The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 9

GUARDIAN WOMEN Wednesday July .26 1978 9 5 "'KM mi ilimn i wi-wpw i nil i mini i i I (i Annette Kuhn, Elizabeth Wilson, Michele Barrett, Julia Naish HriijigfP I Feminist -fashion writers (left to right) Ursula Owen Yestevday our group Seminists explained why they objected to the media's treatment fashion. Today they show how it should be done. They chose the clothes, arranged the pictures, and wrote the story. This is the result IFasMdDimeall uni? wim nmmaige the same clothes and the pictures were taken at the same time and both unposed." one is much more like a traditional fashion picture than the other. When working together (big picture) women escape to some extent the dominant passive image of fashion photography.

Nevertheless, in both pictures, aren't we selling a life-style in our own (Casual, friendly, informed, confident, middle-class, moderately off-beat). We didn't intend this, but it does illustrate the power of the image. Feature prepared by Julia Naish, Michele Barrett Elizabeth Wilson, Ann-Marie Wolpe, Annette Kuhn, Ursula Owen. interested in being whistled at in the streets indeed I deliberately wear clothes which would not provoke it. "The clothes I wore for the photo session were selected to look reasonably smart because 1 had a work meeting.

I can't say the idea of being photographed for The Guardian made any difference to my choice. "The thing I dislike about a lot of fashion clothes is that they would fall apart if you led an active life. I never spend more than about 15 on a garment and the silk shirt I am wearing here cost 1.50 from a second hand shop." In spite of the fact that we took our own photos, although in both we're wearing that the image I am presenting is of someone comfortable, casual and not trying too hard." Michele Barrett I am wearing a Norwegian cardigan made for me by an aunt. I suppose I might buy something which would be as expensive as this but it is unlikely 1 almost always go for cheap things. My shirt and black trousers were bought a long time ago and I don't remember where.

I hate shopping and try to avoid it." Julia Naish "I do mind about what I wear. Some mornings I change two or three times but I do it because I like to feel comfortable in my clothes. I'm not and met one morning at 8.iS0. wearing the kinds of clothes that we normally wear to work. In the other pictures we are wearing clothes we feel comfortable in none of them were expensive, none of them will split' if we run for a bus, they're not particularly high fashion.

Ursula Owen said: "I chose the striped cardigan which is a cast-off from a friend because I think it looks nice and because I can put my hands into the pockets something I love to do. My shirt and trousers came from a jeans shop. "I don't dislike buying clothes but I rarely seem to have time to do it. I feel SMART people modern people magazine. people people in our society don't do half the things we do they don't sweat, neither do they go to work and produce." What Judith Williamson (Decoding Advertisements) said about advertising we feel applies equally to fashion photography, particularly' the way it produces an idealised image of women.

It's not just clothes they're selling but whole way of life. This is well illustrated in the photo from Vogue. What photography does in the interests of fashion and commerce is to make the voyeur into the We set out to do a different kind of feature on clothes, Micnete JJarrelt (left), tne Norwegian cunuyun wus Knitted ty an aunt, and Julia Naish, wnose mic shirt cost 1.50 second hand 3 Women are expected to work alternating shifts in bakeries or lose their jobs. Angela Phillips investigates a typical instance of hardship Give us this day our daily bread but what about the workers? It's easier now, but the loss works shifts and with a 15- unfair dismissal but although the women had originally work from Spillers on top of their normal load the management is making use of the more flexible hours written into the contracts. In bakeries overtime isn't compulsory but you have to do it.

A new national agreement was arrived at during the height of the Spillers crisis to bring in three shifts a day and a five-day week. It is already helping to spread the load in some bakeries- but only -a big rise in Hie-basic rate of, 47 a week will decrease the- pressure to do overtime. Eric' however, has another suggestion. He feels that women iiold the key to the problem -of long hours. "The- housewife demands fresh bread.

Until she is content to put' up with day-old bread, Une bakeries will have to work six days a week." Unfortunately, Mr Williams doesnt.dp the shopping. He's a breadwinner, not a bread buyer so bis influence will be limited. of 40 a week hurts and so does the loss of independence the money gave her. The 7 she earns from school meals doesn't go far and she's looking for another job. For these women, in spite of the hardship and lack of a social life, the evening shift had provided the only reasonable means of earning money.

