British bank notes - Gender and class politics played out

Pride, Not Prejudice, we did it! 35K signed on @UKChange & @bankofengland will put a woman on banknotes http://ow.ly/i/2GVq6 

Is filling me twitter feed. Is it only me who feels a little deflated by this. Yes we have kept a woman on a bank note and the swap will happen at the same time as losing Elizabeth Fry from the £5. But lets be careful not to confuse a woman on a bank note with women on bank notes. There are 4 notes are there not and will still only be one woman (aside from the Queen). 

I did sign the campaign and am incredibly relieved that women have not been lost altogether and grateful to those women who tirelessly led the campaign at great cost to themselves, but at most this represents a stalling if not a slight regression and certainly not progress. Elizabeth Fry was an activist and reformer who called out abuse and exposed oppression. Jane Austin wrote love stories, which however subversive or radical they might have been at the time probably represent a message to women today to conform to a worldview that regards achieving matrimonial bliss and securing Mr Darcy and his large house as women's primary goal in life.

I am more interested in the outcomes of a review of selection policy which has also been announced and how that policy is implemented.  Currently the criteria requires that candidates be uncontroversial but Churchill made it through. How can anyone do anything significant and not be controversial? Churchill wasn't just the PM during the second world war he also fiercely opposed Indian independence and was no friend to women's suffrage, hardly. It is his memory which is supposedly uncontroversial not him himself.

Is it only me who in this age of cuts and shameless right wing propaganda feels uneasy that as a replacement for the social reformer Elizabeth Fry we have Winston Churchill. It just feels like a bit more hiding of a certain British history. Just like we saw at the jubilee and Thatchers funeral the right speak a narrative of our shared history many of us don't feel we share.

So sorry for not joining the party but while Jane Austin may have some feminist elements I can't see it as a massive achievement. Especially when she's got on at the expense of Elizabeth Fry - we should not have to have an either/or. Patriarchy pitting woman against each other on our bank notes. 

I know I'm spoiling the party. Sorry.