In Search of Mary (2 page)

We spend long hours in the dressing room with those wonderful mirror lights. Conversations generally range around blowjobs and sexually transmitted diseases, diets (the four-day orange fast versus the one day a week eating only toilet tissue), abortions, anorexia and waxing. These nocturnal ramblings paint a new and foreign landscape. I quietly take it in.

Every so often a cockroach sprints out of the showers and across our dressing room, to be met with a barrage of screams and a blast of toxic spray. The cockroaches are peculiarly large and insistent, and come in a variety of shades. Once we even got a translucent albino one. The spray causes prolonged bouts of acrobatic dying, as though the cockroaches’ deaths are their own baroque form of revenge, making us scream even more.

Weeks upon weeks of nightly performances, with never a day off, does strange things to your mind. We create mischief to counter the repetitive strain. One night we experiment with hair-pieces, and in the first pirouette my face gets tangled up inside a long blonde ponytail. Another time we “borrow” someone’s medication: a dancer has been prescribed local anaesthetic for her toothache, and for fun we all have a go. On stage our lips are so numb we can’t close our mouths properly, and every turn releases a flying trail of spit. We choke on snorts of dribbly laughter.

Night after night we sit around sewing our tights, semi-naked in the dressing room, and bare our souls. Bad boyfriends, tricky
childhoods, same-sex encounters, boob jobs gone wrong – we discuss it all. These are tough and independent women: none of them are stupid. Yet I am stunned by what they deem acceptable in life – have I been so sheltered until now? There is a general tolerance of starvation in various forms. Abuse is the norm. One dancer’s former captain threatened her: “Move your cunt or I’ll set fire to your tampon string”; another had ice cubes forced up her vagina by jealous colleagues. She relates this while picking her herpes scabs. These are examined and dreamily flicked away.

One night, the word “feminist” is uttered. Not by me, but I prick up my ears. “No way would I grow hairy legs, bloody lezzers!” is the blistering riposte. Do I leap to feminism’s defence? No, I keep quiet, probably gluing on some giant eyelashes. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it to this day, sometimes adding an alternative ending where I proclaim the sisterhood and convert them all, maybe getting carried aloft on their shoulders.

Something in this flippant remark begins to germinate, deep within. Here I am, in a room full of hungry women on low wages, who’ve endured public weighings, been called bitches and “fat cows on ice” in front of their colleagues, whose very living depends on being looked at – and if they look down on feminism, what has feminism done wrong? If you can’t mention it here, what’s the point?

Being a showgirl equipped me with a nascent sense of feminist outrage, and the twin habits of wearing only underwear on a night out and never having to buy a drink. Untroubled by any inherent contradictions, my next stop is Glasgow.
The diva-ish corners are soon knocked off in my new life as a student. I actually have to buy drinks. But I’m still haunted by the dancers’ acceptance of physical abuse and casual sexist bullying. Why do they put up with it?

Still wondering this, I have the luck to encounter someone who changes my life. An unforgettable woman of courage, a woman who inspired me then and still does now. A woman who had all the mud thrown in her face but achieved greatness, who was smashed and reviled but kept going, who invented her own life and was, in her words, “the first of a new genus”.

Annoyingly she’s been dead for a couple of centuries, but that doesn’t hold our relationship back. This is where the book comes in. Lights go on when I read it. Entering her world for the first time many years ago set off a chain reaction that’s still taking place now. The book was first published in 1796 as
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
. This was affectionately abbreviated by the author’s future husband to
Letters from Norway
. And as a rollercoaster ride into the life and work of the world’s first feminist, it has no equal.

This is the story of how
Letters from Norway
got into my life and took over. This book seeks to proclaim that book, the woman’s life and her legacy, and how they came to infiltrate my waking hours. I want you to love her as much as I do. If I could reach out and squeeze your arm I would do it right now. Mary Wollstonecraft does not disappoint. My first reading of
Letters from Norway
is followed by three escalating phases of interest in its author. They are: the Romantics, the Vindication and Motherhood. Handily these are also passing decades,
successive life stages. How was I to know that she would be the star and chief informant of all three?

1. Wollstonecraft and the Romantics

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven
. I was young when I first read
Letters from Norway
. It influenced the great poets that I was now studying. Romantic literature suits this early life phase, with its intensity and urgent possibilities. The teenage anthem of “it’s not fair” is in fact an understatement. This is nothing less than the battle of trying to become yourself. For some of us this doesn’t happen again so awkwardly until the day we abruptly turn into parents. Romantic literature, with its quests, iconoclastic visionaries and brave horizons – this is where you need to be for life’s big dramas.

It’s easy to check whether you yourself are a Romantic (NB: this does not mean people who send Valentine’s cards). Look into the sky on a clear night. Some people pick out the constellations they recognize and point them out.

“Look, there’s Saturn.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I am – look, you can tell because X Y Z.”

“Oh.”

Other people look out for satellites and discernible aeroplane routes. Avoid these people. Some respond with excitement: the outer edges of human understanding are delineated right here. They’ll mention a Brian Cox thing they read. These are sexy and confident
New Scientist
types who love a challenge.

But some people look up into a sky full of stars and think: “Oh God, it’s just too much – how can any of this be possible?” Their mind reels with all the people who’ve died beneath these stars and those who are yet to live. Humanity is so vulnerable, so flawed. Nature is so ineffable. Infinity is so… infinite. They might mention the Sublime and other words elevated by capital letters. They feel a spiky restlessness, deep inside a mystery internal organ. This person is a Romantic.

