazers of the world’s first industrial revolution without Mary and Anne Boulton, Mary Priestley and Sally Wedgwood, but that is a redundant question. The fact is the women were there; they contributed.

And are we really to believe the men of history where untouched by female influence? That their mothers, nurses, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, wives, daughters, granddaughters and female acquaintances really have no impact on them at all? To argue that women are of no importance because they weren’t the major players in history implies that men existed in a hermetically sealed vacuum. That at some point they moved from the same sort of world we live in today, one of myriad and interconnected relationships and influences, and became something other than human beings. That at the time they were doing all the important stuff of history, they did so a parallel universe, where somehow they had miraculously been de-womanised.

Men and women exist in each other’s history, by virtue of existing in each other’s lives; they lived enmeshed and intertwined with each other and that doesn’t somehow magically unravel when the present moves into the past. The historian can unpick those intertwined strands and separate the histories out, but you can’t pretend either one didn’t exist. So, Master Narrative, I salute you, you have a history to tell and the right to tell it. But you and your followers should remember that your Mistress has a history also, and she’s not going anywhere.

Recent Posts

  • Books, Bras and Birthday Buffy
  • Footnoting a post-truth world
  • The Eye of the Bird and the Worm
  • The Shadow of Eve
  • Twisting the Ribbons of Time

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  • Twisting the Ribbons of Time

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