by Edwina Dunn
Things are changing. The 30% Club carried out a survey of students’ aspirations. No one said they just wanted to make loads of money and 99 per cent, male and female, said a good work/life balance would be a career priority. That term hadn’t even been invented when I was a student. Established business has been slow to pick up on this, but young people today expect more. Right from the beginning they want to have a career, have a family, make a difference, make their intellectual contribution any time, any place. I’ve noticed this not only with my own children but also with their peers. Young men and women both want work/life balance. It’s not just a woman’s thing. It’s how we move on as a society.
Helena’s Object
I’ve chosen my home. Not for the structure itself but for what it holds within – my family. Material objects aren’t meaningful to me – it’s all about the people I love. My favourite place in the world is home, with those people. When I’m away from home, I always carry a photo of all the family – including, of course, my husband. Currently it’s a lovely one from a summer holiday in Portugal on a blustery day; a bit of the essence of everyone’s character is in the picture and I smile every time I look at it. The children have given me a beautiful big collage of photos of them each holding up their own version of an ‘I love you’ message – I’d like a portable version of that to carry with me too.
HELENA MORRISSEY
CEO, Newton Investment, and founder, the 30% Club
CAROL BECKWITH AND ANGELA FISHER
Carol Beckwith, American, and Angela Fisher, Australian, met in Kenya in 1979 and have been working together ever since, photographing African rituals and ceremonies. In the course of creating their extraordinary record, comprising more than half a million images, diaries, field journeys, drawings and video recordings, they have travelled over 300,000 miles, on camels, mules and on foot, in 4x4s and in canoes, visiting 48 countries, living with 150 different ethnic groups and exploring their cultures for weeks or months at a time. They have written 16 books and their photographs have been widely published in magazines and exhibited in museums all over the world.
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We met after Carol had taken a hot-air balloon across the Masai Mara. The trip was a birthday present from her family so she could photograph the area from the air, and the balloon’s pilot was my brother. At 1,000 feet, he looked deep into Carol’s eyes and said, ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you …’ There was a thrilling pause, and then he said, ‘I’d really like you to meet my sister.’
We met in Nairobi months later, and neither of us was what the other one had expected. One of us was in high heels and the other one was wearing a beaded backless dress. There was an immediate bond. [Carol had trained as a fine artist and had been a painter before becoming a photographer. Angela’s background was in sociology and she was writing a book about African jewellery.] Within weeks of meeting, we’d had the idea of compiling a visual record of the ceremonies that accompany people through life in Africa.
You almost spring to press the shutter at the decisive moment, to capture the essence of what you’re experiencing.
It’s very rare to have a 40-year collaboration between women. We spend five to ten months a year in Africa, depending on the stage of our current project. We have to respond to the rhythm of rituals. The Dogon [an ethnic group living in Mali] hold a mask ceremony every ten years to drive the spirits of the ancestors to the afterlife, and the Masai have a ceremony to pass from warriorhood to elderhood once every 14 years. If you want to experience those, you have to be there at the right time, but in Africa everything is on a sliding scale. You can arrive and there won’t be enough honeybeer brewed, so you have to wait two months.
The people we work with understand that we come with an appreciation for their cultures and traditions and a deep respect for the creativity in their cultures.
We see things similarly – 99 per cent of the time, we’re agreed about what makes the best photograph. We both take the pictures and we share joint credits. We are always trying to raise the standard, so we celebrate each other’s photography – but if you looked at a breakdown of our images, you would find that they are split more or less equally between the two of us. It’s hard to define what makes a great image but you can sometimes feel it coming; you almost spring to press the shutter at the decisive moment, to capture the essence of what you’re experiencing. We are see-ers rather than thinkers. We focus on the moment.
Sometimes we will spend as much as seven months living with a group of people. We don’t even take out our cameras for the first few days. We learn some of the language, we make friends and we become part of a family – and then people are happy for you to record them. Increasingly, these days, we get requests, especially from groups who are concerned that their traditions may be dying out. We recently climbed a mountain with the Samburu [an ethnic group living in Northern Kenya], who have never allowed women to come to their ceremonies before, to witness a ritual that has given meaning to generations of men but which the elders now fear may never happen again.
We have always wanted to remind people that there are 1,300 different cultural groups in Africa, reaching some of the great peaks in humankind’s creativity.
It is important for us when we take photographs that people don’t feel we are taking something away. Reciprocity is an important concept in Africa and we always bring presents, whatever is appropriate – sugar and tea to the desert, fish hooks to the Omo River in Ethiopia – and we always bring back our finished books. We ask the elders what would help them and we have a fund so that we can give them a well or a small clinic, something practical that maintains their independence. Fundraising takes up at least part of every year, because you don’t make any money from books.The people we work with understand that we come with an appreciation for their cultures and traditions and a deep respect for the creativity in their cultures.
