women and the church From far left canon nerissa jones and rosie woodall, an ordinand
Fifteen years after the Church of England first ordained women, it is finally allowing them to become bishops. So does equality reign among the clergy? Far from it. By Stephanie Rafanelli
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Photographs by Laura Hynd
THE STAINEDGLASS CEILING
t’s 7 o’clock on Monday morning and Rosie Woodall is getting dressed. She selects a pair of sparkly bootcut jeans and a fuchsiastriped sweater from her wardrobe before making her way to chapel. On Saturday night she gathered with her fellow students in the college common room to watch Strictly Come Dancing; this morning she leads them in Morning Prayer. Woodall, a 28-year-old with a porcelain complexion and ringlets, is studying at Ripon College Cuddesdon, near Oxford, to be a priest. She will be ordained in two years; within five she could begin a career that sees her rise eventually to the role of bishop – one of the most senior posts in the Church
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of England, previously barred to women. ‘There’s this image of women clergy wearing pastel shirts and floral skirts, but I think the pioneering women priests were trying hard to prove they could be feminine in a man’s world,’ Woodall tells me when I comment on her fashionable dress. ‘I think my generation can be different. But I know that being a woman priest is still going to be a challenge. The Church has been a male-dominated society for more than 2,000 years. We’ve only existed for 14 years, so we’re still at the forefront, in a way.’ Woodall, who studied wildlife biology before she decided to become a priest, is one of a growing number of women training for a career in the Anglican
Church. Fifteen years after the first women priests were consecrated in the Church of England, female ordinands – or trainees – now outnumber men. Unlike their female predecessors, these women will be ordained knowing that the legal barriers to leading posts in the Church – including five bishop seats in the House of Lords – are soon to be removed, with promotion to be based on talent not gender. On 7 July 2008 the General Synod, the church’s legislative body, voted to allow the consecration of women bishops – despite the threats of 13,000 clergy to defect (the first female bishops will be ordained about 2013). But at the same meeting the Church also voted for
a national code of practice that makes ‘special arrangements’ for those who cannot accept the ministry of women bishops, allowing them to circumvent the Sexual Discrimination Act of 1975 on theological grounds. This is not the first time this has happened. The Church of England currently claims an exemption from the Sexual Discrimination Act, barring women from the most senior roles of bishop and archbishop – the administrative heads of the Church’s 44 dioceses. This sanctions members of the Church to continue to reject women’s ministry. In 1993 the Act of Synod was passed, which permits parishes to ‘opt out’ of having a woman priest, turning them into no-go areas for female clergy.
Today more than 1,000 of a total of 13,000 parishes have passed such resolutions, and four bishops – in the dioceses of London, Chichester, Blackburn and Europe – refuse to ordain women. ‘The Church is institutionally sexist,’ says Christina Rees, the chairman of Women and the Church (Watch), an organisation that promotes women’s ministry, who has been at the forefront of the movements to ordain women as both priests and bishops. A member of the General Synod, Rees believes that by allowing areas where women’s ministry is not accepted, the Church has created a sexual apartheid. ‘A decade ago the Church admitted it was institutionally racist, but has not yet acknowledged its
discriminatory attitudes towards women. If you substituted the word “black” for the word “woman” you simply wouldn’t be allowed to say these things.’ Rees agrees that, until women have legal parity, female ordinands are entering one of the most sexist institutions in Britain. Beyond the Cotswold-stone walls of Cuddesdon, Rosie Woodall has already encountered the force of those opposed to the ordination of women. The Jersey parish in which she grew up has voted that it does not wish to have a woman priest. Once she is ordained she will be unable to return to preach there. In the college canteen we meet the Rev Dr Andrew Teal, a tutor. He explains the theological objections, based on the stella 33
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teachings of the Church Fathers in the second and third centuries. Cuddesdon is one of the most broadminded colleges in the country in the promotion of women’s ministry, but the college was once a men-only bastion with a strictly monastic atmosphere. Dr Teal was a student here when the college first admitted women: ‘Cuddesdon was split in two. Some of the men’s reactions were quite hysterical back then. They didn’t want to sit near the women or touch what they had touched.’ Canon Nerissa Jones, a former ballet dancer, was among the first 1,500 women ordained as priests in 1994. ‘Some of the women had been waiting to be ordained for more than 40 years,’ says the 67-year-old vicar as she drives me through the rolling fields of her Dorset parishes. ‘I entered the church knowing that it discriminated against women, but the calling to the work is so deep that you have to obey. I felt so profoundly that Christianity was about equality; I wanted to change the church from within by my existence. ‘We were viewed by some male clergy as heretics and even witches,’ Jones continues. ‘In the early days we were spat at and told that women like us
‘One colleague still won’t take communion from me. But the Church says they are free to do this’ Canon lucy winkett
should burn. Some clerics refused to receive communion from us or walk side by side with us in church.’ For her first job as a priest, Jones was sent to a parish in Coventry where the previous vicar had been mugged 11 times. ‘The first women priests were given some of the worst parishes in the country,’ she explains. ‘The lastchance saloons that no one else wanted because they weren’t stepping-stones to promotion.’ The situation was no better for the few women in more prominent roles. In 1997 Canon Lucy Winkett, 40, was the first woman to join the team at St Paul’s Cathedral, where colleagues publicly refused to receive communion from her. (Now, she tells me, she has one colleague who will not take communion from her, but points out that, ‘It is the Church’s official position that they are free to do this.’) ‘As Ginger Rogers said, “I did
everything that Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels.” No one really anticipated what it would feel like to be a lone woman in a male-dominated institution with high levels of hostility,’ she tells me. ‘Tolerance is an important Christian virtue, but not when it becomes a code word for abuse.’ The experiences of Jones and Winkett are not isolated incidents. In 2000 a study called ‘Journey to Priesthood’, by Dr Helen Thorne, the professor of theological and religious studies at the University of Bristol, found that more than half of all ordained women had received derogatory comments or had colleagues refuse communion, and a quarter had suffered sexual harassment, with isolated reports of sexual abuse. Now, almost a decade on, the Church of England claims a new-found equality for men and women priests, but many women working in the church disagree. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, 35, is a chaplain and research fellow at Durham University, and the youngest among the candidates tipped to be bishop. ThrelfallHolmes believes that the battle against institutional sexism is far from over, and that now a new generation of women, who grew up in the ‘working girl’ culture of the 1980s, is clashing against attitudes in these dioceses that are 2,000 years old. ‘Bullying still persists in the church today, because, 15 years after the vote, clergy who are actively working against women’s ministry are still selected for ordination. There is a clear message that it is OK for clergy to be against the ordination of women; but that has somehow got legitimised so that is it acceptable not only to think it, but also to show it and bully women on the back of it,’ she explains.
