building in the shadows of ruins

Today, 28th December, is known in the Christian liturgical calendar as Childermas, or ‘The Feast of the Holy Innocents.’ Believed to be an unlucky day, the fourth day of Christmas is a day to commemorate the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, during which King Herod of Judea ordered the execution of all male infants in Bethlehem, as described in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16 - 18). 

The murder of babes doesn’t seem a particularly festive topic to be observing during a period meant to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. In the medieval period, the day was a time for children to run somewhat wild, pulling the kind of pranks we now associate with April Fool’s Day.

Later on, it became tradition for children to be beaten in their beds on December 28th, supposedly with the intention to drive out evil spirits before the new year. But much of the music and literature associated with Childermas doesn’t really focus on children at all. Instead, they are frequently meditations on motherhood - or, more specifically, maternal grief. 

The Coventry Carol is one of the most famous Christian songs associated with Childermas. First recorded in 1534, it was performed as part of the medieval ‘mystery play’ - travelling theatre tableaus depicting Bible stories - during a pageant put on by one of Coventry’s city guilds. ‘The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors,’ depicted the nativity story from the Gospel of Matthew; while the lyrics of ‘The Coventry Carol’ reference the Massacre of the Innocents. Sung by a chorus of grieving mothers, it’s referred to as a carol, but really, it’s a lullaby-lament:

Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

Thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?

Herod the king, in his raging,

Chargèd he hath this day

His men of might in his own sight

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee

And ever mourn and may

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay."

What makes The Coventry Carol notable isn’t just that, particularly in its setting by Philip Stopford, it’s a hauntingly beautiful piece of choral music, or that it has survived and been passed down for over 500 years. To me, The Coventry Carol - and Childermas - are noteworthy because they not only give space to, but credence of, grief – in a time otherwise reserved for festivities and celebration. 

And to do so via a chorus of women, who otherwise are granted rare acknowledgement during the liturgical calendar, makes that contrast the more poignant. After all, what grief is more acute than that of a mother mourning the death of a child? When is grief more pronounced than in the darkest nights of winter? 

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We are, at best, culturally uncomfortable around death. To mourn for ‘too long’ is considered socially gauche; yet deviation from normative funeral customs is often frowned upon. To be bereaved can feel like an illness, especially when emotionally uncomfortable or unattuned people around you treat you as if your grief may be contagious. 

We mark anniversaries, birthdays and seasonal holidays for a reason: annual celebrations give us opportunity to reflect, reset, and recognize our good fortune. But remembrance gets a far more meager plate at the table. A national day of mourning, linked to a monarchy which many do not support, and a country that has brutalized many more others, is more insult than equivocation for these regular celebrations. 

Birth and death are the two diametric certainties of our lives. And yet, in their very opposition, death and birth are closer to synonyms - yet we spend much of our waking moments trying to exclude the existence of one from the other. 

I can think of few more heartbreaking scenes than that of a mother singing a lullaby to her permanently-asleep child. And yet, this mourning dirge has been part of the Nine Lessons and Carols line-up for centuries, used to celebrate the birth of a child. Through its poetry, The Coventry Carol places mourning and new life side by side in a manger. 

Joy does not erase loss, any more than grief extinguishes the experience of happiness. Salt makes the honey sweeter. Acknowledging loss - which exists like a crater in the living room floor of our daily lives - won’t cause the ground of your own house to cave in. It simply offers a hand, so you can, gingerly at first, and eventually without even thinking, step around it. 

On Christmas Day 1940, The Coventry Carol was performed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, six weeks after the brutal bombing which set much of the city ablaze. Broadcast live as part of the BBC’s Christmas programming, the ancient carol was heard around the world, during a time in which much of the world was mourning. 

The first Coventry Cathedral was built in 1095, with the second iteration built in its place during the 14th century. On November 14th 1940, this building was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitz - and the Christmas service was held there weeks after, while the cinders were almost still smoking. 

But rather than rebuilding on top of these ruins, it was decided to keep the destroyed Cathedral as a monument, and for the land to remain hallowed ground. Rather than erasing this brutal illustration of the city’s tragedy, the new Coventry Cathedral was built alongside the ruins of the old. Consecrated in 1962, it is one of the only cathedrals in Europe in which the alter faces north, not east. 

