The other morning I was watching the Australian morning show and they were conducting a poll on whether fathers should be the one giving the bride away in traditional Christian weddings…Apparently the debate over this issue has been going on for a while in Sweden…Is it sexist? should mothers have a part in that too? what do you think?
here is a link,
http://manolobrides.com/2006/09/07/down-the-aisle/
Thanks
What year did women get the vote in New Zealand?
So, how many years have we had the vote for?
And what did you do on suffrage day? Did you celebrate it in any way?
— Jacqui
Thinking of becoming a lawyer in NZ? Are you a woman? Don’t count on becoming a partner in a law firm any time soon — or even in your career at all!
Deborah Hollings, feminist and Auckland QC barrister reports in the latest NZ Law Society’s magainze that “women barristers are poorly represented in top legal appointments, despite increasing numbers in the profession”. While Dame Sian Elias holds the loftly position of Chief Justice, figures show few women following in her footsteps. WOMEN ARE HITTING A CONCRETE CEILING IN THEIR LEGAL CAREERS AND URGENT ACTION IS NEEDED TO REDRESS GENDER IMBALANCE AT SENIOR LEVELS OF THE JUDICIARY.
“There are 1319 barristers sole practising in NZ. Of those 36% are women. Including the most recent round of appointments, there are 78 MEN practising at the elite level as a Queen’s Counsel (QC) but only 11 WOMEN! Only 19% of partners in law firms are women.
Hollings go on to report: “there are few women involved in big appellate or commercial cases and if they are, they rarely have “speaking parts” and “are destined to be juniors for the rest of their lives”.
Change is slow in coming…”Part of the problem is the CULTURE OF THE BAR”. “Any professional group that for 700 years has comprised solely men, is bound to have inherited attitudes that may seem unwelcoming to some different entrants. Instances of stereotyping, prejudice, harrassment and “plain unfairness” did little credit lawyers who ghad such an influential role in society”.
UNFAIRNESS,UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITIES, STEREOTYPING AND DISCRIMINATION — BUT THIS IS THE LAW PROFESSION? DON’T THEY KNOW BETTER?
Want to know some of the recommendations to change this situation – or at least this report on the report www.stuff.co.nz/4185336a11.html
DO YOU EXPECT A CONCRETE CEILING IN THE CAREER YOU HAVE CHOSEN OR ARE CHOOSING?
– Jacqui
So those of you in Gender and Politics which feminist theoretical perspectives do you think expliciate Tayyibah’s perspective best?
By the way, I am putting two copies of AZIZAH on my office door for you to peruse upstairs in No. 14. And I thought I’d blow up the photo on the backcover of the Muslim American woman surfer and out it on my door too!
Cheers, Jacqui
It was great to have the opportunity to see Coco Fusco’s performance-lecture “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America” yesterday. It’s not often we get a chance to see an internationally renowned performance artist – let alone for free!
I was really pleased to be able to go along with a number of Gender and Politics students. What did you all think of it? What do you think Fusco was saying? What do you think her point was about what happens when women gain entry to overtly masculine institutions, for instance?
I’m looking forward to discussing this further!
Tania
This article in The Bulletin caused quite a stir in Australia last week and I was wondering how other people felt about women being encouraged to acquiesce to their husband’s ‘demands’. For those of us in 213 it might be nice to couch responses in differing feminist perspectives – Mel
Happily married sexThe Bulletin Thursday, July 26, 2007The hand comes creeping across the bed,and the wife once again pretends to be asleep. Nightly in the nation’s bedrooms women are turning off sex in their droves. Now, new research by Bettina Arndt suggests a provocative solution.Remember that wonderful scene in the movie Annie Hall when the camera switches between Woody Allen in his psychiatrist’s office and his lover, Diane Keaton, in hers. They are each asked how often they have sex. “Hardly ever,” Allen says plaintively. “Maybe three times a week.” “Constantly,” Keaton groans. “I’d say three times a week.”It’s great stuff, touching on the yawning gulf between men and women in everyday sexual desire. It’s true that most men feel they aren’t getting enough and women feel under pressure to come up with what the men want. That’s the elephant in the room in many relationships, the often unspoken source of much marital tension.Sex in marriage isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when sex was simply part of women’s wifely duties. Now most men find themselves on the back foot, feeling very much at the mercy of women’s whim. And that makes for lean pickings given the large numbers of women who go off sex.There seems to be a universal epidemic of women not wanting to have sex. Or at least not wanting as much sex as their partners. On daytime television there’s a passing parade of women worrying about their lost libido. “It would be totally fine if I never had sex again,” one young wife tearfully told Oprah Winfrey.That means trouble. How do couples deal with the strain of the man wishing and hoping while all she longs for is uninterrupted sleep? “That’s what we fought about most in the first 10 years of our marriage,” says 54-year-old Amy who, with her husband Jim, 56, is filling out diaries as part of my research on how couples negotiate their sex supply. “Every night he’d have a go. He’d reach across the bed and it was my decision whether it was on or not. It was this big ogre between us.”Amy continues: “Even if I refused him, I’d be so upset that I’d lie awake at night thinking, ‘Why did I say no?’ I might as well have let him have it because the next day he’d be so grumpy.” “That’s right,” Jim acknowledges ruefully, “I was a great sulker.” Even on days he didn’t approach her, Amy says she was nervous. “He’d be snoring loudly and I’d still lie there worrying that the hand was going to come creeping over.”It’s a drama being played out in bedrooms across the country. But this is usually a silent movie, with couples rarely talking about their subtle negotiations. His calculations: “What if I …? Will she then …?” Her excuses: dropping her book and feigning sleep as he enters the bedroom. Tensions. Resentment. Guilt. But still joy, of course. How reassuring that, despite the sags and bulges of a less-than-perfect body, you are still wanted. How comforting that warm and familiar body.It’s now almost 30 years since Amy lay rigid in bed, dreading the creeping hand. “I look back and am amazed now that we let sex become such a source of tension between us. It was because we couldn’t talk about it.” But there was another huge stumbling block – in Amy’s head. This was the 1970s, a time when women’s sexual rights had become a rallying cry. Women must no longer act as spittoons for men, preached Germaine Greer. Women were to reclaim their bodies for their own pleasure and that meant having sex only when they felt like it. Female desire must come first, pronounced the famous sex researchers Masters and Johnson. Without desire, there was no arousal, no pleasure, they said.But as Amy discovered, if she waited for her own libido to rear its weedy little head, the couple’s sex frequency would have hit the red very quickly. After one particularly nasty fight, Jim announced he was sick of having to approach her. “If you ever want sex again, you are going to have to ask me for it,” he told her. “That was a complete and utter disaster,” says Amy, describing how she’d lie awake worrying about not wanting sex yet knowing how grumpy he’d be.She’d got it all wrong, Amy now realises. As we all have had it wrong. The assumption that women need to want sex to enjoy it has been a really damaging idea that has wreaked havoc in relationships for the past 40 years. But now research by Professor Rosemary Basson from the
University of
British Columbia has shown that many women do experience arousal and orgasm if they have sex without any prior desire, provided there’s a “willingness to be receptive”.“Just do it!” suggests sex therapist Michele Weiner-Davis in her best-seller The Sex Starved Marriage. She says desire is a decision – you have to make it happen. She’s reached that conclusion after years of counselling married couples experiencing tension as a result of one of them – usually the wife – not being interested in sex. She found that many reluctant lovers reported that when they did have sex, they ended up feeling good.Weiner-Davis poses the revolutionary idea that there’s no point worrying about the reasons why women aren’t interested in sex – there’ll always be plenty of them: squalling infants, stress, tiredness, irritation that he won’t help with the housework. “Knowing why you are not so interested in sex won’t boost your desire one bit. Doing something about it will,” she says.It seems many women are willing to do it. They manage the sex supply by sometimes having sex when they don’t feel like it. An internet survey by The Australian Women’s Weekly found 73% of respondents reported that they sometimes have sex when not in the mood. Half of them gave the reason, “I know I am likely to end up enjoying it”, while a third did it to keep their partners happy.Amy discovered it worked for her. “It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m desperate for sex or not, whether I want it or not. As soon as it gets started, it’s OK. I’ll enjoy it. But that took me a long time to learn.” Amy now counsels other women through her church and finds many are extremely resistant to that message. “They often haven’t had sex for years because they say they have no desire, yet they are looking for love and intimacy and closeness to come back. I explain to them that’s never going to happen unless they start having sex again. But when I tell them to just do it, they are often horrified, saying that’s like being a prostitute.” But many find their sex lives improve immensely if they can get their head around this radical rethink.That’s the funny thing. The idea of having sex without desire is now considered radical – a challenge to long-time feminist orthodoxy. “To contemporary women, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfilment is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters,” comments Caitlin Flanagan in her thoughtful Atlantic Monthly essay, “No Sex Please, We’re Married”.Flanagan points out this has made life very difficult for the poor married man hoping for a bit of comfort from the wife at the day’s end. “He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone-tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the worktops and fold the tea-towel after cooking the children’s dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his emails, catch a few minutes of sport on television and call it a night.”Joan Sewell is the author of a funny and provocative new book, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love my Low Libido in which she acknowledges how difficult it is for men to keep women in the Zen-like state needed for arousal. And she admits that with her it’s a lost cause. “My libido is not very strong. It’s as fickle as hell. It’s apathetic and it’s not easily aroused or easily sustained,” she writes, concluding that’s actually pretty normal for women. Sewell argues that women have naturally lower sex drives. That it’s a hormonal thing. Testosterone makes humans horny and men have lots more than women. Sewell reports feeling envy for genuinely lusty women, mentioning she met one who described herself as a juicy tomato. “If you were a vegetable, what would you be?” the woman had asked Sewell. “I don’t know, maybe a celery stalk,” she replied.But are most women really celery sticks? Certainly not, says Susan Davis,
Monash
University’s professor of women’s health and a world leader in the study of hormones affecting female drive. She’s met lots of juicy tomatoes. “Oh God, yes. I have one patient who is an academic who tells me she sometimes has to close the door of her university office so she can masturbate,” adding there are also plenty of men who have a low libido. There’s a huge variation in both genders.
