Pick your battles
Sharing the benefit of her experience and wisdom, Jackie is a shining, if unlikely, example of how women can make themselves heard, noticed and ensure they are taken seriously. ‘My one big piece of advice on that score is to pick your battles, because you can’t deal with everything all the time,’ she says. ‘Whether it’s a work, domestic or social situation you find yourself struggling with, just focus on what is important in the moment. There’s a calm that comes over you when you have clarity of purpose and that is a wonderful feeling.
‘The message given to women that we can and should have it all is a false one, which makes us feel we’ve failed,’ she continues. ‘It’s impossible to have it all, so you have to prioritise. Life is not perfect, families are not perfect, we are not perfect. Spread yourself as thin as Marmite and you will never feel in control. I try to understand other people and where they’re coming from. It helps to be a little kinder to them – it brings out their better nature and it helps me reassure myself that it is not about me.’
Jackie believes age can be a useful bulwark rather than a compromising life stage that renders women invisible and takes away their authority. ‘Just change the premise – it’s as simple as that,’ she explains. ‘I think it was true in the past that women were perceived negatively beyond middle age, but I’m not sure it’s as true now. There are such positives if we can only recognise them. As we’ve grown older, our responsibilities to our children have diminished, our confidence has grown and we are much less crushed by all the information around us.
‘If I’d been opening the BRITS in my 20s or 30s, I wouldn’t even have wanted to be on the stage with those “empowered” females;
I just couldn’t have put myself up there beside them. But, as an older woman, it doesn’t bother me. There’s no sense of competition, which is completely freeing.’
Jackie, described by commentator Piers Morgan as ‘the greatest feminist icon since Emmeline Pankhurst’, has three further pieces of key advice she believes can help women in all situations: ‘Lead by example, generate respect and have quiet confidence in your position. Achieve these and you will put yourself in a very strong position in all areas of your life.’
Jackie may make it sound easy, but her beginnings in life were challenging and this has helped make her into a woman able to take control and calm the chaos. ‘I had a very difficult, angry mother,’ she explains. ‘I could never openly challenge her but I made sure nothing she did was going to make me cry. Today, I suppose
I take on bullies because I have a strong sense of justice and what’s fair and not fair.’
In the Handforth Parish Council maelstrom, the world watched Jackie taking a brave stand. ‘We saw karma – we saw some people doing the wrong thing and we saw consequences to their actions. We often hope for that kind of reckoning in life but we rarely see it played out before us. And, on some level, it is extremely satisfying to watch people totally losing it!’
Lead by example, generate respect and have quiet confidence in your position