We naturally dropped our “g”s as children but quickly learnt at our middle class, direct grant school to pick them up again.

Yes to your last paragraph! How funny your son was born at the hospital in Chelmsford so central to the book!

I think Martin Jarvis read the Just William books. He seems to specialise in audiobooks. The soundtrack of our children’s pre-teen lives!

Hephzi- you remind me. I remember the dropped ‘g’ of Just William (as read by….who? I forget) on the story-tapes we gave our children…their best electronic minders. We have a local antique dealer who speaks with aristocratic dropped ‘g’s. Wealthy but from the borders of North Essex and Suffolk, his Essex links have seeped through. Our name for him? Just William.

I agree with you that it was a shame Perry did not talk more about real Essex Women or (Essex) Mondeo man etc and felt like you, let down in this respect. I did like the reference to Rebecca Solnit’s quote about the fact that change is not (yet) irrevocable is not a failure…‘A woman goes walking down a thousand mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere.’

I gave birth to my first son in St John’s Hospital, Chelmsford, the starting point of Perry’s Essex Girls, He has never forgiven me for the ten days which condemned him to be forever name-called an ‘Essex Man’ if his origins seep out, victim of the intellectual snobbery of Cambridge.

I do wonder whether the Essex Man/ (more than) Woman was not a construct born of Thatcher’s ‘property owning democracy’ overture to an element in Essex: the aspiring working class, the ‘jack-the-lad’ (or Jill) entrepreneurial individualist, go-getter who like her, cared nothing for the collectivism of the striking dockers or miners in the 70s and 80s. By the late 80s most had long forgotten the struggles of the Dagenham women and collectivism was for the birds. They were sassy, independent, out for a good time and many voted Tory if they voted at all.

It was your mention of the ‘dropped g’ that set me running to my browser. I always thought of it as an upper class ‘thing’ – as in Bertie Wooster. I now find that it occurs in a number of accents of different varieties, including Cockney as well as ‘country aristocracy’. Interestin’!

A religious education only goes so far. If the child finds a teacher outside the religion, they may be enouraged to think independently. That is the death knell of religious fundamentalism and its oppression of women.

I hate the way stereotypes box people in but have to admit that this particular one has quite a lot of resonance for me. It might have something to do with the fact that I began my teaching career in Basildon – quite a few years before the genesis of the expression but it chimes with my experience of the county and its people. I admired so much about their grit, their orneriness, their loudness and determination to have a good time but it made teaching their children v v tough. Maybe being m/c in a v w/c, ex East End of London town emphasised how we are class bound or as you put it, we expect them to be part of the lumpen proletariat. I got out after 3 years in which I learned a lot, especially that Essex and I weren’t going to make each other happy long term. What worries me more than the fact that the trope is classist is that it’s picking on the women. Again, I admire that loudness, the desire to speak out, the laddettishness which you see in TOWIE. They ask you to take them as they are even if you don’t agree with it. I find Essex man much more of a problem. I still have friends in Essex and when I go there I feel that some of the blokes are really chauvinistic.

I do wonder about the link you make between education giving rise to rebellion against injustice and religious upbringing. Don’t you think that a strict religious education has exactly the opposite aim? Or perhaps I am just misreading what you were saying.

I did follow the link to the article about the removal of the term from the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary which defined Essex girl as ‘not intelligent, dresses badly, talks in a loud and ugly way and is v willing to have sex’. I can see why they campaigned to have it removed but I always worry about this kind of censorship of language. Are advanced students of English not able to understand stereotyping and derogatory expressions?

Lots of food for thought in your blog, as ever… thank you.

As ever, you make some great points. I think the Thatcher element refers to the trope of feckless women acquiring offspring with a view to council housing; this was a common Daily Mail theme in the 1980s and of course then council housing was massively sold off to people who appeared to have more lofty ambitions.

I take your reservations about Sarah Perry’s pamphlet. Nevertheless, if territory and class can be bypassed, perhaps we could include a number of Australian women in the Essex girl category as defined by Perry: germaine Greer, Carmen Callie, Kathy Letts come to mind. But for me the best example of the Essex girl as defined by Perry is seen in the Dagenham strike. The film did quite well in commemorating those women.
As always I enjoyed reading your blog with its wry wit, and wanted to follow up the links. I would also have liked to know more about how Perry saw the definition as a construction of the Thatcher era.

You are right about sell-by dates, and I had forgotten reports just before Xmas that “a dictionary” – the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary – had dropped the term: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-removed-from-dictionary-following-campaign

Perry reclaims rather than champions the Essex Girl trope, more or less claiming she is everywoman, which I think is stretching a point. She remarks that, as stereotyped, both left and right despise the Essex girl – the former for her materialism and the latter for her wanton lifestyle.