Learning life lessons from our foremothers

As a side effect of Cameron’s odious cupcake culture and his desire to drive liberated women back to the domestic prisons of the ‘50s, the giftbook market has become saturated with quaintly packaged reprints of ye olde manuals for new brides.

But apart from tittering at the preposterous suggestions for deterring your husband from making advances (lie silently in the dark so that he can’t find you), and going cross-eyed at what a miserable time women are portrayed as having in days of yore, is there anything useful we can learn from our foremothers?

Four weeks from my own wedding, I’ve been on the receiving end of a few of these tomes, plus some delightfully dated cookbooks. So I decided to take a closer look at them and see if there was some accumulated wisdom to inherit, tucked away between the pages about skinning a rabbit or turning the mattresses over weekly.

So let’s start at the beginning. Or, 1861 to be precise, the date of the oldest book on my shelf. Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (Wordsworth Reference, £3.99) has 1,120 pages crammed with 2,751 entries covering everything from childbirth to poison and how to cure apoplexy (“the strong kind”), and not ignoring domestic abuse. By the by, the recipe layout we now know (where the ingredients are listed at the start of each recipe) was apparently pioneered in Beeton’s book.

Moving on… Sex Tips for Husbands and Wives from 1894 (Summersdale, £4.99), is by vicar’s wife Ruth Smythers. Let there be no doubt: she does not want new brides to be getting up to mischief with their “lascivious” husbands. With a fresh look for 2011, this is one self-help book that won’t be of help to anyone… although it’s ideal for poking fun at on your hen night. (“While sex is at best revolting, and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured.”)

Fast forward to 1934, and let me introduce you to The Country Housewife’s Book, by Lucy H Yates (Persephone Books, £12). This no-nonsense tome is for the country wife who is busy gathering crops in order to ensure her dishes are seasonal. Which is terribly fashionable now, of course. The recipes themselves (stewed lettuce, pigeon pie, mushroom ketchup) may not seem the most tempting, nor the ‘hobbies’ (dressing rabbit skins, using fowl feathers) the most appealing, but Yates’ book is beautifully put together, as Persephone reprints always are, with delightful illustrations by Mary Gardiner.

Heading out of the country and back into the city, and in 1936 there were two small but deadly books called How to Be a Good Wife, and How to Be a Good Husband (Bodleian Library, £4.99 each). Decorated with smart drawings from the Army & Navy’s clothing catalogues from the same era, these tomes are surprisingly forward thinking in some respects. For instance, wives are told to ensure their sons respect girls and women from day one: “Do from the earliest years, teach the boys to pay every respect to women, not forgetting their sisters. The boy who is so brought up will find himself welcome and at ease in any class of society.” Yet on the other hand, wives are reminded that they must be permanently presentable, otherwise they only have themselves to blame if hubby has his head turned by his secretary. 

When the tables are turned, men are advised that to be a good husband they must never be “like a bear with a sore head when your wife’s mother arrives”, but also to “cultivate the habit of coming down to breakfast with a smile”. So, despite the bluntness of the wiles women must employ to ensure her man doesn’t stray, at least there’s a hint of equality in the kindness and manners each must show the other. Not that it should need spelling out! More importantly, the husband is reminded: “Your wife will probably have ideas of her own.” Yes, she will.

Hopping on to 1949 and Kay Smallshaw’s How To Run Your Home Without Help (Persephone, £12). Aimed at the post-war wife who is setting up home sans the servants who helped her mother, Smallshaw’s wife is presumed to know nothing and told the hard facts straight. Filled with briskly British maxims, Smallshaw issues plenty of bright-side statements such as: “Bedmaking can be quite a pleasant interlude from the dusting and sweeping. Also it has the advantage of stretching the muscles without undue exertion.” “With more housework to do, cooking must be as simple as possible, so choose a steamed meal.” What-ho! Not to mention one-and-a-half pages devoted to instructions for washing up efficiently. Further chapters advise on “entertaining with enjoyment”, and encouraging your husband to peel the vegetables at the weekends.

Taken with a pinch of salt, as a fledgling bride with no domestic skills whatsoever, I have to say I found a lot of useful information tucked away in How To Run Your Home Without Help… seriously.

