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brightknightie) wrote2026-02-23 07:56 am
brightknightie) wrote2026-02-23 07:56 am
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Call the Midwife S15E01 got the history irritatingly wrong (spoiler under cut)
I watch Masterpiece on PBS Passport streaming these days, not over the airwaves, but I still watch on Sunday nights, wrapping up the weekend as I have since at least Downton Abbey. Last night, I watched the finale of season 6 of All Creatures Great and Small (set at the first Christmas after WWII), which was a solid and satisfying, if busy, episode, and also the premiere of season 15 of Call the Midwife (set in 1971), which was also busy, but neither solid nor satisfying.
(On broadcast, Call the Midwife won't premiere until March 22 in North America. Come, support PBS and watch a month early!)
I love historical fiction, but I do need it to get the history mostly right. We all make mistakes sometimes! It's so easy to fall for an urban legend historical fallacy! But. This show has an entire staff, any of whom could have used even just Wikipedia at any point to spot-check this particular item and learn that it's not only false, but a deliberate slander/sarcasm against what the episode was trying ineptly to celebrate and ended up trivializing. Not every historical fiction show can be The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for citations, but I remember when Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman would sometimes end on a screen with a simple text paragraph about the real history of whatever the episode was depicting. Movies depicting real historical people do that regularly. And some novels. Maybe all historical fiction should try that, just to prompt someone to double-check.
Call the Midwife was so exceedingly excellent in its earliest days, when it was still directly based on the memoirs of the real Jennifer Worth. The farther it gets from that -- now in season 15! -- the more often it trips.
In this case, S15E01, set in 1971, mushed together a bunch of tropes about the women's liberation movement, oversimplifying enormously, squishing down into a single episode something that could have, if taken seriously, richly fed an entire season. And -- sigh -- they made a big deal of bra burning as a protest adjacent to a strike and a parade demanding... well, the signs were a muddle, but pro-women stuff. Nurses and janitors marched together in London within weeks of first hearing of "women's liberation" and being handed provocative-covered copies of The Female Eunuch, played for laughs or shock, but multiple scenes and much dialogue devoted very superficially to bra burning with no explanation as to why these characters would burn bras bought with hard-earned money that they had no intention of ceasing to wear. What was it supposed to mean? Who was it supposed to persuade? The episode did not bother to explain. The phrase "equal pay for equal work" was used exactly once; two scenes were devoted to husbands not pulling their weight with household chores.
The twentieth century is not one of my historical specialties. That said, my understanding is that bra burning was not actually a thing. While a few individual women somewhere may well have done anything, the origin of this historical fallacy has been traced to a protest outside a Miss America beauty pageant where some protestors put some makeup, high heels, girdles, and bras into a trash can as a symbolic statement on beauty standards and oppression. They did not set the contents of that trash can on fire. However, some commentators, intending to belittle the protestors, conflated their protest with US draft-card burning during the Vietnam War. And thus was this persistent urban legend historical fallacy born.
(On broadcast, Call the Midwife won't premiere until March 22 in North America. Come, support PBS and watch a month early!)
I love historical fiction, but I do need it to get the history mostly right. We all make mistakes sometimes! It's so easy to fall for an urban legend historical fallacy! But. This show has an entire staff, any of whom could have used even just Wikipedia at any point to spot-check this particular item and learn that it's not only false, but a deliberate slander/sarcasm against what the episode was trying ineptly to celebrate and ended up trivializing. Not every historical fiction show can be The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for citations, but I remember when Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman would sometimes end on a screen with a simple text paragraph about the real history of whatever the episode was depicting. Movies depicting real historical people do that regularly. And some novels. Maybe all historical fiction should try that, just to prompt someone to double-check.
Call the Midwife was so exceedingly excellent in its earliest days, when it was still directly based on the memoirs of the real Jennifer Worth. The farther it gets from that -- now in season 15! -- the more often it trips.
In this case, S15E01, set in 1971, mushed together a bunch of tropes about the women's liberation movement, oversimplifying enormously, squishing down into a single episode something that could have, if taken seriously, richly fed an entire season. And -- sigh -- they made a big deal of bra burning as a protest adjacent to a strike and a parade demanding... well, the signs were a muddle, but pro-women stuff. Nurses and janitors marched together in London within weeks of first hearing of "women's liberation" and being handed provocative-covered copies of The Female Eunuch, played for laughs or shock, but multiple scenes and much dialogue devoted very superficially to bra burning with no explanation as to why these characters would burn bras bought with hard-earned money that they had no intention of ceasing to wear. What was it supposed to mean? Who was it supposed to persuade? The episode did not bother to explain. The phrase "equal pay for equal work" was used exactly once; two scenes were devoted to husbands not pulling their weight with household chores.
The twentieth century is not one of my historical specialties. That said, my understanding is that bra burning was not actually a thing. While a few individual women somewhere may well have done anything, the origin of this historical fallacy has been traced to a protest outside a Miss America beauty pageant where some protestors put some makeup, high heels, girdles, and bras into a trash can as a symbolic statement on beauty standards and oppression. They did not set the contents of that trash can on fire. However, some commentators, intending to belittle the protestors, conflated their protest with US draft-card burning during the Vietnam War. And thus was this persistent urban legend historical fallacy born.
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