‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply.
‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply. She was for the first time in the same room as Peter Jolley, who had helped to organise the notorious 1970 Miss World contest. He, too, does not seem to have changed much in the intervening decades. ‘So much work went into it, my dear,’ he insisted, riling his fellow conversationalists, perhaps deliberately.
Twenty-five billion viewers switched on to watch the event at the Royal Albert Hall as 58 ‘girls’ from around the world were set up like prize specimens and assessed for beauty, personality and demeanour. On this occasion, though, another group of ‘girls’ had decided they’d had enough of women being exploited for commercial gain and smuggled into the hall in their ‘handbags’ an armoury of smoke bombs, rotten tomatoes and ‘limp lettuce’ to disrupt the competition and expose its iniquities. They were arrested and the broadcast resumed, but only after the world had witnessed the fracas. In those days ‘live’ TV meant live.
Sue MacGregor brought together three of the Libbers with those who had taken part in the contest for another gripping session of The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday). It’s a perfect radio scenario: a group of people who once witnessed or took part in an extraordinary event, sitting around a table and reliving its tensions and dramas by talking about what they can remember. In this week’s programme (produced by Christina Captieux) the friction between the two opposing camps was palpable, even now so many years later when you would have thought most women had achieved a degree of liberation.
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