In 1969, Mary Berry presented The Bride’s Cookbook (Conde Nast, out of print), complete with deliciously psychedelic cover and title pages (above). There’s no beating about the bush here, and Berry begins by saying: “Remember that a great deal of your time will be spent in the kitchen so make it an easy and pleasant place to be”… making mealtimes sound like a prison sentence. Berry tells the new bride how to plan her food shopping, make a good pot of tea, and prepare a “tropical pineapple tower” for a party. The Bride’s Cookbook is a beautiful history lesson into not only the tired gender attitudes still prevailing on the cusp of the ‘70s, but also into the foul-sounding dishes couples were expected to consume (spice tongue with raisin sauce, frankfurters with eggs).

However, as with the other books, the most revealing bit is the thin section devoted to ‘Man in the Kitchen’… where Berry advises it is best to get your husband used to helping out as soon as possible, otherwise there’s no hope. And of educating him about the best way to do the weekly shop, before he stops off at the Spotted Dog for a pint. “The husband should be provided with clearly written instructions as to the quantity and description of the goods required. Until he is experienced, the simple words ‘cheese’, ‘bacon’, ‘biscuits’ will not suffice.”

Finally, bringing us pretty much up to date is Anthea Turner, whose book How To Be The Perfect Housewife (Virgin Books, £12.99) accompanied a BBC3 series of the same name in 2007. The most alarming thing to notice about Anthea's book is that being so recently published means it cannot be viewed as quaintly historical or dated... in fact, this must be how Anthea maintains women in the 21st Century should behave! Much of the information she provides is the same as in the books already mentioned (the book is even subtitled "Lessons in the art of modern household management" in a nod to Mrs Beeton). With a few nods to contemporary life in the form of sections about how to run your home office, and some more appealing sounding recipes than in previous books (baked pears with honey and almonds, yum). 


There's a fair deal of useful information in Anthea's book (the art of ironing a shirt, of stain removal, or planning the perfect dinner party etc), but it's wrapped up in a fairly sugar-coated manner that implies Anthea possibly has more time on her hands than the average housewife, who - after juggling her job, children and social life - may not have time to disinfect her dustbins every week, or to make her own furniture polish.

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So, what did I learn from these books? Well, while Smythers' book is clearly dated in terms of how most women view sex, the other books above (tone and language aside) don’t seem so dated in spirit. A book published now would be rightly ridiculed if it tried to tell brides their place was in the kitchen, looking permanently beautiful, while effortlessly whipping up three course meals. But the popularity of cupcake culture and the growing rise of cookery TV shows (Berry is currently a hit on BBC’s The Great British Bake Off) proves there is both a media drive to promote the Cameronification of old-fashioned domesticity, and a public willingness to lap it up.

I’m not for a moment saying you can’t enjoy cooking while also being a successful woman, but the messages coming loud and clear from the books mentioned here is that you are a wife first and a woman second… which sadly doesn’t seem a million miles from the Big Society push to drive women back into the home, and keep them there.

"Coasting" at Bristol Old Vic - theatre review

It’s a brave production that seats some of its audience on the floor. Especially when some of those people are press. But Coasting (directed by Emily Watson-Howe, from a script by Natalie McGrath) makes this decision, as part of the experimental spirit imbued through the script. Whether this is to reinforce the claustrophobia of the characters, and/or to strengthen our solidarity with the uncomfortable existence of those souls… who can say? Maybe it’s merely a quirk designed to make you view this as an avant-garde theatrical experiment? I’m only guessing.

In the heavily misted Studio, we wait and then watch as druggy clubby ‘80s urchins Pearl (Nadia Giscir) and Ocean (Tom Wainwright) ricochet and screech from one side of the room to the other. Their rapid speech is littered with bizarre patois, and the characters refer to themselves in the third person, which is strange, but after a while you think perhaps this is a device to underscore their closeness. Regardless, for the first few minutes I hadn’t got a clue what they said!

Coasting watches Peal and Ocean in their impoverished existence in a nameless seaside town on Bonfire Night. There’s a threat in the air and the looming presence of an otherness… quickly identified as “lily law”, aka lonely policewoman Falcon (Helena Lymbery).

The issue of burgeoning sexuality in an unforgiving and hateful world is as topical now as it was in the late ‘80s, the era in which Coasting is set according to the programme. However, this is at odds with the early ‘80s pop played while we waited for the play to start. Aside from being years out, it seemed doubtful that characters living on the fringes of society would spend their time listening to early Human League or OMD. That’s not a tricky detail to get right and, as with anything, it’s the details that make something a success… or not.

Wainwright is passable as a disheveled angry gay man, but Giscir carries the show with her strong performance, her believable emotion and her growing terror. However, Lymbery seems ill at ease alongside these two. Her performance, in a deliberately contrived script, jars with those of Wainwright and Giscir, who have a spark and have clearly rehearsed and rehearsed their lines, generating genuine chemistry.

Coasting is an interesting experiment in playful language, imaginative use of the theatre space, and casting of homegrown talent, but there’s still a long way to go. If you take risks and try something new, you have to work twice as hard to ensure it pays off, and I don’t believe this is there yet. That’s not to say there’s not talent on display: Giscir is clearly a gifted actress, and McGrath’s script shows great potential. But as it stands, I didn’t feel carried along by the sway of Coasting or invested in the characters… meaning that the end came as something of a relief.

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Coasting is presented as part of Bristol Ferment, which is a year-round programme for the community of theatre-makers from Bristol and the South West.

Coasting is being performed until 15 October. For more information, visit the Coasting microsite. And to book tickets, please visit the Bristol Old Vic website.  

“Well done, sister suffragette”

Last week, @TheNatFantastic posted an eminently sensible tweet.

Recently, I’ve been reminded about how awesome the suffragettes were and just how many things we have to thank them for. It started after I stumbled across this incredible WSPU pin badge from the 1910s in Bristol City Museum, which I took a photo of and keep returning to and studying.

I look at this badge and find myself wondering who the woman was who owned it: what her story was, what her role in the fight was, did she go to prison, was she force fed, what did her family think, and – more than anything – that I hoped she lived long enough to see women achieve the vote, thanks to her and her sisters.

I want to know how this badge ended up in the Bristol City Museum: the signage by the case indicates it was donated as part of a large collection of costume jewellery from someone in Oxford. But how did it come into their ownership, and by what means did it leave the suffragette’s hands, or her family’s? Were her family not proud of her amazing fight, so tossed it out with the rubbish? Maybe the badge was absent-mindedly lost and later mourned by the suffragette's ancestors. Perhaps nobody appreciated the socio-historical value of it.

The badge is a wee thing – about 3cm high and 1.5cm wide. But among a museum of countless mind-blowing artefacts, this is the one thing that is guaranteed to receive my attention every time I visit (which is regularly).

But the badge isn’t the only suffragette symbol to return in recent weeks. At the UK Feminista Summer School last month, I was delighted that environmental activist Tamsin Omond stood up before her talk and bedecked herself in a glorious ‘Deeds Not Words' sash, echoing the slogan of our fore-sisters. A little digging around tells me Tamsin models the action of her activist group Climate Rush on the suffragettes. I’m going to find out more about her, and hopefully contact her to ask about her loyalty to the suffragettes.

Back in March, a few of us Bristol feminists joined the audience for the suffragette-set play Her Naked Skin, performed by drama students at the University of Bristol. It was excellent. And my friends and I earned ourselves some sideways glances from other audience members for cheering and clapping loudly at appropriate points in the story (and boo-ing at a few, too)! You may be interested to know that Her Naked Skin was written in 2008 by Rebecca Lenkiewciz  and was the first play by a female writer to be produced on the main stage at the Royal National Theatre, London (opened 1963). A 45-year wait. But why?

And with all this going on, and having had a fairly stressful few months lately, the combination of Nat’s tweet, finding this incredible badge, applauding Tamsin for her sash, plus some general reading around the suffragettes to learn more about them (having admired American Djuna Barnes’ support for the UK suffragettes so much that it took up much of my first MA thesis), the spirit and legacy of the suffragettes has kept my head above water.

