In the 1964 Disney musical film Mary Poppins, Winifred Banks, the mother of the children whom the nanny Mary Poppins is engaged to care for, is a valiant and fervent feminist. She is a surreptitious but very active member of the suffragette movement. Surreptitious, because she knows her husband finds such activities distasteful and she does not care to rock the boat of her well-ordered household. In her husband’s presence, she comes across as a passive English housewife, who says “Yes George” all the time, does exactly what her husband says and leaves all major decisions to him. When he is not there, she either prances about the house chanting “votes for women” or is off at a meeting or a protest with her sister suffragettes. No doubt, Winifred Banks’s character was modelled after a very real suffragette.
In 1964, the word feminist was a bad ‘f-word’; frowned on and whispered about and regarded as something practised only by radical activist man-haters, regardless of what forward-thinking feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and others may have said.
But as an older brother pointed out to me just last week, with just a hint of amazement in his voice, a lot has changed since then. He noted that there was less of the “us” versus “them”; feminists have become somewhat blas
