Daughters of Emma Peel
A Pilgrimage to Broome Street
A few weeks back, my post on the late writer, Jeff Zaslow, circled back to the longform essay that kicked off this Substack, and how I’d been forced to cut mercilessly from that piece. The months I spent researching and writing my longform Playboy essay meant traveling backwards in time, revisiting the TV shows and music and politics that I’d grown up with. My old haunts, a collage of 1970s pop culture, had me weighing the individual strands that truly stood out. While writing “Daughters of the 1970s” and considering the impact of second wave feminism on how women were depicted in Hollywood, I’d thought first of Emma Peel.
Emma Peel was a character from the charming, slightly spoofy British spy show, The Avengers, that ran in the 1960s. Married, though her husband was missing in the Amazon for the entirety of her time on the show, she was whip smart and credible as a karate expert and had somehow been enlisted as a secret agent aligned with the government. Her call to action in each episode was a missive from her partner, John Steed: “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.”
According to Geoff Loftus, a writer on leadership in history, pop culture and business, “she was a breakthrough character in every possible way.” And she stood in solid contrast to the depiction of female power on Charlie’s Angels.
Despite Betty Friedan’s work and the mounting women’s movement and the eventual inroads they’d make into the culture, genuine female empowerment would be a slow bleed into Hollywood. Much of the success of Charlie’s Angels was “because none of us wears a bra,” as Farrah Fawcett put it.1 For a few reasons, mostly because I could not fit in everything I wanted to say about Emma Peel—and her portrayal by the incomparable Diana Rigg—I left her on the “cutting room floor.” I knew I’d come back to her.
What I first want to tell you is that doing a little background research on Emma Peel, I went to retrieve an essay on her I’d read quite a few years back by the memoirist Lucette Lagnado. It was in that Google search that I came across a bar on NYC’s Lower East Side. The Emma Peel Room.
A little more Googling and I found there’s also a venue in London. Peel, an event space “[n]amed after the always elegant and spirited Emma Peel from The Avengers, this room has a large white lacquer table at its centre crowned by a pivoting chandelier. A wall of silver birch trees and blonde wood defines this serene space.”
Lucette Lagnado, who passed away in 2019, would, I think, be pleased to see Emma Peel as both avatar of an au courante downtown bar in Manhattan, and namesake of a sleekly decked out private dining venue in the UK. Ms. Lagnado was more than a fan. She was a senior special writer at The Wall Street Journal, the author of two books on her Jewish family’s exile from Egypt in the early 1960s, and she’d written extensively about how deeply Mrs. Peel had mattered to her. “[A]bout how as a girl bedridden with cancer, she was inspired by Emma Peel, the fearless British secret agent…”
Emma Peel was many things. She contained multitudes.
She announced herself to us in 1965, the first of two seasons she spent fighting crime as the replacement for Honor Blackman’s character on the existing spy show, The Avengers. Her preferred motorcar was an open-top coupe.
Her partner, John Steed, was played by Patrick Macnee. The actor was the son of a socialite and a sophisticate in real life. Unfailingly polite, John Steed referred to her, always, as Mrs. Peel.
In the vast wasteland of female agency that was network TV in the early 1960s, Emma Peel made us take notice. At the time, the women with the most “power” in television were Barbara Eden’s Jeannie (an actual genie in I Dream of Jeannie) and Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha (a witch in the series Bewitched). Both shows were premised on the female characters stifling their abilities, their magical gifts, in deference to their male partners. Thought leaders and scholars have argued over whether these women, Samantha in particular, were foretelling the increase in female power that was burgeoning, echoing societal misogyny or some mashup of the evolving culture that was the 1960s. It’s hard to argue that any sitcom featuring Agnes Moorehead, with her flowy caftans and take-no-prisoners sarcasm, was an homage to traditional gender roles. But still, Bewitched sought to confine Samantha to the role of “housewife.”
To me, then in grammar school without any understanding of misogyny or any personal opinions on feminism, I did have an opinion on Bewitched. It was a show I adored, yet it had struck something inside of me; something that I did understand. It was unfair.
