There’s so much heart in Ben Taylor’s Joy that you won’t even hold its very formulaic filmmaking against it. While remembering and celebrating Jean Purdy, the most unacknowledged part of the trio behind one of the most groundbreaking scientific achievements in reproductive medicine, Joy doesn’t gloss over the universal implications of Jean’s story. On the surface, this is a movie about how nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, and Cambridge scientist Robert Edwards achieved the first in vitro birth while combating the wrath of the reactionary media and God-fearing society. But when you read between the lines, you’ll see that at its core, Joy is a feminist story that doesn’t want you to forget how hard the fight for rights and choices has always been.
Spoiler Alert
What happens in the film?
A young Jean didn’t even know what exactly the job entailed when she came in for an interview at Dr. Edwards’ lab in Cambridge. She was just excited to pursue her knack for scientific research further, but Edwards was consumed by a dream that took Jean by shock. His experiments on rodents got enough promising outcomes for him to believe that he could fertilize eggs outside of the human womb. But for that, he needed a skilled surgeon, someone who wouldn’t hesitate to challenge the conformist and misogynistic industry that’s Western medicine. Steptoe was the perfect candidate. He was bold, brilliant, and he’d recently rattled the world of medicine with a less-invasive way of examining the uterus. It was Jean’s charm and persistence that got Steptoe to come on board. They were underfunded, the hospital and the lab were a long journey for them all, and as soon as the world got wind of what they were trying to achieve, they were branded as sinners who were messing with God’s will. When Jean, Steptoe, and Edwards had started out, they knew it wouldn’t be an easy journey in any capacity. But they’d hoped that the world would not be so cynical about a scientific discovery that could give infertile women a chance to experience motherhood. In their hearts, they knew they were doing the right thing.
Why did the project shut down?
The kind of persistence and dedication Jean, Edwards, and Steptoe absolutely needed to have for them to persist through all the trials and tribulations can’t just come from ambition. They all knew that what they were aiming to achieve was world changing–not just in the field of science and medicine but also the lives of women as a whole. But people, media, and even the Scientific Research Council weren’t ready for that progress. Society didn’t want to lose one of their preferred ways to keep women tamed. Think about it. If in vitro fertilization could give infertile women a shot at motherhood, society wouldn’t be able to use their biological issue to make them feel bad about themselves. Edwards was likened to Dr. Frankenstein for having dared to try to create human life outside of the womb. It was completely ridiculous of a Nobel prize winning scientist like James Watson to claim that IVF could heighten the risk of babies being born disabled. And the way Watson approached it on national TV was spiteful, to say the least. All the while James Watson was going on his majorly ableist rant about whether or not disabled babies deserved to live, he knew his target audience would lap it up. Their hateful screams drowned out the sensible logic Edwards meant to put forward in their defense. And then came the church and the religious lot, harassing and humiliating everyone involved with the project and claiming that they’re playing God.
Edwards’ only mistake, if you can even call it that, was expecting that the people who were against his work would listen to reason. Jean Purdy’s personal life was in shambles as a consequence of her work. She was rejected by her church and practically thrown out by her God-fearing mother. Jean experienced doubts along the way. As a woman brought up with strong Christian dogma, Jean still thought of abortion as a sin against God and nature, and in extension, she saw Steptoe as a sinner for performing abortions. What she needed to learn about how Steptoe was a savior to women who needed a safe way to exercise their rights over their own bodies came from Matron Muriel of Kershaw hospital. That lesson only pushed Jean to get a better understanding of the job she was doing. She was in the business of giving women a choice. But even if they could block out the noise outside, they were facing countless setbacks while trying to perfect the fertilization and the embryo implantation process. It was a remarkable achievement for the entire group when one of the women they’d implanted an embryo in was pregnant. But they weren’t quite there yet. And it completely shattered them as they had to watch their hope disappear when the pregnancy turned out ectopic. The research might’ve gotten right back on its feet if it weren’t for the circumstances. Jean’s mother fell sick. And when the feeling of failure mingled with the guilt she felt for choosing her work over her family, Jean couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. She abandoned her dream and moved back home to care for her dying mother. And without her, the whole project fell apart. The hopelessness infected Edwards too. And soon, the project was shut down.
How did Jean restart the research?
