If only we could, Call the Midwife! Gender, class and the hegemonic power of television costume

The starting point for this article was a chance encounter with an episode of the BBC’s ‘Call the Midwife’ (Holdsworth, 2023) whilst visiting my elderly mother on a Sunday evening. The brutal and graphic portrayal of women’s health issues and abject poverty in Poplar, East London during the latter part of the 1960s elicited feelings of warmth and nostalgia in my mother, not anger or frustration at the lack of progress for working class women with regard to some of the issues represented, this was difficult for me to understand. Indeed, as recently as August 2022, the UK government published data that confirmed that there remains a gender gap in healthcare; the 51% of the UK population that is female will spend a significant portion of their life in poor health compared to men (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/womens-health-strategy-for-england/womens-health-strategy-for-england ), and this is further compounded for those women that live in poverty. What is it about this text that produces a form of nostalgia that is neither a reaction to change, nor a driver for it?

The superlatives applied to ‘Call the Midwife’ within the mainstream media such as ‘wholesome’ (Williams, 2023), ‘beloved’ (Quinn & Garratt, 2022), ‘cosy’ (Doran, 2017) or ‘comforting’ (Hughes, 2019) appear misplaced when we consider the subject material; poverty, homelessness, miscarriage, abortion, death and domestic and/or sexual abuse. This article suggests that the reasons for such a reaction are symbolised through the costuming. The language of clothing employed, particularly the use of print and colour saturation work to render clothing items as meaningless, negating the power of the narrative in relation to the intersection of gender and social class which produces a gendered form of alienation. Neoliberal interpretations of such class ambivalence assumes either acceptance or consent, the framing of which as the correct and reasonable option, is in fact the product of hegemony utilised by those in power to retain power.

The context of this is the lack of impact or interest that the social politics of gender and class has on the lives or experiences of those in privileged positions or positions of power. Despite the fact that the drama has been labelled as ‘quietly subversive’ (Hughes, 2019) it does not produce the same level of cultural debate or motivate to action as other examples of UK social realism such as; ‘Common’ (McGovern, 2014), ‘Hillsborough’ (McGovern, 1996), ‘Freefall’ (Savage, 2009) or ‘Who Bombed Birmingham’ (Ritchie, 1990). The reason for this ambivalence is that the examples listed deal with issues such as points of law, public order or policing, finance, and politics respectively, that are still viewed as predominantly ‘masculine’ fields, maintained by the privileged.

This article employs Lefebvre’s concepts of difference and distinction ([1988] 2005), Lawler’s ‘Disgusted Subject’s’ (2005) and Skegg’s idea that working class women’s bodies are ‘repositories of negative value’ (2004: 167) as a provocation, suggesting that the embourgeoisement of sexuality and relationships (Brooke, 2006) experienced by the working class during the 1950s and 1960s and represented within ‘Call the Midwife’ has had far reaching effects on gendered class identity and consequently on contesting the negative material effects of the current UK class system including the issue of women’s health.