I feel like most people get pretty upset about the way that Peaky Blinders took a very real and very significant historical figure, and made her into a love interest. Jessie Eden was a pretty incredible woman and I highly recommend reading this biography from Graham Stevenson (who was a British Marxist and friend of Jessie's) as he has been one of the biggest critics of Jessie's portrayal in the show. Plus, it's got a few bits about how the show is historically incorrect if that is something you fancy. It's also an explanation for why we didn't see her in season 6 because in 1933/1934 she had 'disappeared' to Russia and was helping rally women to build the Moscow Metro! The show really missed out on showing how impressive she actually was.
an article by Graham Stevenson in the Morning Star, a Birmingham socialist periodical that describes the real Jessie Eden and calls out the rampant misogyny of her PB storyline:
SOMETHING of a stir has accompanied an initiative to hold an event celebrating the real life of Birmingham heroine Jessie Eden, who features in the BBC TV series Peaky Blinders.
Local trade unionists are a tad slighted over the way that the programme, which is set in the city, has used her character in a “love interest” subplot — even if the popularity of the series has brought attention to communist pioneers of the region’s special brand of mass factory trade unionism.
Although the TV series’ cinematography, music and fast-paced action is obviously attractive, especially matched to outstanding charismatic performances, it’s disappointing that an expert in Tudor history was the historical adviser to the series, rather than someone with a background in trade unionism or communism.
Many local trade unionists are now asking, if you want to write about trade unionists in history, would it not be wise to ask trade unionists? Of course historical drama needs to be subject to the same rigour as historical fact.
The series implies a thoroughly modern social outlook among the programme’s characters. Seemingly, the 1920s working class held a sophisticated sexual knowledge and their values and tastes were not dissimilar to those held today.
I knew Eden, and as a callow 22-year-old, I didn’t ask the 70-year-old Jessie about her relationships, let alone sex life. But I doubt her private life was as complicated or dramatic as her eponymous character’s. Nor can I see any young woman during the 1920s gratuitously going into a gents’ toilets, as Eden is shown doing, for any reason at all other than life or death. The social values of the programme are ahistorical.
It is surely the conceit that Tommy Shelby, the gangster villain-hero of the series, could ever convince a woman like Eden to be wined and dined, let alone be seduced, that finally reveals the true motives of the creators of the programme. A character tells us of Shelby’s plan to “defeat revolution with his cock.” For the British army has offered him lucrative contracts if he can help entrap leading communists.
Peaky Blinders’ commercially minded creative team displays an outdated and traditional view of women. The focus is on a white male viewership, but Peaky Blinders has many female fans, who have created Pinterest boards and Tumblrs and are creating their own fan fiction. Will some now draw on the real Jessie Eden?
Especially now that she has been turned into yet another disposable love interest to show off Tommy’s machismo — disposed of like many female characters.
The creator of the series, Stephen Knight, conceived it as a kind of Western. Raw masculinity seems to need strong women to enable heroic men to shine, but the outcome is always sadly misogynistic, as they can never win. Peaky Blinders denies female characters a role in driving the narrative and frequently diminishes their status or hurts them. Many have noticed small issues of non-fact, perhaps because the source is mainly a novel from four decades ago, rather than contemporary records.
For example, Georgia in the Caucasus is described as tsarist in the Soviet civil war, whereas it had been Menshevik, but was conquered by the Bolsheviks before the time of the story, and Winston Churchill wasn’t home secretary in 1919 but had been a decade before.
Stories around the IRA, which appear to be sourced from online biographies of communists from Birmingham and Coventry who actively supported the war of Irish independence, are closer to the 1970s scene than 50 years before, but worryingly, they take no account of the distinct position that communists took in each instance.
And it’s highly unlikely that gangsters named Peaky Blinders ever used razor blades in their caps. The name probably just came from the peaked flat cap, which could hurt if you were poked in the eye with it. Peaky Blinders were, like Teds in the 1950s, a name for a style of youth dressing, which dated from 30 years before the series is set.
Eden wasn’t a mass union leader in 1926, merely a shop steward of a small group of unionised women, hugely outnumbered by 10,000 non-unionised women at the Lucas motor vehicle factory. Unlike the portrayal in the TV series, she was never a professional paid official for a union, able to clad herself in Roaring Twenties flapper finery. Making her the “area convener for the Boilermakers’ Union” is a travesty of understanding of what a convener was for, let alone which unions dominated the locality. Yet seemingly, “with a single blow of a whistle she can bring the whole of Birmingham’s workforce out on strike.” This is some accomplishment given the many hundreds of unions and the relative absence of joint shop stewards committees at that time.
The show is planned to end with air raid sirens sounding in World War II, over another two series. How will it deal with Eden’s greatest achievements, thus far unshown? For her remarkable true story has been obscured in the drive for mass marketability.
Eden’s leadership triggered the founding of mass factory trade unionism for women and young workers in the Midlands. And also so far unshown is her equally extraordinary achievement in bringing 45,000 Birmingham Council tenants out on rent strike in 1939 — and winning. From her late forties to her retirement she was the key official of the city’s tenants’ association.