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he most vociferous opponent of women’s ministry is Forward in Faith, a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic association with 8,000 British members. Along with other Anglo-Catholic groups, it holds 90 of the 467 seats on the General Synod. Its members reject not only ordained women but any priest who has been consecrated by a woman bishop. In preparation for the ordination of women bishops the group has drawn up plans for a ‘third province’: a parallel stella 35
women and the church church with male-only clergy. ‘We believe that [the ordination of women] is against the scriptures as they have been interpreted by tradition for 2,000 years, and that we need to base our decisions on what we understand of God’s will from scripture and not modern society. Despite our position, of course, Forward in Faith does not condone bullying in any shape or form,’ says Sister Anne Williams, a lay preacher and spokeswoman for the organisation. The Rev Rebecca Hollingsworth (not her real name), who became a priest in 2007, grew up in ‘a London parish that does not promote women’s ministry’. ‘Most of the women who went for the priest selection process with me in 2003 had their applications stalled or lost in
the post – and it took months to get an initial appointment,’ the blonde with bobbed hair tells me when we meet at café in the outskirts of her home town. Hollingsworth, now 30, was finally accepted to theological college, but after graduation, when she and six other candidates from the diocese applied for a job back home, she was rejected along with the other two female ordinands; all four men were offered posts. ‘I was The rev dr miranda threlfall-holmes
‘Bullying persists in the Church today. Clergy who work against women’s ministry are still selected for ordination’
forced to leave my church, my friends and my family to work in an area in the Midlands where I knew no one and had no support.’ Here she has found further opposition. Her new deanery includes two Forward in Faith parishes. When all the local clergy are invited to religious ceremonies in those parishes, Hollingsworth is excluded because she is not recognised as a priest. And attitudes filter down to parishioners. Colleagues and members of the congregation regularly refuse to accept bread and wine from her during Eucharist because they believe it is ‘tainted’. ‘I have constant low-grade sexual harassment, from questions about whether I’m menstruating before a service, to sexually inappropriate
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women and the church remarks, to comments about the way I look. I sometimes wear patterned tights or earrings or natural make-up – and am told I should dress differently,’ she says. ‘When I reported this to my dean I was laughed off and told that I was being “an emotional woman”. The attitude is, “Keep quiet and don’t complain or this will jeopardise your prospects.”’ Hollingsworth is currently paying to see a counsellor. ‘It’s a lonely existence, being constantly rejected, and I struggle on a daily basis to maintain a sense of self-worth.’ Her voice cracks. ‘The only choices available to me are to leave or have a nervous breakdown.’ She has chosen the former and has recently been accepted for a post as a university chaplain, where, because the college is her employer, she will be covered by employment legislation and the Sexual Discrimination Act. Rachel Maskell, a national officer for the trade union Unite, believes that the Church of England is failing women clergy because those in the Church hierarchy are not sufficiently proactive in raising awareness of sexual discrimination or providing training and support to protect them. Responsible for the non-profit sector, including faith workers, Maskell deals with cases of bullying and harassment in the Church. ‘The politics that operate in the Church are quite frightening, and the majority of people find it easier to keep quiet about harassment. But we need to make it clear that, while there is currently an opt-out from sexual-discrimination legislation on religious grounds, where this exemption is not clearly stated in the diocese or where a women has been accepted into employment and then subsequently discriminated against, it is totally unacceptable,’ Maskell points out. Su Morgan, the human resources director of the Archbishops’ Council, the Church’s governing body, explains their position: ‘The Church does not exist as an employer. Rather like the NHS trusts, there are 44 dioceses that are statutory bodies, and they have a wide degree of independence. A booklet is available on harassment. But measures like genderappropriateness training are down to individual dioceses, because the Church itself has no authority to instruct them.’
‘There is an intense level of scrutiny for women in senior roles. There is too high a price to fail at the job’ The very rev vivienne faull
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here is hope that in future the Church will be taken to task over sexual-discrimination cases. On the recommendation of the House of Lords, a new terms-of-service measure is set be introduced, which will give clergy employee status and the right to tribunal. This measure should be in place before the first women bishops are ordained. None the less, many women are still concerned for the working conditions and welfare of the first female bishops. The Very Rev Vivienne Faull, 52, the Dean of Leicester Cathedral, was one of the first women to be promoted to provost – and later dean – in 2000, and is top of the list of favourites to be bishop. ‘I was the only women dean for four years and it felt lonely and exposed,’ she says with the clipped air of a school mistress. ‘There is an intense level of scrutiny for women in senior roles, and you have to be more cautious and guarded because, as the first women, there is too high a price to fail at the job.’ Mrs Faull believes that the ordination of women bishops is vital to the future
of the Church. Statistics released in December by Christian Research suggest that Sunday attendance will fall by 90 per cent by 2050. Others point to the rapid decline in young female churchgoers. Dr Kristin Aune, an author and senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby, attributes this to a range of factors, including the Church’s silence on issues such as sexuality. In addition, new research by Aune suggests that the fall in the Church’s female population may be greatest in places that do not support women’s ministry. Under the dome of the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s Cathedral, Canon Lucy Winkett bows her head and bids the congregation, ‘Let us pray.’ Above her the blue and gold mosaics of the prophet Isaiah and the apostles St John and St Matthew look down as if they are waiting for her to make her next move. ‘There are so many amazing women in the Church, and so much potential for women religious leaders,’ she tells me later. ‘Christianity could be a force for women’s liberation around the world. Women bishops can address the huge issues in society today: the lack of positive female role models, teenage pregnancy, underage and binge drinking among women. But we can only do that in an institution that has its own house in order. Until then we don’t have a leg to stand on.’ stella 39
super-nannies
Illustration by Tobatron
THE NAME’S POPPINS… Once upon a time she was in charge of the school run and bath time; these days she can be asked to fend off intruders and foil ambushes. Stephanie Rafanelli meets a new breed of British nanny who comes straight out of Bond
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el’s head jolts as she slams the brakes to the floor; her sternum lurches forwards and slumps hard against the steering wheel. Beneath pastel-pink eyeshadow her pupils dilate. Two men in dark clothing dismount from the silver Jeep that diagonally blocks her path. ‘Get down!’ she turns and screams to the empty seats of her people-carrier as a second car hems her in from behind. She throws herself in one fluid move across the gearbox and out of the passenger door and unloads five imaginary children. Crouching over them with arms outstretched to act as a human
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shield, she scampers into bushes at the side of the road. ‘Only run if you are under fire in an ambush situation, Mel,’ says one of her assailants, a cleanly shaven man with squeaky leather boots, from the foliage. ‘Your attackers are unlikely to want to harm the children – or you the nanny – at this stage.’ He pauses. ‘You are worth more to them alive.’ This is the advanced-driving-skills module of the 30-hour Hostile Environment Awareness Training (Heat) course for child-care professionals, run by Lynceus, a company more used to training policeman and war correspondents than nannies.