And in the background to all of this, stuck in my head, is the rousing call of Mrs Banks to her Sister Suffragettes in the 1964 film Mary Poppins (dir: Robert Stevenson), set in London, 1910. I’ll assume you know the film, which has been one of my favourites since I was about six and I used to watch the video on rotation, mesmerised by it, although at six, I knew nothing of suffrage or voting. But I remember the most interesting school history lesson ever was when I was about 12, and the suffragettes got a mention in one solitary class. For once, I was fired up by a teacher to know more about these outstanding women. But I remember going to the school library and looking for a book about suffragettes… it was not there. The suffragettes popped up again in an English literature class, for which maddeningly I can’t remember the book’s name or author, but it led to some exercises involving writing letters and diary entries as if we were the imprisoned suffragettes we were reading about. More chillingly, it involved imaging you’d been forced fed and writing about how that felt.

At the time, I wanted to bring in my Mary Poppins video and play Mrs Banks’ song to the class. I wasn’t allowed, but now into adulthood that hasn’t stopped me playing 'Sister Suffragette' in regular bursts from the soundtrack CD, and watching the film in times of low spirits.  The lyrics are mostly bang on (bar the line about men being “rather stupid”), and are well worth repeating. I print them in full here for your reading/singing pleasure. Deeds not words. Stand up, sister suffragettes. Solidarity to all, and particularly those who have been exceptionally kind during my recent struggles.

We're clearly soldiers in petticoats
And dauntless crusaders for woman's votes
Though we adore men individually
We agree that as a group they're rather stupid!

Cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sign in grateful chorus
"Well done, Sister Suffragette!"

From Kensington to Billingsgate
One hears the restless cries!
From ev'ry corner of the land:
"Womankind, arise!"
Political equality and equal rights with men!
Take heart! For Missus Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!

No more the meek and mild subservients we!
We're fighting for our rights, militantly!
Never you fear!

So, cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sign in grateful chorus
"Well done! Well done!
Well done Sister Suffragette!

Penny read: Reviewing Laurie’s latest book

Among my mail last Friday was a review copy of Laurie Penny's forthcoming book and the latest issue of the New Statesman. Left-wing literary leafs, indeed. 

Flicking through the NS, I stumbled on Penny’s weekly column and read it – enjoying her turn of phrase and agreeing with her on the state of the contemporary romantic relationship as depicted in David Nicholls’ novel One Day.

And then I flicked through the latest published collection of her columns, Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent (Pluto Press, published 20 October), and read the foreword by Warren Ellis. Something in what he wrote sounded familiar. So I returned to her column in the NS, then back to Ellis’ foreword, and made the connection.

In his introduction, Ellis includes the sentence: “Sometimes she makes you so angry in the way that makes you want to hold her head down the toilet until her legs stop twitching.” And in her NS column last week (12 September issue), Penny ends a sentence saying: “…a faster, simpler alternative might have been to hold his head down a toilet till the kicking stopped.”

Oh, Penny… Are there no original thoughts in your head?!

I wanted to enjoy her new book, I really did. I wanted to prove to Penny and to everyone else that I don’t take pleasure in criticising a sister feminist, and that my arguments with Meat Market (Zer0 Books, 2011) were not personal.

In summary, Meat Market was presented and sold as, well, fresh meat, yet some light Googling quickly confirmed the content was ripped from Penny’s old columns and was actually anything but fresh. Penny later told me: “Zer0 don’t say they’re [collections of old posts] but that’s what most of them are… To be honest this is such common practice in small scale writing that I can’t help feeling a little singled out.” I felt cheated by this. Penny continued to squirm, petulantly insisting it was not her fault that the citations were missing from some quotes in her book, quotes that I pointed out were actually sourced by other people. In addition, some quotes in Meat Market were purported to be from interviewees who subsequently told me Penny had never interviewed them for the book – despite at least one of the quotes being explicitly presented as interviewed for Meat Market.

Over the course of the 26 messages Penny sent me (messages conveying an increasingly paranoid, dramatic and pointlessly emotional tone), the amount of things that turned out to not be her fault in her own book made me wonder why she is incapable for taking responsibility for her professional work.

Penny Red is honest in the fact it is a collection of old columns. Although I do wonder when she will write something new, rather than keep capitalising on existing material. At £9.99 for the 68 pages of Meat Market, and £12.99 for the 211 pages of Penny Red, she’s not a cheap date. So I wish Penny would actually say something, rather than churn out rehashed books for no better reason than the vanity of having her name on a spine.

