It was 1980 and Gloria Steinem was coming to town, London town that is.
Gloria was the co-founder and editor of the magazine ‘Ms’. She was young and sexy with long legs that she showed to advantage. She knew everybody in New York and was renowned for dating fashionable men. She was not so well known in England and hadn’t done much publicity here.
But she was to be well taken care of. Not by the grotty south London feminists like me who didn’t wear make up, rarely brushed our hair and never washed our jeans. We had managed to entertain Kate Millet, the author of ‘Sexual Politics’, in somebody’s unkempt flat though we had all steered clear of her, abandoning her in a corner with a bottle of red wine and a handful of Twiglets, when the whisper went round that she was unhinged.
Susanne Valadon - self portrait
Gloria, though, would be entertained not south of the river but in the exclusive and expensive heights of Hampstead; popular, trendy and fashionable, she was destined to be taken care of on her visit by well-heeled feminists, the wives of famous men.
Jill Craigie was her host on the evening I was invited to meet her.
Jill Craigie
We knew of Jill Craigie through her marriage to the former leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, and she had worked indefatigably for the feminist cause during the seventies. But that was the extent of our knowledge. And in those prehistoric pre-Internet days, it was unlikely we could find out more.
I had no idea of Jill Craigie’s history in film making. At that time, the only work for women in film, as far as I was aware, was in front of the camera if, that is, they got past the audition on the casting couch.
I don’t remember receiving an invitation to the evening with Gloria Steinem. I was living with my partner and I think it must have been he who took the call and accepted the invitation on behalf of both of us. I think I was under the impression that he was the invited one and I was the hanger-on.
I hadn’t realised it was to be a small and cosy get-together and, even when I was introduced to a group of women in the upstairs living room, I didn’t understand that this evening was being hosted by a feminist in honour of the best known feminist in America and the people I was being introduced to were all women: Glenys Kinnock, Jill Craigie and Jill Tweedie.
I knew that Jill Craigie was married to the leader of the Labour party and that Glenys Kinnock was married to the upcoming one. But other than that, though I knew a bit about their menfolk, I was totally ignorant about them.
The only one I knew anything about was Jill Tweedie. She was very well known mainly through her column on the Guardian Women’s Page which was bold, well-written, and compelling.
I had stumbled into journalism only a year or two before and had also written for that illustrious Page. Jill T had sent me words of encouragement via Liz Forgan, the editor, and now, at the evening gathering, she introduced herself and said how much she liked my work, commenting that she hadn’t seen me in print for a while and asking what I was working on.
‘Oh, I’m not writing journalism any more,’ I said blithely.
‘So what are you doing?’ Jill asked.
‘Astrology,’ I said.
She was polite. She simply said I was an idiot and I was too good for such nonsense.
It is only now in retrospect that I realise how rude I was. I had been invited to a small and exclusive gathering of very interesting and influential women and had behaved like an abusive upstart, a ruffian from the wrong side of the river.
Part of the trouble, though, was that I didn’t know that I had been invited in my own right. I assumed it was my husband they wanted to meet. He, after all, had been writing about feminism and had even been invited to speak at women’s conferences, on one famous occasion giving a lecture on the difference between a vaginal and a clitoral orgasm.
I was struggling to get published in obscure magazines and he was acclaimed in the literary pages of all the best known papers.
My job, I had decided, was to give him support, run the household, and bring up the kids. I was quite happy to give up the hassle and insecurity of free-lance journalism and to devote myself to being a wife and mother and move out of London. And study astrology.
(In time, I would establish a practice in counselling and healing and would return to journalism to write a column for the New Age magazine, ‘Caduceus’, and a book, ‘The Face of the Deep’.)
Marriage, though, was a mixed blessing. Jill Tweedie went through three and, from what I can ascertain, after losing a baby to a cot death, then lost two more children when they were abducted, aged 2 and 3, by her estranged husband, a Hungarian count. (Mercifully, she was to have another son by another relationship.)
Like the unmarried and childless Gloria Steinem, Jill Tweedie pursued her own career with dedication, achieving great success in her lifetime and is still published and talked about now, thirty years after her death.
It was not so surprising to know nothing about the wife of a party leader and the impressive body of work that Glenys Kinnock accomplished in European politics came, for the most part, after this time in the early eighties when her husband, following two failed election attempts, stepped down from leadership of the party. No longer tied to her husband’s career, Glenys could follow her own pursuits remaining happily married while bringing up two children, both now active in Labour party politics. When she died two weeks ago, she was surrounded by her family and acclaimed by the wider world.