Ms Tilston is convinced that the shift was changed specifically to get rid of women and replace them with men. That may not have been the intention but it looks like being the result. According to the Union, apartfrom two women. working casual shifts, the only people to be taken on at the bakery since they left have been men. As Ms Tilston says This equal rights business is a load of hokum if it that women's conditions of work have to be equalled down, to meet those of men." The busy season' in Chester is at its height and with extra makes no allowance 'for the work that most women have to do at home.

This happened to nine women at the Country Maid bakery in Chester. Their section had been working a combination of full and part time permanent shifts between 9 am and midnight. In June last year they were informed that a new order was on the way and the shifts would have to be altered to allow 24-hour production when necessary. The women who were unable to work these hours would have to go. The women wanted to reject the proposals, but it soon became clear that under the terms of their contracts of employment the employers were within their 'rights to vary the shifts.

Under the circumstances, most of the women agreed to stay on but for nine of them an alternating day and night shift would have been unworkable. The union took their cases to an industrial tribunal claiming vear-old daughter in the house she didn't feel they could both be out at night. She didn't take kindly to the suggestion that women work for pin-money: must he joking, I'm not going to pull my insides out for pin-money. It was terribly hard work, sometimes. -12 hours, on Cynthia Robthson also lost her job.

She had been on- the evening shift for two years, working Sundays as well and preparing school meals during the week. It wasn't easy When I was home all I was doing was shouting hurry up in the mornings to get tlm to school and when thev got home, rushing to get their tea and get them over to the neighbours. I used to get terribly tired." She missed spending time with the children and left out when she realised how much closer they were to their father who at least had the' evenings with them. hours to adjust from night to day work. The health hazards are such that the bakeries are covered by a special law governing "night work and rest breaks, so that no-one can work nights for more than four weeks at a stretch, or for more than half the year.

No one, that is, except women. The Baking Industry Hours of Work Act doesn't cover women because under the protective laws which cover all industries they are not supposed to work after midnight at all. But employers have had little difficulty in obtaining exemption orders to release women for night work and this leaves them with even less protection than the men. In some cases women have opted for permanent nights which allows them to organise their domestic commitments on a regular basis. In other bakeries, women are expected to work the same alternating shifts as the men.

A working pattern which ties of dough in the bread loaf section. With increasing mechanisation, part-time workers have provided a useful stopgap solution in plants which have been running at less than total capacity while waiting for the price war to bite and bring new orders flooding an from bankrupt bakeries. But with Spillers tottering, many bakeries had been reorganising their labour in preparation for full capacity production. So women have had to choose between longer hours or losimg their jobs. Bakeries are not pleasant places to work in.

They are hot and humid, and breathing in flour all day doesn't do the lungs much good. Nevertheless, men have been working 12-hour shifts six days a week in the busy season, finishing at 6 am on a Saturday morning and starting again at 6 am on Sunday morning only 24 A OUT THROAT business is bread. Over the past few years the 'big three bakeries Rank Hovis MeDougall, Associated British Foods, and Spillers have waged a price war in the super-mankets, swallowing up the smaller bakeries who couldn't compete until finally, cutting its own throat with the size of its discounts. Spillers has pulled out leaving the field to its rivals. The real casualties of the supermarket war haye been the bakery workers, with redundancies over the past five years and another 4,000 from Spillers.

Almost a third of bakery workers are women, many of them woriaing part time on day or evening shifts producing smaller goods like bread rolls and buns. Traditional women's work, on conveyor, belts where speed and nimble fingers are more important than the strength required to lift quanti been taken on for specific shifts their contracts were open-ended and they lost the case. Union -delegates raised the case at the TUC women's conference in March. But the men at the bakery were not prepared to protect the women's right to work shorter hours. According to shop steward Eric Williams the attitude was now thev've got equal pay why shouldn't they work the same hours as we do? "A lot of men look at it this way," he said.

"Women are working for pin-money. The hours have suited them over the years but they aren't doing a bread winner's job. A man is a bread winner and 4 man's job comes foremost. What the women have got to do at home is nothing to do with the men." Dorothy Tilston was one of the women who lost her day job. Her' husband already On the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the constitution gives women equal rights but older customs continue to dictate acceptable behaviour.