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el Beecroft, a 25-year-old nanny with bobbed hair and flushed cheeks, cares for the children of a ‘very highprofile family’, shuttling them up to six times a day between school and home, the family’s 200-acre estate in the south of England. ‘I never used to lock the doors of our vehicle because I thought it would be a fire risk; I didn’t realise how
easy it would be to grab the kids from behind,’ she rasps in a husky Australian accent. ‘We’d be easy to target.’ Back in a conference room in Kensington, Mel and three other nannies assemble. The course’s main instructor is Bob McKay, a 6ft 3in wall of ex-military muscle with blade-sharp creases in his trousers. He paces up and down in front of the class, trailed by a waft of cologne. ‘Children are the new commodity for global organised crime,’ McKay begins, jabbing at the air emphatically with giant fingers. ‘They are soft targets: easy to kidnap for ransom, financial gain, political motives, human trafficking or sexual gratification. As a nanny you are the last line of defence in protecting the child in your care.’ McKay has 26 years’ experience of covert military and police operations involving ‘kidnap and extortion’ and anti-terrorist activities in the Middle East. ‘There are human traffickers, child-porn rings and individual paedophiles at work in our society. The threat of kidnap is real,’ he booms. 42
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While Colombia may still be the kidnap capital of the world, the rate of kidnappings in Britain is on the rise. As McKay explains to the class, ‘Children are often the weak spot to get to someone politically or financially. The higher the profile of your client, the greater the threat of a kidnapping plot against their children.’ The children of David and Victoria Beckham, Madonna, Katie Price, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have all allegedly been the targets of credible kidnapping threats. Consequently, Britain has undergone a huge surge in demand for elite nannies over the past three years. ‘Elite nannies are highly skilled on a number of levels,’ explains Catherine Houton, the head of the nanny division at SLM Recruitment. The domestic-staffing agency helped devise the Heat course and now subsidises all its nannies on it. ‘They usually have child-care qualifications as well as experience of working with affluent people, confidentiality agreements and the demands of international travel. But in addition to this more clients are looking for nannies who can defend themselves and the children in their care.’ Elite child care has become a challenging and increasingly sought-after long-term career with the opportunity to sample a glamorous lifestyle and serious financial perks. Elite nannies in England can earn between £650 and £800 a week with their own flat (plus expenses), car, BlackBerry, Left the girls learn food, tax and health insurance how to ward off attack all included. below staging a practice ambush in the park ‘But expectations are high,’ Houton warns. ‘Clients want efficiency and flexibility and can require 24hour cover six or even seven days a week. That’s a great deal of responsibility for a nanny to take on.’ Tamara Wells is an experienced elite nanny who worked for three high-profile clients between 2004 and 2006, all of whom had been threatened with child-kidnap plots. While based in Europe, Wells was nanny to the children of a British ‘sports personality’and lived in a compound with an entourage of domestic staff, a security team and the family themselves. As part of the job Wells followed strict security procedures, liaising daily with PAs and bodyguards, as well as sending out decoy cars before leaving the premises. ‘I loved my job, but it was really intense at first,’ says the petite 27-year-old from Cornwall. ‘There was a threat to the kids’ safety, not only from kidnappers but also from paparazzi and
‘There are human traffickers, child-porn rings and individual paedophiles at work in our society. The threat of kidnap is real’
Peter Dench
In recent years a new breed of ‘elite nannies’ has emerged in Britain to meet a growing demand from celebrities, politicians, royalty and the large numbers of Russia’s new London-based financial elite. With the rise in threats from terrorism and kidnapping, elite nannies are now expected to offer not only the best available child care (combined with ultimate discretion) but also security awareness, able to juggle high-pressure situations and frequent travel to global ‘high-risk’ zones. During the Heat course, the nannies are taught countersurveillance techniques (altering your daily route to school; avoiding vulnerable traffic spots), how to spot if you are being followed on foot (using the mirrors of parked cars and shop windows to look behind you), self-defence and keeping a copy of your child’s DNA and fingerprints in case a kidnap attempt is successful.
super-nannies According to the Ministry of the Interior, 16,000 children fans, too. Everyone is screaming and grabbing at you, and you a year disappear in Russia; one third of these are victims of have to try and fight them off to protect the children.’ kidnappings, and the charity Russian Futures has identified Most elite nannies are required to sign a strict confidentiality 190 child-trafficking networks within the country. agreement to prevent leaks in information and breaches of Tara Jeffrey’s blue eyes glaze over as she talks excitedly security. ‘As a nanny, it’s crucial that you remain anonymous, about the extravagant lifestyle of her employer, a Russian otherwise you can be targeted by kidnappers and the press, bank owner and his wife, who live in a gated development, trying to gain inside information,’ says Wells. She often wore one of the ‘millionaire villages’ of the Moscow suburbs. The a hat and dark glasses to disguise herself in photographs and 33-year-old, originally from Portsmouth, moved was unable to reveal her daily whereabouts, to Moscow a year ago, lured by the pay and future travel arrangements or even the name working conditions. She looks after the family’s of her employers to her own boyfriend. five-year-old girl in rotation with a French and ‘You live this celebrity lifestyle, but you can’t a Russian nanny, working 10 days a month for tell anyone about it in case you put the family £800 a week plus her own flat – all expenses at risk.’ paid – phone and driver. Wells experienced one such breach in ‘The threat of kidnapping is high here, but security first hand while caring for the three families don’t want to acknowledge it in case children of a pop star. ‘Someone managed to it scares off British nannies,’ explains Jeffrey, break into the family’s property, and the kids who cautiously admits that her employer’s job spotted the intruder on the CCTV system,’ makes her a probable target. ‘You are always she says, her assertive tone faltering. ‘They Below as part of her accompanied by a bodyguard or a driver were absolutely terrified. The trickiest thing in ‘awareness’ training, who is fully armed at all times, even inside the a crisis is to react like an adult, but to remember a nanny is tagged without her noticing compound. Some Russian nannies even carry that keeping the children calm – and safe – is guns themselves.’ your ultimate priority, no matter what.’ Daniella Scott, 36, from London, spent or her most recent position Wells was headhunted by three months earlier a prominent family based in Paris, where she worked with this year as a nanny a bodyguard 24 hours a day. She is currently taking a short for a high-profile break from nannying (‘to have my own life for a bit’), but her family in Moscow: experience working with security teams – and the fact that she ‘I was told never is British – makes her one of the most sought-after elite nannies. to travel anywhere ‘British nannies are in global demand because everyone on my own without wants their children to grow up speaking English with a perfect a driver. I felt accent,’ explains completely helpless. You are there Katherine Shields to look after the child, but you don’t of Imperial Nannies, even speak the language. I wouldn’t an agency with offices have known what to do if something in London and Bath. had happened to my child.’ ‘Foreign families, At the end of the Heat course, especially those during the final ambush training in Russia and the exercise, Bob McKay is confident that Middle East, will offer his trainees will never feel as helpless enticing financial as Scott. Alert, primed and armed packages to poach with nothing but a pushchair, Mel nanny talent from Beecroft and two other nannies take Britain. But it often their high-profile charge – a grubby means that girls antique doll with wildly backcombed are going out to hair and a lazy left eye – for a walk high-risk zones in the park. Suddenly, a woman to with challenging their left screams hysterically; the nannies turn their heads, cultural differences.’ momentarily distracted. A man swoops in from the right and Nowhere is this demand for British nannies greater than in tries to grab the plastic baby. But the nannies are too quick. Moscow. According to Forbes magazine, the city now boasts In an instant they have formed a human barricade around the 60 billionaires, the highest concentration of any city in the pram. The plot successfully foiled, the man makes off into the world. Russian families are willing to pay up to £1,000 per bushes. McKay laughs heartily, clapping his muscular hands: week, and often fly to London to interview shortlisted ‘elite’ ‘Well done, team. You are all officially super-nannies.’ £ candidates. But behind the large salaries lie increased risks.