We feel very strongly that everyone in the world should benefit from progress, and medicine and schooling undoubtedly improve people’s lives. But we are also aware that traditional cultures nurture many things that are missing in our world. The individual is not on his or her own. The elders are always included in the community and their wisdom and knowledge is passed down. The ceremonies that are attached to the progression of life are a great preparation for the next stage. We have a friend who attended the Dipo ceremony of the Krobo people [an ethnic group in Ghana], in which girls are taught cooking and dancing and how to present themselves and even ways of making love. She also went to Oxford and she said, of the two, the ritual was of more benefit in helping her to move forward into adulthood.
As well as having a good working relationship, we are friends. It’s always been important to both of us to have men in our lives. But we’re continually on the move and when you’re in a traditional community, you have to be part of that world. We’re lucky that we have both found relationships with understanding men but you have to find someone who likes spending time on their own!
When we took our last book back to the Wodaabe [nomadic cattle herders in the Sahel], the chief, who is a very special friend of ours – we have made 20 or 30 visits – spent several hours looking at it. He has seen two or three books in his entire lifetime. Eventually, he said that it was ‘medicine not to forget’. We hope that’s right, because we have always wanted to remind people that there are 1,300 different cultural groups in Africa, reaching some of the great peaks in humankind’s creativity.
Carol and Angela’s Object
A Leica camera. That’s the one object that sums up our history and our careers. We both started with Leicas and they are very versatile and lightweight. If you need to be mobile, you want something you can carry on your shoulder, even if you’ve got two of them. You need to have your camera with you all the time because then you can catch the decisive moment when someone is at the peak of emotion. The camera is what enables your eye, your hand and your inner vision to work together and to reach into what it is to b
e another person, to capture their spirit. It is an amazing thing, to hold the images of your life as you travel through it.
CAROL BECKWITH & ANGELA FISHER
Photographers of African rituals and ceremonies
LAURA BATES
Laura Bates studied English at Cambridge University and worked as an actor before launching the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012. The project allows women to post online about the sexism they experience in everyday life. It rapidly gathered momentum, reaching 100,000 entries in April 2015, and, as of late 2015, had nearly a quarter of a million Twitter followers and is now active in more than 20 countries across the world. Laura Bates’s first book Everyday Sexism was published in 2014, and her second book, Girl Up, in 2016.
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The Everyday Sexism Project started out of a sense of sheer frustration. I had never been involved in the women’s movement and wasn’t particularly aware of feminism. Then, in just one week in 2012, various things happened: I was followed by a man who was really aggressively propositioning me; some blokes in a car competed over who could shout the worst thing at me; I was groped; a man said ‘Look at the tits on that.’ I thought about all those incidents and what struck me most forcefully was that I wouldn’t have thought any further about any of them in isolation. What brought them home was that they all happened at once. It was the normalisation of casual sexism that struck me – and I wondered why this was such an accepted part of life in 2012.
That prompted me to start asking other women and girls about their experiences. I thought maybe five or six would have a story to tell, but it was everyone – hundreds of stories. But until they were asked, the women I spoke to never told anyone. I started trying to talk about it and people said that sexism didn’t exist any more, I needed to learn how to take a compliment, I should look at women elsewhere and realise I didn’t have anything to complain about. I just wanted to close that gap between what was happening and what people thought, which was that the problem didn’t exist. I thought if all the stories were in one place, other people would have the same epiphany that I’d had, and realise that women weren’t complaining about nothing. I thought it would be a tiny website, but it exploded to include people from all over the world, of all ages, genders and sexual identities.
It’s amazing to me now that I wasn’t aware of feminism. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, or that I rejected it. I just didn’t know about it. Social media has enabled so many young women to access feminism and be part of it. The most important thing is the power of collective voices. The reason the project has become important isn’t about me. It’s about 100,000 voices shouting together. Social media has also made a project that speaks to an audience that isn’t self-selecting. A speech, a march, a book – by definition, the people who turn up or read the book are already interested, and are overwhelmingly women. With a quarter of a million people, our posts are being retweeted, reblogged, shared – they are appearing on the pages of people who never went looking for this kind of material. For many men, that’s arresting and shocking.
There are, however, two glaring downsides to being on the internet. The first is that not everybody has access to it. We try hard to take the project offline, too – into communities, schools, universities, businesses, government, the police force. The second is online abuse. Those threats have an impact on young women, some of whom are driven out of online spaces. It’s not something I’ve worked out how to cope with. It takes a huge mental toll. The abuse is very graphic and detailed, but I have a lot of support. My husband and family are amazing and I’m trying to deal with it in counselling. And there is a lot of solidarity from other women in the feminist community who’ve experienced similar things, especially at the beginning, when it came as such an initial shock – like having a bucket of icy water poured over you. Part of you just wants to shut everything down and run away, but you also get pissed off. People are responding to a website on sexual harassment by harassing you in the most sexist way possible: ‘There’s no such thing as sexism, you stupid bitch!’
