Women Aren't Persons

By Erica Stary

A fascinating exploration of the interaction of law and culture to inform the (mis)treatment of women around the world.

Since the death of her mother days after her fourth birthday, Erica Stary's life has been coloured by an acute awareness of her perceived inferiority as a female in a male-dominated society. Though that hasn't

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erica Stary
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739687465

Book preview

Chapter 1

Growing up in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s

I was born towards the end of World War II. My father had volunteered at the onset of war and served as a UK-based trainer of Royal Marine Commandos, thus never saw active war service at the front. Sadly, Mother died within a month of my fourth birthday. As a result of her death, I became, like many of my little friends, part of a single-parent family. Unlike those friends who all knew their surviving parent (mother), I did not know mine, who had only been home sporadically for fleeting visits and was now home solely because he had managed to obtain a compassionate discharge due to his wife’s imminent death.

Whilst the war had already ended, many volunteers and conscripts were not discharged for several more years: for instance, one of my uncles (who was in Berlin during the post-war Russian blockade when the Allies ran the airlifts to drop in necessaries such as food and fuel) was not released till 1949 after the official end of the airlift that September! I think many were later.

Apparently, I was very suspicious of my father as he did not, unsurprisingly, look like the young man whose photo on the mantelpiece had been taken several years earlier shortly after he had enlisted. Emotionally, therefore, I was orphaned. In (most of) my friends’ cases, it was their father who had died, killed by enemy aircraft, in battle, by torpedo, friendly fire (which happened, sadly, on occasions), etc.

I have never met anyone whose parent died before they became adult who did not suffer an emotional loss. The level of the loss varies with the level of love and care the child received after that death: many of my chums really missed their fathers whom they hardly knew if at all as some were born posthumously or they lost their fathers when they were very little. They were desperate to know something about them. Sadly, their mothers, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, would not talk about them or tell them anything. The child felt unable to ask as s/he knew it would cause distress. Where the surviving parent, and his/her replacement spouse, if any, did not pour warmth and love into the child, the loss had lifetime impact. Their loss also impacts on their own family too – it can be seen in the way the bereaved child, now parent, behaves towards his/her child – because, I believe, that parent is emotionally damaged. My husband, although he too had lost his father in WWII in Central Europe, was much better at cuddling our child than I was, for example, but his emotional needs as a child had been met by his grandmother who had poured love and affection into him.

When a parent dies for his/her country, he/she entrusts the children to the surviving spouse and the state. None of my friends appeared to have been cosseted in any way at all by the state by way of thanks to their lost parent. It is not even, it seems, possible to have their names placed in the UK war memorial records where the surviving adult did not mention the child at the time. I discovered this as a result of pressing strongly for recognition with regard to a friend whose estate I was winding up. I find that refusal appalling. In her case, the father was killed about three weeks after her birth, her mother would have been too distressed to have thought properly about what to include, and I don’t suppose for one instance that the relevant government department thought to send a form for completion which would give prompts, such as children’s names to be given. My friend and her children in turn felt and feel rebuffed and insignificant due to the refusal – it’s as if the deceased’s children were irrelevant.

In my case, Father assumed that we would not notice that Mother had been replaced and insisted that we called his new wife Mummy. I discovered (much) later that both of us realised we had been conned when this woman did not transmogrify into our adored Mummy, in the way our childish minds thought would happen, but was clearly someone else…. I thereafter reserved the word mother in my thoughts exclusively for my own mother – refusing ever to apply it to her replacement. This caused an interesting problem when, now adult, I decided I was too old to call her Mummy. I couldn’t manage emotionally to change it to Mother or to more endearing versions such as Mum; it stuck in the craw. I therefore wrote to ask if I could call both parents by their given names. There was a stunned silence for well over six months followed by a very reluctant ‘yes, if you must’.