With contributions from architects and artists from across the world, Coventry Cathedral is now regarded as a locus for working towards global peace. Home to The International Centre for Reconciliation, which works to promote reconciliation, rather than revenge for devastation, in areas of conflict, the building itself serves as a metaphor for this mission. 

Rather than removing evidence of the brutality of war, new beauty was built alongside it. In Coventry, destruction and defiance, grief and celebration, stand in stark co-existence. With one of the world’s largest tapestries and a stained-glass, full-height window, through which light appears to oscillate like the dance of sunlight on a butterfly’s wings, the Cathedral is not only a testament to craft and artistry – but how giving due room to grief better enables true recovery. 

Loss cleaves our worlds into a before and after, its chasm occupying the liminal space inbetween. To prematurely usher ourselves into that tertiary space, or pretend it didn’t even happen, not only gives disservice to our before, but ignores the enormous physic marathon that is mourning. 

I visited Coventry Cathedral for the first time three years ago today, on Childermas, while bearing my own fresh, deep grief. I went with a dear friend of mine, Barney Norris, who in his novel The Vanishing Hours, offers a definition of a word which is too often seen as a binding state, but is in fact an ever evolving mode of being (just like mourning). 

RECOVER. To save or rescue something. To grow back a skin that can shelter nerve endings. To be able to feel again without the feeling burning. To bloom again, to sprout new life, put roots down. To have gone through hell. 

The experience of loss, like the experience of severe illness, fundamentally changes us. And when that loss is bound up with love - how could it not? Like Coventry, the structure of our lives are rendered cinders, and those same walls of our ‘before’ selves can never be rebuilt. But new buildings can be constructed, and sometimes, they might just be breathtaking monuments of grace and glory. 

But the true beauty of any ‘after’ comes when we pay credence to the griefs of our lives, and allow them to gently exist alongside us. By giving space for grief, we give ourselves room to recover. We allow light to filter through stained-glass windows, so that colours might dance amongst the shadows of ruins. 

50 years on from women and their bodies: where are we now?

In 1970, a group of women calling themselves the Boston Women’s Health Collective published a 200-page pamphlet entitled ‘Women and their Bodies: A Course’. Hand-typed and self-illustrated, it was a reaction to the lack of care and information they felt women were given in regards to their own health. With chapters on anatomy, sexuality, birth control, pregnancy and abortion, it is not just an educational manual, but a critique of the inadequacies of a capitalistic healthcare system which prioritises profits over the wellbeing of the women it supposedly treats. 

Designed as a living document, ‘meant to be used by our sisters to increase consciousness about ourselves as women, to build our movement, to begin to struggle collectively for adequate healthcare, and in many other ways they can be useful to you,’(4) it is ‘a tool which stimulates discussion and action, which allows for new ideas and for change.’(4) The booklet isn’t just supposed to be a factual resource: it is material to incite conversation ‘about how we felt about our bodies, how we felt about ourselves, how we could become more autonomous human beings, how we could act together on our collective knowledge to change the health care system for women and for all people.’(4) 

Reading ‘Women and Their Bodies’ 50 years after its publication is an insightful yet disconcerting exercise. It includes information about how to contact your local Planned Parenthood, how to access different birth control kits and IUDs. It looks at how women patients are treated by doctors, about medical, sexual and social objectification. About many women’s alienation from their own bodies, about the shame we are made to feel about those bodies, especially when those bodies are considered to have ‘gone wrong.’ It talks about masturbation, orgasms, homosexuality, fantasies, STIs and abortions – all subjects which are still often considered taboo today. It is a testament to the importance of collective work, and the power of women gathering to self-educate beyond the systematic educational systems which do not serve our needs.  

Yet it also proves how stunted our current medical system is. Very little has changed in the intervening years since the booklet’s publication. Despite better sex education in schools, a greater acceptance and legalisation of abortion and birth control, despite sexual liberation generally being more tolerated and celebrated in society, and openly discussed in shows like Netflix’s Sex Education, we are stuck. ‘At first a birth control pill, Provera, was developed for men, but it drained a man’s ability to have an erection as well as acting as an antidote to the potency of the sperm-producing cells,’ the booklet states. ‘Now researchers are working on a sperm capacitation pill in Sweden and California. It may be available in 2-3 years.’(70)

To emphasise, this was written in 1970. It is now 2021, and there is no male contraceptive pill commercially available. A BBC news article published in 2019 reported that a birth control pill for men had passed initial human safety tests – but that it could still take a decade to bring it to market. Why has it taken over half a century to achieve so little progress? Well, if we consider the collective’s view: ‘the fact that there is no effective, safe, and esthetically pleasing birth control method serves to maintain the dependent-submissive relationship women have vis-a-vis men.’ We are stuck. 

