Breaking down Sexist Barriers in Happy Valley

by: Heather Salter Dromm , June 14, 2021

‘I’m 47. I’m divorced. I live with my sister, who’s a recovering heroin addict. I have two grown up children, one dead, one who doesn’t speak to me, and a grandson,’ says Sergeant Catherine Cawood of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, which first aired on BBC One on 29 April 2014, and is now available to American audiences via Netflix. Cawood delivers this introductory monologue to a suicidal Calder Valley, West Yorkshire villager in one of the first scenes of the show’s pilot episode while garbed, per usual, in police uniform. Viewers later learn in the same episode that Cawood’s daughter Becky was a rape victim who became pregnant with her attacker’s child and then committed suicide shortly after giving birth and that her rapist Tommy Lee Royce has just been released from prison, where he was being held on a drug conviction. Throughout most of season one, Cawood, as well as battling sexist barriers, political corruption and local drug dealers, investigates Royce’s involvement in the kidnapping of Anne Gallagher, while raising Becky’s son Ryan. In season two, Cawood tries to find a serial killer who has been targeting vulnerable women in Calder Valley. Applying the feminist theories of moral freedom from Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity sheds light on the ways in which Cawood breaks down these barriers through her commitment to her principles and responsibilities to community and family.

Sexist Barriers

In The Second Sex, De Beauvoir says, ‘[m]an defines woman not in herself but as relative to him…she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other’. (De Beauvoir 1970: xvi) In classic crime dramas, the male is subject, such as in CBS’s Perry Mason (1957-1966) and NBC’s Dragnet (1951-1959, 1967-1970), Columbo (1971-1978) and Hunter (1984-1991), while women are sidekicks and secretaries. Regarding women in classic series such as Dragnet, and in hardboiled detective fiction, such as The Big Sleep, Nete Schmidt states:

In the workplace, the female detective is exposed to the hierarchy of the patriarchal society. The sex kittens of former times are above work … and their less rich and fortunate sisters in Philip Marlowe’s universe are primarily secretaries working behind the scenes, gaining little recognition or reward. Women are dispensable props, placed on life’s periphery, merely intended to show off the prowess of the male. (2015: 429) 

There have, of course, been some exceptions to this paradigm on classic television, such as the series Cagney and Lacey (1982-1988) and Get Christie Love! (1974-1975). There have also been several contemporary examples that break this mold other than Catherine Cawood. Some of these include DCI Cassie Stuart of BBC’s Unforgotten (2015, 2017-2018), Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope of the British crime series Vera (2011-2020), and Annika Bengzton of Sweden’s Annika Bengzton: Crime Reporter (2012), just to name a few. 

Although there were always exceptions, especially after the second wave of feminism, female detectives were often still degraded to the status of ‘dispensable props’ (2015: 429) working behind the scenes, as Nete Schmidt put it, and also as sex objects to further intensify the ‘prowess of the male’. (2015: 429) According to Lisa M. Dresner, even when female detectives did move beyond the secretary and sidekick roles, show creators and writers still sometimes placed them in male sexual fantasies. To back up her claim, Dresner presents the example of a Charlie’s Angels’ (1976-1981) episode in which the Angels go undercover as ‘inmates in a women’s prison-cum-bordello’. (2007: 91) To further illustrate Dresner’s point, I would add that in an episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015), private investigator Phryne Fisher spoofs this common trope by going undercover as a burlesque fan dancer. 

While classic crime dramas have objectified women by reducing them to secretaries, sidekicks, and sex kittens, some contemporary popular crime dramas have focused heavily on the showing of sexualised victims in what Barbara Klinger calls ‘gothic striptease,’ which she says are ‘not based on a full, prolonged gaze, but on intermittent visual hints’. (2018: 528) Klinger provides further explanation of this term in the following:

Just as the contract between burlesque performer and audience relies on a performer removing clothing piece by piece for sexual display and stimulation, this [type of] program’s code enters into a ritual of concealing and revealing infused with a voyeuristic desire to see and know. As the show figures an abject female body in netherworld spaces, [the] suspenseful apportioning of information … blends gothic and erotica to manufacture and circulate the body crime TV often requires. Like striptease, the audience knows what is coming, but waits for the performance’s specific iteration. Unlike striptease, anticipation is connected not just to nudity, but also to bodily annihilation … The forensic and other scenes produce a series of ‘congested glimpses’. (2018: 628) 