What helps most are the success stories, the positives. For every death threat or rape threat, I’ll get at least two stories saying a woman has reported a rape, an employer has rethought a policy, girls have set up a feminist society at school. When I started the project, it was hard to feel hopeful about the future, but, because the project has become so well-known and we’ve created this online community, we’re now sharing stories from women who have found ways to stand up. I’m seeing the most incredible energy from young women. It feels as though we’re talking about this everywhere now.
I thought maybe five or six would have a story to tell, but it was everyone – hundreds of stories. But until they were asked, the women I spoke to never told anyone.
I’m also hugely aware of, and very grateful for, the work of women who’ve gone before. Those women have won us enormous gains. We have incredible legislation on equal pay and harassment but the corresponding cultural shift hasn’t yet happened. What we need now is the shift in attitudes and behaviours, and that’s something legislation can’t do. It’s up to us as individuals.
I have always been a voracious reader. One of my earliest role models was Malorie Blackman, until recently the UK Children’s Laureate. She has a diversity of characters in her books, not just in terms of gender, but also race, which is absent elsewhere. And, more recently, Malala. Her strength of conviction and courage are inspiring to young women all over the world. She showed that you can, at any age, stand up for what you believe in and make a difference.
When you see lists of top women or great women, you often see names you already know. One thing that has become very clear to me is that the real, back-breaking, coalface work in this area is being done by women whose names you never hear. The women who run organisations such as End Violence Against Women, Rape Crisis, Southall Black Sisters – those women are my real inspiration.
Laura’s Object
A T-shirt designed by some 12-year-old schoolgirls, who had invited me to speak at their school. The reason was that when they walked into a classroom, the boys had started shouting out numbers in sets of three – seven, five, nine, or eight, four, two and so on. The girls had realised the boys were rating them out of ten for their faces, breasts and bums. I thought the girls who had asked me in might not want to be identified, but when I got there, they were waiting for me, all proudly wearing a T-shirt they had designed, and they had one for me, too. On the front was a quote inspired by Martin Luther King: ‘I want to live in a world where I am judged by the content of my character, not the parts of my body.’ Often the impact of that kind of behaviour is to shut girls down. I felt so positive that these girls had been able to band together and draw strength from the wider feminist movement. I felt a real surge of hope and admiration. When I took the T-shirt off later, I saw there was also some writing on the back: ‘I am 10 out of 10’.
LAURA BATES
Founder of Everyday Sexism Project, writer and activist
YVETTE VEGA
Yvette Vega is the executive producer of the popular late-night interview programme Charlie Rose, hosted by Charlie Rose and known for its thoughtful mix of topics and its high-calibre, high-profile guests. She has worked on the programme since it was first broadcast in 1991, beginning as Charlie Rose’s assistant. She is a graduate of the New York University film school.
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People in my team who are in their 20s ask if I knew what I wanted to do when I was their age. I don’t think that I did! Sometimes it’s good to know what you don’t want to do, and that’s where I started from. I never pictured myself sitting in an office doing the same duties day to day. I wanted to do something that would make me think creatively. I also knew I didn’t want to work alone. I wanted to be part of a team working together. But when I was in my teens, I didn’t have anything set in mind. I felt all doors were open and I think that’s important. You don’t have to choose straightaway.
Young people
think everything has to be perfect, they have to excel, they can’t make a mistake – but if you fall down and scrape your knee, you put on a Band-Aid, get up and run faster!
My parents were first-generation immigrants – my mother was born in New York, my father in Puerto Rico – and seeing their children gain independence was very important to them. Our mandate at home was to be self-sufficient and find a career where we would not have to struggle financially or take anything from anyone. I loved science and I loved the idea of helping people, so I applied to join New York University’s pre-medical programme. It was very rigorous, very competitive, and I just wasn’t ready. As a 17-year-old who had always excelled, I felt I was failing. At the time, I saw it as a negative because I didn’t make the cut. I did some soul-searching, asked myself what I really loved, took some economics courses, some journalism courses, and when I realised you could study film-making at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, I felt like the luckiest person in the world. It was a hard lesson, but it turned out well.
It’s OK to make mistakes – that’s key. Young people think everything has to be perfect, they have to excel, they can’t make a mistake – but if you fall down and scrape your knee, you put on a Band-Aid, get up and run faster! That message doesn’t come across often enough. I remember when I was learning to ride my bicycle, I was racing this boy down the block and I hit a crack and fell off. My father was there and rather than saying, ‘Let’s get an ice cream and go buy something pink,’ he said, ‘Are you OK? So go get back on the bike and go ride.’ That builds your confidence, which is very important for young women. As clichéd as it sounds, experience gives you confidence. You learn over time what works, what’s better and what’s right.