Judith Condon has criticised the BBC series Call the Midwife for perpetuating “tired stereotypes” about the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. In a letter to the Guardian, she expressed disappointment that a programme known for illuminating the everyday lives of women in postwar Britain had resorted to a reductive depiction of the movement.
The first episode of the new series showed female characters attending a Women’s Liberation Movement meeting and then assembling to burn their bras over a brazier. Condon described the scene as providing “an amusing image of the various styles of bra” but argued it was not worthy of the show’s usual standard.
She noted that second-wave feminists confronted everyday sexism on a scale “almost unimaginable to women today”, and reminded readers of the movement’s four demands: equal pay; equal education and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and 24-hour childcare.
Condon called bra-burning a “false trope” that was readily picked up by tabloids of the time, for whom women were either “housewives” or “dolly birds”. She added: “Shame on the BBC writers for having reproduced it. Jill Tweedie must be turning in her grave.”
