When a celebrity becomes untouchable after putting in tens of thousands of hours of work, spending years perfecting her craft, and earning 19 Academy Award nominations, she's achieved Meryl Streep status. To this day, Meryl Streep is the only one who has attained it.
Streep's success as an actress has turned her into a quasi-deity, and she's used that leverage to speak out on issues like the gender pay gap and fighting ageism in Hollywood. Her prominence, coupled with the issues she's invested in, is the reason we get articles with hyperbolic headlines like "God Bless Meryl Streep..."; "Meryl Streep is the perfect person to call out sexism in film criticism"; "53 reasons why Meryl Streep is the best"; and "10 reasons Meryl Streep is queen of everything."
Streep's transcendence from actress into all-around hero represents a master class in celebrity image management. People expect her to be good in movies and be a good person. But as it turns out, even Meryl Streep isn't immune to bad decisions and the internet hate that comes with them.
The T-shirt that tested people's love for Meryl Streep
During the promotional tour for her new movie, Suffragette, a period piece about the women's suffrage movement in Britain, Streep had an interview with Time Out London. What she said in that interview didn't matter, because of a T-shirt she wore for the accompanying photo shoot. It read, "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave," and in the days that followed, the other Suffragette actresses started appearing in the same shirt:
Uh... Oh. pic.twitter.com/vBWIqxha75
— Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) October 5, 2015
The shirt upset people, in part because it could be interpreted as a reference to the Confederacy and slavery. No one genuinely thinks that Streep was actually trying to make a dumb statement about secession, the Civil War, and the South. Nor do people believe she was blaming slaves for their own enslavement.
They were more upset that she didn't consider how the shirt could be interpreted. They were upset because it's a reference to literal slavery, by white women. And because, well, you expect more from Meryl Streep.
Meryl Streep has to know better. And if not, her publicist should have.
— deray mckesson (@deray) October 5, 2015
The woman who said these words wasn't exactly a saint
"I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" are the words of Emmeline Pankhurst, a British revolutionary who was the head of the suffrage movement that won women in her country the right to vote. Streep plays her in the movie. Pankhurst's original quote is as follows:
Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.
The quote has its basis in coverture, a concept in English common law where a woman was considered her husband's property. This concept also found its way to America.
Pankhurst wasn't American and didn't have the same relationship with or historical perspective of the Civil War as Americans do. She was using the empirical definitions of "rebel" and "slave" to illustrate a woman's right to vote, and wasn't referring to the Confederacy.
But let's be clear: Pankhurst and the British suffrage movement she led had a complex relationship with matters of race. Britain has its own complicated history of slavery and the tendency to bury it. The Telegraph talked to suffragette scholars, one of whom explained that black women were not visible in the movement and that Pankhurst eventually became a conservative later in her life.
Jad Adams, a historian and author of Women and the Vote: A World History, told the Telegraph that black women weren't a major part of the suffrage movement due to the class barrier. Black women in Britain were part of the lower working class and didn't have the security to join in the movement. But even if they had the financial stability, Adams believes black women still might not have been encouraged to participate.
"I wouldn’t presume [black women] would have been welcome [in the suffrage movement] if they’d joined," Adams told the Telegraph.
The context of the quote didn't matter to the American internet
What's important to remember here is that it's magazines, not actresses, that are in charge of photo shoots; ergo, the decision to use the T-shirt in question was on Time Out London. In a statement, the magazine said that it invited the actresses from Suffragette to participate in the photo spread, signaling it wasn't a studio decision. The magazine also said the quote was being taken out of context:
Time Out published the original feature online and in print in the UK a week ago. The context of the photoshoot and the feature were absolutely clear to readers who read the piece. It has been read by at least half a million people in the UK and we have received no complaints.
The implication here is that American audiences took the photo out of context, while Brits who understand their history saw no problem with it.
Part of what makes the outrage fascinating is that it shows how we view social media platforms like Twitter through an American lens. Even though Streep is starring in a British film about British suffragettes, and was promoting said British movie in a British publication, it didn't matter once the photo hit the internet. The context fell away, and the picture was blasted.
The picture, white feminism, and Meryl Streep
"My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit," Flavia Dzodan wrote in an essay pointing out that white feminism can fall into a terrible tendency of being à la carte — that "feminists" will champion equality as it suits them, and ignore things like racial inequality or LGBT discrimination. Dzodan's words dovetail with a major criticism of feminism today — that white women who call themselves feminists tend to pay attention only to issues that pertain to them.
This idea came to life in the Meryl Streep T-shirt controversy. The fact that Streep didn't seem to recognize how her shirt could be interpreted is, to some people, confirmation that feminism still isn't intersectional.
Streep hasn't commented on the shirt. She probably won't, since Time Out has taken responsibility with its apology. But like the context of the quote, that apology pales in comparison with the image of the most recognizable and respected American actress of the past 30 years wearing a T-shirt her publicist shouldn't have cleared. And the outrage is as much a testament to Streep's image as it is to the internet outrage machine that overwhelmed it.