Jean wasn’t brought up to rebel against the norm. She was expected to adhere to it. She loved her mother, and I think that’s what filled her with so much doubt about what she should’ve done with her life. She hated the idea of disappointing and hurting her mother. When you’re told what you should want for long enough, you’re bound to confuse what’s expected of you for what you really want. So even when she’d been working with Edwards and Steptoe, there’d almost been that sense that she was emotionally checked out. One of the women called her out on her inadvertent coldness. Thankfully, Jean was the kind of person who didn’t mind acknowledging that they were wrong. She immediately made efforts to connect with the women who came to the lab with hope in her hearts. She practically became a part of The Ovum Club, the group of women who’d been putting their faith in Jean, Edwards, and Steptoe. When Jean befriended these women, she actually got to realize all the different ways their infertility brought them pain. That was a pain Jean knew all too well. Her severe endometriosis meant that her womb wasn’t fit for a child. Jean took her time, but she eventually found it too hard to live a lie. She laid her truth bare to her mother. And when she was loved for it, and her mother told her that all children were beautiful, Jean found her faith again. She came up with an idea to hopefully fix the flaw in the process–following women’s natural cycle instead of inducing it with hormones. Steptoe hadn’t been too happy about the research trial stopping. He’s instantly persuaded to restart the project when Jean tables her idea at her mother’s funeral. Getting Edwards to jump in wasn’t too hard after his not-too-successful run at politics.
Why Did It Take So Long For Jean Purdy To Get Credit For Her Work?
Like I said before, Jean’s work has more to do with her personal life that she’d initially let on. Being a part of the process meant being familiar with all the ways it could fail. Maybe that’s what kept her from hoping that maybe the procedure she was working to develop could someday help her too. I think there was also that factor of Jean not wanting to be a subject of the experiment and preferring to remain a mind behind it. Jean saw how everyone poked fun at Edwards for mentioning women by their serial numbers and not by their names. Maybe by keeping herself out of the race, Jean was trying to avoid becoming a serial number. But Jean and everyone else read Edwards very wrong. He was only awkward with the expressions of how he felt. But that didn’t mean that his heart was made of stone. As a man whose entire world hinges on science, something that yields success about once in a blue moon, Edwards tries to keep himself from caring too much. If his head wasn’t steady, everything could fall apart. There came a point for Jean when she steadied her nerves and allowed Dr. Steptoe to give his expert opinion on her chances of conceiving a child. Part of her knew what he’d find out, but another part wanted to be sure. Steptoe didn’t have anything hopeful to say. But while she was completely crushed by the fact that she’d never become a mother, she could feel how much their research would mean to women who still had hope. They couldn’t help everyone. Some hearts would be broken. But if they succeeded, they would’ve given a lot of women a chance to fulfill their wish for a family. Their research was the first step to thinking outside of the human body in the context of reproduction. Everything that would come after, surrogacy and such, would owe it to these three brilliant minds for laying the groundwork for more research on reproduction and reproductive health. In Western medicine, research and inventions are hardly ever about women’s health. So the setbacks their research faced from the Medical Research Council obviously reeked of misogyny and dismissal of new ideas. But that only bolstered the trio’s resolve to go on, even if it needed a lot of personal and professional sacrifices.
When Lesley Brown and her husband came in to talk to Steptoe about joining the trials, her odds were the same as all the other women who’d walked in through the door of Kershaw. Jean’s idea proved to be just what they needed. The one ovarian follicle Steptoe could extract gave them a healthy embryo. Lesley Brown’s pregnancy made them as happy as it made them nervous. They were extremely particular about protecting all the women who’d put their faith in them protecting from the rabid media. Even though desperate journalists swarmed around the hospital on the day of the cesarean delivery, and one even sneaked in pretending to be a janitor, the team didn’t let anything ruin the special day for the Brown couple.
In Joy’s ending, the birth of Louise Brown made everything that Jean, Edwards, Steptoe endured for 10 long years worth it. Edwards chose the middle name Joy for baby Louise, clearly because that’s all that he felt when she was born. Now, when you get to know the story behind this entire, glorious venture, something that Edwards would go on to get the Nobel prize for, you know that there’s no space for any doubt about Jean’s part in it. They couldn’t have done it without her, and Robert Edwards had to keep repeating that tirelessly for over a decade for Jean Purdy’s name to be included on the plaque. After spending 10 years working on a groundbreaking scientific project, Jean Purdy had to wait for another 15 years to have her name mentioned alongside her male colleagues. At the age of 39, she lost her life to cancer before she could see her achievement and find acknowledgement. Jean’s one of the many women whose names are forgotten in conversations about things they’ve put a lot of work into, and that phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the world of medicine. There’s no industry unaffected by the patriarchal need to erase women from the history of new ideas and new creations. It’s a systematic act of convincing the world that only men are ever really behind great discoveries and achievements. Even though this is a story from the 70s, things are hardly any different now. Like I said, it’s been a long fight. Edwards’ persistence did achieve the desired result. Maybe it was Jean’s resolute, unyielding quality that got rubbed off on him.
