Princess Diana - the finest feminist of them all
Yes, she was a feminist. The icon of her generation. There have been zillions of articles on her lack of O-level, her shyness as she walked out to get married in the pastry puff gown. Her relationships and her friends. Her media interactions, her outbursts and what not!
Still, she was the best feminist icon I can think of when it comes to the generation defining the 1990s. She was all woman and she was not afraid to show it. Which throws up the question of what or who is a feminist? Princess Diana fell out with her husband and did not choose to stay silent about it, though it was expected of her. Doesn’t the feminist code say exactly that? To speak up and not say silent and suffer?
Some of us who started as the bra-burning types have only come to rue the sag we feel on our chests as the millennials jut out those perfect bodies and look at us with incomprehension.
We can only sigh and say that if the suffragettes hadn’t tied themselves to poles outside the British Parliament, the Indian Constitution wouldn’t have known how to naturally give women the right to vote. That we who argued for education and careers, paved the way for the 20-somethings to choose – not to have one – if they didn’t wish to. But who would be listening to us?
Diana, the princess of people’s heart taught women of her generation to go for it all, on her terms and damn the establishment. No doubt, she must have gone through great turmoil and angst as the rest of the world ganged up over her seemingly impulsive choices or company. What everyone forgets so easily is that she took the decision not to stay silent – her methods be damned – about the things that bothered her, yell that she was not happy and that she had every right to be.
Met with appalling criticism, accused of being frivolous, she nevertheless stood her ground and did what she wanted to and spoke her mind, as a woman, a wife and a lover, and if she sought to be loved completely, was it wrong?
The ultimate test, for women who are also mothers, is how their children regard them. Of course, there is the theory of unconditional love but there are so many instances of deep emotional confusion, especially with broken marriages and homes.
Looking at her sons – as her offspring – and not princes of the realm, can anyone argue that she didn’t do a stellar job! It was her inherited charm that had Prince William host her-kind-of disco deewane music concert in her memory not so long ago (something Diana herself would have found hard to pull off on her birthday), bridged the world of his grandparents, supporting his father in his new relationship and standing firm beside his "un-aristocratic" wife.
It is her deft "touch" that he has inherited and is happy to give her credit for it too.
She also defied the regressive notion that being pretty, hot and sexy automatically disqualifies you from being a feminist. She would have been a headline even if none of the above applied simply because of who she was married to. The Duchess of Cambridge has been a model royal but she too, has not been spared the prying cameras "inside" her holiday home.
Diana revelled in her sensual beauty. She didn’t apologise for it. She embraced style and used it to great effect. Whether she twirled with John Travolta on the White House floor, or walked through that landmine path, she did her job and she did it well. It was Travolta who confessed to nerves later.
She laughed at her own intellectual abilities and turned it into a joke. To any eye, that is a mark of great confidence. That she would keep a list of words on her desk so that she could write impressive letters?
I cannot think of another famous woman who would so willingly concede her limitations.
She became emotional – irrationally so the pundits said – after her divorce, only demonstrates what hundreds of unknown women go through after breakups. I seethed for a decade in vengeful anger after I divorced and I know many of my ilk who couldn’t forgive or forget! Every divorcee feels such acute loss that a divorce, psychologists say, is second only to bereavement when it comes to feeling pain.
Why was her agitation and mood swings so surprising? If she sat forlorn at the Taj Mahal bench or spoke of three people in her marriage, wasn’t she in her own way trying to cope?
Feminism is as much about survival as it is about emotion and that makes every inch of Diana a feminist.
She found the strength to do the things her children expected her to do. She got out of bed every morning, looking fitter and better every day and did her duties. She coped with being ostracised when she realised that the friends she had, were firstly her husband’s, just the way it happens in the rest of the world. She shook them off and went ahead to make new ones of her own and so what if they didn’t fit in?
She was hardly hurting anybody by having her palm read. How many of us deny that we have not looked for a cosmic sign to get us out of our misery? As for that final straw: love, again?
Give me one woman who hasn’t looked for it and I will chew every shoe that can be thrown. Does being a feminist mean that one cannot look for personal fulfilment, desirability, that heady notion of belonging to someone so completely that everything else falls away?
How was she to do it if not secretly, when her life was splashed daily for all of us to see?
Those who try to date after a divorce wouldn’t want any kind of scrutiny. As a feminist, she was able get up from detritus of her marriage, brush of her bruised knees and continue to be seen as the most famous women of her time, without having a crown or a title, and that is an example of female grit.
She was a modern, free woman who broke up a bad marriage, raised two amazing kids, did an enviable job as the most recognised face from the UK, apart from the Big Ben, and made her life her own.
If that isn’t a feminist, no one else is!