 The ‘congested glimpses’ and the ‘gothic striptease’ Klinger describes are present in episodes of the U.K. series The Fall (2013-2016) in the ways in which the bodies of female murder victims are depicted. For example, in the third episode of the first season, the serial killer Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan, paints the nails of the woman he has just murdered as her naked corpse lies on the bathroom floor. After he has washed her body and sheets, he returns her to the bed where he killed her and displays her body as if he were preparing a photoshoot for a pornographic magazine. The body is on display again in several frames when her sister discovers her, when a police officer arrives at the scene, and when forensics investigates. Klinger goes on to say that by ‘blend[ing] gothic and erotica,’ especially in forensic investigations, ‘anticipation is connected not just to nudity, but also to [mutilation]’ (2018: 528), which robs the victim of her personhood and reduces her to object. Of course, that is what the killer has done to her, but the narrative framework fails to elevate her above that status in its representation.

Another negative element that sometimes occurs in contemporary crime fiction is the feeling of inadequacy which manifests as an internal conflict within the mind of the female detective. She feels that she is not up to the tasks she must accomplish. According to Nete Schmidt, women in contemporary crime dramas ‘typically face demands that bring out their inherent guilt feelings. They do not feel competent and capable, and they feel that they never perform satisfactorily or live up to the expectations of their surroundings’. (2015: 432) These feelings of inadequacy are the ‘negative side effects of patriarchal society’ (2015: 423) and relate directly to what Cecilia L. Ridgeway and Shelley J. Correll, in keeping with De Beauvoir’s theory of gender as a social construct in which ‘[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ (1970: 283), refer to as ‘the cultural rules or instructions for enacting the social structure of … gender’. (2004: 511) Furthermore, Schmidt observes, ‘[e]ven though these beliefs are stereotypes, they still carry a substantial and broad social significance, as the inner battles of [female detective characters] clearly demonstrate’. (2015: 355) For Cawood, the feelings of inadequacy occur both in her family life and work life. Viewers of Happy Valley hear Cawood’s doubts in her abilities to adequately raise her grandson Ryan during a meeting at Ryan’s school in which the school’s head teacher tells her that she wants to bring in a child psychologist to discover the root cause of Ryan’s violent outbursts at school and to provide him with strategies to control his anger. Cawood, while sobbing, delivers the following dialogue:

Can I tell you something? Becky, my daughter, died just after Ryan was born. He was six weeks old. She never really wanted him, but she couldn’t do anything about it in time because I didn’t know she were pregnant, and she refused to believe she was…She was raped…And she couldn’t tell me because she was frightened of how I’d react, of me making her report it, which God knows I wouldn’t have done…She hanged herself in her bedroom…I had to look after Ryan. I didn’t have to, but I didn’t think there was an alternative…And he didn’t ask to be…None of it was his fault, was it? Complete innocent in the world, and nobody wants you. I didn’t particularly…but I do my best for him…I’m terrified if Ryan’s like [Royce] in any way, shape, or form, which he’s bound to be, isn’t he? 

Cawood reveals here that she believes that she is partially to blame for her daughter’s suicide because Becky thought that her mother would have put her responsibility to uphold the law before her daughter’s well-being. She also feels that Ryan’s behavioural problems are her fault.

At the workplace, Cawood has moments in which she feels that her superiors view her as inadequate and that they only trust her with the grunt work. Cawood says the following to her sister Clare after arresting a ring of drug-dealing ice cream vendors: 

You know what annoys me? I rang ahead. I flagged it up to the drug squad … Of course, it’s all ‘no comment. No comment. No comment.’ So that’s it for our level … Any intelligence they have, drug squad, about where all this stuff’s coming from how it’s getting here, I never get to hear about it. I just get to mop up the mess at the bottom end.

Cawood also sometimes mistrusts her own judgment when managing the young officers under her command. An example of this self-doubt occurs when she feels responsible for the death of Kirsten since she had just scolded the young officer for not being bolder when the councilman refused arrest. Cawood tells her, ‘You’re a police officer. No one bullies you.’ Kirsten responds, ‘All I’ve ever wanted to be was a police officer, and I’m shit at it.’ Cawood expresses to Clare that if she had not been so hard on Kirsten and had said, ‘No. You’re not shit at it,’ then Kirsten would not have pulled over Royce’s accomplice without backup and Royce would not have run her over and killed her.

