"The only thing a woman can own is knowledge..." Mrs Welsh (Blue Stockings)
Last
night a couple of really good friends who I haven't caught up with for a
while, invited me to the Press Night of Blue Stockings, the play
they've been working on for the last few months at Shakespeare's Globe.
Although the play is not related to hair, I still found it relevant, for a number of reasons.
Blue Stockings is set in Cambridge University in 1896 and is about the struggle for women to have the right to graduate.
One of
my favourite scenes was a confrontation during in which one of the male
students asks the women what exactly they're doing at
Cambridge, before breaking into an astonishing, arrogant rant stating:
"We're not average men here. We are the future. The leaders. The establishment… We built this country. We made this nation..."
Why
did I find this relevant?
Because it was true then, and continues to be true
today.
The truth is, those men were "the future. The leaders" the history makers, the society shapers, essentially the power holders of the nation, and as
such were privileged to be educated by other men considered to be the enlightened elite. Men like Dr Henry Maudsley, who we watch as he gives a very serious lecture stating:
“A
woman who expends her
energy exercising her brain does so at the expense of her vital
organs, leaving her unfit for motherhood.”
For anyone
reading/ hearing this statement today, it's packed full of
ridiculousness. Where would I even begin? Do I even need to?
The concept
that studying could leave you unfit for motherhood, the concept that
your validation as a woman comes from being a mother, to think that this
level of misogyny and ignorance was being practised and taught by some of the most 'intelligent' men on the
planet, makes it easier for me to understand
why there are still so many battles for equality that remain unfinished.
OK, so what's this got to do with hair?
Well, I guess it's more to do with me as a woman, and especially as a black woman, than with hair. It reinforced my feelings that all the work that's gone into the current
Origins Of The Afro Comb exhibition >here< is so very important.
In short, it made me think about how far things have come, for the
exhibition to even be considered at Cambridge, let alone for me to be
giving a talk there, as I did at the opening >here<. An exhibition like this would not have been considered in Cambridge 70 years ago. Now it's here and the first of it's kind, and you have the opportunity to be involved too!
Often
when I think about 'women's rights' it's all too easy to brush it off
as something I know about so I don't really need to be too concerned about
it any more; but watching Blue Stockings was a bit like being pinched
and forced to wake up out of my complacency. It wasn't until 1948, that the ladies at Girton College, Cambridge won the right to graduate.
1948!!!
That's post-World War II!!
That
means that even if my great-grandmother were 'intelligent' enough to
attend Cambridge, she would have been prevented from graduating due to
her gender, that's before we even get into the issue race, but I'm not gona take
it there today.
As a woman of African descent I feel I have a huge responsibility to make the most of any opportunity I have to place myself and others like me, as history makers and society shapers, whenever the opportunities arise.
If not, we will always be reliant on other people to talk about us, for us; and history has already shown us what gets said for the people with no voice.
