Author: Stephanie Henthorne 1970s
My parents’ JOINT passport from the 1950s
This image symbolises everything that led me towards the struggle for gender equality.
The passport is in my father’s name. He is the ‘Bearer’, the woman simply ‘Wife’. Wife of = property. Always and already OTHER. Secondary status. My father had the right to travel alone on this passport. My mother did not. Inside it reads, ‘British Subject: Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. He is confidently looking out towards his place in the world. She looks apologetic at even being there.
My father died when I was just six years old and I don’t really remember him. And yet, I now realise that both his life, and his death, have indirectly governed so much of how I have lived my life. I have only anecdotes about my father and a few saved objects from which I have tried to piece together the values by which he, and therefore my mother, lived. Spreading these small objects before me on my table now, in 2021, I see that these are the values I fled from. But back then I had no language to express why I did not belong in this scheme of things. This stifling village, where women made jam and the males went to the Working Men’s Club, strictly no women allowed.
My father’s badges of belonging
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Memorabilia of my father’s life
Brass freemasons badge — the infamous square and compass.
- Precision tools with real ivory handles.
- Membership badge and tie, Shark Angling Club of Great Britain
- RAF Service and Release Book
His tankard, which would once have hung in his local ale house.
His books that he won at school, all about engineering — railways, aeroplanes, submarines,
electrical inventions.
In contrast, from my maternal side
Four generations, my mother the babe in arms. Women, posing to order, for the gaze of the camera. Passive, indoors, domestic.
Mum had a badge too, of which she was justifiably immensely proud. It commemorates her 50 years of being a blood donor. It symbolises nurture, giving, healthcare. ‘A woman’s job’.
So, women colonised in body and mind, just as nations were colonised. Indeed, the colonies were often referred to as our ‘possessions’. My upbringing embodied the belief system that these items make manifest — patriarchal dominion over females, nations and the animal kingdom (the ivory, the shark).
The above artefacts concretely demonstrate:
| MEN | WOMEN |
| Outdoors | Indoors |
| Independent | Dependent |
| Belonging | Exclusion |
| Social space | Domestic space |
| Self-belief | Self-doubt |
| Active | Passive |
| Dominant | Subjugated |
| Remunerated work | Unpaid labour |
| A place in the wider world | Shut out from the wider world |
I was truly terrified of my future because it looked like that. Careers advice at school laid out my options: secretary, bank clerk, or nanny. A school that, incidentally, would not allow me to continue woodwork, making me instead take needlework. I desperately sought to delay the inevitable. I got a full grant to go to university. I had no interest in yet more stultifying education, but the prospect of delaying the horror a little longer was too tempting. I had my ticket out of here! In a world of new ideas, I could breathe and grow. I found a new love for learning and study. I fled that earlier life, into the welcoming arms of feminism.
Reprinted with permission from Write women into history, Hackney Howlers