Speak Up
6 minute read
When Meghan Markle spoke her truth to Oprah Winfrey a couple of weeks ago, the divisiveness of the reaction was not caused by her accusations of neglect, deceit and racism against the Royal family as much as by her defiance of a long-held belief about womanhood; that we suffer in silence, put up and shut up, keep quiet and carry on. Women have always been taught to keep the peace irrespective of whether that peace is theirs or someone else’s. Instead, Meghan raged against the injustices meted out to her as the first bi-racial member of the British monarchy.
While the interview has been compared to the late Princess Diana’s famously explosive conversation with Martin Bashir in a 1995 episode of Panorama, there is an important difference. Unlike Meghan, Diana’s demeanour was stereotypically sheepish and shy. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat with every secret she revealed and came across as the quintessential damsel in distress. Meghan’s persona, on the other hand, was powerful, opinionated and unapologetic. On that day in LA, Meghan boldly stepped outside of the boundaries that have always existed to contain women, and this made a lot of viewers uncomfortable over the course of the Duchess’s 90-minute chat with the American talk-show icon.
Feminist author Rebecca Solnit wrote in a 2017 essay for The Guardian that, “Being unable to tell your story is a living death, and sometimes a literal one.” Princess Diana suffered both. Meghan was determined not to. Solnit adds that, “A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.” Whether you like the Duchess or not, whether you buy into her account of events or not, being free to voice her side of the story is more important than the story itself in my mind. This was the underlying message of Meghan’s interview; a woman’s right to speak her uncomfortable truth and to own her story.
Women’s truths often are uncomfortable because they so frequently shake up the status quo.
As 84-year-old feminist and psychologist Carol Gilligan once said, “there are both psychologically and politically huge forces against listening to...[your own] voice.” It sounds almost sinister, doesn’t it? The reality is that for women, using our voices has always been an act of insolence and resistance. To this day, a strong and vocal woman remains an offensive proposition to many. The best example I can think of is Hillary Clinton and the vitriol hurled at her during the 2016 US Presidential campaign; not about her policies, mind you, but about almost everything else, from her “Sergeant Pepper” trouser suits to her “shrill” tone of voice. If insults had been stones, the former Secretary of State would have been unrecognisable for the bruises she suffered by the end of that campaign.
There are more ways to silence women than simply refusing them a literal and figurative podium, or by shutting them down with insults and bully-boy tactics. Forcing conformity is another way society robs us of our voices, as child-star-turned-pop-star Demi Lovato explained in a revealing portrait by The Sunday Times Magazine last weekend. She said her whole life she’s conformed – as the Disney child star; the sexy, skinny pop star; the poster-child for addiction recovery; and the heterosexual fiancée. She goes on to explain that, “It was only when I stepped out of other people’s identities and owned what I felt was natural to me that I’ve become myself.”
At 28, she has stopped trying desperately to be thin, identifies mostly as gay and has cut her lustrous locks into a pixie crop. Actress Rose McGowan, who shaved her hair off entirely in 2015, was told while in Hollywood that she must have long hair or men wouldn't hire her. In fact, she was told they wouldn’t want to sleep with her so therefore they wouldn’t hire her. In her 2017 memoir Brave, the 47-year-old explained, “[In Hollywood] if you’re [the] America’s Sweetheart type, you have simple blonde hair, if you’re the vixen it’s long, dark and big. Those are the rules, do not deviate.” By shoe-horning herself into a cookie-cutter film star look, she lost her own sense of self and inner strength.
“The longer my hair is, the less powerful I feel,” she admitted. The same year she released her memoir, she publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. Fittingly, later that year when Time magazine featured women from the #metoo movement on its cover in December 2017, it labelled them “The Silence Breakers”.
In an interview with What Will it Take, an online platform founded to empower a new generation of women leaders, Stacey Abrams, an American politician and activist explains this phenomenon of identity loss. “...the minute we allow ourselves to be silenced...then we are beginning to weaken who we are and what we can be.” Meghan is proof that a woman who speaks her mind and/or doesn’t conform risks being disliked, or worse, hated. After the controversy about the disparity between male and female actors’ pay packets in Hollywood, Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence said she was “over” trying to state her opinion in a way that was “likeable”. She added, “I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It’s just heard.”
“In her feminist tract, Women & Power, author Mary Beard takes “a long view of the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment” and explains how power has always been gendered male. Women today are battling against centuries of silencing, or at the very least editing, revising and censoring.
It’s only since reaching my 40s that I’ve found any kind of a voice.
And I’m still far more comfortable expressing myself in this format than in real life. I often wonder, too, if the references and quotes I pepper through my articles have as much to do with the fact that – even at age 46 – I still don’t feel as if my own voice is meaningful, worthy, or valid enough without the support of others, as it has to do with reinforcing whatever point I’m making.
Being true to what you think and feel, speaking your truth, sometimes invites controversy and confrontation, and I am deeply uncomfortable with both. Of course, that is half the battle for women – overcoming our discomfort with conflict involves a kind of reprogramming, a little like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But instead of erasing memories, we need to re-evaluate some early life lessons; those which taught us to be peacemakers, mediators and moderators over and above anything else.
My silence over the years probably had a lot to do with the fact that my father was the vocal parent, my mother the quiet one. I really had no idea what a forthright woman looked or sounded like. Young girls, and women in midlife, need to continually see other women stand up for themselves and voice their ideas and opinions if they are to measure up how and when to use their voices to best effect. Whether you love or hate Meghan, she took part in a larger, even more important narrative than her own – that all women’s voices are valid and deserve to be heard.
Marie Kelly, March 2021
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