What Mary Whitehouse got right
by Louise Perry, UnHerd:
Ridiculed for being on the wrong side of history, her time is now.
The critic Raymond Williams reminds us in Marxism and Literature that societies are always in a state of flux. At any one time, there will be dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements existing simultaneously and in tension with one another. We tend to celebrate those historical figures who were part of emergent strains that later became dominant: the people credited with being ahead of their time and later vindicated, sometimes only (and most romantically) in death.
But we usually pay less attention to the people who found themselves part of residual elements that may once have been dominant, but eventually faded away. We venerate the people whose ideologies won out, perhaps imagining ourselves to be among their number. We think a lot less about the people who lost.
The infamous campaigner Mary Whitehouse is one of history’s losers. Born in 1910, she never let go of her Edwardian sensibilities, even as the society she knew collapsed around her ears. She spent 37 years organising letter-writing campaigns in an effort to halt the arrival of what she called the ‘permissive society’, horrified as she was by the displays of sex and violence that suddenly appeared on British television screens from the 1960s onwards. A contemporary of Whitehouse’s described her in The Financial Times as a “little Canute, exhorting the waves of moral turpitude to retreat”. She didn’t campaign for change, she campaigned for stasis. And she failed utterly, in a grand display of public humiliation.
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