Sweetheart on the barricade

Dear Richard Thompson,

Don’t get me wrong, I love that you’re one of a handful of people writing songs about working class women. “We stood on the picket line, my Jennifer and me.” “She's my bright jewel of the alley / She's my Cooksferry Queen.” “I fell in love with a laundry girl who was working next to me.” Okay, you’ve established factory girls as romantic leads. But I assume there’s not a Jennifer out there writing songs about how much fun it was to picket with you as an accessory, her Richard, the equal of any woman? Not so much fun to be cast purely as the love interest, is it?

While you’re at it, why don’t you do a cover of “Union Maid” and advise us all to “get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary”? It might not go over so well with Jennifer, though.

Sincerely,
your feminist academia queen