Davis says very little of it is due to hormones, although much of her recent work has focused on treating women with low sexual drive by using testosterone.Testosterone is the nearest thing we have to a pink Viagra. The Pfizer company abandoned research on women using Viagra-like drugs when it discovered that even though these increased pelvic blood flow, many women didn’t notice. There’s a disconnect between what’s happening in women’s heads and between their legs. New research is directed at drugs focusing on parts of the brain directly connected with arousal and orgasm. Meanwhile, testosterone is helping boost libido in some – perhaps one in every two – but the hormonal issue is very complex: some women have low sex drive yet naturally high testosterone levels and some very juicy tomatoes show very low levels.Hormones are only part of the story. Women’s libido is simply different from men’s. Female sexual drive tends to be less robust, more easily distracted and dampened by stress, fatigue and relationship hiccups; more bound up in the desire for intimacy. As one woman once told me: “I wrap up sex in all the garbage of the day.” Male desire is comparatively resilient, urgent and less dependent on the right conditions. That’s why Joan Sewell’s husband Kip would have sex five or six times a week if he could have as much sex as he wanted, compared to her once or twice a month. “If I had a choice between reading a good book and having sex, the book wins,” Sewell confesses.But she still feels guilty about it and has tried to rev up her libido. She’s tried everything from talking to therapists, taking hormones, to talking dirty and smearing chocolate on her husband’s genitals – all to no avail. Sewell concludes the real problem is that no one is trying to lower men’s sex drives. Why don’t we hear men saying, “Doctor, my sex drive is too high. Please do something about it. I feel guilty and ashamed that I don’t want less sex. It’s killing my marriage.”Her plea prompted a response from Don Savage, widely syndicated sex advice columnist ( www.citypages.com/savagelove). He comments that whenever he publishes a letter from a man who complains about not getting enough, he’s deluged by what he calls “if only” letters from women … If only she didn’t have to do all the housework, she’d want sex. If only he would talk to her about her day, she’d want sex. By proclaiming that low-libido women are normal, Sewell has done men a favour, suggests Savage: “Well now, thanks to Sewell, straight guys everywhere know that it doesn’t matter how much housework you do, or how sincerely interested you are in her day, or how much of the childcare you take on: she still won’t want to f*** you. So leave the dishes in the sink, grab a beer and go play a video game, guys. Your ‘if only’ nightmares are over.”We wish. But “if only” days aren’t over. So many men, and the occasional woman, are still trying to find the key to a welcoming lover. There’s a great story about one of those old pubs which offer a row of bedrooms above the bar, all with paper-thin walls. This night, everyone was bunkered down trying to sleep when, from one of the rooms, there were sounds of bedclothes rustling, a bed creaking and then a plaintive male voice, “Oh come on, Beryl. Come on!” Silence … and then the rustling started up again. “Berrrylll, oh come on!” So it went on until another irritated male voice called from a nearby room, “For Christ’s sake, Beryl, give it to him! Then we can all get some sleep.”That’s the consolation. This is such a familiar bedtime story with men and women everywhere struggling through the same old, same old.
I couldn’t resist posting this article sent to me as part of an unsolicited email from the Maxim Institute – a social conservative think tank based in Auckland. I thought the research showed it was specifically men who physically benefitted from marriage cf. unmarried men. I guess the Maxim Institute don’t gender disaggregate their data. What a surprise… Still David Benson-Pope could do with a few of those physical benefits!