I was in the right place to identify this. In the furthest-away university, with the darkest weather and most glowering Gothic spires. The elements drive right into your face. It’s a fact that Glaswegian rain falls in all directions at once, even upwards. The baffling depth of the winters, the soaring stone tenements blackened by the years and the savage landscapes beyond – this was the place for
sensibility
. This was right up my moody street.

The undergrad literature curriculum at Glasgow University had something for everyone, even people who like aeroplane routes. Among its many genres are the Romantic, the Medieval and the Augustan. Over a plastic pint in the corner of the Queen Margaret Union bar we’d imagine these three categories as blokes. First comes a dark hero, a-roving on a galloping horse. He’s a lover and a fighter, and he never gets old. Behind him comes a monk croaking in Latin, telling bawdy fart jokes on the side. He, in turn, is pursued by a desiccated old grammarian in a wig, who mocks everything in sight.

So it’s pretty obvious which one you’re going to fall for. And I fell hard. I heard about some upstart woman called Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a kind of travel book made out of letters. Its portrayals of the Sublime, of wild and terrifying nature,
drew rave reviews. It was a bestseller, and the young Romantics couldn’t get enough. The poet Robert Southey breathlessly asked a friend: “Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Letters from Sweden and Norway
? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” Coleridge channelled her straight into his
Kubla Khan
. William Godwin wrote: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.”

My first reading of
Letters from Norway
proved unforgettable. Like Godwin I promptly fell in love, but for different reasons. Right there in the introduction, where naturally I was seeking shortcuts, was the real motive behind this apparently jaunty trip of hers. In the worn edition I still use today, the evidence of my youthful astonishment remains. The following words are underlined in stupid green ink: “In fact, Wollstonecraft was on a treasure hunt in Scandinavia.”
A treasure hunt
. That single phrase hooked me. A treasure hunt. Has there been another treasure-hunting single-mum philosopher on the high seas?

But the Romantics don’t just caper around gasping at mountains and starry skies. They also go out and try to change the world. Which brings us to:

2. Wollstonecraft and the
Vindication

The next time Wollstonecraft electrifies my life it’s via
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. This is her best-known work, and feminism’s first manifesto. It was published in 1792 and soon quoted around the world, even by the American president. And it’s blisteringly angry. Reading it again among the
doldrums of my early career felt like being in the same room as an intoxicating but terrifying woman. A taster description of fluttering girly types:

Stand back – you’ll get scorn in your eyes. Some of it’s funny, some of it is weird, the rest is very powerful. Admittedly she spends time on topics unlikely to vex today’s youngsters, such as “Does woman have a soul?” and “Does God want women to be inferior?” But elsewhere she could not be fresher. When she demands “
JUSTICE
for one half of the human race”, Wollstonecraft is talking about equal rights to education and financial independence.

In the middle of one of her scraps with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who argues it’s their lovely quiet pretty softness that gives the ladies power over men), she delivers the killer blow that’s still feminism’s bottom line to this day:

Power… over themselves
. Are we there yet? This question of power over ourselves still needs a proper stare in the face. The
Vindication
is a tonic for anyone who’s twenty-something and a bit vague: if there were a curriculum for such people, she’d be top of the list. The final distillation is: woman up. Get educated. Be useful. And, above all, independence is “the grand blessing of life”.

For me, the book was a kick in the backside at the right moment. In the thick of trying to achieve “power over myself”, after the year as a showgirl my next professional gig, inexplicably, is journalism. From a job where you get looked at, to a job where you get shouted at. It’s my mid-twenties, and I’m paying the rent by making live news programmes for the BBC World Service.

The wages are lower than showgirl wages, and the management equally incomprehensible. Our boss emerges, tells us how much he misses journalism, then goes back into his office to do more managing. We roll our eyes and get back to work. His sole piece of career advice is to elaborate on job applications precisely how I will make his life easier.

On the upside, the colleagues are exceptional. The World Service in the 1990s is the most exciting place. It still lives in Bush House – home to exiles, poets, eccentrics and rebels from all over the world. As a rookie in the Latin American Service, I’m taught to razor-cut audiotape by a bass-voiced Chilean and a Mexican Goth. The African Services have legendary parties. The Russians never answer the phone. The Arabs smoke more than any smokers have ever smoked, anywhere. The head of the Uzbek Service wears a famous hat and translates Shakespeare. There are marble staircases and stained threadbare carpets. No high-camp sequinned glamour, but also no undignified thong adjustments. Swings and roundabouts, I reflect sagely.

There are female bosses, and there are female correspondents. But very few. Reporting is still largely a posh bloke’s game, and the women who do make it aren’t necessarily of the sisterly kind. One producer, on hearing the flat-vowelled beauty of what remains of my Yorkshire accent, shouts “Give ’er a bag o’ greasy chips!” And there’s an unforgettable female presenter who goes out of her way to crush the ideas, hopes and even the most timid utterances of her junior female colleagues. This includes me, and I spend much of the two years I work on her programme wanting to throw up.

One day this presenter holds up the interview brief I’ve written between her finger and thumb, waves it at our editor and acidly pronounces:

“I’ve done what you
might
call some
basic journalism
on this
story
, and it turns out that
Law in Action
did it
two weeks
ago.”

I quietly call
Law in Action
and find out that this is not true. But it’s too late. The editor won’t stick up for an idea that the presenter has so thoroughly murdered. There’s nothing to do but take the humiliation and grind my teeth.

If you are feeling downtrodden, try a prescription-free dip into the pages of the
Vindication
. It’s a resolve-firming, terrifying boost. Like sticking your head out of a car window into a hailstorm of indignation. It may sting, but your complaints will pale next to what she had to put up with. Sometimes she can’t contain herself, and adds an asterisk so she can blow off more steam at the bottom of the page (
what nonsense!
etc.) You will feel better for it.