“… to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourselves in a way that others may not, simply because they’ve never seen it before…” — Kamala Harris
One evening in November 2019, I found myself caught up in the #NousToutes march in Paris. It was dark and cold, the lights from the shops on the Boulevard Voltaire reflecting smudged and damp in the leaf-filled puddles. I hadn’t intended to join the march, but there was something in the swell of people, the up-beat pull of It’s Raining Men blaring out from the sound system, that saw me doubling back and weaving into the throng.
I was born in the UK in 1973 and have only recently taken stock of what it is to be a woman of that generation. In many ways, it is the #MeToo movement and the global offshoots like #NousToutes that it has spawned that have prompted this re-evaluation, casting new light on the era and culture in which I was raised. When I applied to university in 1992, for example, the Cambridge college that I applied to, although founded by a woman in the 14th century, had only started accepting women just eight years before. Portraits of the illustrious and overwhelmingly male members that marked its history lined the main hall walls. I was interviewed only by men, and when I was eventually admitted, both my tutor and supervisor would be male.
At the time, I thought nothing of it. It certainly never occurred to me to wonder if my university experience would have been different in a more heavily female context. There were, after all, plenty of women around. At least half of my professors were female and as a girl student, I never once felt outnumbered by my male peers. If anything, it was my state-school back-ground that felt like the greatest source of difference, and even in that, I was one amongst many, and as a white girl from the home counties, I can hardly claim to have stood out.
It is only now that I understand the true impact of the masculine environment in which I was not only educated but more crucially socially and culturally formed. As a child, although many of my dance, music, and schoolteachers were women, I was surrounded by very few professional, female role-models. The heads in every school I attended were headmasters. Our family doctor and dentist were men. Even in my parents’ social circle, few of the wives worked. My Mum was one of the rare women that did. Along with my Dad, she restored watercolor paintings, a job that saw her liaising with some of the most prestigious auction houses and galleries of central London. Yet, in her family life, she made a very clear distinction between male and female identities, upholding rather conservative views about gender and the division of familial roles. For my Mum, the domestic tasks of cooking and housework were as firmly regarded as her responsibility as car maintenance, and household repairs were my Dad’s. That said, my sisters and I were expected to give a hand with each, and I can’t honestly say that I felt any less inclined to creosote the shed than I did to set the table.
Yet whilst our parents allowed us to explore activities that transcended traditional perceptions of gender, the wider community in which we lived proved far less versatile. At seven, like most of my friends, I was enrolled in the Brownies. We learned to sew on buttons and to iron shirts. To earn the ‘safety in the home’ badge, we were taught to carry kitchen knives with the blade facing downwards and to turn pot handles inwards towards the counter so they wouldn’t get knocked off. There was no ‘safety in the garage’ or ‘safety in the shed’ badge, still less any information about ‘safety on a night on the town,’ which as a teenager in the 1980s might have been of far greater use.
A couple of years ago, a friend’s daughter who was studying in France appeared one morning at my door, looking pale and tense. She had been raped coming home from a party with friends. I was struck by her composure. She had already gone to the hospital. She had the necessary contraceptive and anti-AIDS medication. In the practical sense, in coming to me, she was simply dotting her ‘i’s and crossing her ‘t’s. It was heartbreaking to see a young woman managing such huge physical and emotional trauma with such poise. Of course, she was in shock. The full magnitude of the experience was only just beginning to surface. Yet through it all, she had no doubt that her story would be believed. She knew she could trust her friends not to judge. And whilst nothing could protect her physically from the attack, she lives in a time where she felt able to speak out and get help, a time in which the absolute certainty of her rights could be translated into an expectation of support and assistance. I am not sure if this would have been the case when I was at university. Had I been the victim of such an attack, I’m not even sure that I would have reported it. Who would I have gone to? Who would I have approached and how? Whilst a couple of my female professors would, I am sure, have been sympathetic and provided the necessary assistance, I wonder whether I would have seen much point in taking things further? Back then, as now, the university culture was one of drinking games and pub crawls, and as my diaries from those days show, I had an unshakable belief that should anything ‘bad’ happen, it would be entirely my own fault.
These last few months have been quite momentous for women. Sean Connery has died. Johnny Depp has lost his libel case against The Sun newspaper who labelled him a ‘wife-beater’, and Kamala Harris was elected as the first female vice-president of America. It says a lot about just how far we as women have come. For whilst Connery was famous for his on-screen embodiment of masculine virility and sexual conquest, as interviews from the 1960s reveal, he displayed in life misogyny that publicly condoned and justified violence against women. It had little if no effect on his career. Depp, however, as an actor some thirty years younger, has been unable to shake the tarnish and has had to stand down from his role in the Fantastic Beasts franchise. The difference in public reaction between 1965 and 2020 demonstrates the seismic shift that has occurred with regard to women’s rights. Much of this is the result of social media and the pressure it puts on Hollywood producers and publishing houses, political parties, corporations, and global brands to account for their support and promotion of controversial figures. Much too is due to the increasing visibility of inspiring female role models who, like Kamala Harris, allow young girls to see themselves in the land’s highest positions.
I am now in my late forties, and despite the macho era in which I grew up, I cannot honestly say that I have ever felt ‘less’ as a woman in any real way. And although I believe very firmly in male/female equality, I have never felt the need to actively advocate for women’s rights or feminist agendas. Yet, in the aftermath of the Weinstein and Epstein trials, I have begun to reflect on the dominantly masculine world in which my generation of women was forged. For decades, I unquestioningly accepted that world for what it appeared to be – a force that was as natural and inevitable as the air that I breathed. Looking back, however, I now see how very limiting and restrictive that environment really was and understand for the first time the extent to which it impacted not only on the ideas that I developed about what I could achieve or who I could be but also the unconscious, interior worldview that I have held ever since.
When I imagine editors reading my most recent submission, I think it is always a male figure that I picture holding the page. Of course, hundreds of female editors are out there, yet my forty-year-old self is stuck with a forty-year-old worldview that is programmed in the 1970s and ’80s cannot simply be re-booted or refreshed. And it is this that is important about movements such as #NousToutes or #MeToo: that they can and do evince change. They are not simply flash-in-the-pan phenomena or a series of pictures on Instagram. For as the images of Kamala Harris that have circulated since her election show, they are forces that, through their reach and visibility, work not only to change society’s attitudes as a whole but also those of the individuals within it. They affect our interior worlds as much as the exterior, recognizing that ideas of the self are as crucial as legislation and opportunity in creating a fair society in which every individual can achieve their full potential.
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Jane Downs grew up in the UK, and now lives and works in Paris. Jane’s work includes short stories, reportage, and poetry. Her audio play “Battle Cries” was produced by the Wireless Theatre Company in 2013. Other works have been published by Litro and Pen and Brush in New York.