This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 36, Winter 1997/98.
Public reactions to the death of Princess Diana in the Paris car crash in the early hours of Sunday, 31st August, were passionate and profuse. Crowds thronged the Mall, threatening to storm the palace if the queen failed to fly the flag at half mast and show some respect for the late princess. Amongst the millions of mourners were not only staunch anti-royalists and die-hard socialists, but gay men, members of the black community and all manner of feminists. What, then, are we to make of this very ‘neapolitan’ show of mourning, and what, if any though, was the significance for feminism of the life and death of Diana Spencer?
Hilary McCollum: Surviving in public
In spite of a longstanding, and at times rabid, dislike of the royal family (I caused scandal in my Ulster protestant family when I spoke as an anti-royalist on a TV talk show in 1984) I was a big fan of Diana. I did not know her, I never met her, but I admired her and looking back on her life I think that feminism has things to learn from it.
First and foremost for me, in her life Diana was a survivor, a woman who had lived through being victimised and come out the other side, with strength and humour. In Diana: Her True Story Andrew Morton documents how Diana was chosen to be essentially a ‘brood mare’, an attractive virgin who would be a suitable mother for a royal heir. Buckingham Palace thought that it would be an easy task to manipulate and control such a young and naive woman and Prince Charles was happy that he could carry on his long standing relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, a relationship that he did not have the guts to publicly choose. They had not reckoned with Diana nor with the reaction of the public (especially women) to her.
Breaking the silence
From the beginning, Diana’s story was no fairy tale romance. She was treated within the royal family as someone who did not matter, who was only of value as a breeding machine and publicity tool. Her response to being so marginalised and undervalued and to having so little control over her own life, was self-harm. She developed bulimia and injured herself through falling down stairs. Self-harm is a common coping mechanism used by many women when they are made to feel worthless and powerless.
Receiving no support from within the royal family, Diana found the courage to deal with her pain and to move on. (Perhaps if a few more feminists found the same courage we would not have so many women’s groups wrecked by the destructive behaviour of a few women who won’t deal with their own shit). One step in this was her public admission that she had suffered bulimia. The limited public discussion of eating disorders prior to that point had focused almost exclusively on anorexia, presented by the media as ‘the slimmers’ disease’. Diana instead presented eating disorders as a coping mechanism, as a response to pain and trauma. It was a brave thing to do, to put herself forward and take on a stigmatised label. And it had a huge impact not only on public perception, but also on individual women with eating disorders. It encouraged many women who had previously been isolated to come forward and get support. Some of these women appeared on TV a few days after Diana’s death, talking about how the trigger for them getting help and even setting up services themselves, had been her public admission of her own self harm. She gave women in a similar position a sense that they were not mad and the hope that they could find other ways of coping that were not so self-destructive.
Like many other women, especially those with histories of self-harm, my liking of Diana came from an identification with her as a woman, particularly as a woman who had been made to feel that she did not matter but who was fighting back against that judgement. She learned how to use the media to her own advantage in her battle against the royal family and Prince Charles, laying the blame for the problems in their marriage at the door of his infidelity and coldness. She refused to keep their secrets, rejecting their definition of her as the problem, and instead exposing their treatment of her as the real issue. She took them on, and largely she won. This, for me, was partly why I felt initially so upset by the manner of her death. It reinforced for me the fear that you can’t take them on, that they always win in the end.
Active resistance
But our only hope is fighting back, activism the only way of changing things. And in many ways Diana herself was an activist. Not overtly a feminist one, though she visited Refuge, donated money to them and met with Kiranjit Ahluwalia. But her work for charities, particularly in recent years, was at least as much about addressing policy issues as it was about interacting with individuals. Her involvement in the campaign for a global ban on landmines shows this. Her approach to campaigning put an emphasis not on high theory but on the potential impact of policy changes on individual lives. It is an approach that has also been employed by feminist campaigns such as Justice for Women who have used the cases of individuals such as Sara Thornton and Emma Humphreys to highlight the wider issues of domestic homicide. In many ways Justice for Women went against the trend of recent feminist politics which has become bogged down in theories, developed often within academia, which have lost sight of the lives of individual women. But to be successful not only in getting media attention in the first place, but also in engaging people’s interest in an issue, requires the ‘human interest’ angle beloved of journalists — using the experiences of individuals to make a problem ‘real’ for those not directly affected by it. If we really want to change the world we need to engage a much wider constituency of women in feminist politics. The best way of doing this is not by starting with theory but by starting with human interest.
Diana was dismissed during her lifetime, particularly by middle class ‘leftie’ Guardian readers, as not very bright, a manipulator and an airhead. Such an image is contradicted by her clear grasp of how to use the media not only in her campaign against the royal family, but also in her campaigns on issues such as landmines. For me it was an image clearly rooted in misogyny, a way of undermining her and the causes for which she campaigned. Yet the ‘airhead’ opinion was accepted by a number of feminists that I knew. During the planning of the Brighton conference a number of members of the steering group suggested that Diana be invited to open the conference. We wanted her there as she was an important symbol for many survivors, she had given money to services for women and children escaping domestic violence and, most importantly, her presence would create the level of media attention that the event deserved. But the suggestion was rejected by others in the group who dismissed her as a privileged, manipulative and brainless woman. They refused to see her strength and courage, refused to recognise what she represented to many women not only in Britain but across the world. It was as if the fact that she was from a very privileged background stopped some of the radical feminists in that group recognising that Diana could still be oppressed as a woman. This was certainly the position of most socialist feminists who argued that Diana’s wealth and privilege put her beyond the power of sexism and misogyny. But it is hard to understand why a similar position was adopted by any radical feminist. Unlike socialist feminists we see gender rather than class as the fundamental oppression and Diana’s life supports our argument. If we did not live in a woman-hating society she could not have been so easily dismissed as an airhead and her self-harming behaviour could not so easily have been seen by the establishment as symptoms of instability and weakness.
‘Asking for it’?
Diana had the intelligence to work out how to use the media, but she did not have the power to control them. She was subjected to virtually constant harassment and at one point described the paparazzi’s intrusive aggressive photographing of her as feeling like she was being raped. Whilst I would not agree with her making this comparison in this way, I think there are parallels in the treatment of Diana and that of women who have been raped. It was said, implicitly if not always explicitly, during her lifetime and even more so since her death, that Diana had brought the media attention on herself. The argument goes that since she sometimes tipped photographers off as to her location or sometimes leaked stories to them herself, then she had created a situation where the press would not be able to tell when she wanted to be photographed and when she did not, when she wanted to have stories in the press and when she did not. In other words because she had co-operated with the media once, she should co-operate with them at all times in all situations: since she sometimes said yes she never had the right to say no.
In spite of the constant harassing media attention, Diana tried to find a new role for herself after the end of her marriage to Charles. Again I found this interesting as a feminist and lesbian, to watch this woman grappling with the limitations put on her and trying to define for herself a new way of being, a new way of living; trying to find positive ways to use her power. It seemed important to her in this that she be taken seriously, not dismissed as a ‘loose cannon’ but recognised as someone who actively wanted to ‘do good’. It was only after her death that we discovered that Tony Blair had been in discussion with her about taking on formally some type of ambassadorial role. Blair recognised at least some of the positive qualities that she could bring to such a role. In the weeks after her death stories emerged about people she had cared about — ordinary people that she came across in her life and who she made time for, not only at points of crisis or illness, but checking up weeks and years later to find out how they were getting on. Perhaps that is something for us all to learn from.
Liz Kelly: Including others
I had been adjusting my view of Diana for several years. At the start of her public life I proudly wore my ‘Don’t Do it Di’ badge, and wandered the empty streets on the day of the wedding wishing we had arranged a feminist alternative. For many years I studiously avoided the media reporting, but every now and then something caught my attention. The first time I paid proper attention was when her visist to Refuge was televised; there was something about how she greeted the women and the expressions on her face which communicated an understanding, a feeling with abused women rather than just about them. There were moments in her famous television interview that moved me, as they did later during a documentary about land mines.
It was only her death that made me think about why — why had I been moved by this woman? What was it that I thought I saw? And more importantly perhaps what was it that many women thought they saw and understood in her and from her?
Why women?
If there was one thing that infuriated me about all the media coverage more than any other it was the repeated failure to notice that ‘the public’, ‘the nation’ was overwhelmingly female. Even the reflections by feminists in the ‘quality press’ by Ros Coward and Bea Campbell only mentioned this in passing. To me it said something important about the woman herself; using South Kensington Tube in the week before the funeral, the fact that the crowds carrying flowers were women, and many looked like mothers and daughters, fascinated me. The easy explanation is that this was simply the product of the glamour and preoccupation with her in best selling women’s magazines. That seems insufficient to make sense of the enormity of the response, the resonances through varied and disparate communities.
Somehow this woman who came from an acutely privileged background managed to transcend some of the expectations of her and make a different kind of connection with those she met and many she did not. This was not just respect or shock, but something felt in a more profound way — a loss that was both public and private, symbolic and real.
Bridging differences
This sense of connection seems to me to link to one of our basic feminist concepts: the personal is political. One didn’t need much feminist theory to understand that Diana had been used and abused by a powerful man and an extremely powerful family. What mattered about her to many women was surely that she fought back, refused to be silenced and sidelined. That she did this under a public spotlight whilst maintaining some kind of quiet dignity must have resonated with countless women who have conducted their own resistances in private. She refused the stoicism and silence which has been the lot of generations of women, and is still expected in the higher echelons. She placed herself alongside women who dare to challenge and refuse tradition and power structures. And within this she used the personal, her own experience of pain and humilation, as a way to make connections with others.
The media reporting amplified what had been obvious for some time — this woman had an extraordinary ability to create human connection across many differences. I found it impossible not to be impressed and moved by the previously untold stories involving her maintaining connections with gay men beginning new courses of treatment for AIDS, with children who faced repeated hospitalisations. A friend of mine began to notice in the endless retrospectives how she unerringly headed for the person in the room least likely to be able to gain her attention, that she sought out those who were most ‘outside’, those who could most easily be ignored and forgotten. Maybe she didn’t have a theoretical analysis of power relations and exclusion, but she certainly practiced inclusion in her public life. The issue which feminists and other political groupings endless agonise about at a conceptual level, she simply did at a human one.
There were two messages I took from her death and the response to it. It made me aware of my own mortality; the importance of making sure that those close to me know how much I value and care about them. On a more general level it was a reminder of why experience is important in feminist politics. It is not our personal experiences in and of themselves which matter so much as the way in which we make sense of them and communicate about them enabling connection with other women.
Debbie Cameron: A gilded cage
I won’t say I felt nothing when I heard Princess Diana had died. When you hear of anyone dying unexpectedly and unnecessarily you feel regret; but I felt no more than that. Without doubting the sincerity of other people’s grief, I was puzzled by the extravagant displays of public mourning. As the funeral approached I felt more and more alienated; I stopped buying the paper or listening to the news, because I just couldn’t share in the widespread sense of tragic loss.
I also found myself at odds with some of the sentiments being expressed about Diana by feminists. What bothered me was the attempt to claim Diana as ‘ours’ in some way: as a subversive, a survivor and maybe even, in her secret heart, a sister. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this. I think it is an example of what literary critics call ‘reading against the grain’, and what the rest of us might well call ‘ignoring the obvious in favour of the implausible’.
A questionable role model
Let me, then, state the obvious. However much we might have cheered when she publicly put the knife into her husband and her in-laws, when all’s said and done Diana was a powerful symbol of gender conservatism, not subversion. She came from a class, and married into an institution, whose outstanding characteristic is anachronism. Aristocratic and royal women are the only group of women in contemporary British society of whom it can still accurately be said that marriage is their trade, and that they, along with their children, are chattels. Such women live in the proverbial gilded cage: their extreme class privilege is conditional on an equally extreme gender subjection. Diana’s personality was formed by this regime, and however unhappily, she adhered to its archaic notions of proper femininity — which, boiled down to their essence, are about pleasing men — in just about every respect.
Actually, she did more than adhere to them, she was a particularly effective advertisement for them — a ‘role model’, as the media kept telling us, for women of all classes and ages. Young, pretty and personable, she represented a feminine ideal which other women of her generation had consigned to the dustbin of history, and made it seem acceptable, even desirable, again. I do not blame her for this; her upbringing and education equipped her for little else. But in the light of it I find it difficult to see her as in any way ‘subversive’.
Admittedly there were aspects of the traditional, upper-class female role which Diana could not stomach, such as the treatment of women as brood-mares to be cast aside when they had produced a legitimate male heir. But she was less critical of the idea that for women, power and agency are extensions of feminine sexuality. Women act on men (using their beauty, glamour and charm, always assuming they are lucky enough to be endowed with these attributes), and men act on the world on women’s behalf. If that counts as power, no woman on earth in the late twentieth century possessed more of it than Diana, and no one was more skilled at using it, whether for her own advantage (as in the Panorama interview) or for the good of others (as in her campaign against landmines).
True, Diana was unusually upfront about the limits and the high emotional costs of this particular kind of power. But at the same time, so far as I can see, she was unwilling to give it up and unable to imagine any alternative to it. That was the reason why she fought the royal family so fiercely after her divorce. She wasn’t resisting tyranny or looking for some abstract justice, she was trying to hold on to her power base as the wife and the mother of future kings. Again, one cannot blame her, since this was the only power base she had or was likely to have. But it seems to me that pity would be a more apt feminist response than admiration.
The perfect princess
Feminists who admired Diana cite her strength, her courage and her humanitarianism. But even if I am prepared to grant her these attributes, I cannot help feeling there was something else going on, something feminists would find hard to admit openly. To see this, we need only ask why Diana was so much more popular than the other royal women of her generation, Princess Anne and Sarah Ferguson, and why, even before her death, her plight and her response to it got so much more attention than Sarah’s or Anne’s. There are, after all, many points of similarity: any of the three of them could symbolise women’s unhappiness within and desire for independence from an archaic patriarchal institution. But some symbols are more equal than others.
It is clear that Sarah Ferguson, like Diana, felt oppressed by the rigid gender-codes of the royal family, and when she divorced her royal husband she was treated with similar contempt. Like Diana, Sarah gave voice to her unhappiness and spoke, in particular, of her troubled relationship to her body and to food. But Sarah’s revelations were treated quite differently. Her problem took the form of overeating, not bulimia; a fat, frumpy and loudmouthed princess does not excite the same sympathy as a thin, designer-clad and dignified one. In public perception Diana was ill-treated and righteously angry, but Sarah was merely embarrassing and vulgar.
Princess Anne has been portrayed for many years as a charmless, horsefaced harridan. She has worked as hard as Diana ever did for humanitarian causes, but somehow the effect is not the same. Anne, who once said in public that she wished she could have been a lorry driver, was arguably the first woman to play the part of ‘reluctant princess’. It is, perhaps, more difficult to make her into a symbol of resistance to the royal family, since she belongs to it by blood rather than marriage; but I don’t think that is the real issue here. The issue is femininity, and at the crassest level, looks.
Diana became the ‘people’s princess’ because she, or more exactly her public image, fitted the people’s idea of what a princess ought to be: beautiful, glamorous, gentle, sweet and kind. Not to mention vulnerable. No doubt many people also admired her more ‘feminist’ qualities — her refusal to tolerate her husband’s infidelity, her resistance when her in-laws wanted her to fade gracefully into obscurity. But as we see when we compare her with less favoured royal women, the strength she demonstrated at various points during her life would not have been acceptable if it hadn’t been grafted on to the more traditional package, of fairytale beauty and glamour and charm.
