Tributes poured in following the death of Jane Goodall, with stories of her remarkable life and doings, the way she set out new paths in research and lived a different kind of life. The quoted remark of hers that most struck me was
“It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”,
although there has subsequently been a debunking of the attribution. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is in the spirit of things she might have said, given interviews of her I have seen.
For me, that first sentence certainly rings true. Although few men of my acquaintance would admit to the fact they like women to know their place quietly in the background, I nevertheless think somehow that’s what many men around the world expect. It is just one aspect of that pernicious habit we all have of stereotyping. The trad wife may be having something of a revival, at least on the other side of the Atlantic, but will be little seen in academia: you’re not going to survive long in the cut-and-thrust world of research if you choose to fade into the background and merely bring in the cakes for celebratory teas. But there may still be an expected element of ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ said to the head of a team (who is statistically likely to be male), still, in almost all scientific disciplines.
There are a number of other notable women who have made this same point about being difficult in different spheres, probably far more than I know of and covering centuries. Let me just give a few not-so-distant examples. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Harvard Professor of early American history, who used the phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ in an article she wrote, back in 1976. The phrase took on a life of its own, according to her, and she subsequently expanded on it in her book of the same title. In 2019 she reflected on this in a fascinating essay, casting the sentiment back to a poem published by Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (published in London, although she was a colonialist New England poet). Bradstreet wrote:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, …..
In other words, get back to your sewing, woman.
Moving forward to a period I lived through, let me highlight another woman, like Jane Goodall, sadly missed, Lisa Jardine. I only met her a couple of times, but she was another force of nature who, when she became the first female fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1976, created badges which said ‘behave badly’. These she would give out to colleagues, such as Jane Tillier, the first woman Lay Chaplain to be appointed at the College in 1984, exhorting them not to go about their business quietly.
Of course, in our current political world, there is the example of Jess Phillips, famously pugnacious, who says of herself
‘I’m tough in most situations and I’m not afraid to speak back at people if they’re having a pop at me.’
And lots of people do have a pop at her. As she puts this in a chilling comparison with domestic abuse ‘
What happens is there’s a slow and steady buildup to control a woman – you have to be very negative about them, bring them down, groom them to a position of weakness, isolate them from people by threatening to embarrass them at work. You close them in, and then when all those bits of control are done, you escalate to violence.’
Intersectionality, as ever, makes all of this much worse with the well-worn trope Angry Black Woman particularly prevalent in the USA, with such women considered to be ‘hostile, aggressive, overbearing, illogical, ill-tempered and bitter.’
No, women just want to be allowed to speak up without fear – but with good sense. Whether in science or anywhere else, our voices need to be heard and listened to, not treated as if we are out of line for daring to open our mouths. Too often women are spoken over, ignored or slapped down. Still. That this is ongoing was apparent from my conversations with younger women at the recent WISE conference, who were all too familiar with the sensation of men around them who weren’t necessarily willing to listen. Who might additionally mark a woman down for speaking up. I fear, if the ructions in the USA spread over here, those sensations may only grow.
Apart from the potential of damaging one’s career, speaking up in the face of negativity or worse, can be extremely tiring. There are times when any fighter, in any situation, may prefer to go and hide in a corner and nurse their wounds. It takes energy from the day job, such as research or teaching. It takes time away from the actions that might lead to progression, be it writing papers or attending conferences. By fighting one’s corner there are many ways in which one’s career may be jeopardised, or at the very least hindered. But if we don’t speak up, then nothing will change. I know I have the luxury of no longer having a career to worry about, but Lisa Jardine did not when she was first elected as a junior research fellow all those years ago. By encouraging others, as well as herself, to ‘behave badly’, she paved the way for all the women research fellows who came later to have a voice and a status.
Many of us will be marked down as ‘difficult’, or indeed as feisty, not a shrinking violet, unpredictable, outspoken – at this point you should insert your own particular bête noire phrase, because most readers will know what gets under their skin if they speak up. This, of course, can happen to men too, but somehow the vocabulary is usually different, with words like feisty rarely applied to a man. It may not inherently be pejorative but, when tossed in my direction, I have always felt that was the message conveyed. However, being difficult is, too often, the only way for change to happen. The parsing of ‘women are aggressive while men are assertive’ may linger under so much of this, but that’s not a reason to stop putting one’s case without fear.
