Written on International Women's Day 2023.
The song Respect had a history in the 1960s, promoted by Otis Redding and redirected by Aretha Franklin into the feminist anthem it became. It came from the 1960s but seems tame today - when her man comes home, give the lady some respect.
All I'm askin'
(Oo) Is for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit)
It led to the song Natural Woman, which was again not the feminism that would develop later:
When my soul was in the lost and found
You came along to claim it
I didn't know just what was wrong with me
'Til your kiss helped me name it
Now I'm no longer doubtful, of what I'm living for
And if I make you happy I don't need to do more
'Cause you make me feel
You make me feel
You make me feel like a natural woman
Today's feminism demands agency andfree choices which are free of patriarchy (that is male demands. Women musicians were freeing themselves from male demands to be pretty eye candy, subject to 'the male gaze' criticising their looks, bodies and behaviour. Violence against women was and is a consequence of these outdated male attitudes. The battle for female emancipation is renewed still, decade by decade.
Respect was a civil rights theme also. Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind became a civil rights anthem:
And how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind
The chorus draws on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes: all is vanity and a striving after wind. It cannot be grasped.. Such a text would be well known to Robert Zimmerman.
I had been involved as a carer to my younger siblings through the 1960s. Those years were controlled by the evangelical Christian group called Plymouth Brethren who devalued the role of women. Many of the young women I knew never really broke away. When my mother did, she said that she wished had broken away years before because she found her local church so welcoming and supportive. I as a 17 year old raised the issue of female freedoms in a Bible study public meeting (led by a preacherer ironically called Short) and was shouted at by an out of control former 'Exclusive Brethren' member, bullying of the highest order. I was taken to task by the 'oversight', the senior men because I had asked such a question. Good grief!. They were wrong and I was right. My PhD topic was about marriage and the position of women in society. My first publication in 1972 was about women in the Bible, not brilliant but at least authentic.
By the time I arrived at Manchester University, the evangelical fundamentalism I had been brought up with have been challenged and rejected. Essentially I had become an enemy to patriarchy and to coercive behaviour in general. I was slow to distance myself from evangelicalism. I remember seeing adverts for the Bahai Faith in my first university term. In that transitional period of my life I might have joined them as they have much that morally appeals to me. In terms of this item, Bahais believe in equality of the sexes and condemnation of misogyny. Their belief in the divine was less fundamentalist than I had been taught with more emphasis on mystery. Today I find this harder as I have distanced myself from divine realism (as opposed to a symbolic metaphor). I nevertheless value my later work with Bahais.
My life has always been female focused and my social and academic ambitions have been concerned with the emancipation of women, both in real life and in student work. My wife too devoted her teaching life to supporting female students and colleagues. Some are still in touch. There are some interesting stories. School teacher friends in Oldham married in the early 1970s and we agreed to drive them to their hotel. But they were interested in steam railways and had a long term connection to the Worth Valley Railway and on their wedding day the preserved locomotive 92220 Evening Star, the last steam locomotive to be built (1960) was in Haworth where a party was arranged. So of course we drove them to Haworth, where we all enjoyed the party before delivering them to their hotel. Meantime, back at the wedding, folks had decorated their own car with tin cans, only to see us drive away on our Austin A40. 50 years later they are still close friends.
In the late 1980s I was working in teacher training in Oxford, and she became deputy head of a girls' comprehensive school, a quarter of whose pupils were Asian, mostly Pakistani. We became very close to the Pakistani community. This paragraph features a close friend who has been like family now for 35 years. Though she had a teaching qualification from the Punjab, she was only allowed to work as a teaching assistant in England, working with the Equal Opportunities Centre. She registered for an MEd which she passed, and with the help of our local HMI Ron Arnold we managed to secure qualified teacher status for her in 1990. We went to Pakistan for a family wedding in 1992 and as I worked away in Birmingham that year Jean stayed with her to save her commute during the week. The school closed because of falling numbers, leaving Muslim girls with no school to go to. So this friend and Jean set up a small Muslim girls secondary school which had excellent exam results and help many girls to university courses. I supervised this friend for her PhD for which she interviewed 80 former pupils about their educational experiences and their consequences. She now was an Oxford University post.
A final story. Jean worked in Swindon College from the early 2000s until the powers that be unfairly closed the department. A colleague and friend.applied for and was offered a school post subject to references, but Jean found the request sitting unanswered in an in-tray. Enough to say that after a bit of shouting, a reply hit the post that day and the offer was confirmed. There the colleague met her husband and has been happily married now for twenty years.
I hope we have both enriched the lives of the women and girls we have met and taught and encouraged them towards independent lives with personal agency.
