Female leads not such a modern invention

I’m torn about whether to muse on female leads or spit tacks about lies. Maybe one and then the other.

This isn’t a feminist rant since I’ve never regarded myself as one. I was brought up by a father who was brought up by a suffragette mother and three older suffragette sisters, so equality goes way back in the family. I never expected to do anything other than a) get a self-supporting and interesting career; and b) be treated exactly like everyone else. My first mortgage was acquired in my early 20s (all of £1800 for a two room flat). The lawyer’s surprise at a single woman being approved startled me. And why not? 

  I moved as a journalist onto the Woman’s Page at the Glasgow Herald with friends murmuring I’d be stuck covering knitting patterns till eternity.  Unlikely. I woke the page up with social activist pieces on adventure playgrounds, the homeless, autistic kids, Marie Stopes contraception for the unmarried and David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Then into news and current affairs television as a researcher/writer, eventually editing the afternoon programme and then became (to my astonishment) Editor of the 6 O’clock News programme (evidently first woman ever for a regional news show). 

Perhaps memory fails me but I don’t remember sexual harassment being an issue, or indeed losing any jobs along the way because I was female. Then into the BBC as Producer/Exec Producer documentaries; and finally Senior Producer for the first inglorious year of TV AM. It was a high-adrenaline environment but I never slept on any casting couches, nor was ever propositioned to do so. Mercifully I was always clear that professional and personal should be kept separate and, barring a few slips, managed never to cross lines.   My experience will be different from others and maybe it goes back to expectation, bred into me early on. 

   My favourite teenage novel was Middlemarch, George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans)  wondrous tale of independent-mind Dorothea. Followed by Jane Austen - her Lizzie Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility carried the flag for liberated women in a time where everything conspired to keep them submissive. And OK we’ve all yearned for our Mr Darcy, but then Jane Austen never found him either, which is why she had to invent him.

   All of which explains why I have a female lead – it never crossed my mind to have anything else. What is so startling is that it is thought worthy of comment. But in these retrograde times, maybe it does.