Sylvia Pankhurst speaks to an east London crowd

Sarah Irving, author of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation and a series editor for ‘Revolutionary Lives’, has written a very interesting post on her own blog about gendered language:

When I was writing my biography of Leila Khaled for Pluto Press, my fabulous editor, David Castle, pointed something very valuable out to me. This is the fact that writers talking about men generally refer to them by their surname (‘Churchill’, ‘Cameron’), whilst women get called by their first names. It’s not 100% true, but go and look at most ‘serious’ or semi-serious books or journalism and you’ll see the trend. Women, it seems, even important historical or political figures, lack a certain gravitas conferred on men by the fact of having chromosome rot* and inherently funny-looking genitalia.

If you’re writing a biography, though, you tend to use your central subject’s name so often that you become desperate for a bit of variety. So what to do? For the Leila Khaled one, I tended to use ‘Khaled’ most of the time, breaking it up with her full name in key places and with ‘Leila’ at points which were more personal and intimate. It worked OK, I think (hope).

So far this spring, I’ve had two manuscripts to read as one of the editors of Pluto Press’ ‘Revolutionary Lives‘ biographical series, and so the subject has come back to haunt me. Writing about Salvador Allende, Victor Figueroa-Clark probably didn’t even think about the issue. One is writing about a man; one uses the surname (and I’m absolutely not blaming Figueroa-Clark for this – my point is that he didn’t need to think about it). For Paula Bartley, though, writing on Ellen Wilkinson, it became a question to ponder long and hard, and to engage in email discussions with myself and David over.

On the one hand, as an experienced historian of the British women’s movement, Bartley absolutely got the point. On the other, she felt that Ellen Wilkinson, as a woman who delighted in challenging formality and pomposity – especially of the male variety – would perhaps have preferred to be ‘Ellen’, and that the tone she was trying to set in her biography suited that better. Again, in the end, we reached a compromise that seems to satisfy everyone.

For another of the forthcoming Revolutionary Lives biographies, the issue takes on a slightly different slant. Katherine Connelly has written on Sylvia Pankhurst and, of course, there are rather a lot of Pankhurst women to mention in that life story. So Sylvia stays ‘Sylvia’ to differentiate her from Christabel, Emmeline et al, not to diminish her status as a political figure.

Visit Sarah Irving to read the blog post in full.