In a commencement speech for the 1996 class of Wellesly College in America, the screenwriter and essayist Nora Ephron told the group of graduating women, ‘Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand [...] any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you—whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.’

The publication of Women and Their Bodies in 1970 was a response to an ongoing attack on women – and it’s an attack that hasn’t ceased. In 2021, the US state of Texas brought in Senate Bill 8, or the ‘Texas Heartbeat Act’. This not only delegalised abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy (before many women even know that they are pregnant), but made it a criminal offence to ‘aid and abet’ an abortion, with a $10,000 reward offered to those willing to report the criminal action of female agency. Women’s freedom comes with a fee. 

‘Health is a state defined by an elite.’(6) As women, the collective writes, ‘we have not had power to determine medical priorities; they are determined by the corporate medical industry and academic research. We have learned that we are not to blame for choosing a bad doctor or not having the money to even choose.’ And then comes the feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist rallying cry: ‘We as women are redefining competence: a doctor who behaves in a male chauvinist way is not competent, even if he has medical skills. We have decided that health can no longer be defined by an elite group of white, upper middle class men. It must be defined by us, the women who need the most health care, in a way that meets the needs of all our sisters and brothers.’(6)

To respond to Nora Ephron – why should we take this personally? Because, in the words of the collective, ‘what are our bodies? First, they are us. We do not inhabit them - we are them (as well as mind). This realization should lead to anger at those people who have subtly persuaded us to look upon our bodies (ourselves) as no more than commodities to be given in return for favors.’(9) As women, they say, ‘knowledge of our reproductive organs is vital to overcome objectification. We have been ignorant of how our bodies function and this enables males, particularly professionals, to play upon us for money and experiments, and to intimidate us in doctors’ offices and clinics of every kind.’(10) 

Lesser discussed - perhaps by its very nature - are the attacks on women by omission. The fact that a lot of the information contained within the booklet, fifty years later, is news to many millennial and Gen Z women, should be seen as attack on women via the inadequacy of general education, not just in England or America, but across the world. We are kept in the dark about our own bodies, and thereby rendered powerless in crucial aspects of our lives. Girls not being taught about their own genitalia is an attack by omission. Not being told about the realities of pregnancy and childbirth; not being educated about the legal ramifications of marriage and child rearing if those relationships go wrong; not being given the support or practical help to leave damaging partnerships, these are no less attacks on the women in the world than the 137 women who are murdered every day by a partner or family member. (UNDOC, 2018)

When we’re not armed with information about our own lives and our own bodies; when we are deliberately shut out of classrooms and boardrooms; when we are told to get back in the kitchen or forced into the bedroom; when we are segregated through romantic isolation and gaslighted by the medical establishment, these are attacks on our being which makes us more vulnerable to ending up murdered. This isn’t a false equivocation. Silence breeds shame and shame is an ideal environment in which to inflict violence. Violence loves the shamed, the insecure, the self-doubting. Education cannot protect you from violence, but knowledge does make it far harder for violence to sink its teeth in, to take root. 

Ignorance begets pain. This is not to say that women’s lack of knowledge about ourselves causes the violence that has been metered out upon our bodies and beings, time and time again. It is to say that without knowledge, without empowering ourselves within our bodies, we cannot hope to break the ties that bind us. Ignorance leaves us vulnerable – and knowledge is one way we can arm ourselves against the attacks metered out on our bodies from men, from medics, from the world at large. Women learning about their own bodies is not just important for us to understand how they work, but to arm ourselves against a world which does its best to destroy those bodies which have birthed every person here. 