 Cawood’s internalisation of the guilt she feels for failing to capture Royce and keep him contained creates another barrier that threatens the freedom of her autonomy. Though she knows that vigilante violence goes against the moral principles of her career and core beliefs, Cawood imagines ‘the exquisite satisfaction [she would] get from grinding [Royce’s] severed scrotum into the mud with the underside of [her] shittiest shoe and burying his worthless carcass in a shallow grave.’ According to Julia Sineokaya’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory on revenge, the person seeking revenge ‘ends up trapped in evil, becoming a captive’ in which ‘the will turns all of life’s joy into frustration and rage, thereby venting its powerlessness against the past’. (2015: 355) If Cawood were to kill Royce and hide his body, she would be breaking the very laws that she works so hard to uphold and defend. Moreover, the creators of Happy Valley seem to suggest that if Cawood did grant herself the position of judge, jury and executioner, she would be no better that season two’s Detective Sergeant John Wadsworth, who murders his vindictive ex-lover and frames the serial killer for the crime. The guilt that results from Wadsworth’s act of revenge torments his psyche and holds him captive. In the final episode of season two, unable to face the consequences of his actions and continue to live the with the guilt, Wadsworth commits suicide. If Cawood is to overcome guilt and the feeling of inadequacy and thereby obtain autonomy, she must free herself from the temptation of vengeance.

Cawood Breaks Barriers

De Beauvoir offers the following theory as an answer to why men have often been in charge throughout human history: ‘superiority has been granted to man’ due to his status as a warrior, because he ‘put his life in jeopardy to elevate the prestige of … the clan to which he belonged;’ historically, women were often not allowed the opportunity to become warriors. (De Beauvoir 1970: 58) If viewers were to ponder this theory while analysing feminist concepts in Happy Valley, they would see Cawood as a warrior since she continuously risks her life and refuses to back away from fights, proving that the lives of Calder Valley citizens are worth saving and deserving of dignity and respect. When she gets close to the suicidal villager, she puts herself in danger; the possibility exists that she might burn to death with him, even though she jokingly tells her colleague who makes a remark about her sunglasses that ‘he can blow himself up to kingdom come if he wants to but he’s not taking my eyebrows with him.’ In episode two, Cawood takes on a gang of drug dealing ice cream vendors and shatters the passenger window of the truck with her baton, completely ignoring the voice at police headquarters coming over her radio that had advised her not to follow the ice cream truck on foot. When she does catch up with the criminals later in the episode, she doesn’t back down even when one of them kicks her in the face while she’s wrestling to get him handcuffed. 

Furthermore, Cawood endures a brutal beating at the hands of Royce when she arrives alone to rescue Ann Gallagher. The only weapon Cawood has with her is a police baton. Royce is able to quickly disarm her, and the two fight each other with their bare hands. Royce punches her in the stomach, and when she falls to the floor, he repeatedly kicks her. During the fight, Ann is able to continue to loosen her bonds. When she is free, she hits him over the head with a heavy object, and as he backs away in pain, she sprays him in the face with mace. Royce then retreats from the fight. Ann drags Cawood out of the building, and Cawood calls into her police radio and tells the dispatcher that she needs an ambulance. Refusing to linger in the role of damsels in distress, both women kept fighting, with the outcome being mutual rescue. 

Though her superiors may sometimes purposefully keep her in the dark, Cawood’s younger colleagues and subordinates look up to her, and call on her for help. In episode two of series one, an intoxicated city councilman refuses a breathalyzer test after rear ending the car of another motorist and calls the female constable on duty, in the words of Cawood, ‘a stupid little effing something that begins with “c”‘. Kirsten, the young constable on duty, calls on Cawood for backup because she knows her sergeant has the moxie to stand up to him, and she does. Cawood searches the councilman’s car and arrests him for cocaine possession.

When she arrests the councilman, Cawood, looking far from glamorous, is wearing her police uniform and is sporting a blackeye and other scars from her scuffle with the ice cream drug vendors, and looks as if she has been ‘through the wars’ as the councilman suggests. Happy Valley’s creator Sally Wainwright does not provide viewers any opportunity to sexually objectify her protagonist. Sergeant Cawood never goes undercover as a prostitute, fan dancer, or any type of male pornographic archetype. However, Wainwright does not completely de-sexualise her. Cawood and her ex-husband, who is married to a much younger woman, have a brief affair in the first season, which becomes only a minor plot detail. Cawood tells her sister Clare, ‘It’s not like we were doing anything we haven’t done a million times before.’ She also says that she just wanted a distraction from thinking about killing Royce, which is an idea that ‘has been buzzing around in [her] head’ every night. She has sex because she wants to and because she enjoys it. Furthermore, contemplating revenge and morality are concepts at the forefront of her mind; she is not preoccupied at all with winning the affections of a man or with reinforcing his prowess. 

