Presentations and Conference Papers

BSECS ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008

GENCAS ANNUAL CONFERENCE. The Merry Widow: Rethinking Widowhood in History, Culture and Society 2007

(CENTRE FOR RESEARCH INTO GENDER IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY) conference paper

The Scottish Widow: ‘Preparation is Everything’.

In June 1996, about a month after my husband’s body was discovered and I began to emerge from a self-imposed numbness, I reluctantly made my way to the benefits office in Andover to collect the Widowed Mother’s Pension. I didn’t want to have to admit that I needed this money. I wanted to be able to raise my six-year-old son without government support. But getting out of bed to be available to him and to help him with the trauma of losing his father, took all the energy I had. At the window inside the benefits office, I was greeted by a lady with a kind smile. I handed over my husband’s death certificate and the completed application for the Widowed Mother’s Pension.

‘Are you collecting this for your mum, luv?’ the lady kindly queried.

‘No,’ I replied, feeling that I had the word ‘widow’ scrawled across my forehead. I continued, ‘It’s for me.’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking up and into my eyes with a sort of astonishment I would become accustomed to seeing when I told people I was a widow.

‘You don’t look like a widow.’

On my way home that day I started wondering what a widow looked like. I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was one. As I walked up the street on the way to the pharmacy to pick up some vitamins, I passed a bus shelter featuring a full-colour ad of the Scottish Widow looking out at me. ‘Preparation is Everything’, was written in reversed out white text above her head.

She seemed to be about my age and she didn’t look too bothered about being widowed. Perhaps she was prepared. I wasn’t.

‘Is that what a widow looks like?’ I wondered. And so began my journey into trying to find out about where our ideas about conduct and appearance associated with widowhood came from. Here is the first paper I gave at a conference of academic women who were talking about representations of widows. I decided that my approach would be to ‘uncloak’ the widow by finding out how and why she was constructed for a financial services company with Widows in its name.  Ever since the day I walked past that Scottish Widow on the bus shelter, I’ve pushed against and embraced her in equal measure. 

Solent University (Southampton) Research Seminar Lecture Series, 2018

Marina: Narrative Accounts of an Assassin’s Widow

These slides will guide you through some of Marina’s experiences, first as Marina Prusakova: a young woman who lived an ordinary life in 1950s Russia, then as Marina Oswald, wife and mother and finally as Marina Oswald, assassin’s widow. Marina was studying for her qualification as a pharmacist. She was dating different guys, asking questions about which one she liked best, and enjoying being young. The young adult Jacqueline Bouvier was doing something very similar, but across the pond in a different social sphere. In the same way that everything changed in Jackie’s life after she met Jack Kennedy, so too did everything change in Marina’s life when an American ex-Marine walked into the dance Marina had gone to. Jackie was used to being photographed; Marina wasn’t. 

When Marina became involved with Lee, he was already drawing attention to himself. The U.S. Embassy in Russia knew about him through the ‘announcements’ he made to them about wanting to defect. And there’s lots more. Tempting as it might be, I don’t want to make the story about Lee Harvey Oswald; there are plenty of stories out there about him. This story is about Marina and how through her association with Lee: as his wife, as the mother of his daughters and later as the assassin’s widow, she came to be the focus of unwanted media attention and the subject of a range of narrative accounts about her.

There aren’t many photos of the private side of Marie’s life. No-one has written her biography and there are no photos of her life as a child growing up in Red River County near Clarksville, Texas. What we do have are a few photos of her life with J.D. Tippit. Marie gave very few interviews. The ones we do have were media appearances she made at ceremonies designed to commemorate her first husband’s memory. However, Marie does have a story and it’s an important one in the context of the historical record of the ‘dark weekend’. The slides in this presentation show the 35-year-old widow Tippit in deep grief at her husband’s funeral and later on her own with her young children. She married again to another Dallas police officer, Harry Dean Thomas, and became a widow a second time when he died from cancer. There was a third marriage to Carl Flinner, but it ended in divorce.

In the last years of Marie’s life, she reverted to using Tippit as her last name, almost as a means of going back to the place she had hoped she would never have to leave.

Marie Tippit died in Texas during the Covid-19 pandemic, about five weeks before what would have been her 93^rdbirthday.