The Queenager: Eleanor’s Letter (April 7th 2024)

Dear Queenagers,

Happy blustery Sunday. I’m typing this from bed with a sore throat and the wind is whipping round my house. Storm Kathleen is raging… and tomorrow is the new moon and the total eclipse. My friend who is expert on these things has been telling me this is a big moment: all about endings – a time for consolidation, tying up the loose ends before we start a whole new 20 year era. That feels apt to me as I just received the final proofs of my book – exciting and terrifying to see it all ready to go. Mad how something can go from the inner workings of my head and heart into a physical manuscript ready for the world (well it is ready, I am not sure that I am…it will be published on August 1^st by HarperCollins and is available for pre-order, good news is if you pre-order you don’t get charged till publication).

In my house we are all at thresholds. My eldest is about to sit her finals – the end of the education road; the last big fence to jump. We went to the Duchess of Malfi in the Sam Wannamaker Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globeyesterday in the name of revision for her Jacobean tragedy paper. It is a wonderful small theatre, all lit by candle light as it would have been in John webster’s time. We sat on benches – the actors so close you could touch them. The shadows and flickering of the candles add an extra piquancy to the Duchess’s fall: she defies her powerful brother the Duke to marry for love and is murdered by him and his henchman as a result. The most crucial scene happens by candlelight – the Duke has sworn never to lay eyes on her again when she thwarts him by marrying Antonio, a commoner. So he comes to see her in her cell in the pitch darkness, giving her the dead hand of her lover, intending to make her mad.

The intimacy, the shadows, Malfi’s courage in the face of the worst transpiring are truly inspiring – a cry down the centuries for female autonomy, for control over our own loves and bodies. The ghostly nature of the theatre and the intensity of the confined space only serve to emphasise how trapped she is by the time, the conventions, how her own wishes count for nothing in the face of obdurate, controlling patriarchy symbolised by the Duke and her other brother a corrupt Catholic Cardinal. She is killed, as are her babies and Antonio. Despite her spirited rebellion and desire to fulfil her own wants –  not society’s-  she flourishes only for as long as it takes for her brother(s) to find out and stop her – permanently.

The production brought to life Malfi’s predicament – she could be any one of us. Trapped and co-erced by another time. I write here often about how women are still trapped by out-dated thinking, particularly as we age. In a culture dominated by a male lens which glorifies women for youth, beauty and fecundity where is the valuing of older female wisdom, or experience, of our forged-in-fire capacity to re-order, and comfort and contain?

But watching this play is a good reminder of how far we have come, of the hard-won rights we Queenagers now enjoy. I married the man I chose. I was the recipient of the best education money could buy. I have worked all my adult life and been the main breadwinner. I have been able to use my voice and experience to speak out for the changes I hope to see in the world. I  hope I am a good exemplar of agency and possibility to my daughters… that I have imbued them with a sense that they can have an effect on the world! In my lifetime I have seen so many changes for the better – when my eldest was born the legal framework allowed me only six months off work for maternity leave, by the time my second was born, two and a half years later, I was allowed a year off. Then flexibility, which I had had after my first as a special boon, became a legal right for all workers too. We have been living historic changes and as such are maybe less aware of how much has shifted around us than we should be..

The truth is that our generation of Queenagers have spearheaded social change. Now the next piece of the jigsaw is to embed ‘life-leave’ around the midlife collision, to get companies to understand all the elements which hit us at this stage and give us the flexibility we need to stay in employment and pack our pensions for our long old age. Malfi’s heartfelt cry to live her life on her own terms, is one which resonates down the centuries. We stand on the shoulders of campaigning giants… the next piece of action required is to keep pushing to make sure all women benefit and to think about the intersection of age along with all the others. We need the spearhead that we are to continue to bring the change we need to see. This revolution is ongoing.

