What a pity to see Call the Midwife, still one of Britain’s most popular television series, stumbling into tired stereotypes about the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s.
The first episode of the new series had the female characters attending a WLM meeting, then assembling to burn their bras over a brazier. The scene may have provided an amusing image of the various styles of bra, but was not worthy of a programme that has previously shone much light on the everyday lives of women in postwar Britain.
As a recent Guardian long read made clear (‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act, 18 December), second-wave feminists confronted everyday sexism on a scale almost unimaginable to women today. A reminder: the four demands of the movement were equal pay; equal education and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and 24-hour childcare.
Bra-burning was a false trope picked up readily by tabloids of the time – papers for whom women were either “housewives” or “dolly birds”. Shame on the BBC writers for having reproduced it. Jill Tweedie must be turning in her grave.
Judith Condon
Halesworth, Suffolk
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