A contradictory role
The way some feminists have talked about Diana since her death reminds me of a narrative formula that used to be popular in fiction and autobiography during the early years of the WLM: the ‘how I woke up to injustice and became my own woman’ plot. Applied to Diana, there is something to this, but not much. There are some injustices she seems never to have woken up to; the woman she became was no less dependent than the one she left behind on femininity and male approval as sources of identity and power. To the extent that she was critical of the role she was forced to play, she was caught up in a basic contradiction: people were prepared to sympathise with her complaints about how hard it was to be a fairytale princess, only because she personified that stereotype so well. She had it both ways. Feminists cannot.
Joan Scanlon: The horrors of heterosexuality
When the news of Diana’s death first broke, I was in Manchester staying with friends who had taken more of an interest in her life and doings than I had ever done. I hadn’t even bothered to watch the Panorama interview a couple of years ago, although I regretted it later simply because it had generated some heated debate in the most unlikely quarters. I wasn’t sure at first what I thought or felt about the news, apart from a certain sadness and an awareness that for some people (I’m not sure exactly who I was thinking of — probably her children) this was a shocking and tragic loss. I assumed that news of Diana’s death would be met by other women I knew, similarly, with varying degrees of regret (depending on how far they had followed either the Royal Family saga or Diana’s involvement in the AIDS issue and, more recently, the anti-landmines campaign). Instead the intense and extreme public response was mirrored in the reactions of women I know well. I was also surprised by the strength of my own eventual response, which grew into a fulminating fury against the various men who were involved in commenting on Diana’s life or death and an increasing empathy with the hordes of women for whom the event had such symbolic force.
Mourners or maniacs?
That women were behaving out of character, or at least contrary to expectation, was epitomised by my mother’s rather puzzling reaction. A luke-warm royalist, who listens as a matter of form, but without great enthusiasm, to the queen’s speech at Christmas, my mother has never been a huge admirer of Diana. In fact, in disputes amongst her peers, she would incline towards a defence of Charles if critics seemed ‘to go too far’. Moreover she would blame his upbringing and his austere and disagreeable father for any faults laid at his door. It was with some surprise therefore that I learned, following the funeral service, that she had been impelled to go down to the Finchley Road and watch the cortège go by. She had also stopped buying her Daily Mail (her daily rag for as long as I can remember), because it was one of the papers to have bid for intrusive photographs of Diana and Dodi Al Fayed.
Less than a fortnight later I asked my mother if she was maintaining her boycott of the Daily Mail, and she retorted that she’d tried all the others but they didn’t suit her, mostly because they were the wrong size. More recently she made some passing remark about the ‘mania’ following Diana’s death, and when I asked her why, then, she herself had gone to see the funeral cortège pass by, she said, with startling honesty: ‘I suppose I was one of the maniacs’.
My own view is that the overwhelming public response to this event was not a homogenous one; there were those who felt a genuine sense of loss directly connected with what this particular woman represented, those for whom the event triggered immense feelings of grief in their own lives and provided a legitimate pretext for expressing these emotions, those for whom the event had a historical significance that they felt a need to be part of, and ‘maniacs’ like my mother.
Icons and pin-ups
While the broad public response may have been influenced by the media, in my view it was not created by them. Journalists and broadcasters alike were all trying their utmost to ensure that their coverage reflected the public mood in the way that Tony Blair’s initial statement appeared to do, while at the same time making miserably ineffectual attempts to analyse the phenomenon.
What was of course noticeable for its absence was any coherent feminist commentary on the whole chain of events and their representation. Even those women journalists who tried to establish what Diana stood for, and acknowledged that the majority of mourners were women, fell into the trap of idealising her, or translating her into a kind of feminist icon, which she mostly clearly was not. They also mostly reproduced uncritically the view, expressed by most male commentators on the event, including her own brother, that it was blessing (for whom?) that she died while she was young and beautiful. This idea was subtly reinforced by Elton John’s adaptation of his tribute to Marilyn Monroe, another vulnerable and exploited woman in the public gaze whose early death turned her into a twentieth century icon. This was the kind of angle, in my view, that linked Diana’s fate to that of thousands of other women, for whom objectification is no compensation for harrassment or abuse. In other words, being trivialized, patronised and pursued is the price women pay for the alleged benefits of being valued by men for their looks.
