Zoe Williams - What's the best way to get written out of history? Be a middle-aged woman
The omission of Mo Mowlam from a lineup of
the architects of the Good Friday agreement shows how older women are forgotten
– even ones who changed the world
History erases the contribution of middle-aged women. It takes a lot of
time, but that’s fine, because that’s what history’s good at. “How the devil
did they get away with that,” you might think, looking at a magazine cover’s
lineup of the architects
of the Good Friday agreement that is entirely male, and doesn’t
include Mo Mowlam. “What happened to the women who actually broke this story,”
you possibly wonder, surveying an
all-male panel called upon to discuss the finer details of the
Cambridge Analytica revelations. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not the next day,
but some time soon the airbrush will have come for Theresa May, Angela Merkel
and Sheryl Sandberg, and we will be confused, unable to understand how Brexit
meant Brexit, or the euro survived, or who taught Mark Zuckerberg how to open
his mouth in the manner of a person smiling.
In fact, all social
movements of any importance were started by middle-aged women, and there’s a
solid case-by-case reason why we have forgotten them all. The Fight the Famine
Committee, after the first world war, began in the house of Catherine Courtney in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, but that’s
right on the corner of the road where Margaret Thatcher was coached in public
speaking to get rid of her high, grating (cough “female”) voice and make her
sound like a story tape on a Sony Walkman that was running out of batteries (this
reference is aimed purely at middle-aged women). So already I can’t remember
who destroyed the industrial heartlands, and who started the organisation that
became Save the Children, which was run by two sisters, though unfortunately
they are lost to the mists of time, because one of them had a funny name
(Eglantyne Jebb) and the other one didn’t (Dorothy Buxton).
The temperance
movement was driven by women, but we let ourselves be written out of that
because it gave us a bad name. The highly fruitful school of thought connecting
poverty to infant mortality, and perhaps more radically still, holding infant
mortality to be a bad thing, was developed by the anarcho-socialists Maud
Pember Reeves and Charlotte Wilson in the early 20th century (in fact, Pember
Reeves was the socialist and Wilson the anarchist but these things sound more
authentically middle-aged when you mash them together).
The background to their
work was the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which found poverty to be
morally driven, exacerbated by do-gooders giving food and relief to poor
people, which only incentivised them to be more poor. Pember Reeves and Wilson
discovered, with close and what we would now call “embedded” research into the
respectable poor, that the children of highly moral ones were also dying in
large numbers before they reached the age of 10. You can see why this would be
easier to erase than to commemorate.
The
abolitionists Hannah More and Elisabeth Jesser
Reid were forgotten because they were basically doing the same thing
as William Wilberforce, and he had that pretty alliteration going on with his
name. Mary Prince, a campaigner, author and former slave, got a commemorative
plaque in Camden in 2007, so that’s OK. Sarah Parker Remond, another woman of colour working
internationally against slavery in the 1850s, had a more famous brother, which
is a near-failsafe way to get yourself written out of history. Shall I use my cloak
of invisibility to fight crime, or for evil? That’s the question I ask, upon
turning 44. Fortunately, it won’t be remembered either way, and the world is
our plaything.