But of all these exceptional women perhaps Jill Craigie was the most accomplished and the greatest pioneer.
Back in the 1930s she had entered the bastion of male privilege, film. This was so extraordinary it was scarcely believable.
Women didn’t make films; they didn’t even make tea for the men who made films. In the holy sanctuary of film, directors were gods and women could no more get access to the precincts than they could get the Church to permit them any role of significance. In the church, they could at least arrange the flowers but in film they could only arrange themselves, in few clothes or none, for the camera. But Jill Craigie, who had the looks of a film star, started out as a film actress and went on to make several significant documentaries.
Last year the National Film Theatre showed some of her works. One has a title that could not be more pertinent to the times we are living through now.
‘Children of the Ruins’ was made as the second world war was coming to an end and was linked to the forming of UNESCO.
Among her other achievements, Jill Craigie made a film about the suffrage movement and a documentary about equal pay well before the Women’s Liberation Movement started to demand it.
With the current revival of interest in the women’s movement, her work lives on and is inspiring a new generation of women, some of whom are celebrating her in a three-year research project at Sussex University, ‘Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer’.
Even in the eighties there were plenty of places that were closed to women - clubs, pubs, sports facilities, educational facilities...
People didn’t know much about women and, though our prime minister was female, I don’t think anyone ever asked her what her pronouns were.
Anthologies of art back then included 100% works by men. All my teachers at art school were men and all the subjects of their lectures were men.
As for poetry, it was standard practice for anthologies to include no women poets at all. It was a breakthrough when Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in their 1982 anthology, ‘The Rattlebag’, included a miniscule scattering among their selection of 400 poems.
You could understand that Hughes might have boycotted Sylvia Path – marriage and divorce among poets and artists was a messy business. And it was understandable that the whole history of women, whether in the arts or elsewhere, was not just ignored but considered not to exist.
In those days of privilege, I attended university as well as art school. Not a single female artist had been mentioned at art school and, in the English department at my university, no women were studied. It was as if the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield had never existed.
For a short while in the eighties, it had seemed that there might be a chance for women to emerge from the shadows of history and to take their place in the culture. But almost as soon as women’s studies courses were set up, they disappeared under a barrage of political correctness preparing the way for the subsuming of the category ‘woman’ into ‘gender’ and the sublimation of ‘women’s studies’ to ‘gender studies’.
There seemed to be no women in the art world. We had still scarcely heard of Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, we might have heard of Vanessa Bell but never saw her works, we had heard of Gwen John but only ever saw copies of her domestic and shy painting of her own attic room. As for Suzanne Valadon, we had heard of her son, Maurice Utrillo, but not of her.
The contemporary, Bridget Riley, was side-lined as a minor and obsessive talent (though she has now triumphed and proved to be a highly successful major talent).
Women artists had no place in the history of art and women poets had no place in poetry anthologies.
In the mid-eighties, women in England put pressure on the Hayward Gallery to show the extraordinary work, ‘The Dinner Party’ which the American artist, Judy Chicago, had initiated and overseen, gathering a great many women to make it.
The Dinner Party
It consisted of long tables forming a triangle, with ceramic place settings, each one celebrating a woman from history. It was a bold, beautiful and inspirational piece - and no-one would display it. Then the Hayward muttered about exhibiting it. A great many women and men were eager to see it and it really seemed as if it were at last going to be possible. When the Hayward backed out (I can’t remember their rationale), it felt like a kick in the teeth.
In the States, the University of the District of Columbia planned to house it and in 1990 it was accepted as a gift by unanimous vote. But forces gathered to stop it. The Washington Times published a story claiming that ‘The Dinner Party’ ‘had been banned from several art galleries around the country because it depicts women’s genitalia on plates’ and a congressman stated that it was ‘ceramic 3-D pornography’.
Meanwhile, male pop art was flourishing and profiting from images of women in fetish clothing, kneeling on all fours while supporting trays of drinks or ashtrays, and that kind of thing, I’m sure you know it well.
The Dinner Party is now acknowledged as the important work of art that it is. The public demand to see it continued and it has now been shown all over the world and is permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.
All the three women I met that night in Hampstead have now died, Glenys Kinnock just last week, Jill Tweedie in 1993 and Jill Craigie in1999.
As for Gloria Steinem, she lives to fight another day, saying,
‘At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much, and I’m using it to light the torches of others.
‘Because only if each of us has a torch will there be enough light.’
What an interesting piece, thank you Penny. Going to read again, keep and pass it onto my Daughter. Some women there that I haven't heard of. 🤩🥰😇