As floodwaters engulf a Yorkshire town during the opening scenes of the six-part crime drama After the Flood (Britbox), visibly pregnant police officer Jo Marshall plunges into a raging river to help rescue a baby. The urgency and life-threatening danger of the situation are apparent, as is Jo’s bravery and dedication to her duty.
By the end of the episode, the plucky policewoman, played by Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders, Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack), has also waded down a street thigh-high in murky water to check on the wellbeing of an elderly couple and been first on the scene at a sewage-contaminated car park to investigate the discovery of a body in a lift.
Go Jo, you rock. That’s some day at the office. But really? It’s fine, indeed welcome and wonderful, to see a pregnant woman portrayed as a capable and courageous person going about her work with unwavering commitment, refusing to regard the human growing inside her as an impediment. But perhaps this pregnant-woman-as-superwoman thing has gone too far?
There was a time when even uttering the word “pregnant” was taboo, at least in America. Let alone showing an expectant mother who also had a job. For decades, TV’s women were mostly consigned to the margins, as wives and girlfriends, as devoted secretaries, nosy neighbours and difficult mothers-in-law. More recently, as female characters have moved to centre stage, their personalities have been more fully fleshed out and the range of relationships that they can have, at home and at work, has expanded. Meanwhile, the ranks of expectant mothers have also swelled and protruding bellies have become particularly prominent in crime stories, where a pregnancy adds a handy extra element of risk.
The shift started slowly and quite a while back. Following its 1952 debut season, I Love Lucy’s star, Lucille Ball, discovered she was pregnant with her second child. At the time, US TV standards were governed by a code of practice that prohibited profanity, illicit sex and drug use, and stipulated that family life, God, religion and law-enforcement officials should be depicted in a positive light. On screen, married couples had to sleep in separate beds.
Yet Lucy’s pregnancy suggested that comedy’s heroine and her husband, Ricky (played by Ball’s real-life husband, Desi Arnaz), had actually – shock, horror – had sex. Both the implication and the description of her condition alarmed the CBS network. After much discussion and scripts approved by a priest, a minister and a rabbi – that’s not a joke – the show used “expecting” and “with child”, and titled an episode Lucy is Enceinte, perhaps believing that the word sounded less confronting in French. Or that people mightn’t know what it meant.
In more than a half century since Lucy was enceinte, as female characters have moved from supporting roles to playing protagonists, a broader and deeper perspective on what it means to be a woman has also developed. Female characters are now routinely seen juggling the demands of their careers and their personal relationships.
We’re seeing working women, with bulging bellies, clocking on to do their jobs and bristling at offers of special treatment. These are not women inclined to cocoon in their homes, put their aching feet up and dreamily contemplate nursery decor. They’re determined to demonstrate that their brains work fine and their ambitions remain intact even as their bodies nurture new life.