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A Different Lens

Another voice

There is a funny and lively piece of theatre touring the UK at the moment. It will be available for a few more months, so catch it if you can. It’s called ‘Pride and Prejudice -Sort Of’ and as the title suggests, it is not a straightforward adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. All the characters are played by a small ensemble of women, who change clothes and accents with astonishing dexterity while singing, dancing, and using some interestingly choice language. The key events of the novel remain the same, but, and here’s the twist, the story is presented to us by the servants. They, of course, are always present, hearing and seeing everything, but disregarded by their employers. 

The idea of retelling a story from a different point of view is not new, of course. In The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys wrote a ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre giving a voice to Mr Rochester’s first wife, the ‘madwoman’ in the attic. More recently, Pat Barker brilliantly re-imagined The Iliad in her Women of Troy trilogy.  In Perceval Everett’s latest novel, James, we hear The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim the enslaved runaway, and in Sandra Newman’s novel Julia, we can ‘climb into (as the New York Times put it), the misogyny of Orwell’s writing and flesh out a woman’s perspective’. And of course, the musical Wicked upturns the stereotype of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

Change the focus?

In the middle of March, finishing only a few days ago, there was a major conference in the United States. It happened at the same time as the the Trump administration busied itself with sacking people, waving chainsaws, abolishing organisations and banishing words (yes, words like anti-racism, bias, disability, equal opportunity, feminism, Gulf of Mexico and so on) which vanished from documents because of a deranged war on diversity, equality and inclusivity.

In the midst of all this authoritarian bluster and finger-wagging by men with ridiculous hairstyles and unfortunate experiences with Botox, the conference, held at the UN Headquarters in New York, dealt with important and relevant work and is worth a close look. This was the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), which was held from March 10-21.  It was attended by over 100 world leaders and about 5000 members of civil society, who together worked to address what the Secretary General of the UN called ‘the poison of patriarchy’. This, the world’s largest annual conference for women and girls marked the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which has been called the most revolutionary plan for gender equality. There are six key actions:

• A digital revolution
• Freedom from poverty
• Zero violence
• Full and equal decision-making powers
• Peace and security
• Climate justice

Idealistic, passionate and forward thinking, here were hundreds of women and girls working together to drive lasting change. Shamefully though, the USA then criticised aspects of the text in the final declaration and refused to support it.  

In the meantime, at the White House, Donald Trump was having a tantrum about a portrait of him that he didn’t find sufficiently flattering.

Designing for diversity?

Here are a few scenarios. If you are a woman of average build, they may ring a few bells.

You are in an aisle at a large supermarket. No one else is around. You search for a bottle of soda water and spy it on the top shelf, a good 8 inches beyond your reach. When you arrive at the checkout you tell the till operator who makes a phone call, and a few minutes later a male manager bustles over with a bottle. ‘There you are love, I went and got this specially for you, darling’. You try to engage him in a discussion about shelf height, but he just looks baffled and scuttles off.

Your next stop is an appointment at the outpatients of your local hospital. The nurse ushers you into a poky room to take your blood pressure (which is sky high anyway because of the parking issues). As you struggle to take your coat off, she says, ‘You can hang your things up there’, pointing to a hook fixed high up somewhere in the stratosphere. When you remark that it must have been fixed there by a 7-foot-high man, she sighs and says, ‘Yep, it’s the same everywhere’.

Ooh, this is exciting. You are in Derbyshire, accompanying a group of students on an expedition. You are going to go inside a cave system, but because it’s going to be very wet, you’ll need to wear special waterproofs. You are handed a rubbery orange outfit and try to work out how to put it on. But what’s this? Your suit has been designed for a giant with exceptionally long arms and legs. You have to roll up the sleeves and trouser bottoms and clutch the middle to your bosom. You enter the cave disguised as Michelin Man. Not exciting at all, quite humiliating in fact.

All these may seem like minor irritations, but they do point to bigger problems, which have not been resolved. Remember the difficulties that women NHS staff and carers had with badly fitting PPE during the Pandemic? Remember the car crash test dummies which were only male in format? The clinical tests which were only carried out on men, with the assumption that effects on women’s bodies would be the same? 

In Invisible Women (2019), Caroline Criado Perez drew on huge amounts of data to expose appalling gender bias. You can probably come up with your own examples where designs have only used men as the default model. From transport systems to public toilets women’s needs are still not in the ascendant.

Lots of proverbs - but we need a bit of action too

The phrase ‘looking through a different lens’ has become quite common recently, following on from many similar and older quotations about being empathetic and seeing things from a different perspective. The idea of walking in someone else’s shoes may be of Cherokee origin and is picked up in a poem of 1895 by Mary T Lathrap: ‘Just walk a mile in his moccasins / Before you criticise and accuse’. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee creates an image of climbing into someone else’s skin and walking round in it, and in Robert Burns poem To a Louse, he wishes: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see ourselves as ithers see us’. Empowerment is also central to the Native American proverb: ‘Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter’.

Poems and proverbs and pieties can help us to see things differently. But radical structural change and rebalancing of power are needed. On a final, and hopeful note, let’s rewind, refocus, and hold these words from 1995 fast in our minds:

‘Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights’ (Beijing Conference 1995)

MARCH UPDATE ON THE MK FAWCETT CAMPAIGN FOR A SAFER, HEALTHIER, FAIRER MILTON KEYNES

• We have circulated background papers with baseline evidence of the need for making MK Safer, Healthier and Fairer
• Following preliminary meetings last year with all three MPs for Milton Keynes we have now met for a second time with Emily Darlington and are finalising dates to meet again with Chris Curtis and Callum Anderson
• We participated in a meeting with the Milton Keynes Youth Cabinet in November 2024 and are planning further conversations with them
• We have now met women leaders from Milton Keynes City Council – Shazna Muzammil (Conservative), Jane Carr (Liberal Democrat) and Lauren Townsend (Labour, and Deputy Leader of the Council). We have shared ideas with them about making Milton Keynes a safer, healthier and fairer place.
• We are keeping records of our meetings and plan to report back as widely as possible
• We are monitoring and collecting further evidence to support our campaign

We will continue to promote the manifesto campaign and encourage people to become more involved with the political process.

We will include an update in every blog. Thank you for supporting us in our campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights