Even with female singer-songwriter Peggy Seeger co-helming the BBC Radio Ballad, the project did little to alter perceptions of women and their voices in British radio and beyond. Peggy Seeger, who many know as Pete Seeger’s half-sister, led much of the musical direction and arrangement for the BBC Radio Ballad. Throughout her work with the project and her close musical and romantic partnership with Ewan MacColl, Seeger often went under recognized by the general public and the press. MacColl once admitted his wrongdoing in his “‘automatic attitude to women that also made Peggy and [him] call [their] joint company Ewan MacColl Ltd'” (Freedman 128).
Image Courtesy of peggyseeger.com.
Similarly to the United States, Great Britain emphasized the romanticization of women’s roles in the home after World War II. The vision of women “orchestrating domestic consumption” and “choosing and purchasing for the house” (Langhamer 355) was intended to be a distraction for the women who wanted employment in the workforce. Yet the wages of the women who did end up working “were now used to buy ‘extras’ for the family, rather than to ensure survival” (Langhamer 359). Thus, the rendering of women’s wages as “secondary” affected their ability to participate in society. The limits on women’s participation in society inevitably affected Seeger.
While recording “actuality” for Singing the Fishing, Seeger attempted to board the Honeydew with MacColl and Parker. She was not allowed to do so because “the fishermen believed that a woman aboard would bring bad luck” (Freedman 126). Pivoting in a different direction, Seeger decided to feature the stories of the women who gutted the herring on the shore, who described how “the rough salt breaks your skin, the pickle gets in, then it festers” (Online Transcript (Author Unknown) 14). Women did not enter the episode until halfway through the episode. In fact, the earliest presence of the feminine subject was the appearance of the ship, who the male seafarers always referred to as “she.” Using more gendered language, the male seafarers also referred to the herring as masculine by calling it the “King of the Sea” (Online Transcript (Author Unknown) 15).
The Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot is known for his discussion of how historical narratives involve the creation of “silences.” Within Singing the Fishing, silences are especially present in “the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)” and “the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)” (Trouillot 26). The voices of women on shore appear in a brief subplot that ties into the seafarers’ longing for their wives, though many story elements – their names, their background, their psyche – get lost in the silences.
To look further into the concept of “silences” in terms of gender, I looked briefly at physical silences in the waveform of Singing the Fishing.
I used pydub to identify segments of silence that appeared throughout the hour-long episode. The insufficient air time of the women’s voices was immediately apparent after using this tool – none of these silences fell between moments in which the women spoke. As an alternative next step, I searched for instances of the men speaking about the women or the ship.
The only moment I found was at Start Time: 1295.03 seconds, End Time: 1296.074 seconds. One seafarer discusses right before this silence how “you just couldn’t see the ship, all you could see was the mast sticking out of the water on her” (Online Transcript (Author Unknown) 9). The silence is brief, existing as a catch breath for the speaker, rather than a moment of emphasis. A faint background noise appears. It sounds somewhat like a muffled drumroll, but it is likely just the ambient sound of the room. This audio snippet contrasts with the interview that precedes it and the mini ballad that follows it, since its audio is not nearly as crisp and resonant.
Focusing on the figure above, the descending minor scale of the English concertina creates a smooth, almost triangular decay. Seconds later, the speech pattern of the seafarer creates an instantaneous decay. His speech reaches a higher amplitude than the amplitude of the English concertina. The final release of the English concertina coincides with the attack of the seafarer’s speech, providing no space for complete silence.
When women’s singing voices do appear later on in the episode, they are quite rushed, blending into moments of men’s singing and speech with little silence in between, similar to the example above. There is one exception, found later in the episode at 3184 seconds, in which one of the herring gutters expresses, “If I was to live my life again, I would never marry a fisherman” (Online Transcript (Author Unknown) 20). This moment, unsurprisingly, comes up when fishermen begin to discuss their longing for home, continuing to reinforce the expected image of women working in the home, rather than on shore.