Another feature of the show that overcomes sexist barriers is that it frames violence against women in a way that distances it from ‘gothic striptease.’ Although some may misinterpret the messages Happy Valley conveys and as Jenny Diski does in the London Review of Books, accuse Wainwright, of creating a ‘melodrama’ of the ‘misogyny … in so many cop/crime dramas such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’ (qtd. in Gorton 2016: 81), the grotesque ‘congested glimpses’ of the female body that Klinger describes do not occur in Happy Valley, mostly due to the ways in which the show depicts raped and murdered female victims. As Krysten Gorton notes, ‘we never see Tommy rape Ann, this is only alluded to and then confirmed by Ann when she discusses the rape with Catherine. This is really important because the rape(s) [of both Ann and Cawood’s daughter] are framed as violent, not as sexually gratuitous’ as they are in traditionally formatted detective programs. (2016: 82) Wainright continues to demonstrate that she ‘refuses to position Cawood as a victim [of her daughter’s rape] by using anger instead of sadness or melancholy’ as seen when Cawood is at her absolute lowest moment after she returns from the hospital to recover from the beating at the hands of Royce. (2016: 80) She is in physical agony and is discouraged that Royce got away before police backup could arrive at the scene. Gorton says that though ‘Cawood shouts, uses profanity, [and] gets angry with her grandson and her sister,’ viewers see her ‘as almost physically working through the pain and loss she has suffered and finding a way out of her own emotional entrapment’. (2016: 80) When faced with the opportunity to kill Royce, or to at least allow him to kill himself, she chooses ‘to do the right thing.’ Although her guilt and desire for vengeance threaten to victimise her, Cawood is able to work through these ideas by committing herself to her community. 

Cawood’s Commitment to Community 

De Beauvoir says that ‘freedom realizes itself only by engaging itself in the world: to such an extent that [a hu]man’s project toward freedom is embodied for [them] in definite acts of behavior’. (1976: 78) Tove Pettersen, Annlaug Bjørsnøs, and Margaret A. Simmons interpret Beauvoir’s theory on moral freedom in the following:

In everything Beauvoir wrote … she explains why we should embrace moral freedom … it is for our own and the sakes of others that we should espouse freedom. This reveals an important aspect of Beauvoir’s ethics: it is consistently intersubjective. In Beauvoir’s ethics, the agent’s motivation for acting morally is neither purely egoistic nor completely altruistic … For Beauvoir, a human being is present in the world as a being connected with others … Human beings are perceived as unique and free individuals, who are also interconnected with other unique and free beings. (2015: 75)

Even during her most vulnerable moments, when Cawood could easily become a victim of her daughter’s rape, she recovers by committing herself to helping someone else, just as her protégée Ann Gallagher does. The following dialogue occurs between Cawood and Ann in the final episode of season one: 

[Cawood says to Ann]: How are you coping?

[to which Ann responds]: I’m coping. I have to for my mother’s sake. Which is good. What happened says more about him than it will ever say about me. I’m not pregnant. I haven’t got AIDS.

[Cawood then responds]: That’s a good attitude. Women so often blame themselves. God knows why. But they do … You’re very rare’. (2016: quoted. in Gorton 82)

Gorton explains the exchange between Cawood and Ann in the following way: ‘Ann frames her emotional recovery through the need to be there for her mother who is dying of cancer. It is not to say that she does not feel anger or injustice over what happened to her, but that family enables her to move forward’. (2016: 82) Both Ann and Cawood find their strength in responsibility to family. Cawood looks after and supports her recovering addict sister and her grandson, though she admits that she never really wanted him. When she made the decision to raise him, she had to take a demotion at work to reduce her working hours and divorce her husband since he did not want to be a part of Ryan’s life. She falters sometimes, but she stays committed to her decision. She is visually very upset when speaking to the head teacher at Ryan’s school, but she stops crying, wipes her nose, pulls herself together and says, ‘But, no, you’re right. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, will it?’ Cawood refuses to wallow in self-pity and decides to continue to do her best for her grandson, putting her responsibility to him above her own fears and grief.