Maybe it comes from a deep human sense of self-hatred. Maybe it comes from religion and power and societal norms. Maybe the roots of misogyny have spread their tendrils so far that no single cause can be attributed - but in common with all is not just a hatred of the female body, but a fear of women claiming ownership of their own selves. This is what the miseducation and stifling of knowledge comes down to. By understanding your body, you are able to be closer to knowing yourself, and when you know yourself, you begin to know what you will and won’t stand for - and that’s how revolutions happen. ‘Once we have some basic information about how our bodies work by talking and learning together and spreading the correct information, we need not be at the total mercy of men who are telling us what we feel when we don’t or what we don’t feel when we do (it’s all in our minds!)’(10)  

We have not moved so far in history that we are safe. But we are talking. And we are better placed to make our voices heard, and however much it feels like it’s two steps forward and one step back, progress is being made in teaching, and arming, women about their bodies. 

Works Cited

Astor, Maggie. “Here's What the Texas Abortion Law Says.” The New York Times, 9 September 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/abortion-law-texas.html. Accessed 12 January 2022.

Boston Women's Health Collective. Women and their Bodies: A Course. 1970, Boston. Our Bodies Our Selves, https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Women-and-Their-Bodies-1970.pdf.

Ephron, Nora. 1996 Commencement Speech. 1996, https://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1996commencement.

Roberts, Michelle. “Male pill - why are we still waiting?” BBC, 26 March 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47691567. Accessed 12 January 2022.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Global Study on Homicide: Gender-related killing of women and girls.” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2018, p. 64, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_Gender-related_killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf.

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Written for the publication Treating/Treated/Loving/Loved by the Amsterdam-based action-focused artist collective ‘Cranberry Juice’

Rebecca Took is a freelance writer from England, now based in the Netherlands. After graduating from the University of Oxford, she completed an MA in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her interest in women’s health spans from the personal into the socio-political. After witnessing and experiencing how the male-dominated medical industry repeatedly and systematically fails women, she developed an interest in researching the gender pain gap and looking at how healthcare perpetuates gender, race and class inequality. 

Yes, Birmingham: a story of contempt and curtailment →

Last week, BBC Archive tweeted a video of the Birmingham bid for the 1992 Olympics with the sneering and incredulous comment: “Birmingham was bidding to host the 1992 Olympic Games. Yes, Birmingham. Yes, the Olympic Games.” The remark was met with condemnation, with West Midlands mayor Andy Street denouncing it as a "silly, smug post". The hashtag #BirminghamYesBirmingham started trending on the social media platform in response, with many sharing photographs which showed their city in a more flattering light.

Birmingham has more canals than Venice, more parks than Paris and is famously the birthplace of the beloved balti. It has the youngest population in Europe, and one of the most diverse, and is home to world-leading scholars, scientists and singers alike. So why does such a dismissive and distorted perception of Birmingham persist?

The impression of the city as a grey, faceless wasteland seems to have been informed by the view from the A34 flyover. Though I wish the city planners of the 1960s hadn’t been so zealous in demolishing iconic Victorian buildings such as the original Central Library, Birmingham’s reputation as a concrete jungle is deeply unfair. We have almost 2,000 listed buildings, many dating from the 14th and 15th century, and while in Birmingham brutalist architecture is denounced as monstrous, the same structures in London are celebrated.

Is Birmingham’s poor reputation influenced by the Brummie accent, which according to surveys of popular opinion makes us sound less attractive, less intelligent and more likely to be found guilty of a crime? While the distaste for the Birmingham dialect is rooted in a classism no longer typically tolerated against other regional accents, mockery of Brummagem is water off a self-deprecating duck’s back.

Unfavourable perceptions of the city are not a new phenomenon, either. In the novel Emma, published in 1815, Jane Austen writes: "They came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much, you know, Mr Weston. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound." However, the fact that these words are spoken by Mrs Elton — a caricature of ignorant snobbery – is, even then, intended as an indictment of those who hold such views rather than of the city itself.

BBC Archive has since deleted the tweet and apologised for its tone, but the incident shone a light on the derisive attitudes which aggravate systemic underfunding and underinvestment in the city of Birmingham and its surrounding regions. Just 1.9 per cent of the BBC’s annual budget was spent in the Midlands in 2017-18, despite the area being the largest of the seven English regions and contributing £900m a year to the corporation.