All this aside, what of the content?

Penny obviously writes well: she can produce a good turn of phrase and is adept at making the most miserable of scenarios sound picturesque. I’m not convinced she’s a journalist, although she might be a poet. Clearly she’s cornered the market in pitching up at London’s unfortunately frequent riot scenes, and writing about them in a verbose manner to make them sound like mighty battles of the people, rather than the messy and distasteful scuffles they really are.

She has an incessant desire to drop into every column the fact that she smokes roll-ups as if that makes her cool, and she likes to write about hanging off traffic lights with her “monkey instinct” as if this turns her into some sort of anarcho-acrobat. In Penny’s mock-Dickensian vocabulary, ‘cigarettes’ become ‘fags’, policemen become ‘coppers’, and ‘friends’ become ‘comrades’. While on one hand it’s interesting, relevant and eye opening to read witness reports from these contemporary battlegrounds, it quickly becomes exhausting to have to wade through so much prosaic waffle to actually access the information.

This book had the working title Riot Porn (based on an early listing on Amazon), and that’s exactly what the first section is. Penny is trying to create the impression that - despite her public school schooling, her Oxford bachelor degree, her internship in Parliament and the fact she inherited a stash of money (yet she frequently refers to herself as poor, a fact that made me hum Pulp’s Common People while reading) – she’s some sort of heroine of the disenfranchised youth.

To return to the “Riot Porn” issue, that is exactly what Penny Red is. It is smothered by the following type of phrases, which are literally ten a page - meaning the effect of her ability of write is diminished. “The kids start to sing, sweet and off-key, an apocalyptic choir knotted around a small bright circle of warmth and energy” (p16). “Everyone is stiff and hungry, and our phones are beginning to lose signal: the scene is Dante-esque, billows of smoke and firelight making it unclear where the noises of crying and chanting and the whine of helicopters are coming from” (p21).

Quite why Penny wants to paint herself as some anarchic bohemian, I don’t know. She summons up an image of herself shuffling bleeding from riot zone to police kettle, or swinging through the city from traffic light to lamppost with her aforementioned “monkey instinct”. Penny turns a student riot into a beautiful battleground, which it is not. Despite what she may think, Penny is not the Kate Adie of disenfranchised youth.

However, once we’ve ploughed through the turgid repetition of the first chapter, which focuses on the student and anti-cuts demonstrations, the tone changes and the book becomes less suffocating in its desperation to make a tasteless scene look romantic.

We’re presented with columns about the damage to society caused by page three, the misogyny of vajazzling (a word my spellchecker rejects, as do I), and a very good rant about the injustices being dealt to those who genuinely need to receive disability benefits. I also remember a column in the NS earlier this year that she wrote about how people misunderstood depression, which was excellent, although it’s not included in this book. You can access it on the NS website here, though.

There are plenty of other good columns, ones that tackle important issues in an informed, intelligent manner. There’s also quite a lot of frustrating columns in here, and on reflection I conclude these mostly seem to be the columns where she attempts to infiltrate an event (eg a gathering of the Conservative Future party, or barging into Tate Britain to observe a limp scuffle about the Turner Prize). Here, she seems to shout about her balls at being somewhere covert, but then doesn’t have a story to follow this up with. That’s not journalism, that’s vanity.

On the whole, I agree with many points Penny makes throughout her book. Clearly not every point, but then I’d be pushed to name one person who I agree with 100% on everything. Penny has the ability to provoke and rile, and I’ll be interested to observe over the next few years whether her career takes off and she develops her genuine ability to write well, alongside a journalistic nose for hunting out a story rather than reporting from the sidelines.

While reading Penny Red, I wondered how long it would be before Penny repurposed her existing writing a third time into The Memoirs of an Anarchist or some similar tract purporting to be the handbook for the student generation of protestors. I have no doubt that she will produce a further book, but I sincerely hope she actually comes up with some new copy for it. Otherwise even her staunchest supporters may start to lose interest.

Oh, and one last thing: whatever Penny says, it’s not cool to smoke. Apart from the fact it’ll make you stink like a tramp’s armpit, it’s extremely expensive and will kill you.