‘You are always accompanied by a bodyguard who is fully armed, even in the compound. Some Russian nannies carry guns themselves’
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Peter Dench
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fear of birth
It’s rarely spoken about, but tokophobia – a pathological fear of giving birth – is a condition that affects as many as one in six women, and can lead in the most extreme cases to abortion, self-harm and even suicide. Stephanie Rafanelli talks to three women who managed to overcome their terror and have children, and one who didn’t
HARD LABOUR When Jacqueline goes to sleep at night she dreams of dead babies. ‘I close my eyes and start to drift off and that’s when they appear. Sometimes I hear them giggling from my cupboard or playing with Barbie at the end of my bed.’ In the dream Jacqueline is happy, until she rushes to hug her children and finds them covered in blood. ‘I tell them again and again, “I’m sorry Mummy wasn’t brave enough to have you.”’ Then she wakes up. Just six months ago a thin blue line appeared on the tester stick of her pregnancy kit. She and John – her partner of two years – had desperately wanted a child. ‘I remember looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and trying to smile – it was what I’d planned. But I couldn’t jump up and down in the way that a normal woman might. I just 46 stella 46 stella
had to tell myself that I would be able to go through with it this time.’ The blonde woman in front of me looks down in shame. She does not see herself as a ‘normal’ woman. Jacqueline suffers from a pathological fear of giving birth. Her pregnancy – along with two previous attempts to carry a baby to term when she was 25 and again at 30 – ended in abortion. Now 35, Jacqueline, a PhD student, agrees to meet on the condition of strict anonymity. ‘I’m fine at the beginning of the pregnancy. Then after a few weeks something inside me starts to shift. I call it “the Fear”,’ Jacqueline says, laughing nervously. It starts as shortness of breath and sweating, she tells me, but it develops into full-blown panic attacks. ‘It’s like the foetus inside me is turning into something – an alien incubating
inside me. As it grows bigger it is taking over my body and my life.’ I think of the scene from Alien when the creature rips its way out of John Hurt’s abdomen. This is not unlike Jacqueline’s vision of birth. ‘It’s like a time bomb ticking in my stomach.’ Jacqueline touches her abdomen unconsciously as she speaks. ‘I know that if I don’t get rid of it before the birth I will die or go mad.’ She tails off, struggling to explain. The first time that Jacqueline was visited by ‘the Fear’ she was 25. Within a few weeks she was so desperate to miscarry that she thought about throwing herself down the stairs – or even in front of a car to be more ‘certain’. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion but refused her request for a sterilisation. ‘I should never
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Fear of birth have risked wanting another child,’ she says today. When John found out about the abortion he left her. Jacqueline is too ashamed to confide in her friends – a group of young mothers and broody single women. ‘How could I? They would think I’m mental. Or a monster.’ It is precisely this fear that keeps women like Jacqueline from seeking help. With the arrival of ‘yummy mummy’ culture, innovations in IVF and an obsession with pregnant celebrities, society is more birth-obsessed than ever. In this climate it is not difficult to see why severe birth phobia has remained a hidden problem. While conditions such as depression and anorexia have benefited from increasing awareness, Jacqueline’s condition – tokophobia – was only classified in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2000. There are two types of tokophobia: primary, suffered by women giving birth for the first time; and secondary, experienced by women so traumatised by the birth of their first child that they can’t face carrying another pregnancy to term. In either case only a tiny proportion of women are ever officially diagnosed. According to research by the psychiatrist Kristina Hofberg, who identified the condition in the late 1990s while working in the mother-and-baby unit at Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric hospital in Birmingham, one in six women is so terrified of childbirth that she may avoid getting pregnant or giving birth, even if she is desperate to have a child. There are other signs, too, that birth and motherhood have become traumatic experiences for a growing proportion of women. In 2002 the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health cited suicide as the biggest cause of maternal death indirectly related to pregnancy, in the year after delivery, and research carried out by the University of Sussex concluded that one third of all women considered their labour to be ‘traumatic’. Earlier this year the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued its first guidelines on maternal mental heath, including a section on fear of childbirth.
Jacqueline suffers from primary tokophobia. Predisposing factors include sexual abuse in childhood, a history of depression or negative perceptions or misinformation about birth – often caused by watching graphic birth videos or hearing birth ‘horror stories’. Jacqueline remembers being forced, at 14, to watch a video of childbirth in a sex education class. ‘I had never seen that much blood before. I remember seeing a close-up of the baby’s head crowning, and wanting to throw up.’ And then there
was deeply disturbed by the idea of giving birth. ‘I was paranoid about contraception in my twenties and early thirties and often used two or three methods at the same time,’ she says. ‘I didn’t avoid sex but I avoided serious relationships where having children might come up.’ But Jane’s preoccupation with birth didn’t end there. When she was 27 she decided to become a midwife. Why was she attracted to the thing that she feared most? Eloquent and honest about her tokophobia and sexual abuse, Jane wavers on the reasons why she chose to help women give birth every day. ‘Maybe I didn’t want them to suffer like I had suffered as a child. When I saw women in labour who where lying on their backs with their legs open – so exposed – I somehow felt that they were in the same helpless position I had been as a child with my father. Though the situation was very different, they were out of control of their bodies and clearly in pain. I felt I knew how repeated vaginal examinations might feel if badly handled by doctors.’ In her mid-thirties Jane met Gary – a man 13 years her senior who no longer wanted children. She remained vigilant about contraception but at 36, out of the blue, her diaphragm failed her and she fell accidentally pregnant. ‘I felt violated. All I wanted was to get the parasite out of me as fast as I could.’ She called Marie Stopes International and booked a consultation for the next day. Jane had to wait a week for the termination to take place, so Gary took her to Cyprus. They walked on the beach every day and talked it over again and again. Jane didn’t want to allow what her father did to control her but she couldn’t risk the birth triggering flashbacks of the abuse. What if she had a home birth, in water with no one touching her? Could she do it? Maybe. She agreed to give it a go. To her, however, pregnancy felt like an illness, and she became increasingly depressed. She often lay awake until the small hours, suffering from intrusive thoughts and graphic images of tearing, stretching and cutting. When, at 36 weeks, she was told that a home birth was not guaranteed, Jane
‘MOST WOMEN ARE FRIGHTENED OF BIRTH. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME I’D LOST CONTROL OVER MY BODY’
Sarah maynard was traumatised by the birth of her daughter, abbie, but is trying for another baby
was her mother, who told her that sex was filthy, that her body was dirty. ‘If sex was filthy, then pregnancy was a symptom of that – like a venereal disease,’ says Jacqueline.
