It’s now 100 years since a proportion of British women won the right to vote for the first time. As this book has shown, women’s lives have transformed beyond all recognition since this time. Even a few decades ago, women were unable to start a business, take out a credit card or own their own home without their husband’s permission. Women were, in living memory, prevented from applying for the same jobs as men, being paid the same as men for the same work and keeping their jobs once pregnant. Unmarried women couldn’t get the contraceptive pill and abortion was illegal. The freedom and opportunities available to young women today would have been unimaginable to their great-grandparents.
But the transformation in women’s lives has not been even. Some – particularly younger, middle class and, in the US especially, white – women’s lives have changed far more fundamentally than others. Similarly, change has been far more dramatic in some areas of life. At school and university, girls have not just caught up with boys but are now leaving them far behind; while at home, even though men are more involved, it is often women who still take on board most of the responsibility for housework and childcare. The legacy of historical disadvantage continues to play out, especially for older women, while the expectations of previous generations still have an impact upon children today.
Women’s lives have changed but this progress has not occurred while the rest of the world has remained set in aspic. Men’s lives have changed too. A society that once rewarded attributes such as physical and mental strength, competitiveness, courage, independence and assertiveness, no longer exists. School, work and even home life are all very different to a century ago and success today means meeting new criteria. In many walks of life, women today are doing better than men but according to different standards and expectations than in the past.
Feminism encourages us to score successes according to gender but this is a zero-sum game. Success for men in one area of life does not spell disaster for women and likewise, women’s gains are not necessarily made at the expense of men. Women do not lead their lives in isolation from men; they have brothers, partners and sons. Women and men live, grow-up and work alongside each other. The universal aspiration for a better life is best achieved through men and women working alongside each other rather than seeing each other as bitter rivals.
Just as society has changed, so too has feminism. The issues highlighted by today’s fourth wave, intersectional feminism are very different to the demands of the suffragettes and many of the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. There has never been a ‘golden age’ of feminism. Intrinsic to the demand for ‘women’s rights’ is a challenge to a far more progressive idea of human rights. However, among the earliest feminists there was recognition that liberation for women meant liberation for men too. Men could never be truly free while women were still oppressed. This feminism was less about pitching men and women in opposition to one another and more about realizing universal aspirations for liberty and equality.
In a previous era, even when feminism didn’t have explicitly universal aspirations, it promoted a view of women as strong, independent and rational, as capable of enjoying freedom, and all the challenges that came with it, as men. Sexual liberation was demanded as well as equal pay because there was a belief that women could do anything men could do. The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a powerful political force that continued the battles for sexual equality started by the suffragettes of a previous era.
Feminism has come a long way since this time. Today’s feminism, ascendant precisely as women can no longer be said to be oppressed in any meaningful sense, has become detached from the reality of many women’s lives. Rather than celebrating women’s successes, the search for ‘everyday sexism’ turns up a range of increasingly banal new offences for us to worry about. We’re told that song lyrics, advertising billboards, the characters in children’s story books, baby clothes, workplace dress codes and the very words we use make the world a hostile place for women.
Rather than a demand for equality, today’s feminism is a plea for recognition. Recent high-profile campaigns have focused on the lack of representation of women on banknotes, statues and traffic light symbols; and the gender balance of contributors to comedy panel shows, political debates and boards of directors. Feminism has become distant from the lives of women who have never felt oppressed by a bank note (only, perhaps, the lack of one) or felt unable to cross a road because the light shows an image of a green man.
Today’s feminist campaigns present a view of women as vulnerable rather than strong. Campaigns against skinny models in advertisements, for example, send a message that all women are at risk of developing eating disorders if they see a beautiful but undernourished woman. When many women are faring better than men in school and at work, the message that women are victims flies in the face of reality. Worse, it risks turning back the clock on previous feminist victories.
Once, women fought for the freedom to engage in public life as equals to men and female students conspired to be rid of chaperones. Uninvited comments from men were considered a small price to pay for independence. The right to risk harassment meant women were finally equal to men and many aspired to answer back with uninvited comments of their own. Today, in contrast, the message from feminism that women are vulnerable results in calls for special protections to guard them from men. The assumption is that women can’t be expected to handle public life in the raw.
When women, especially younger women today, are equal to men in every meaningful regard, feminism becomes reinvented as distinctly values-laden and moralistic. Its primary concern is to modify the behaviour of men and women who fall foul of feminist-approved ways for people to interact, speak and even, it seems, think. The fun and feistiness of yesteryear’s ‘girl power’ has been replaced by an authoritarian exercise in policing language, attitudes and behaviour. Enforcing a feminist etiquette comes at the expense of our freedom and independence.
Today’s feminism, preoccupied with the concerns of a small and elite group of women, cannot account for the experiences of older or working-class women. Yet it is all too ready to appropriate the disadvantages faced by these women to support claims for special privileges for the already successful. But these privileges come at a huge cost.
Young women today are told that schools, universities and the workplace are threatening and intimidating not by patriarchal fathers wanting to keep them at home but by trendy feminist campaigners. The frequent repetition of claims that women are victimized by men may have unintended consequences. In 2015, Girl Guiding UK found that 75 per cent of girls and young women said anxiety about potentially experiencing sexual harassment affects their lives in some way.461 A 2016 survey suggested that 41 per cent of young women expect to face discrimination at work.462 These young women had not faced harassment or discrimination: their anxiety was around what might, potentially, happen to them in the future. It may be the fear of sexual harassment, more than the reality, that is holding women back today. If so, women now need liberating from feminism.
If women are to continue to live as equals to men and play a full role in forging the world for future generations, they need to throw off the shackles of feminism. Feminism’s presentation of women as victims of a dominant and rapacious masculinity, on the one hand, and faceless patriarchal forces, on the other, does neither women nor men any favours. It’s time for us to rehabilitate a word popular among feminists in the 1960s: liberation. For women and men to be truly free and able to realize their full potential today, we all need to be liberated from feminism and the gender wars.