Has writing this made me a writeress?

By Holly Morgan

"So, what do you do then?" a slightly frayed hipster smirked at me the other evening. As chat goes this is obviously fairly unremarkable. However, when I told him what I actually do for a living, his response was a little unexpected. He took a lengthy slug of his craft beer and gave his immaculately nonchalant facial topiary a loving fondle (sigh, post-backlash hipster bashing - I get it, but he really was a tit) before correcting me: ‘Don’t you mean you’re an actor?’

Ah, yes: the ever popular actor vs. actress question. On which side of the tricky terminological divide should the thoughtful, eager to read the zeitgeist correctly, struggling (but not doing that badly, really) female thesp position herself? Not an easy decision. Perhaps a little history will help…

The term actress was coined around 1700, some years after jolly, up-for-a-laugh Charles II a) brought strutting and fretting back from po-faced Interregnum fun-bashing and b) pioneered the novel idea of letting women pretend to be other women on stage, rather than getting tonsured men to do it. The response was generally positive. The women were good at it! Samuel Pepys was a vociferous supporter of Nell Gwynne’s comic abilities, and the opportunity to check out the turn of a calf in a nice costume was not one to be overlooked. However, therein lay the beginning of the problem. The young and titled men about town discovered the theatre was a great place to scout out a new mistress - you had a good night out and a bit of a perve in a dark room (not unlike Inferno’s in Clapham High Street).

A Restoration fop (the un-hipster? Discuss) may have responded to "I’m an actress" with a "Come here you saucy doxy, let’s be having you", but does this really necessitate the gender-neutral actor, or, for clarity, female actor? The Guardian and The Observer’s joint style guide would argue yes:

actress comes into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, lady doctor, male nurse and similar obsolete terms that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex (usually men)

Being enlightened, liberal and generally not a certifiable knob, I would say that I am a feminist (down with women being treated as exact equals of men? Yeah? Great: you’re normal). Actor as a sexless term was appropriated following the women’s movement of the 1970s. Zoë Wanamaker has spoken out about the stigma which surrounded actress (I refer you to the previous ‘doxy’ paragraph). In contrast, actor is associated with a certain gravitas and acclaim; it calls to mind Dames, Downton dowagers, good tailoring. This brings us to another sticking point: actor is indelibly allied with those older women who carved out their early careers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It may be gender neutral but is it conversely used as a weapon of ageism? The media (excepting the lovely lefties - we love you guys) does not frequently refer to ‘actor Kaya Scodelerio’ or ‘Jennifer Lawrence, Academy Award winner for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role’.

So should we slug it out until our sex appeal is significantly diminished in order to graduate from actress to actor? Fiona Shaw doesn’t think so: "I think the experience of being an actress is so fundamentally different to being an actor that any illusion that making the name the same, would make the experience of an actress the same, would be humbug really and would just cover the cracks".

Our over-crowded industry is female heavy but fundamentally light on parts. The experience of a young female graduating from drama school will be radically different from that of her male counterparts. As Shaw points out only one in eight parts are playable by women, which means the female graduate has to be eight times as diligent, as talented, as connected. I do not feel that in acknowledging my gender by describing myself as an actress I am in anyway detracting from the validity of my work or compromising my position as a feminist. Rather, I am giving myself a pat on the back. Ultimately, I’m Team Shaw. I don’t mean I’m an actor - I mean I’m an actress, and a bloody hard working one at that. Now put that in your post-ironic hipster pipe and smoke it…

Holly Morgan @morgstoyou

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