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ane Stratton, a 40-year-old parenting coach, grew up on a council estate in south London where, as a child, she was sexually abused by her father. Softly spoken with flushed apple cheeks she is the stereotypical embodiment of maternal, yet from adolescence she
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Fear of birth panicked. ‘I lay in the bath that night and fantasised about punching and beating my lump. She would have to kill the baby or kill herself – it was her or ‘it’. Instead, Jane went to her obstetrician the next morning and begged for an elective caesarean on mental-health grounds. She was allowed to have one. What did the caesarean mean to her? Jane believes it saved her sanity and her life. ‘I was worried that I might be so traumatised by the birth that I wouldn’t be able to bond with or look after Roland.’ She ruffles her five-year-old son’s blond hair.
Some names and places have been changed
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enny Smith was not so lucky. She suffered from severe depression and flashbacks for two years after the birth of her first son, Jake. Six years on she and her husband, Alistair, have begun family counselling to try to come to terms with the fact that Penny is too traumatised – and frightened – ever to give birth again. They are currently discussing adoption. Penny, a 42-year old teacher, stares out across the bleak Cornish seafront where we meet. We watch a young mother push her two-seater pram along the promenade. ‘I still feel sick when I see mothers with two children – I’m jealous of what I can’t have.’ The shock of the birth has changed her permanently. ‘I feel like I was blown up in a terrorist attack. There are parts of me missing that will never come back.’ While for most mothers the memory of birth fades within days, Penny remembers the details of her delivery vividly. After 16 hours of labour Jake – at 9lb – became lodged in Penny’s narrow pelvis. His heart rate dropped and she was rushed into theatre for an emergency episiotomy and a prolonged ventouse delivery (using a vacuum suction cup on the baby’s head). ‘The pain was so great that I thought I was going to die. It was as if my body had already started disconnecting: the blood, the nurses’ faces, the noise, they were all starting to fade. I heard Jake being resuscitated next to me. I thought that my last memory on this earth would be seeing my baby die.’ Jake did survive but his head was – and still is – badly misshapen. He found it
almost impossible to settle, crying constantly. Meanwhile, Penny was left numb. ‘I couldn’t feel anything positive for my son, just anger at what he’d done to me, and the guilt of it tore me apart.’ For the next two years she suffered from ‘tearful’ depression and flashbacks to the birth: the doctor forced the ventouse inside her ‘as if he was raping me’ again and again. Penny went to her GP for help but lied in the multiple-choice test that would have diagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because, like many women in her position, she feared she would be classified as mentally unstable and that social services would take Jake away from her.
explains Patrick O’Brien, a consultant obstetrician and spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. ‘On top of that, if you have an emergency C-section or ventouse you may also think that you or your baby is going to die. It’s an ordeal that should not be underestimated. The key to how traumatic a woman perceives her birth to be is in the communication. A doctor merely taking the trouble to introduce himself before a forceps delivery can transform it from the most traumatic and brutal experience of a woman’s life to the medical necessity that saved her baby.’ Awareness and acceptance of tokophobia in the medical profession is improving. The new NICE guidelines on maternal mental health stress the importance of ‘good communication’ before, during and after birth, and advocate counselling and support and – in severe cases – caesareans on maternal request for women with extreme birth phobia. Sarah Maynard, a 36-year old who lives in Weybridge, suffered from flashbacks and depression after the birth of her daughter, Abbie, three years ago. Despite her fear, she is now trying for a second baby but plans to request an elective caesarean from her GP. ‘I’m starting to have nightmares already,’ she tells me. ‘Caesarean rates are so high. What if they don’t grant me one?’ Sarah is also anxious about being labelled ‘too posh to push’. ‘There’s such pressure from other mothers – it makes me feel a failure because I can’t give birth to a baby “naturally”.’ She feels that mothers are still expected to keep a stiff upper lip. ‘I think most women are frightened about birth. For me it was partly the anxiety about becoming a mother, but it was also the first time I’d really lost control over my body and my life. Everyone is so busy trying to be the perfect earth mother that no one thinks they can be honest and open about they way they feel.’ £
‘I COULDN’T FEEL ANYTHING POSITIVE FOR MY SON, JUST ANGER AT WHAT HE’D DONE TO ME’ ‘Most women are frightened to admit that they are still traumatised by the birth when they should be focusing on their new baby,’ explains Maureen Treadwell of the Birth Trauma Association, whose website, when it was launched in 2004, was inundated with anonymous stories from women who had never spoken out before. ‘Even if they do go for help, PTSD is often misdiagnosed as postnatal depression and treated with antidepressants rather than counselling. These women will remain traumatised, sometimes for several years, and some may go on to self-harm or even to commit suicide’. Twenty years ago academics scoffed at the idea that women could suffer PTSD after such a ‘normal’ event as birth. Now an estimated one to two per cent of women in Britain are diagnosed with PTSD after labour – about 10,000 women every year. ‘For most modern women who have not been exposed to a lot of blood or violence, labour can be a very shocking, brutal experience, rather like war,’
The Birth Trauma Association, birthtraumaassociation.org.uk. The National Childbirth Trust, nct.org.uk; 0870 444 8709 stella 51
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In the heady drink-and-drug-fuelled days of booming Eighties Britain, three fiercely driven, trailblazing women fought their way to the heart of the male-dominated worlds of TV and journalism, reshaping the landscape. But did their pioneering iconoclasm bring about any lasting change? And what does the future hold for today’s high-profile female media figures? STEPHANIE RAFANELLI and STEPHANIE THEOBALD investigate
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t was a deranged Algonquin Round Table, a labyrinthine stage set called the Groucho Club where, any night of the week, you could find an alluring cast of Bright Young Things from the new media world. The setting was ‘1985 to 1995’, the dramatis personae were all seditionary, and yet, just as it was Dorothy Parker who dominated the uproarious 1920s meetings at the Algonquin Hotel, so it was the fabulous dames of the Groucho (the first members’ club to admit women when it opened in 1985) who caught your attention. On its grand staircase, you might bump into the bullish ‘First Lady of youth TV’, Janet Street-Porter, who’d be boasting to her friend Neil Tennant about the Bafta she’d recently won for her groundbreaking music show Network 7 on the alternative and newly emerging Channel 4. Or you might spy ‘Princess of punk’ Paula Yates, just back from filming The Tube in Newcastle, whispering secrets to her coterie of Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart and the Le Bons, all guests of honour at her recent 1986 wedding to Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof at the height of his acclaim after the successes of Live Aid the previous year. At a long table at the back of the club, if you’d been brave enough, you might have sneaked a peek at ‘Queen of the Groucho’, one Julie Burchill. Famous for spouting shimmering profundities about Situationism, the Viet Cong and Marge Simpson to a court of beautiful young acolytes, both male and female, Burchill would tip the waiters lavishly before rushing off to the bathrooms where the toilet seats had conveniently flat lids.