Caring for others makes Cawood a warrior, though not in the traditional sense.In many ways, Happy Valley is in line with the postfeminist Third Wave which, according to Stéphanie Genz, ‘establishes a link between . . . previously opposed alternatives as it carves out a new subjective space for women, allowing them to be feminine and feminist at the same time, without losing their integrity or being relegated to the position of passive dupes’. (2006: 344-345) According to Robyn Bahr in LA Weekly, ‘Cawood’s electrifying ‘mama bear’ posture is a refreshing reinvention of the classical hero. Misogynists may decry this emotional labor as ‘women’s work’ and some feminists will eschew it for fear of being pigeonholed into the role of caretaker, but there’s as much power in comforting the weary as there is in roughing up a bad guy’. (2016)  In a manner that is both caring in a feminine sense and feminist, as a Third and Fourth Wave warrior, Cawood’s policing practice is based on the principle of treating the vulnerable and marginalised with dignity and compassion. After the death of one of their fellow officers, Catherine tells officers going out on patrol:

We have to go out there and do what we do best. Be patient with people. Everything you have to deal with today is going to seem so trivial, but to anyone out there, if they’ve had to call the police, it’s a big deal. So whatever’s going on inside your head, you treat people with the compassion and respect they deserve.

 In both seasons, viewers see Cawood repeatedly put her beliefs about compassion for the marginalised into practice, such as when she places a trafficked girl from Croatia in the home of her neighbor and keeps watch over her all night in her cold conservatory in case the traffickers come to claim her back. In the first episode of season two, Cawood takes sandwiches to two prostitutes, treats them with dignity and concern, and addresses them by name. She asks the older one she calls Annette how she is ‘getting on at Lifeline’ and asks the younger one, Leonie, if she has been taking care of herself. Cawood then delivers the following message, which is the purpose of her visit:

Listen. You need to know we’ve got a bit of a weirdo doing the rounds. He’s killed three girls. Women. One in Ellend, one in Brighouse, and another one two days ago up in Ovenden … He’s targeting vulnerable people like yourselves … And he’s not just killing them. He’s doing stuff to them. I can’t really tell you what. I’ll leave that to your imagination … So you need to be aware, alright? You need to have eyes in your backside.

Cawood recognises sex workers as one of the most vulnerable groups on the streets and is so committed to protecting them that she chastises others for not doing the same. Later, when Leonie is raped by a man who Cawood thinks might be the serial killer who has been murdering prostitutes, she yells at the two officers who were on duty who were supposed to take Leonie’s statement and asks them why they didn’t do their jobs properly. One officer answers that she had always been ‘told to take whatever they say with a pinch of salt.’ Cawood responds,‘“They?” Prostitutes? We’re talking about a vulnerable nineteen-year-old. Her face was bruised. Her neck was bruised. That isn’t somebody crying “wolf.”’ When the officer replies in her defense that it was dark, Cawood loses her temper and shouts, ‘You’ve got a torch, haven’t you?’ Cawood also protects the vulnerable who have suffered loss. She comforts the weary Ann Gallagher, who has been grieving the loss of her mother to cancer by taking her out for drinks. Later in the night, Catherine loses track of Ann. The next morning, on the way to work, Cawood offers Ann a morning after pill and tells her, ‘I don’t know what you did. I don’t know if you need it … Just in case.’ When Ann asks Cawood how much she owes her, Cawood responds, ‘No, it’s fine. It’s nothing. It’s a present’. 

Though a warrior in bringing dignity to the downtrodden, Cawood is not, however, the type of detective Dresner refers to as a Columbo, one who ‘is always one step ahead of the bad guys, never fooled, and never beaten’. (2007: 113) The Columbo type of male-centered classic television has similar characteristics to De Beauvoir’s concept of the adventurer. According to De Beauvoir, the adventurer ‘throws himself into his undertakings with zest, into exploration, conquest, war, speculation … He likes action for its own sake. He finds joy in … freedom’ (1976: 58), but his is not the perfect model of freedom because he ‘remains indifferent to the content, that is to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account of others’. (1976: 61) A better model of freedom is someone who engages with the community, as Cawood does. 

Happy Valley is not about the adventure or about outwitting the bad guy; as Gorton puts it, the show is about women rescuing women and about women mustering ‘the strength and honesty to move forward’. (Gorton 2016: 81) Neither a victim nor a self-serving adventurer, Cawood breaks free and continues to commit herself to ‘mopping up the mess,’ so that others may be free from the ‘scrotes’, ‘nutters’ and ‘tossers’ who threaten to muck it all up.