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

Abstract

The starting point for this article was a chance encounter with an episode of the BBC’s Call the Midwife (‘Episode 12.7’ 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 like her 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 per cent of the UK population that is female will spend a significant portion of their life in poor health compared to men, and this is further compounded for those women that live in poverty. What is it about this text that produces a form of soporific nostalgia that seems to dissolve feminist recognition that women’s health is still an issue, thereby nullifying the drive for change? This article suggests that the reasons for such reactions are symbolized through and within the costuming. The language of clothing employed, particularly the use of print and colour saturation work to render the clothing items as meaningless within the text, actually negating the power of the narrative in relation to the intersection of gender and social class. The costumes do however produce a different type of meaning at the margins of the text that articulate not only the production team’s creativity but also their subjective understanding about class dressing that, it is argued, is in part responsible for producing the gendered form of alienation embodied by my mother and others like her. This article employs critical theory across cultural studies, sociology, film studies and the philosophy of language as a useful and emerging cross disciplinary framework to examine costume and costume drama. Applying theories that may appear disconnected to costuming is a means by which to suggest that the shift in perceptions of working class sexuality and relationships experienced by the working class during the 1950s and 1960s and represented within Call the Midwife via the costuming 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.