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Little Feminism

My Small Contribution to International Women’s Day

By Rachel RobbinsPublished about a year ago 4 min read
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Me at the Yellow Arch Studios in Sheffield doing Stand up

I have a joke in my stand up set, about how I used to be a “professional feminist”. I even co-edited a book on intersectional feminism and social work. But I’m now back to amateur status, since I gave up my academic job as a Domestic Abuse researcher. (As an amateur, my times have really suffered – it takes me much longer to rant a "man-athon").

I sometimes feel guilty about my lack of commitment to such a worthwhile career. And that guilt really comes to the fore at this time of the year and International Women’s Day. I should still be at the coal-face, the front-line, leading the good fight. But I can’t. I can’t do that to my mental health. And I can definitely make arguments about how the toxicity, hierarchy and competition of UK academia is not the place to pursue social justice goals.

My Intersectional Feminism in Print

But feminism is still at the core of everything I do. So, I want to write a celebration of feminism in the smaller things we all do. There are big acts like challenging policing, employment practices, street harassment and I’ll play my part in those as required. But there are also the little acts, like kindness to strangers, being a friend’s shoulder to lean on, believing (in) a woman.

My feminism has no easy starting point. There wasn’t some epiphany where I saw clearly, one day, that the world was unfair. I just knew, from an early age. There were examples everywhere: My Catholic upbringing, in which girls couldn’t serve on the altar. The playground where boys games took up all the space and resources. The way men would leer at me on a bus, or walking down a street. (I was eight years old, the first time a man exposed himself to me…). The way that I was treated as an oddity because I was good at maths. The Careers Teacher who told me that when he was recruiting he would dismiss the applications of married women. (“But, sir, you know my Mum.” “Yes, Rachel. Your mum is an exception”. The class eyeroll in unison – at me, not him.)

A still from Carry on Camping with Kenneth Williams and Hatty Jacques

And then there were the films I watched.

Sunday afternoons, full of roast dinner and a glass of wine (yes my parents let us drink wine from an early age), we would watch the Sunday afternoon film. Often this was a staple of British cinema – a Carry On comedy. Ah yes, Carry on Films, full of comfortable, gendered stereotypes and innuendo. Men leering. Women objectified and categorised. (Fat and a figure of fun, or slim and sexy, and they must never, ever get old - yuk!).

And of course, there were Hollywood Musicals. The ones where boy meets girl, girl changes everything about herself to make herself loveable, to have the happy ending of a man who needed her to change.

And I loved them both. Because without even knowing what I was doing, I was engaging in a feminist dialogue with them. I didn’t take the stories at face value.

The little act of feminism I have always engaged in, is to see the woman as a whole, with a complicated back story, character flaws, and energy. And to love her, with all her imperfections and mistakes.

Doris Day in Calamity Jane (1953)

My favourite film – Calamity Jane.

Calamity Jane, with the wonderfully, wholesome Doris Day.

It is indeed strange for a self-proclaimed feminist to choose Calamity Jane as a favourite. After all, she is made to conform, through humiliation and her desire for a man. And there is even the castration of the final scene, where she gives up the gun in her garter. But audiences choose their own readings. The nascent feminist that I was chose my own reading. What I saw was a woman making it in a man’s world in her own way. She could live without trappings. She was strong and independent. I saw that the shift to femininity was not natural but a set of painful lessons. I saw female friendship being played out as unequivocal acceptance. I saw a leading woman who was a blur of energy and talent. I heard beautiful, heart-felt singing and watched dynamic dancing. I watched a woman pull silly faces, laugh at herself and spar with others. I saw a woman in the lead.

It is a problematic film, on many levels and I am not going to attempt to rehabilitate its attitude to Native Americans. I’m not going to excuse it. It is never good enough to say it was off its time.

But I will always tune in to hear the harmonies of Black Hills of Dakota.

And for me the real story was the friendship between Calamity and Katie Brown. Little acts of kindness and solidarity.

That’s the feminist way: refusing to read the film in one way, but instead seeing women’s lives and characters as a whole. We don’t exist only in relation to men. We are not tokens. We are not boxes to be ticked.

Me doing stand up in Denbigh, Wales

As a female stand up comedian, March is a great month, as promoters attempt to get more women on their bills. We joke it is the only time of year that we are allowed to meet each other. And little do the men know that we meet without their knowledge, in secret, and build real friendships.

International Women’s Day, is a day forged out of socialist activism and tackling the big campaigns around women’s employment and working conditions. And I salute every woman who played a part in getting our histories told, our conditions improved and our politics acknowledged.

However, this year, as with most years, I will spend International Women’s Day with friends, sharing food and stories. Little feminism. Without which there wouldn’t be big feminism.

feminism
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About the Creator

Rachel Robbins

Writer-Performer based in the North of England. A joyous, flawed mess.

Please read my stories and enjoy. And if you can, please leave a tip. Money raised will be used towards funding a one-woman story-telling, comedy show.

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