Jacob Johnson meets, a Mauritian woman for whom professional independence still entails personal inhibitions dream of approaching me as a lover." She could, with her talent, work abroad, to -live a wider life. "I am, married, because. I have more I want to do in life, it (marriage) would put' me in a structure that would' not enable me to do what I want to do. I work here and. not in Paris because here there is so much which needs to be done that I feel it is my moral duty to be here." Soon the total impact of jobs, the freedom to choose and motherhood With birth control, and the equal rights granted by law, will force change even more radically on the women of Mauritius'.

The real and final battle will be in their, own minds, between old ingrained tribal ways, and. the new strenuous liberty their modernising society offers. As if to emphasise the paradoxes now present, I asked Amina to pose for a photograph beside the statue of Queen Victoria outside Government House in Port Louis. Her response showed her own conflicts. Before beginning the journey into.

the' city she changed from her traditional Indian -into Western clothes. tion creates further problems. Last vear there was a serious shortage of women to work cutting and stacking the cane and this in an area of high unemployment and inflation. But girls who have been educated to Cambridge level standards don't want to follow their mothers and work in the cane fields. They would rather remain unemployed, and dream of the prospects of an office job.

Cultural patterns still restrict the personal life of liberated women. Love relationships here for me are impossible," Amina told me. Friendship is tenable, but can't go out alone with a man. There is still a double standard here in the traditional cultures." Amina accepts her lot reluctantly, aware of the effect of rapid change in a community which has changed so slowly in the past. ''Its not much different at her- work even though modern ideas guide the pro- fessionals in her department.

I am number two in my section, I have men working with and for me all the time thev. have framed as a lady, but would never and Creole) by importing thousands of indentured Indian labourers to work in the sugar cane fields. Amina's grandfather came from the north of India as a merchant to sell spices to the Indian immigrants. The first independent Government in 196S had brave intentions. The new constitution embodied equal rights for women.

A national birth control campaign reversed the dangerously high birth rate, and free secondary education became available for the first time to girls. A new (and ineptly named) Ministry of Women's Affairs, and Prices and Consumer Protection was created, but quietly lost the Women's Affairs bit when the woman MP picked for the post lost her seat in the 1976 elections. Out of 70 members of parliament; three are women, notably two in the Militant: Marxist party. Equal pay (there is 'an alert and irvtelli-' gent Wages Commission), the creation of civil service jobs for' the establish- ment of a Free Zone industrial centre provide more opportunities, employment. But each-splu- tional but when I went to Europe I forewent all-my traditions," she says.

Back in Mauritius, she sees fundamental 'Changes that are needed in the status of women, there, but she also understands and appreciates the depth of the religious and social taboos and attitudes of both the' Hindu and Muslim communities there. She spoke frankly and openly to me, but she politely avo'ded my invitation to talk' over a drink at my hotel. Instead she invited me to tea at her parents' home, an elegant French Colonial wooden house which she shares with her brother, a doctor (MB. BCh Glasgow). There, overshadowed by tropical flowers and palms, over a formal tea w.ith cake baked, specially by her mother, she explained the problems faced by all classes of women in this developing country.

Mauritius 'is an artifice created by the successive instruments of four colonial powers, Portuguese, 'Dutch; French and British. When the British took over they fundamentally changed the character of island (whdse population was then mainly European, African, WHEN Amina Barkatoolah was three years old. her father a devout and traditional Muslim, but a. man with firm views about freedom for his womenfolk announced that he intended to make a professional person of his young daughter so She need never rely on a man. His wife, Amina's mother, had left school at 10, in accordance with custom.

She was not allowed to walk alone in 'the street but she was taught French and English at home. That-same combination of traditional with serious education has shaped. Amina's own' life. She was one of the first Muslim girls to' leave Mauritius and study abroad-; she read English at Trinity College, Dublin Dublin only because I was educated by Irish took her master's degree at. the Sor-bonne and is now aged 35, putting the finishing touches to her doctorate thesis.

She is unmarried and is deputy, head of the Audio Visual Aids department of the Mauritian Ministry of Education Here we are all very tradi The lady not for loving 1L iSSf Amiii'a Barkatoulaii with QiieenVictora Mary Stott is on holiday.