The nation is gripped by Labour’s turbulent, white-collar political soap opera: the juicy WhatsApp leaks, declassified docs sent by the snaky Lord Peter Mandelson, political bitching, leadership manoeuvres, wild speculation, rows and rifts. Few notice that no women seem to feature in the messages.
I felt dismayed that the party is still dominated by ambitious men, which is why Labour has never had a female leader. That led me to another desolate truth: in our disruptive, anti-woke era, aggressive masculinity, aided and abetted by some unreconstructed femininity, is pushing back all the progressive steps taken since the 1960s towards female equality.
Before I came to the UK in 1972, I understood female oppression – women and girls in African and Asian families in Uganda were treated as lesser creatures. Boys in my extended family were served first, got the best cuts of meat and bigger chunks of chocolate. Girls had to put up and shut up. I didn’t shut up and so was whacked often by one fat uncle in particular. That sense of injustice was within me, but it had no intellectual underpinning.
In my first years as a post-grad scholarship student at Oxford University, those emotions were shaped into ideas and causes. I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Angela Y. Davis’s autobiography, and Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating. In 1977, I joined a radical feminist collective. One day, we built a fire and burned our bras. Mine was black, lacy and beautiful. I cried on the way home. Soon after this, I got pregnant and left the group. They were a hard bunch of women, but they expanded my mind and made me think about male domination and female subjugation, as well as self-abasement.
Unknowingly, I had joined what is now known as the Second Wave Feminism. The priority in the first wave – across the Western world – was women’s suffrage. The second, which began in the 1960s, extended the fight to include personal liberties and equal social status.
According to an excellent historical analysis by Human Rights Careers, these feisty females focused on “reproductive rights, financial independence, workplace equality, and domestic violence… In the 1950s, women were pressured to marry, have children, and take care of the household while their husbands worked…The second wave, however, made reproductive rights one of its pillars.”
I share all this so older readers can remember what it is we were fighting for, and younger readers can learn a little about how hard it was to get equality and respect. We are still walking that road. And the terrain is harder, stonier, more dangerous than it was at the start of this century. Feminism is being marginalised and women’s hard-earned rights are slowly being crushed.
Donald Trump’s contempt for diversity and inclusion has instigated shameful submission here. Many of our businesses and politicians are fast capitulating to the US President’s wishes. Nigel Farage and his lieutenants threaten to repeal the Equality Act of 2010 and abolish diversity and inclusion policies because these progressive measures, they say, disadvantage white men. No factual justification is offered. It’s just another bonfire of many promised by this vain man and his acolytes. Resentful men think such savage bites into equality policies will deliver them to nirvana. It won’t. But it will make women, once again, into second-class citizens.
Some right-wingers are openly expressing worries about childless women as birth rates drop. Lord Ashcroft is among them. (Those on the right also raise alarm about migrants having too many babies.) Robert Kenyon, the Reform candidate standing in Makerfield, has opined that abortion is murder, and shared his sexist views in since deleted tweets, such as that women rely on abortions so they can “shag anyone they want”. Once again, our bodies are no longer ours.
The misogynist cultures thriving in the manosphere, appalling levels of domestic violence, stalking and control of women and girls, femicide and rape figures – these should all cause outrage. They don’t. Not among most men.
The absence of female voices in the current woes of Labour, to right-wing attempts to curb our freedoms and the dangers we increasingly face, all show our lives don’t matter. All these years of struggle and this is where we are. Where do we go from here? I am tired and my hopes are breaking, like old bones do. Giving up would kill me. But how to carry on when pessimism overwhelms?
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