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This flamboyant female triumvirate was emerging triumphant into changing times. Until then, the media had been a predominantly male arena, an old-boys’ club reminiscent of Mad Men, clinking with whisky glasses and permeated by the pungent whiff of machismo; women were in a minority, often working on female-focused sections or in secretarial posts, while positions of power – newspaper editors and broadcast executives – were the exclusive domain of male suits. It was in this stifling environment (at El Vino’s on Fleet Street, women were forbidden from ordering at the bar) that a young Rebekah Wade began working as a secretary at the News of the World in 1989, the very beginning of her epic media trajectory. (Even later in her career, shortly after being made deputy editor of the News of the World in 1995, a senior male executive famously thrust his shirt and a handful of buttons into her hands, saying: ‘When you have a minute, darling, sew them back on for me.’) Yet the mid-Eighties was also an exciting time: the UK economy swung out of dark recession into a boom, opening up the workplace to women, empowered by both the individualism of Thatcher and the aftermath of Seventies feminism. ‘A big transformation was happening in the media too,’ recalls Lynne Franks, whose notorious PR agency (famously parodied in Absolutely Fabulous), which she set up in 1970, was at its height in that era. ‘Women like Eve Pollard [the second woman to head up a national newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, in 1987] and Sue Douglas [assistant editor of the Daily Mail, later editor of the Sunday Express] were just starting to edit newspapers and change Fleet Street from being an alcoholic all-boys club.’ Aside from the few women, including Kate Adie, Jean Rook and Ann Leslie, who had broken down barriers in the stodgy 1970s, a new group of controversial young writers and editors were making waves: columnists Suzanne Moore and Lynn Barber; Sheryl Garratt, March 2012 |
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PHOTOGRAPHS: REX FEATURES, THE PICTURE LIBRARY LTD, ALAMY IMAGES, JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS
BROADCAST NEWS Julie Burchill in 1989. Right: Paula Yates in 1982. Far right: Janet Street-Porter in 1986. Below: press cuttings from their controversial careers
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one would grab their share – or flaunt their winnings – more single-mindedly, more brilliantly or more notoriously than Street-Porter, Burchill and Yates. Each would forge her own destiny, transcending the limited opportunities then available to her gender: Street-Porter by sheer ball-breaking willpower; Yates by flirtation; and Burchill by rebellious irreverence, searing a range of female archetypes onto the consciousness of future generations. The brash Eighties were in full swing: the epoch of Filofaxes, spritzers, liquid lunches, Kurt Geiger heels, and teddies by Janet Reger. Soho swarmed with hacks, rock stars and designers (Betty Jackson, Katharine Hamnett, John Galliano and Rifat Ozbek) sealing deals over cocktails at the Groucho, or at L’Escargot, Le Caprice or the Covent Garden offices of Franks. Among them, impossible to miss, was the strident figure of Street-Porter: a gangly six-footer with thick glasses, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a dinner lady from Perivale, with a penchant for dyed hair and miniskirts, who swore like a builder in a thick Estuary accent. She was hardly the cliché classic beauty who might rise through the ranks via seduction. ‘I was born with big frilly teeth, milk-bottle glasses and beige hair,’ she used to say. ‘It didn’t hold me back.’ Nor was she an Oxbridge graduate. She had dropped out of architectural college after two years, immediately landing a role at Petticoat, a girls’ magazine. In 1973, she had worked for LBC Radio, where she was juxtaposed with RP-speaking reporter Paul Callan, his accent ‘cutglass’ as opposed to her ‘cut-froat’. (One listener complained that she sounded like ‘she is eating a plate of spaghetti with a fork and spoon’.) But it was not just her accent that provoked others. She was ‘ruthless, single-minded, driven and self-centred’, as she later admitted in her 2006 memoir Fall Out. She had perfected her abrasive manner during ‘a drunken two years’, from 1969, as a fashion journalist in Fleet Street. She’d observed her boss Sandy Fawkes (‘A red-haired, tempestuous journalist with a legendary temper and a huge appetite
Yet Street-Porter was also always fiercely talented – ‘I never applied for a job, I always went in at the top’ – and from LBC Radio she soared colourfully through the grey-suited ranks of the BBC, presenting shows including Saturday Night People, her on-camera persona spawning a wave of venomous imitations, most notably from Pamela Stephenson on Not the Nine O’Clock News, and later Spitting Image. She once recounted how ‘one feeble harpie assaulted me [in the Groucho] with a broken glass because I called her “flotsam”.’ But in certain quarters she was as adored, amassing a celebrity court that included the Pet Shop Boys and Elton John. ‘One night in the Groucho,’ Street-Porter regaled, ‘Courtney Love declared that she wanted to have sex with me. She had watched my programmes on TV on tour and she was a big fan.’ Whether loved or loathed, Street-Porter was on the up. In 1987, she was poached by Channel 4 to head up Network 7, a new, edgy youth-current-affairs programme that dealt with serious issues, such as death row and Aids, with a fast-cut, fast-paced delivery. ‘Her greatest selling point was her skill as a trendspotter,’ according to Lynn Barber. ‘She had no trouble identifying with “yoof culture” (although the term wasn’t invented then) because she never grew up… In some ways, she reminds me of our mutual friend Tracey Emin. They both give the impression of being engaged in a constant battle against a world that is always trying to put them down, to deflate them.’ By now, Street-Porter’s tireless railing – as well as her programmes – had got her noticed. In 1988, Alan Yentob appointed her head of youth and entertainment features at the BBC, where she defined a new era with irreverent programmes such as Rapido, Red Dwarf and Rough Guide. Janet Street-Porter had become the undisputed Queen of Youth – and she would leave her mark on TV schedules for ever.
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ulie Burchill, too, exploded riotously into the media, riding in on a crest of youth culture – specifically, punk. Growing up on a council estate in Bristol, the daughter of a trade unionist and a cardboard-box-factory worker – ‘dressed in black, smoking purple cigarettes and spouting Oscar Wilde’ – she escaped to London, answering an ad for ‘a hip young gunslinger’, subsequently landing the job at the heart of the music scene, at the NME. ‘I was paralytically shy when I came to London. I knew it was make it or break it if I didn’t become a more interesting person. So I remade myself, and became this snarling, switchblade punk girl.’ Within a decade, the sneering teen ‘gunslinger’ would become the highest-paid female writer in the history of British journalism. At the NME, she fell in love with journalist Tony Parsons, who she moved in with in 1981, later marrying and having their son, before abandoning both for Cosmo Landesman. ‘When I first met her in 1983, she looked like Jane Russell in The Outlaw, and squeaked like Minnie Mouse,’ Landesman said. Fellow journalist Toby Young noted that she had ‘a photographic memory, a razor-sharp wit and a brilliant, original mind’. Burchill herself was not known for her modesty. She exclaimed later in her 1998 autobiography: ‘I wrote like an angel on angel dust.’ (A reference to her copious drug habit – she once said she had snorted enough cocaine to ‘stun the entire Colombian armed forces’.) Burchill’s copy spewed out, irreverent, funny, acerbic. She wasn’t interested in sycophancy or ingratiating herself with key media power-brokers: ‘I was born without the vulnerability gene… I’ve never minded what people called me. Just couldn’t care less.’ She made her way in the world on her
‘I was born without the vulnerability gene… I’ve never minded what people called me. Just couldn’t care less’ JULIE BURCHILL for booze and men’), and was ‘awed by her confidence and ready put-downs’. Street-Porter cultivated her own audacious demeanour. ‘When she went to interview Barry Manilow,’ says friend Peter York, ‘one of his minders pushed her over, so she went over and pushed him back.’ According to one ex-employee: ‘She was a bit like one of those Spartan women who put their babies on the roof to see if they would survive the night. If you did, good. If you didn’t, too bad.’ In her private life, she was equally aggressive, and adulterous, later marrying four times. ‘I was always the dumper, never the dumpee,’ she has boasted. ‘Always shag men when you first meet them, because if the sex is shit you don’t have to see them again.’ 284 |
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own terms. The establishment would have to come to her. And it did. It was another woman – Sue Douglas – who gave Burchill her break in newspapers with a political column in the Mail on Sunday in 1986. And in 1991, Burchill went on to launch Modern Review (tag-line: ‘Low culture for highbrows’) with friend Toby Young; at its launch party at the Groucho, she spied 27-year-old gamine beauty Charlotte Raven, for whom she left Landesman. The pair set up home in Blakes hotel. ‘We’d lie in this four-poster bed in this room that was done up like a gentlemen’s club,’ says Raven, ‘and think up bespoke torments for people we didn’t like, such as Will Self and Damon Albarn.’