What no one in the family appeared to appreciate was the terrible sense of loss both my sister and I felt over our mother’s death. We never received any help. We were never given any information. There was no sitting on Father’s lap being comforted. The last time I sat on a lap in my childhood in our family home it was Mother’s, so I would have been no more than three and a half as after that she was confined to bed. When she died, everything of hers was so far as possible either removed from the house or hidden away in the attic. No one appeared to notice our grief. My sister recalls my crying ‘why are all Mummy’s shoes being taken away?’ as an example. I cried myself to sleep for years struggling to come to terms with her loss. In my despair, I often begged God to let me see her, however briefly – he cruelly did not, inevitably. I searched the house for things of hers to remind me. There was very little: Father had done a very good job. But I did find a few books in which she had written her name, and a couple of photos; one was under all my father’s music books in the piano stool and the other beneath his photo in a photo frame. I could not look at these photos of her without crying but they helped hugely in allowing me not to forget what she looked like and to recall her at a better time than on her deathbed where she was often physically sick.

It actually took me forty years to come to terms with Mother’s premature demise. That was triggered by and as a result of my father’s funeral at which I, to my intense surprise, bearing in mind the lack of a real relationship with him, collapsed. We, Husband and I, struggled to analyse it and in the end concluded that it was because, despite Father having steadfastly refused to talk to me about her (or indeed to me at all if he could avoid it), I had lost the person who might, had he been generous-hearted enough, have helped me come to terms with her death. I suspect part of his problem was his own sense of deep loss. Everyone said how much he had changed following her death; he was much more withdrawn, no longer sociable, outgoing and loving. In the end, Husband rang Stepmama to ask whether she could assist in any way, such as by helping me to speak to those of Mother’s friends who were still alive. She did, bless her; it was one of the kindest things she ever did for me. Speaking to those women was cathartic. They were all clearly puzzled to see me but they told me little anecdotes and also how much they too had missed her.

One side effect of the lack of love from my father was my decision to change my surname once legally adult to Mother’s maiden name. I identified very strongly with her family and actually look much more like them than Father’s. In the event, for other reasons, I did not. I’m sorry I didn’t.

The loss for my sister was different: she was roughly five years older than I and so knew Mother much better, also Father. As the firstborn, she was the apple of his eye and clearly much loved by both our parents. But, like me, she had a very difficult time with our stepmother, suffering from frequent rows and explosions. For example, we were often told we weren’t family, to which I would always respond, somewhat undiplomatically but definitely defiantly, that I was there first, emphasising the original family and its linkage. Also, she was sent away to school very soon after Father remarried (just over six months after Mother’s death). As part of the preparation for going away at nine years old, to her horror she had her lovely waist-long auburn hair with golden tints cut to ear length, which was devastating for her and also the new haircut did not suit her at all. She had been so proud of her hair: it had hitherto been brushed a hundred times or so a day as she had been told doing so would make it even more beautiful. She still has stunningly beautiful hair, unlike mine which greyed far too young. She also felt very strongly she had been sent away to get her out of the way of the new relationship. I don’t think that was correct, as I was later told that the parents were so worried about her they thought that sending her away earlier than Father and Mother had originally planned would give her stability. Of course, neither he nor his new wife ever told her that and she did not accept that explanation when I told her, years and years later.

My father, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, gave me my allocated share of Mother’s jewellery, which naturally I began to wear only to be told that it would upset him. I reasoned that he would be upset if I did not wear it; after all, why had I been given it if not to use? It created a row where I tearfully exploded that I knew nothing about her, no one ever talked about her, it was as though she had committed a crime by dying. I did not even know the colour of her eyes or her hair. How could they be so cruel? There was no response from either adult. And I still don’t know. I can only guess – my eyes are blue. They are the only blue eyes in our immediate family. I continued to wear the jewellery. Stepmama was adamantly opposed to body-piercing, which she considered to be barbaric. I now had earrings for pierced ears. I grew my hair long to cover those ears and took myself to a jeweller. When she discovered what I had done, she was furious, but the deed was done, the ears had healed and I was able to wear those earrings, and still do.

