Institutional feminism

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s being said stands in fearless contradiction to everything we’ve previously heard.

This same phenomenon could be seen at work in Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers: Lucy Worsley’s 100 Years of the WI (BBC2). For as long as I can remember, every media account of the Women’s Institute has begun by explaining that there’s far more to the organisation than jam and ‘Jerusalem’. But obviously none of them worked — because Monday’s programme began with the ever-perky Worsley explaining that, while we may think of the average WI member as someone ‘belting out “Jerusalem” or making lovely jam’, there’s far more to the organisation than that.

In fact, according to Worsley, the WI is nothing less than the missing link between the suffragettes and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. At times, admittedly, she did marshal a spot of evidence: as early as 1943, a national meeting of the WI passed a resolution in favour of equal pay for equal work. Mostly, though, she relied on simple assertion — as well, of course, as carrying out the primary duty of so many TV historians: judging the past by the steely certainties and pieties of our own day.