Women in the Mirror
A CHAMPION FOR FEMALE LIBERATION FOR 120 YEARS
It’s time to revolt against the tape-measure dictatorship
MARJE PROOPS RAILS AGAINST ‘BIG BOSOM CULT’
The Daily Mirror’s chairman Cecil King roared with disapproval on opening his paper to see models posing in Mary Quant’s “ridiculous” mini-skirts across its pages. The 1960s symbol of women’s liberation was a little too progressive for him.
But in response associate editor Felicity Green didn’t flinch. She set him straight. And got her way.
“How long are you going to continue to put those ridiculous clothes in my newspaper?” she recalls of his typewriter-jangling demand. “As long as they are news,” she replied, curtly. They continued to appear.
It spoke volumes about the Daily Mirror that Felicity, now 97, felt she could speak and be heard – and that those revolutionary minis could make their mark.
That she was associate editor at all and, in 1973, the first woman on the executive board, showed that in an industry and society still riven with misogyny, the Mirror was different.
Women were largely ignored by newspapers but were intrinsic to the Daily Mirror from the beginning. We launched specifically for women – the only major national daily paper ever to do so. And we had the first woman editor of a British daily newspaper, Mary Howarth. Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, who launched the Mirror on November 2, 1903, said: “It represents in journalism a development that is entirely new and modern in the
world; it is unlike any other newspaper because it attempts what no other newspaper has ever attempted. It is no mere bulletin of fashion, but a reflection of women’s interests, women’s thought, women’s work…”
There is no pretending this vision worked out perfectly. The intention was there, but society wasn’t ready.
But the female imprint was fixed, and has remained, emerging in the issues the paper has championed, and the journalists it has employed – from the first female Fleet Street staff photographer to the first national newspaper royal correspondent and agendachanging columnists from Marje Proops to Sue Carroll and Miriam Stoppard.
During the Great War, the Mirror roared loudest for the nascent Lionesses of today by backing the working class women from the munitions factories who played football while the men were away. It would be banned in 1921 but women’s football was a morale booster at this time. More than 1,000 women’s games were played between over 200 clubs. When Portsmouth Ladies launched the trend by playing a team of wounded soldiers, it was the Mirror who hailed the game.
Our recent launch of monthly magazine Women’s Football News continues the thread.
There were strong female voices at the paper in the 1930s with columnists such as Emily Post, Eleanor Glynn, Eileen Ascroft and Dorothy Dix. They wrote about “acceptable” women’s pursuits of etiquette and love and marriage, but more serious subjects crept in, too.
Birth control, dating and questions such as “can marriage be happy without children?” were groundbreaking. In the Second World War we ran a daring series on the risks of venereal diseases, then rife. Some women readers had not heard of them until they read the Mirror. The 1940s and 1950s introduced a pioneering female snapper, the first woman Fleet Street staff photographer. Doreen Spooner’s photo of Princess Eliza beth was widely shown in Britain’s cinemas during the national anthem.
Joan Reeder, thought to be the first national newspaper royal correspondent, made waves here in 1952 as one of the first to hear of the death of King George VI.
TIt reflects women’s thoughts, interest and work
ALFRED HARMSWORTH
he a haunting 1950s also splash saw by columnist William Connor, under his pen name Cassandra, condemning the 1955 hanging of Ruth Ellis for murdering her lover. It went down in history and is still a ferocious indictment today.
Delia Smith joined the new Mirror Magazine as its cookery writer in 1969. Eve Pollard arrived the same decade. And the indomitable Marje Proops was to blaze a trail with her columns throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Marje did not shy from taboo issues including homosexuality and abortion. In November 1964 she wrote appealing directly to the Lord Chancellor “on behalf of the 100,000 women who face up to the heartbreak and terror of the illegal abortion every year, to bring the law into the 20th century”.
She would become an advice columnist in the 1970s. Memorably she protested at men’s obsession with the Cult of the Big Bosom.
There was no getting away from the Mirror’s tabloid pin-up girls – in the 1910s we promoted a beauty contest featuring won by Miriam
Babbage, and in the 1930s the ‘Daily Mirror 8’ paraded in bathing costumes. Page three was to come.
Yet Marje’s column cut through. Proops lambasted it was “time we revolted against tape-measure dictatorship” after a letter from a young mum saying she was “so self-conscious and unhappy” as she was “only 33 inches round the bust” that she was considering spending money she did not have on breast enlargement.
That persuasive female voice has continued over the decades. In the 1980s, Anne Robinson joined the Mirror as assistant editor and Julia Langdon became the first woman to be a political editor on a UK national newspaper. And acclaimed entertainment writer Gill Pringle ran her White Hot Club column.
Mirror Woman was a regular feature, covering lifestyle, fashion and consumer advice.
Sue Carroll joined the paper in 1998, her persuasive views always making their way to the furthest reaches. For nearly 30 years Dr Miriam Stoppard OBE has been a champion of equality for our readers, speaking expertly on women’s and children’s health.
Fiona Phillips wrote powerfully in the paper for years and candidly revealed her parents’ diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and, more recently, her own.
In the 1990s Mirror journalist Noreen
Taylor secured the first newspaper interview with Nelson Mandela after his release. In the noughties and beyond we have supported such causes as the baby loss awareness campaign work of Sarah Brown, who guest edited a Mirror supplement to mark the 100th International Women’s Day in 2010, to the WASPI women’s fight for state pension equality.
Today the female columnist tradition is continued by names including Polly Hudson, Val Savage, Coleen Nolan and sister Linda, Eva Simpson, Jessica Boulton, Ashleigh Rainbird, Sara Wallis, Fiona Parker, Ros Wynne-Jones’, with her campaigning Real Britain, and Anna Morell and Rachel Charlton-Dailey, focussing on disability discrimination.
With the paper’s current editor, Alison Phillips, at the helm since 2018, women’s voices at the Mirror can only continue to ring ever louder into the future.