Jess Phillips - Everywoman: One Womans Truth About Speaking the Truth

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Epub ISBN: 9781473539396

Version 1.0

Published by Hutchinson 2017

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Copyright Jess Phillips 2017
Cover design and illustration: Melissa Four

Jess Phillips has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson in 2017

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781786330772

To the women and girls who helped build me but never got to see the finished result

Mom, Baby Iris and Jo Cox

Everyman (noun): an ordinary or typical human being
Despite his superstar status, in his movies the actor is able to play the role of an everyman quite convincingly.

Everywoman (noun): an ordinary or typical woman
Despite her role as a working mother of two, in her job she is able to play the role of everywoman quite convincingly.

You will never be popular. Not necessarily what you want to hear when youve just started a new job. Id been in Parliament for just four months when the Rt Hon. Harriet Harman placed her hand on my shoulder and spoke these fateful words to me. Im not a spiritual person I dont have faith; Im your classic smug cynic but I kid you not, at that moment I felt some sort of baton passing. Im not messing I feel a proper div saying this but I felt something in my heart. Id stopped smoking around the same time, so perhaps it was coincidentally the moment that my heart started to function properly after twenty-two years of abuse.

Being told that youll never be popular might seem harsh. Especially when it was said to me by the woman who, aside from my mother, had probably had the greatest effect on my life. This is a woman who fought for women like me to get where I am. She was elected around the same time I was born. Every moment she has spent in our democratic palace has been to make sure that girls like me from outside the Establishment can have a couple of kids, make some monumental mistakes and still stumble upon success and, in my case, one of the most powerful jobs in the land. Dont get me wrong, I deserve a massive wedge of the credit for my own success, but the ladder I climbed wasnt just thrown down to me by Harriet and other women in Parliament; it was whittled by them until their hands bled. Telling me Id never be popular was her way of saying that it was now my job to build the ladders; that my hands were going to be full of splinters but it would be worth it.

So there I was in the mother of all Parliaments, with the mother of Parliament inspiring me with her knock-em-dead feminism. She was right, of course. In my sixteen weeks in Westminster I had become, in some quarters, fairly unpopular both in and out of the parliamentary bubble. Quite an achievement when Parliament was shut for recess for nine of those sixteen weeks. In that short time, Id marked myself out as an angry feminist. A big pink target was scrawled on my back and whaddya know! the delegitimisation of my voice had begun. I dont mean to brag, but I count myself in the cool crowd. I was your classic popular kid at school. This new unpopularity was going to be hard to handle.

I might as well get the negatives out of the way now, so we can get back on track. I am writing this as a call to arms to activism after all. They do say forewarned is forearmed, so even though I am tired of saying what Im about to say, any woman who dares to speak out has to prepare herself for the slow and subtle push for her voice to conform to the norm. These are the top five things people do to infantilise strong (usually female) voices.

I accept that this might be going on in the real world in offices up and down the UK, people might actually be shushing their colleagues but I cant say it happened where I worked at Womens Aid, so Im a bit new to it. In Parliament there is a fair amount of shouting, ribbing and sledging. It is often presented as being a very male behaviour, but many of the women on the green benches do it too. Nicky Morgan is a proper mutterer. Anna Soubry jolly well lets you know what she jolly well thinks. I myself am perhaps one of the loudest, but my voice is rarely alone. If I am getting aggravated or am heckling in a debate, I have noticed men from the opposition benches, men who shout and holler all they like, shushing me like I was a five-year-old on a car journey and they were about to miss some vital bit of storyline on The Archers. I am not a child; do not shush me.

These men have cottoned on to the fact that saying calm down, dear wont play well. So instead they have replaced it with the weaponry of a primary school teacher. On one sublime occasion, a minister on the front bench a privileged bloke who has never lived on the benefit we were debating wanted silence for his oh-so-uninformed view on what gets mothers back to work. He looked at me like I was a pramface commoner, fag in hand, screaming kids round my ankles, and shushed me. Youre not my dad, I responded. Dont you dare shush me while the men shouting around me get no such treatment! There it is: paternalistic shushing, as if the women in the Commons are nothing more than infant children, there to present an acceptable image. I say to you, good sir, you can take your shushing shushes and stick them up your shushing arse!

If anyone ever shushes you, my advice is to call it out. Ask the man in question, Did you just shush me like a child? They will then be forced to verbalise their dislike of your opposition to their views and will fall apart almost instantly.

This is an absolute killer. If you care about something or have been identified as a person with a certain position (i.e. feminism), immediately your insights are no longer legitimate. No one says to their GP, You say Ive got tennis elbow, do you? Well, you would bloody say that. My advice is to simply reply, Yes, I would say that because I am both learned and experienced in this field, so what I say is based on evidence. What about you?

If only I had a pound for every time someone had said to me, Be careful you dont get pigeonholed with the whole feminism thing. As if the fact that I fight for women not to be murdered and raped means that I dont also have opinions on road safety, the economy and foreign policy. My pretty little head can only deal with one thing at a time, you see. No one ever said to Andy Burnham, Watch out, dude, your ten-year campaign for Hillsborough victims means everyone is going to think you only care about football crowds. No, in that time he managed to be a treasury minister and Secretary of State for Health, and also hold a variety of shadow ninja positions. No one ever said to George Osborne, Mate, always chatting about the economy will make people feel like you are a one-trick pony.