I noted very early on that my friends’ fatherless houses were considerably less prosperous than ours (and that ours was considerably less prosperous than my father’s brother’s). The first I put down to mothers not going out to work. Naturally. Mothers stayed at home to look after the children, make the meals, mend the much handed-down in those spartan days of ration cards and shortages of everything clothes, clean the house, bottle the autumn gluts from the local markets or the kitchen gardens which many had in those days via the garden or allotment before Dig for Victory became too distant in the mid to late 1950s – many people, us included, even grew mushrooms in street air raid shelters, and so on. I thus learnt that homes run by mothers were poorer. Some of my friends’ parents also kept hens for eggs – eggs were on ration until the early 1950s. We, sadly, didn’t have room for a hen run in our backyard. Father would occasionally get eggs on the black market which were preserved in a dolly tub by being immersed in isinglass – the eggs tasted foul (in my view) when later cooked, but they had not gone off. A dolly tub was a large ribbed metal barrel-shaped tub which was part of the pre-washing machine process for cleaning clothes.

The second, Uncle’s far greater prosperity, I discovered much later, was down to sibling rivalry – the brothers were in the same business, had been left it equally by their father, but the younger son had been sent away to school (his mother apparently could not control him), whereas the elder had only been sent to Manchester Grammar School (considered at that time to be one of the best schools in the country), which, according to my father, rankled. Grandfather died in my father’s early to mid twenties. Father explained that his big brother told him, probably quite correctly, he had too little experience at that stage to have 50 per cent of the family business (as had been left to him), and at least in theory but, so Father said very sadly many times in my childhood, not in practice, drew up a timetable for his younger brother to rise to equality. When war broke out and it became clear that one of them would be called up (if they didn’t volunteer – the business was not a reserved occupation), big brother, delighted that little brother was keen to join the Royal Marines, encouraged him with various promises and indeed did supplement his forces’ income whilst he was in the Royal Marines, but, so far as I was able to glean, for whatever reason, Father never became an equal partner, nor was he given a share of the freehold of the business premises though at the time he had understood otherwise. There used to be many, many rows between the brothers, and both my parents would be in tears afterwards. We children never really understood what was going on. Father only discovered the full position during the payout following his eviction from the business in the aftermath of a serious heart attack which kept him off work for some time as he was a great believer in letting sleeping dogs lie and hated confrontation – in any event, he had had more than enough income so he had felt no need to pursue his rights.

It was that same loving, generous elder brother who, whilst my mother was on her deathbed, ravaged with pain and sickness, telephoned her to tell her in no uncertain terms that it was not appropriate, however ill she was feeling, to allow her daughter to go out to play in a torn frock – but he was wrong because I had actually torn it that afternoon in his garden as, being the youngest in the group, I had been sent up the tree next to the garage to see if it was safe for the others to climb, and one of the branches had caught it as I descended. He had told me off before he rang Mother and had refused to listen to my explanation. I don’t believe he would have cared that he was wrong. Another of his habits was to demand to see my stepmother’s housekeeping accounts on a regular basis, presumably to make sure she was not stealing any of the money and putting it into a nest egg for herself. I can’t think of any other reason why he might want to waste his time on this.

My next observation involved watching Stepmama wheedle money out of Father. I soon realised that she had no money of her own, which I put down, at that stage, to her not working outside the house like he did because she was a wife and/or not being given pocket money by him, in the way that I and my elder sister were. My pocket money was sixpence a week in those post-war ration book days of real money – 2½p in today’s seriously devalued currency. Anyway, 6d. bought considerably less than the pre-war equivalent due to the taxation (coupled with high inflation) needed to pay for the war effort – the top rate of tax was 97.5%–99% and rose at one stage in the 1940s to 147.5%. In those days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, my week’s pocket money would buy my father a packet of five Woodbines (he smoked over eighty – untipped – cigarettes a day) for his birthday leaving a penny