Midwives’ finale had me in tears
I SNIFFLED my way through the series finale of Call The Midwife last Sunday. It wasn’t just that it was sad – though it was, as this fantastic BBC series often is.
A woman died after developing a blood clot while taking the contraceptive pill. Her bewildered husband was left with three young children to bring up alone.
But what made me well up was how faithfully this episode represented the norm of being a woman in the 1960s. In the show we’d reached 1962, and “the Pill”, newly launched, was hailed as a miracle. Which it was, freeing women from the constant threat of pregnancy.
But there were unforeseen problems ahead, fatal embolisms being just one. On either side of me sat Richard and our youngest son. They glanced at me in disbelief as I snuffled. “You’re not actually crying, mum?” asked Jack. “Why? It’s only a drama.”
But it was so much more than that. It brought back in vivid relief the sheer stress of being a sexually active woman in those days. Not that I was, myself, in 1962 – a bit early for me. But still.
As I watched the women arriving at the contraceptive clinic by a discreet back door; the emphasis placed on her being respectably married; poor nurse Barbara, about to marry her young vicar, embarrassed by the undignified process of being fitted for a diaphragm, I wept for women in those days.
It was all so mortifying, even in the 1970s, seeking contraceptive advice, especially if you weren’t married. You felt somehow WITH its usual common sense, fairness and wisdom, the European Court of Justice this week ruled that firms are entitled to ban female workers from wearing headscarves. They also declared that any other “visible wearing of any political, philosophical or religious sign” may be prohibited.
This was based on the case of a young Belgian woman sacked by her ashamed, despite the so-called “free love revolution” which swept through the 1960s. When, at university, I first went on the Pill, I didn’t dare to see my own GP. He knew my mum; he’d known me since I was born and I couldn’t bear to face his moral judgment.
When nurse Barbara tried to get to grips with her diaphragm and it kept flipping out of her grasp as she squeezed the thing trying to practise in her bathroom, I thought, yes, been there, done that.
It was all so damn difficult, such a palaver. And surrounded by a sense of hush-hush embarrassed decorum. When I hear my daughter’s friends happily and openly discussing their check-ups with gynaecologists (yes, often male; in my day the clinics were exclusively staffed with bracing upperclass middle-aged women) and talking about their sexual health, it’s astonishing to realise how much things have changed.
So yes, I watched Call The Midwife with a full and nostalgic heart. I felt so sorry for all of us back then (and for poor old Vi, struggling through “the change”, forced to wear a special aerated corset to combat the hot flushes).
My mum (who always told me on no account must I let my father and brothers be aware that I had to dispose of sanitary towels) had a favourite saying: “Men must work and women must weep.”
Rot, I used to tell myself in my early feminist days. But as the magnificent Call The Midwife so accurately recalled, she was so right. Thank heavens young women no longer have to put up with all that.
Bonkers eu Judges get it wrong again
employers for wearing a headscarf. She claimed she was being discriminated against because she was Muslim. The European ruling is the result of her unsuccessful appeal.
So what are they going to do? Tell me I can’t wear my favourite necklace, a tiny cross, when I appear on TV?
These EU judges are bonkers. I trust we will all tell them exactly where to go.