Let me give you an example. My daughter is now at the same college in Oxford I attended. When I went up in 1989 women had only been allowed into Brasenose College as Undergraduates for about a decade. The way I see it now, we’d been given the lanyard, the keys to the college, but just because we were allowed in didn’t mean we had real equality. During my entire time at Oxford I was not taught by a single woman don. There were no portraits of women anywhere in the college. The whole place was set up for men, from bar, to the bathrooms (only one for the entire staircase a long-cold walk to the basement on a mixed staircase) to the food (chap-friendly). Now, thirty years on my daughter has a female tutor, there are pictures of distinguished female alumni on the walls. There is still sexism but the women are making inroads… it feels a bit more equal when you go there, like women belong. Our generation was gas-lit that because we were allowed in to the room (on sufferance) we had equality. We didn’t. And its not just Oxford colleges. Look at the ongoing fuss about men-only clubs where the most powerful chaps in the land still congregate! We’re still trying to make those organisations which have served men for centuries work for women too. That is also true of companies. Women’s ‘squiggly’ careers are still seen as an aberration, with men’s straight line career trajectories seen as the norm. But as long as the burden of care still falls on women (and it does, particularly at 50 plus where women do 80% of the unpaid caring work) then it won’t be equal. And women won’t have the pensions they need (the gender pension gap is way worse that the gender pay gap, women retire on average with pension savings of £69k compared to £205k for men according to NOW pensions, the UK Government puts it at 35%)

It is strange to see a play written 500 years ago which still has so much resonance on the lot of women.

But then I came home and watched late last night Scoop, the Neflix drama about Emily Maitlis’s interview with Prince Andrew. I liked it. Particularly its focus on Sam McAlister the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Newsnight researcher, a single mother, who landed the interview. Sam doesn’t fit in with the posh lot at Newsnight. She takes the piss out of Maitlis and her bien-pensant North London audience. McAlister is focussed on the paedofile Financier Jeffrey Epstein’s teen victims. As Epstein kills himself over the scandal and Prince Andrew is implicated in the fall-out she manages to persuade Prince Andrew’s main aide – Amanda Thirsk – that an interview with Newsnight is his best way of explaining the situation to the public. Well we all know how that turned out. A car crash. Not because Maitlis is mean in her questioning, she is actually incredibly fair. But because Prince Andrew is so obsessed with his own image and reputation that he totally fails to show any sympathy or remorse for the girl victims. He truly is hoist on his own dumb petard. It is a wonderful take down of male power – Epstein’s fall precipitating Andrew’s. Andrew must have had no empathy for the poor 17 year old who claims he had sex with her under duress, or he wouldn’t have done it. The interview just proves how blind and entitled he is (in the drama they use the real interview transcript).

Now I have to say I wasn’t surprised. A little while before the Newsnight interview Prince Andrew gave an interview to the magazine I used to edit. Like Sam McAlister in Scoop, I had to go to Buckingham Palace and talk to Andrew’s aides about the interview which was also linked to Pitch@Palace (a toe-curling event I attended, like an even naffer version of the Apprentice but with plush red carpet, Buckingham Palace lanyards and lashings of sycophancy). Prince Andrew agreed to be interviewed by us, his intermediary was a posh chap called Mr Pogson ‘‘Call me Poggo, everyone does’’, a courtier. Andrew’s office was in a cramped upstairs warren in Buckingham Palace, perhaps reflective of his lowly status within ‘the firm’. The journalist travelled all over the world with the prince for Pitch@Palace. We did the final interview in the Palace. We’d agreed a particular shot – in a grand corridor for perspective, for the magazine cover –  but on the day Andrew didn’t fancy doing it, even though he had agreed it before. Petulantly he said he’d had enough. So we didn’t put him on the cover. There was kick back. But I was amazed that after all the effort it had taken to set the whole interview and shoot up no-one in his team insisted that he do the money shot so he got the cover. But they didn’t. So I wasn’t surprised that nobody on his staff had briefed him before the interview with Emily Maitlis that what he most needed to demonstrate was remorese and contrition. It is always a bad sign when someone powerful has no-one in their inner circle who will speak truth to power. But Andrew believed his own hype, that he was charismatic and clever and knew what he was doing. It is shocking but true that even after the Maitlis interview Prince Andrew still believed it had all gone brilliantly and the world was going to sympathise with him.  Talk about having no sense of how you are really perceived… how dangerous is that! And how dumb and arrogant in an age where all he needed to do to see the truth was go on Twitter for five minutes.

Anyway – a tale of two cultural moments. How much life has changed for women in the last five centuries, but also of how far there is still to go…. I loved watching an all female Newsnight team take down Prince Andrew the idiot playboy. Just as my heart ached for the Duchess of Malfi; her lack of agency in the face of patriarchal power, all she wanted was to live with the man she loved and her children. And she died for it. As many women still do today… a reminder of how far we have come but how much more there is to do.

Have a lovely rest of your day and I’d recommend the Duchess of Malfi at the Globe and Scoop on Netflix. Oh and a wonderful novel about the theatres in Shakespeare’s time called The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman.

Lots of love

Eleanor

By Eleanor Mills