From Peggy Seeger's web site as recommended by a poster above:

"At the time I wrote that interviewers always went to Ewan first."


"aking political points with humour is well instanced in her Give 'Em An Inch, a little something that touches upon the transition from boyhood to adultery represented by an inch of dangly flesh. "I do think in feminist songs that you have to somehow make people laugh at what everybody realises is a humorous situation like this little kid that's born with a little inch of flesh. I got that idea from a cartoon where the mother looks absolutely exhausted and the midwife is holding a baby up and saying, 'Oh, this is why they're so powerful'. There's this little dick sticking out. It was an excellent cartoon. You laughed at it immediately. This is why cartoons put things into a capsule, in one statement, something that you can then open out into a whole situation. Both men and women laugh at that. They can't do anything else. The average man does not think of himself with a willy an inch long. More women, than men would like to believe, laugh at where the penis leads men. Laughter apparently does all kinds of things to the brain and the body that they don't even really know about. Laughing with somebody at the same situation, rather than at somebody, works."

Now what did Ewan write about (among other things in his biography)? I did mention this before, and now maybe the point of this reference may become clearer.

This also had chimes with what we know of Ewan's own family background, with its mention of 'bitter' arguments. History repeats itself they say:

My daughter Kitty told me recently that I'd said at one point that Ewan was my perfect life-partner. I still think he was. She said, 'But you argued all the time!' I don't remember arguing all the time. I don't remember bitter arguments. Were they bitter ones? When she told me about one, then I remembered it. I tend to remember the good things."

And one thing I personally got out of the autobiography is how much the women MacColl hooked up with did for him, in terms of supporting him, doing organisational work he could or would or did not do, in terms of bringing theory to his attention and so on. I don't think he would have been the phenomenon he was without his wives. It seems to me that Peggy may have worked a lot harder than he did, as she seems to have taken on all the domestic stuff that the live-in help did not do. Harker does mention I think that he hit her on one occasion but you don't get this picture of bitter arguments. But Peggy herself has put that into the public domain, so there it is.

It'll be interesting to hear what Al gets out of Peggy's autobiography if he feels like sharing what he reads.


I am sorry if my line of analysis seems controversial, I mention it to express my responses and not to try to wind anybody up. And, yes, to some extent this is how things were at the time.