I have this habit of counting older women.
I look to see if they are fairly represented in public life – in the media and in politics – and continually find they are not.
As part of Labour’s Older Women’s Commission, which published its final report just before last year’s general election, I heard the experiences of women in their 50s struggling to stay in work, or being managed out of it. I heard how they are being overlooked and undervalued and end up simply disappearing.
All of the life experience, the value older women have, is being lost to society because of age discrimination. When I do come across older women who have survived the ‘50s cull’, I want to know who they are and how they managed it. I want to get to know them so I can learn from them.
Joyce Gould and Joan Bakewell are two such women. Both with compelling stories to tell.
Groucho Marx once said, ‘Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’
I thought how mistaken Groucho was while reading Joyce Gould’s memoir, The Witchfinder General.
For here was a woman charged in the 1980s with uncovering and identifying those within the Labour party whose ‘aim and ambition’ was to destroy it from within. Militant Tendency had targeted 60 constituencies. To make Labour electable, in her role as the party’s director of organisation, she had to root them out. In this case, the remedy worked and led to a landslide victory for Labour in 1997.
How did Gould feel about the role? ‘I was not always happy but I firmly believed it was necessary’, she writes. ‘Militant were not a party of the “left”. This was shown so obviously by their attitude to policy issues which I supported – equality, individual human rights, reproductive rights and race relations – all of which they treated with disdain. Their response to these basic fundamental rights was always that it would all come right when the revolution comes’.
Militant gave her the name ‘Witchfinder General’ which was intended to hurt. Nor was it ‘easy’ dealing with the threats of violence, including knee-capping, and the harassment, but Gould refused to be intimidated. Her final ‘reward’ was seeing Militant lose its control of the Liverpool party.
When in 1993 the Labour leader John Smith asked her if she would ‘like to go in the House of Lords’ I doubted whether anyone at the time deserved the honour more.
Baroness Joyce Gould of Potternewton started work serving behind a pharmacy counter in Leeds. She had been a lonely child. A ‘downtown’ girl growing up in a Jewish family with no money. When she paid sixpence to become a member of the Labour party 64 years ago, it gave her life a ‘purpose’. As a young woman badly lacking in confidence, she had ‘no idea’ she would play a major part in decisions that could ultimately ‘change people’s lives.’
Over the decades Gould’s work has gone much further than her role in the demise of Militant – most notably as a champion of women’s rights. What shines through from her story is her ‘absolute and resolute’ commitment to the Labour party and its capacity to change lives for the better – but she often comes back to the point that it first has to be a party in government, locally and nationally.
Gould’s memoir is a warm and uplifting read. It is riveting in its description of the routing of Militant and strong in its conclusion that the outcome of this May’s local elections will be a ‘defining point’ for the ‘new Labour regime and its record’. I found it interesting, considering accusations of the party’s introspection under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, that she chose to close her book with a quote from the late Denis Healey:
‘There are far too many people who want to luxuriate complacently in moral righteousness in opposition. We are not just a debating society. We are not just a socialist Sunday school. We are a great movement that wants to help real people at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power until we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country’.
There are no thoughts about the future of the party in the new memoir by Joan Bakewell, but plenty on subjects as diverse as seaside piers, sherry, duvets and what to do with all of the ‘stuff’ she has collected and will inevitably leave behind.
In Stop the Clocks, Gould’s fellow Labour peer takes up residence in a Warwickshire cottage run by a charity which gives female writers space and peace to write. In her seat by the river she looks back at the world that shaped her and watches as the seasons change.
‘The spring air takes some of the solemnity from my thoughts: one day none of this will matter, will not matter at all. What matters is the beauty of the world, the succeeding seasons … leaf and bud, flower and birdsong’.
Her description of the simplicities of cottage life, bringing in wood for the fire, the chiming of the church clock nearby, trigger nostalgic memories of growing up in a middle-class family in Stockport, her long career in BBC broadcasting and public life, and a subject for which she has become well known – what it is to age in a youth-obsessed society.
‘Ageing is often seen as a diminution of life, somehow a feeling of being less alive than in earlier years,’ she writes. ‘I can tell they see me as old and tiresome, getting in the way, someone who would be living at their speed if only I could. But that’s not the case at all. I am living the life of an old person, which has its own rhythms, its own priorities, its own satisfactions. They are not inferior, or declining, they are simply different’.
Her musings on loss – the death of her younger sister Susan from cancer – and the tender way she describes her relationship with her father – his Panama hat still hangs in the cloakroom of her house in Primrose Hill – makes the book feel at times as if it is written in preparation for her own goodbye. But any gloom which threatens to descend is cast off by throwing open a door or window at the cottage and letting nature in to lift the mood.
Stop the Clocks may be thoughts on what Bakewell will leave behind, but it is written from the perspective of a life still being lived to the full.
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Miriam O’Reilly is a journalist who won a landmark age discrimination case against the BBC at an employment tribunal
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The Witchfinder General: A Political Odyssey
Joyce Gould
BiteBack Publishing | 320pp | £25
Stop the Clocks: Thoughts on What I Leave Behind
Joan Bakewell
Virago | 304pp | £18.99