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n some ways, Paula Yates was the antithesis of Burchill. ‘We loathed each other from the word go,’ says the latter, who worked with Yates on her brief stint at the NME. ‘I came back to my desk one afternoon and she was sitting on it, legs wide apart, no knickers, screeching about sex.’ But Yates, like Burchill, emerged onto the London punk scene at 17, escaping her childhood in Colwyn Bay. Yates was ambitious, using her ‘punk Marilyn Monroe’ look, coquettish manner and wasp waist to land both the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and a naked spread in Penthouse in 1978. Rupert Everett, who Yates seduced, recounted: ‘She has this certain fragility that was erotic to men. She could break if you squeezed her too hard.’ But Yates was also fiercely bright, with off hand wit and toughtalking bravado, and it was Geldof who encouraged her to go into journalism: ‘I said if she could write as funny as she could speak, she could make her living from that.’ As a result, she wangled a music column called ‘Natural Blonde’ in Record Mirror, the perfect showcase for her talents; and in 1982, she was hired to co-front recently launched Channel 4’s edgy music show The Tube alongside Squeeze’s keyboardist Jools Holland. Yates and Holland became synonymous with the savvy, anti-authoritarian glamour that emanated from this new channel; her outrageous, flirtatious interviews crackled compared with the staid styles of broadcasters such as Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson. Like Burchill, Yates defined the irreverent attitude of the era. Her relationship with Geldof also gave her access to music-industry insiders – and her interviews were the first to put sex into TV. For Yates used her sexuality audaciously. ‘She wanted to be thought of as a sex symbol,’ said one writer, ‘but she wanted to be taken seriously too.’ In contrast to Yates, Burchill and Street-Porter’s iconoclastic behaviour had smashed the expectations of female deportment. They didn’t need to play sexy. They flouted attitudes towards motherhood too: ‘My relationships have taken the place of having children – and so has my career,’ said Street-Porter. When Burchill abandoned her son by Parsons, and then another child by Landesman, the Daily Mail ’s headline screamed: ‘Is Julie Burchill the worst mother in Britain?’ But Yates’ own trailblazing should not be underestimated: she was one of the first sexualised role models for working mothers (she gave birth to Fifi Trixibelle in 1983, Peaches in 1989 and Pixie in 1990, at the height of her career). She was photographed, babe in her tattooed arms or pregnant while working, rupturing another long-held taboo: the merging of the boundaries between sex and motherhood. (She made a risqué TV series about the former – Sex with Paula – and wrote a book about the latter.) ‘She purposefully nurtures this image of wild child and dizzy blonde…’ said a friend at the time. ‘But not everyone can look after children, make TV programmes, model, write
magazine articles, run two houses. She is a very disciplined person.’ Yet Yates’ careful life-work balance was to be radically destabilised when she met INXS singer Michael Hutchence; their famously lascivious interview, conducted on a bed, live on The Big Breakfast in 1994, left little to the imagination. In 1995, Yates left Geldof, getting ever more drawn into Hutchence’s seductively decadent world. In 1996, opium was found at their flat, causing her to lose custody of the children temporarily. But when, in 1997, Hutchence was found hanged at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel while on tour in Sydney, in an apparent suicide, and when it was subsequently revealed that her biological father was in fact Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green, Yates descended into despair and drug addiction. The oncedevoted mother unravelled before our eyes. In September 2000, Paula Yates was found dead of a heroin overdose in her flat by her four-year-old daughter by Hutchence, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. Her funeral – attended by her fellow Eighties luminaries, including Lennox, Bono, Holland and Jasper Conran – felt like the sad postscript to an era already long gone.
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he fall had begun long before. The excess and hedonism of the Eighties turned in on themselves; the era’s brash, rampant capitalism saturated everything; a new recession loomed; and Thatcher, Burchill’s heroine, left Downing Street in 1990 an ever-more-hated figure, replaced by John Major, the ultimate grey suit. At the same time, a new age dawned in the media, breaking up the close-knit camaraderie of the old days. Newspapers began to trickle out of Fleet Street, finding cheaper office space elsewhere. The internet and email arrived in 1993, radically altering the way journalists worked for ever – it was now more efficient to be desk-bound – although their explosive effects on the print medium would not yet be fully grasped. The increasing
‘The blight is management. The dreaded four Ms: male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre’ JANET STREET-PORTER
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commercial demands of TV meant that, in that same year, Channel 4 became the Channel 4 Television Corporation, with a new remit to move away from the fringe and focus on cheap programming, bringing forth a new generation of DIY shows and lifestyle series that would one day help open the floodgates to reality TV. Street-Porter herself perhaps played a part in precipitating this all-conquering new form of entertainment. In 1994, she left the BBC after missing out on a promotion. ‘The blight is management. The dreaded four Ms: male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre,’ she said the following year. She went on to set up Live TV with Kelvin McKenzie, but the partnership was fraught with power battles and divisions over McKenzie’s plans to take the channel down-market with programmes such as Topless Darts, and Street-Porter left after just five months. In 1996, her fourth husband, 28-year-old David Sorkin, sold his story to the tabloids, chronicling in detail StreetPorter’s sexual appetite during their 20-month marriage. Still, Street-Porter was not washed up. It was simply not in her nature. In 1999, she notoriously manoeuvred herself into the editor’s seat at The Independent on Sunday, a move dubbed by The Daily Telegraph: ‘The most spectacular act of dumbing down in media history.’ Although circulation improved by 11.6 per cent during her two-year March 2012 |
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who later edited The Face; and Rosie Boycott, former editor of Spare Rib and director of Virago Press, who went on to edit men’s magazine Esquire, The Independent on Sunday and the Daily Express. The renegade energy and DIY ethic of punk, born out of recession, had gone mainstream, and there was a sense that everything was up for grabs. ‘The emerging tough girls of the media knew they were winning out against that old culture,’ says social commentator Peter York.