It was unfair that Samantha was told not to use her powers. It was unfair that Darrin, her husband who was “mortal,” always got the credit whenever Samantha saved the day (which was the plot structure of a great majority of the episodes). I understood unfair.
Emma Peel was never treated unfairly. She wouldn’t allow it. No one would ever think to do so. Lucette Lagnado laid out her power in this interview:
Q: What was it about Emma Peel that captured your attention?
A: I loved and adored Emma Peel. She really was my childhood passion, I was obsessed and infatuated. She had all the qualities I wanted to have -- she was of course very stylish and very pretty -- but she was also an amazing intellect, and exceedingly brave -- able to cut down bad guys with karate chops and judo moves. The show, The Avengers, was fascinating to me -- and then there was Mrs. Peel with her gorgeous designer clothes and incredible hairdo but she never used sexuality to get her way; and I liked that too; she was so cerebral. She became an ideal and a role-model. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say, "an Avenger." What is sad is that I became so different from Mrs. Peel -- oh a part of me is definitely an avenger, down to the stories I try to pursue as a reporter, no question, but I find that I get frightened of so much......
She was beautiful because that’s what the show demanded of its star and its character. Her name, Emma Peel, was a play on the phrase, “m. appeal” or “man appeal,” which was essentially, “the male gaze.” But Emma Peel subverted that. For her, beauty was a way to teach by example. Never allowing herself to be shoved into the neat categories of the day, where women were either pretty or smart. What we’d been ingrained to believe. Even her slinky catsuits were not merely slinky catsuits, nor were they merely stylish; her clothing was a conduit to courage. She was successful in her subversive acts, earning the respect of men. For Geoff Loftus, “If you’re a man of a certain age…your vision of women was transformed the first time you saw a British television series called The Avengers, starring Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel.”
Still, I don’t want to overstate the impact of two seasons from a cult British TV show. By now, Patrick Macnee has likely been seen more times in his cameo as the record executive, Sir Denis Eton-Hogg in This is Spinal Tap. Diana Rigg left The Avengers to return to the Royal Shakespeare Company. With a career that lasted to include Game of Thrones as Lady Olenna Tyrell, she’d been Regan to Sir Lawrence Oliver’s King Lear in a televised performance, Helena in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper, and a Bond girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (and James Bond’s only wife). She earned a Tony Award for her role in Medea, and received appointments from the crown, including the title, Dame Diana Rigg. The Avengers was a type of stardom she wasn’t looking for.2
As for feminist icons, beyond Betty Friedan, there was Gloria Steinem (controversial but still iconic). There’s dissident feminist, Camille Paglia. There’s everything in between. Second Wave and Third Wave. Girl Boss. Female Chauvinist Pigs. Revisiting the Sexual Revolution. Too many Wikipedia pages full of activists and movements. Every single one of them competing to be seen and heard above all the others. What space could there be for a woman transmitted to us as a grainy silhouette on the black-and-white 12-inch screens of our youths?
And yet, to have experienced Emma Peel in real time; a breath of heroism and sophistication and Swinging Sixties fashion who came out of nowhere and blindsided us, is to understand how the earth was created out of microscopic specks of dust in the cosmos.
Role model? Aspirational figure?
One could legitimately make the argument that Emma Peel changed our DNA.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Watching
This Week’s Music
"Miss Emma Peel" by Dishwalla (on Spotify and Amazon Music)
Just One More Thing
All questions and comments welcome, but here is a question for this week:
Who’s your action hero?
Independent, “Charlie’s Timeless Angels: Women Who transformed Television,” August 30, 2006.
The Record, December 5, 1967.
Love this, Melanie! I want to go to the Emma Peel Room :) My action hero is Neo (Keanu)
Emma Peel always looked above it all, like she was in on the cosmic joke, which made it less depressing that she wore catsuits and the like. Every boy I knew was in love with her. One friend still calls his partner Mrs. Peel—highest compliment.