Men, mafia and masonry
What came to infuriate me as the week following Diana’s death unfolded was the incessant commentary of men — men who had previously treated this woman with little respect — talking in hushed and and reverential tones on the radio and the television, and asking each other what was her secret. There were all the dark suits and ties, broken voices and pious platitudes, and the undertones of competition: ‘Well, you had lunch with her at Kensington Palace as often as I did, dear boy’. Then there were the men and boys in ‘casual’ suits following the hearse on the gun carriage, making it look more like a mafia funeral than a state ceremony, with the Duke of Edinburgh wearing a more masonic and sinister demeanour than usual. It seems to me no wonder that all sorts of conspiracy theories have emerged to explain the car crash in which Diana died. The sheer relentlessness of the coercive presence of men in her life and death struck me as I watched the television coverage — she was harrassed by men in life, she died at the hands of men (whether it was the paparazzi or a drunken driver) and was literally man-handled and surrounded by men after her death — whether it was the uniformed hearse-bearers or the motorcycle outriders on the last leg of the journey to her burial. Yes, the island seemed an amazing symbol of escape, a flower-strewn idyll after all this — and yet what do we see on the television the next day? Earl Spencer squatting amongst the floral tributes on the island, posing for a photographer.
Pimps and voyeurs
All this brought out murderous tendencies in me. I went down to Kensington Gardens the day after the funeral simply to be where the women were and to calm down. The atmosphere was that of a Hindu temple or a feast day in a Catholic country — it was remarkably un-English. Although it was fast becoming a tourist attraction, with numbers of men waving their cameras about, women were still walking quietly along the perimeter fence reading the tributes or building new shrines of candles and flowers in makeshift vases under the outlying trees. Christian Wolmar had written in The Independent the day before — the day of the funeral — that he had been ‘caught’ by a fellow socialist amongst the mourners at Buckingham Palace, and ‘it was like being caught by one’s partner leching at the topless beauties on a St Tropez beach’. While I suppose in some ways this was no worse than the ‘another rich bitch dead’ view freely expressed by many leftwing men around this time, the comment confirmed my gut feeling that, for some, the event had been turned into a kind of death porn.
This is the only explanation I can give for the rage it produced in me. For all the moral righteousness about the images of the car crash that agencies in France had put on the market before news of Diana’s death has been announced, the so called ‘serious’ press and media here were in my view doing something very similar in an insidious way. It was as if, smiling from every shop window and newsstand, Diana had been transformed through death into a symbol of the perfectly desirable woman. What was so hateful about all this was the caring-sharing rhetoric that went with the canonisation of Diana by commentators who were far more interested in her affair with Dodi Al Fayed than in her ‘good deeds’ scarcely a week before. And by the by, where had all the racism gone suddenly? How had Dodi become transformed so swiftly from a playboy and a ‘foreigner’ (worse, an Arab) into a perfect lover, the source of all Diana’s happiness? She was always surrounded by men, most of them unspeakably awful — but are we to say then that her life has no relevance for us? On the contrary, her life and death seem to me to symbolise the full horrors of heterosexuality, internalised and lived out by a woman for whom it caused nothing but damage.
Sexism and idolatry
I think I understand better now than I did at the time the significance of this event for those women who had followed the events of Diana’s life and made some connection with their own. For many, the way in which her life offered a public record of the private struggles that women have — around eating disorders, self-harm, broken relationships, divorce, family strife, depression — made her death come to symbolise a battle lost, and their own grief was commensurate with this. I can also see how if you avoided turning on your radio, resisted the press and television coverage, and determinedly stayed away from London on the day of the funeral, you could have remained quite detached from the whole sequence of events from the first news of the car crash to the funeral itself. But I defy any feminist who followed the events of that week to have had no response to the visual imagery and hideous mixture of sexism and idolatry that we were fed throughout that time.