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Guardian columnist
Zoe Williams
sets the scene for the third wave of feminism
If you were watching A Woman of Substance right now and you’d gotten over Jenny Seagrove’s accent and where, precisely, of the North she was affecting to come from, you could direct your attentions to its gender politics. I’d say the first key question it throws up, not for the prototype feminist in the plot, but for modern feminism in general, is this: how do you resolve the work versus children problem? Our heroine’s final scene as matriarch shows her – now morphed into Deborah Kerr, and not affecting any accent at all – presiding over a table full of adult children who all hate her.
The explanation is totally black and white: she wasn’t interested in them while they were growing up, she was only interested in her business. This depiction would never happen today, not because it has been subjected to close rational interrogation, I don’t think, but just because it lacks the sophistication to reflect anyone’s real experience of the work versus motherhood conundrum. That straightforward ‘your money or your kids?’ question was only compelling when the idea of the working mother was completely theoretical. Now that millions of women do it all the time, we all know that it’s not a choice between the wallet and the heart – there’s never that much money kicking about anyway, and your kids can hate you for reasons that are limitless and totally random.
In the shoulder-pad decade, however, precisely because only women on the telly had shoulder-pads, never mind boardroom jobs, these were the topics that culture was grappling with, and it was about more than a conflict of priorities and time-management. Motherhood was just a signal, if you like, of essential femininity. The question was: does the pursuit of money automatically neuter a woman, thereby making her an unfit mother?
Never mind not withering them, age just bounces off them like the death ray of an arcade game
Besides, the Eighties were still wrestling with questions that sound very dated now. Will men and women ever want sex in the same way? Are men naturally predatory? Are women hard-wired to fend them off? Do women even have a sex drive? Are all men either, well, jessies or rapists? Are all women either victims or denatured by their rejection of victim status?
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