editorship, by rising like a phoenix from the ashes, Street-Porter had reinforced her unofficial title of Most Hated Woman in the Media. ‘If I were a man, my career would be described as eclectic,’ she commented. ‘But because I’m a woman, I’m trivial… what utter bollocks.’ In 1995, Young ‘torched’ the Modern Review rather than see Burchill and Raven’s ambitions to take it over come true. This led to a vitriolic public war between the two snarling writers. Meanwhile, Burchill, by now dumped by Raven, took up with her lover’s younger brother Daniel, moving to Brighton and slipping into semiretirement with a serious case of ‘Grouchitis’. There, she wrote a book about Princess Diana like ‘a pissed Barbara Cartland’, as well as an autobiography, I Knew I Was Right, in 1998 (both slaughtered by critics). Others began to doubt her talent. ‘I lost my mojo,’ she admitted. ‘Writing talent is a finite thing.’ While Burchill’s fire seemed quelled (although she went on to write a column for The Guardian from 1998 to 2003), there were reasons to be optimistic. In May 1997, New Labour won the general election, with 120 women MPs elected to the House of Commons (twice as many as in 1992). As the new Prime Minister stood grinning on the steps of Church House in Westminster with 101 Blair Babes, it seemed to symbolise the dawn of an exciting new era for women. The future looked bright.
‘We can’t expect every woman thrust into a high-profile job to be a combination of Rosa Parks, Madonna and Thatcher’CAITLIN MORAN
Above: Yates with then-boyfriend Bob Geldof in 1979. Right: presenting ‘The Tube’ with Jools Holland and guest Sting in about 1984. Far right: the infamous live ‘Big Breakfast’ interview with Michael Hutchence in 1994
CULT OF YOUTH Above, from left: Street-Porter in 1976. With fellow ‘Saturday Night People’ presenters Russell Harty and Clive James in 1980. With the ‘Network 7’ team in 1987
PHOTOGRAPHS: REX FEATURES, CORBIS, STARSTOCK/PHOTOSHOT PHOTO, ALPHA PRESS
F Above: Burchill with Tony Parsons at the ‘NME’ Christmas party at Dingwalls in 1977. Right: with the editorial team of ‘Modern Review’, including, front row from left, Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young. Far right: Burchill (right) with Charlotte Raven in 1995
entertainment and news at Sky); Helen Boaden (director of BBC News and rumoured possible successor to director general Mark Thompson); and Janice Hadlow (controller of BBC Two). In print: Marjorie Scardino (CEO of Pearson); Sly Bailey (CEO of Trinity Mirror); Tina Weaver (editor of the Sunday Mirror); Dawn Neeson (editor of the Daily Star); Katharine Viner (deputy editor of The Guardian); Nicola Jeal (Saturday editor of The Times and editor-inchief of The Times Magazine); and, until very recently, Rebekah Brooks. The latter’s trajectory has, after all, been perhaps the most meteoric of all. She was the first woman to ascend to the lofty heights of CEO at News International when she was promoted in 2009. In two decades, she had risen through the ranks of the company from secretary in 1989 to editor of the News of the World in 2000 (the youngest
ifteen years on – despite the trailblazing of women like Burchill and Street-Porter and the promise of Blair’s government – change has been slow to come. In the critical areas of politics and media, men are still dominant and shaping our world. The figures are damning. Only 22 per cent of the coalition-government MPs are women.The media shows a similar ratio: 78 per cent of newspaper articles are still written by men; 84 per cent of reporters on Radio 4’s Today programme are male, as are 72 per cent of pundits who appear on Question Time; and 92 per cent on Have I Got News for You, according to recent research by The Guardian. ‘The point is that that era in the Eighties just didn’t effect any changes,’ comments Rosie Boycott. ‘It was just a blip and it went away. So you can’t really say it was meaningful. It didn’t really change the structure of the media in any way. Was it a golden age for women? No, not really. I don’t think Thatcher made much of an effort to change culture to make it more female – I don’t think any of them did.’ Yet those female mavericks did leave their impact on the future generation. Author and Times columnist Caitlin Moran is in some ways the natural successor to Burchill. ‘She was a massive role model and inspiration to me growing up. She came in like this lady boss from a Lynda La Plante novel. She didn’t play the game. She didn’t primp up or lose weight. She did it all, like a man, but in a really good way.’ But is the empowering effect of individual role models ever enough to change such a deeply entrenched system? ‘Women still have to work twice as hard,’ says journalist Rachel Cooke, who believes that, to some extent, women are still ghettoised. ‘I write book reviews. Say, out of 18 reviews in a week, about 13 of them will be written by men. I will never be given Jonathan Franzen to review. I would be given Hilary Mantel… To a degree, women in the media have internalised the old sexist attitudes.’ But this not an exclusively dark tale. There are beacons of hope on the horizon: a new set of women, working more discreetly than their trailblazing predecessors, some holding powerful key executive roles. In television: Sophie Turner Laing (managing director of www.harpersbazaar.co.uk
female editor of a Fleet Street newspaper) – and finally The Sun in 2003, aged just 35. For the first time, the paper’s influential threemillion-strong readership was in the hands of a female editor. Brooks, like Street-Porter, has always had her critics – firstly, over her recapitulation on scrapping Page 3. ‘It would have been a huge move to make. She would have remained a hero to a lot of people,’ says Boycott. ‘One of the papers that can bring about enormous change in our culture is The Sun.’ More crucially, like many people, Boycott ‘feels let down’ by Brooks over the phone-hacking scandal (though on the exact nature of her involvement, the jury is still out). ‘I have this naive notion that women could make better leaders. If there isn’t an ideal of a better woman leader, why does it matter that there are no women?’ she says. Moran, however, goes some way to letting Brooks off the hook. ‘We can’t expect every single woman thrust into a highprofile job to be a combination of Rosa Parks and Madonna and Margaret Thatcher and to single-handedly save our culture. When you are the only woman in a completely male environment, it’s exhausting, and probably your last priority is forwarding feminism.’ Whether motivated by feminism or not, the very existence – and in some cases persistence – of women in the media continues to at least challenge. Street-Porter, once the embodiment of youth culture, is now a pin-up for 60-plus women on television. And one suspects that in the next decade or so, women such as Mariella Frostrup, Kirsty Wark and Kirsty Young will still be stubbornly and brilliantly gracing our screens. (The BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders and Sky News’ Alex Crawford are also rising stars.) What is vital for women, says Cooke, is the creation of a strong mutual-support network. ‘It’s really important to nurture women on their way up. There are brilliant bosses like Katharine Viner and Nicola Jeal, who are tremendously supportive,’ she says. ‘You decide what you write about. You can try to be positive about other women.’ There is still a long way to go. Some consider that the time is again ripe for firestarters like Street-Porter and Burchill. ‘We could do with a lot more Janets,’ says Boycott, ‘women with sheer ballsy brilliance.’ But perhaps in their fire and bile, they were ultimately creatures necessarily of their epoch. There is an alternative: the stoical power of the slow burn. ‘I think today there is also a quiet kind of feminism,’ says Cooke. ‘In the end, it will be how we get our revenge – just by being better than the men.’ March 2012 |
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