For 35 years, Birmingham was home to the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios, the broadcaster’s largest production base outside of London. The relocation of BBC Birmingham to The Mailbox complex in 2004 initiated a series of redundancies, and it was recently announced that 91 per cent of jobs at the Birmingham-based online editorial hub are to be lost in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet regional cultural investment is not only necessary for employment and educational opportunities, but enables more voices - and Brummie accents - to participate in the conversation.

As more companies look to leave the London bubble, drawn upwards by the promise of the "Northern Powerhouse," Birmingham has been repeatedly neglected. Last year, Channel 4 moved its headquarters to Leeds and opened "creative hubs" in Bristol and Glasgow. Greater Manchester’s MediaCity is home to several BBC divisions, as well as ITV Granada and ITV Studios, while the publishing company Hachette recently announced the creation of five new regional offices, in Edinburgh, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and Bristol. The geographic diversification of media and the creative industries is necessary and welcome, but creating a vacuum in the Midlands will not solve the gross disparity between north and south.

As part of the Northern Powerhouse plan, £15m has been invested in cultural regeneration projects. However in the last five years, while employment in the north has grown by around 7 per cent, child poverty has increased by a third. This distorted economic profile suggests that equitable devolution cannot be achieved by simply transplanting companies from London to the north.

The 1945 Distribution of Industry Act attempted to redevelop the regions hit by post-war unemployment and economic migration by forcing industry out of Birmingham, in an attempt to regulate the dominant manufacturing hub. Although some jobs were created, the majority of economic growth following the policy was in the Home Counties, and Birmingham’s power over its own future and prosperity was explicitly restrained.

The 1965 Control of Office Employment Act later prevented the financial and service industries from developing in the city for nearly two decades, further driving the city of a thousand trades to become overly reliant on one - the motor industry - and economically vulnerable. Since the 1960s, Birmingham has gone from having an average household income 13 per cent higher than the national average, to having a child poverty rate of nearly 37 per cent.

The common contempt for Birmingham exposes an ignorant snobbery bolstered by decades of systemic underfunding and underrepresentation. You can mock our accents, but Birmingham is tired of your underestimations.

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Article written for The Independent, published 27.07.20

The Paradox of the 'Strong Female Lead'

In her recent book, Invisible Women, writer and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez examines the ‘gender data gap’. As she argues, “women are so under-represented. I was one of those girls being taught, via a curriculum, a news media and a popular culture that were almost entirely devoid of women, that brilliance didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t being shown women I could look up to (either past or present). I wasn’t being taught about female politicians, female activists, female writers, artists, lawyers, CEOs. All the people I was taught to admire were men, and so in my head power, influence, and ambition equated with maleness.”

The correlation of success, talent, and intelligence with maleness is so pervasive in our society that even successful, talented, and intelligent women have been conned into believing the myth of exclusively male brilliance. Criado Perez suggests that “the result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.”

The nicheness of womanhood is made explicit by Hollywood. You can see it in Netflix streaming categories: a quick search for ‘female’ produces category suggestions including ‘Action & Adventure Featuring a Strong Female Lead’, ‘Romantic Films Featuring a Strong Female Lead’, ‘Violent Action Featuring a Strong Female Lead’, ‘Inspiring Comedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead’, ‘LGBTQ TV Programmes Featuring a Strong Female Lead’, and ‘Action Comedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead’. A search for ‘Male’ produced Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant.

Without the eponymous ‘Strong Female Lead’ – also known as – a woman who speaks for longer than a minute – a film is just called a film. A graph produced by the BBC showed that in the last 24 Academy Award Best Picture winners (1991-2016), not one had women speaking more than men, even in female-led films. In two cases – Schindler’s List and The Hurt Locker – women didn’t speak at all. Less than one-third of all speaking roles in films released between 1990 and 2005 went to women, and men spend almost twice as much time on screen.

Think about this when the Oscars' men's and women's awards suggest parity of any sort. I've seen these numbers, about how speech is apportioned in films, but this chart is really striking. ht @ellentejle pic.twitter.com/JIwgDKOPhQ

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) March 4, 2018

Even when women are the lead, their screen time is only equal to men’s. Women aren’t even dominant in stories about their own lives; we are being elided from our own narratives.

And yet there still remains the inaccurate stereotype of women ‘talking too much’, when in fact, in formal situations, it is men who dominate the conversation. When women are given equal airtime, men perceive women to be dominating. Such is the power of the default, that gender equality is interpreted as female dominance.

