Clerks
£2.40
‘Clerks’ Anti-Brexit Greeting Card to support the No Brexit, anti-Brexit movement, featuring a mockup of a World War II Ministry Of Information poster about clerical work for ‘girls’.
– Blank inside for your own message
– Printed in the UK on premium card stock
– Supplied with a white envelope
In stock
Description
Clerks
Clerks is an anti-Brexit greeting card featuring a mockup of a World War II Ministry Of Information poster about clerical work for ‘girls’. It reads as follows:
Ministry Of Labour, The Ministry of Food requires girls aged fifteen to seventeen years of age to enrol for clerical work for the duration of Brexit. Continuing education will be provided in working hours. Recruits can therefore earn and learn at the same time! The food question is a woman’s question. Come and help the Food Ministry. The want you now! Apply at your local Brexit office.
Implied Messages
One of the implied messages is that the cry will go out for girls to help and that they will be women when they complete the system. Another implied message is that the work will be somehow lesser work than that done by men. The reference to food implies also that women or girls should only be concerned with domestic matters. All in all it is a slight on women. And that is what is at the bottom of our thinking with this satirical card. It is a spoof on old Ministry Of Information posters because its attitude to women is antiquated.
How will it all pan out? Will girls and women fill the clerical roles?
Clerks were originally priests, and the word comes from the Latin word clericus. That use reflects the fact that at one time only clerics could read and write. Therefore it was they who acted as scribes and bookkeepers. So perhaps Brexit will be the turning point that marks the slow descent back into a kind of 21st century feudalism. People with technical skills in computers will be the new meritocracy. And the womenfolk will bake the bread, as it were.
Coding Skills For Clerks
Well that is not likely to happen because coding skills reside in both sexes. In fact the rise of women in the workplace can be measured in step with the rise of these non-physical skills. It is hard to imagine a dystopian world like that in The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel about a patriarchal future where fertile women are a tightly controlled commodity seems a million miles away. It seems to be a long way from what we (the collective we) would put up with.
But then perhaps some variant of the coronavirus could upset all the best laid plans of mice and men. And then who knows what tomorrow’s world will be like?
SKU: B0005