But women can use this elision of their lives and narratives to their own advantage: if our experience is niche, our stories are less known, which means fresher. There is a treasure trove waiting to be tapped. And recent years have shown that there is growing demand for female-led films.

The blockbuster comedy Girls Trip, starring Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish, and Queen Latifah, was one of the most successful films of 2017. It was also the most successful film with an African-American female screenwriter ever (Tracy Y. Oliver), grossing $140.9 million at the box office. 

Lady Bird (2017), written and directed by Greta Gerwig, grossed $78.6 million, and the new Captain Marvel (2019), starring Brie Larson, grossed over one billion dollars worldwide. Women are out there doing the work, making the money, and being very successful with it – yet are still facing institutional and structural roadblocks.

Women have to do twice the work if they want to find representations of themselves, creating their own curriculums to study the work of fellow women. Just because women have been left out of the history books – usually included only under the study of suffrage or the exceptional few, like Boudicca and Florence Nightingale – doesn’t mean they weren’t making history. 

In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, the formidable Mrs. Lintott asks, “What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.” But I’m not sure I’d quite agree with Mr. Bennett in this case. The more that women have researched and written their own stories, the more it seems that history has been full of women doing the work of men (or men’s work for them), only to be handed the bucket and instructed to mop.

Most children, when asked to draw a doctor or a lawyer – both of which are general neutral terms in English – will draw a man. On forms, while men only have to tick ‘Mr.’, if that is how they identify, women are presented with the multiple options of ‘Mrs.’, ‘Miss’, ‘Ms.’. We are forced to declare our relationship status to the bank, to an employer, to the tax office. We’re not allowed to just be: our independent identity is constantly subsumed under our relation to men.

Hidden Figures, the 2016 biopic about the lives of three black female mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who worked at NASA during the famous space race as ‘human computers’, helped engineer the first moon landing with their calculations. These women were exceptional, working in a field that not only discriminated against their gender, but during a time in which segregation was still enforced in America. Yet the fact that the film was the first time many audience members had ever heard of the figures is a telling indictment of the bias of our media. 

Exceptional women exist. But their superior talents are valued beneath the mediocre talents of their white, male colleagues. Hidden Figures showed hundreds of thousands of girls (particularly black girls, who are disproportionately expelled from schools) that a STEM career isn’t impossible, as the path has already been laid. 

The world was made for men. Criado Perez’s book illustrates this fact, while films are starting to illuminate these hidden figures. Stories are important, and powerful. And the more women who tell, write, and speak their own stories, the more the world will see that not only do women have stories to tell, but also impressive lives to live.

On the Basis of Sex: 'Wife' is not a job title

Mimi Leder’s On the Basis of Sex is a contemporaneously relevant biopic, depicting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fight for gender equality to be recognised in American law. It is not an exceptional film, but it does sensitively depict the life of an exceptional woman.

As a lawyer, feminist, and still-sitting US Supreme Court justice, the 86-year-old Bader Ginsburg is an icon of modern progress and the promise of equality. Yet while the film highlights how far we’ve come, it reminded me just how far we still have to go.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956 at the age of 22, only six years had passed since women were first granted admission. She was one of nine women in a class of 500 men: at a commencement dinner, the female students were asked why they deserved to take the place of a [presumably more deserving] man.

Despite graduating at the top of her class, Bader Ginsburg struggled to find employment in a law firm because of her gender. As is the reality for many women in professional fields, Bader Ginsburg was forced to turn to teaching. Teaching is a vital and noble profession, yet there is still a gendered expectation that while women teach, men do.

We’re not given the same opportunities. Though she was by all accounts excellent, it took years of teaching before Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the opportunity to put her own education into action. In the case Moritz v. Commissioner, which fought against the ruling that an unmarried man could not apply for carer’s tax deduction, Bader Ginsburg defended a male client against the patriarchal assumption that it is women who are default carers, thereby inversely opening an avenue for her fight for gender equality.

In the film, Ruth expresses her frustration at having to go home, “sit in my corner and write a lesson plan to inspire the next generation of lawyers to go forth and fight for equality.” To which her husband Martin replies, “What could possibly be more important than that? I don’t understand why you’re acting like it’s a punishment. You’re teaching young people to change the world!” But Ruth explosively responds, “Because that’s what I wanted to do!”

Despite this, the Ginsburgs’ relationship was largely considered ‘remarkably supportive.’ While at Harvard, Martin was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Ruth not only attended her own and her husband’s classes, taking notes for both of them and typing his dictated papers, but did so whilst caring for Martin and their infant daughter. She managed all of this while being the first woman to make both the Harvard and Columbia Law Review. When being treated for cancer herself in 1999, she did not miss one day of work.

Remarkable indeed: however, it isn’t Ruth’s superhuman work ethic or intelligence which made the Ginsburgs’ relationship remarkable, but apparently her husband’s support for his wife. A husband doing his share of childcare and housework, while also working and encouraging his wife’s career is considered exceptional. But when a wife does the same – in addition to literally changing history – it is taken for granted. To add insult to injury, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was actually penalised for working while married, being paid less as a professor purely because she had a husband.

I agree with feminist writer Judy Syfers: I Want a Wife. In her searingly ironic essay, Syfers writes, “I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.”

Syfers is referring to the phenomenon of the academic wife, the anonymous women who for centuries enabled male academic careers. While in the Ginsburgs’ case, the husband happily and supportively enabled his wife’s career, academia has long been sustained across the world by the unacknowledged labor of forgotten women. According to Brian Martin, “the work of women and minorities is used to further the careers of those already in privileged positions, thus maintaining and justifying the hierarchy.”

Women typing men’s essays is indicative of a larger problem with the way women’s labour is devalued – quotidian work is simultaneously considered necessary and menial: men consider it below them, or too dull to be done by themselves.

Mileva Marić, wife of physicist Albert Einstein, was herself a brilliant scientist. The only girl allowed to attend male-only physics lectures, she was admitted to the physics-mathematics section of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich in 1896, along with four other students, one of whom would later become her husband. Mileva outperformed Albert Einstein in the applied physics class, yet only Albert was granted a degree.

Despite this, in a letter to Mileva dated September 1900, Albert wrote, “You must now continue your research – how proud I will be to have a doctor for my spouse when I’ll only be an ordinary man.” Yet their combined work was published in articles bearing only the name of the ‘ordinary man.’ After they married in 1903, Mileva assumed full domestic duties, despite also working with Albert on his work late into the night. They had a son in 1904, and the following year Albert published five articles, one of which would see him be granted the Nobel Prize.

They divorced after Albert Einstein started an affair with his cousin, following which, Mileva was forbidden from talking about her contribution to her ex-husband’s career and success. She was repeatedly blocked from the scientific community due to her gender, and was prevented from claiming credit for the work she did. Mileva was Einstein’s proofreader, editor, advisor, collaborator, partner, wife, and domestic servant, yet in a 1909 letter, she dejectedly noted: “With all his fame, he has little time for his wife […] What is there to say, with notoriety, one gets the pearl, the other the shell.”

While men have been taught that they are entitled to dominance in all dominions beyond the domestic – laundry, childcare, and cooking are women’s business – when a woman rightfully and deservingly earns a place, her entrance is hastily and forcefully blocked. And so come the choruses of men, patronisingly chanting “just don’t do it, then.” If housework is getting in the way of your career, just don’t do it. If laundry is distracting from your academic work, just don’t do it. If having babies might destroy your body, your relationship, and your career, just don’t have them.

The thing is, most women don’t have wives. And for those who do, the labor balance is generally more equal. While Martin Ginsburg cooked, cleaned and supported his wife in her (very successful) career, too often, men don’t see the invisible labor of women because they don’t have to. And too often, if women don’t do it, it won’t get done.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg took on a male-dominated system and secured rights for women across America. But the recognition of her success, intelligence and drive, as illustrated by On the Basis of Sex, is a rarity. Where is Mileva Marić’s biopic? Where are the films about the millions of forgotten wives, without whom their well-known husbands would likely be as anonymous as women.

Women seeking professional success are expected to do the work of a woman and a man, a husband and a wife, and will probably be lambasted if they complain. This enforced duality gets a little bit exhausting.

I don’t really want a wife, nor do I really want to be a wife. I just want ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ to be optional relationship descriptors, rather than career titles. And I’d also quite like to be as badass as the notorious RBG.