Read on…. Jacqui
Marriage-the healthy choice
While debate on the role and importance of marriage has been raging for years overseas, in New Zealand such debates are not so frequently heard. International research reveals various ways in which marriage is beneficial to society and individuals, including more than 100 years of research that shows married people have better physical health, on average, than unmarried. Married people get sick less often and tend to live longer than single or divorced people. Emerging research also suggests it is likely there are health differences between those who are married and those living in de facto relationships.
There are three main reasons offered for these health differences. One is that married couples’ long-term mutual investment in each other encourages healthy habits and discourages unhealthy ones. Unlike those in more casual relationships, married couples expect to rely on each other in the long term for childcare and financial support, so they are more likely to take an active interest in each other’s health. While people living together in de facto relationships may also benefit from this to some degree, statistics show that on average marriage lasts longer than de facto relationships. Therefore, accumulated health benefits are not as significant over time outside of marriage. Secondly, married couples generally accumulate more wealth and this is associated with better health, due to improved diets, and a greater ability to visit doctors and dentists and to take out medical insurance. There is also a link between relationship quality and physical health. Married couples tend to have higher quality relationships than those in less formal relationships, often because of the added security that comes from long-term mutual commitment.
Internationally, sceptics who question the benefits of marriage have argued that marriage does not cause better health for adults-or any other associated advantages observed for the married-but that healthier and wealthier people are more likely to marry, therefore ensuring that they will continue to have the best health over the long term. The weight of social science evidence, though, does not support this view. This is because long-term research shows health advantages for married couples accrue after they marry; they are not evident beforehand. Similarly, after divorce, physical health tends to deteriorate, which indicates there are a number of factors associated with marriage that lead to better health. The fact that there are many social and taxpayer costs related to ill health reminds us that marriage is not only personally beneficial, it is a social good as well, not just for individuals, but for the whole community.
Read a Maxim Institute research note on The physical health benefits of marriage
Clinton and Obama clash after YouTube debate
· Candidates grilled by public’s video clips
· Accusations of naivety over foreign policy
Ewen MacAskill in Charleston and Ed Pilkington
Wednesday July 25, 2007
The Guardian
Hillary Clinton speaks with Barack Obama after the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential candidates debate. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty images
Bickering broke out yesterday between the camps of the two main contestants for the 2008 Democratic nomination with Hillary Clinton’s team seeking to portray Barack Obama as naive in his approach to foreign policy in the wake of an experimental debate organised by CNN and YouTube.Mr Obama, responding to a question from a YouTube user in Monday night’s debate, said he would meet without preconditions the leaders of countries with which the US has strained relations – Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
Mrs Clinton, asked the same question, said she would not as she did not want to be used “for propaganda purposes”.Yesterday she said she thought Mr Obama’s response was “irresponsible and frankly naive”. Mr Obama’s camp highlighted a quote from Mrs Clinton in April in which she said: “I think it’s a terrible mistake for our president to say he won’t talk to bad people.”
The spat demonstrated how intense the rivalry between the two has become six months before the first primary contests begin. It also shows the impact of the new irreverent style of debate that was pioneered on Monday. The organisers of next year’s key US presidential debates are planning to dispense with much of the old formula and incorporate the freewheeling style of the YouTube website and other new media favourites.
Presidential hopefuls, television companies and political websites yesterday judged the debate, organised by CNN as well as YouTube, as a success. The eight candidates for the Democratic nomination faced two hours of questions from a cross-section of Americans who submitted 30-second video clips.
The debate, in Charleston, South Carolina, included questions about Iraq from a mother whose son was to be deployed there and a father who had lost a son in the country. There were also questions about health from brothers spoon-feeding dinner to a father suffering from Alzheimer’s, about Darfur from an American in a refugee camp, and about gun laws from a man cradling a rifle which he described as his “baby”. Some questions were gimmicky and aimed at winning laughs.
One of the organisers said it would now be impossible to return to the old format. Although the candidates at times seemed uncomfortable with the uncertainty, listening with fixed grins, their campaign managers yesterday said it had been refreshing. Joe Trippi, who is part of John Edwards’ campaign, said: “I thought it was great. It was more freewheeling.”
David Axelrod, the campaign strategist for Mr Obama, said: “I think he relished this. He thinks the American people have been cut out of Washington politics.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of a history of presidential debates, called the move a milestone. The humour in some of the videos inspired interest in topics that might otherwise bore viewers, as did the images of “real” people talking about troubles in their lives, she said.
YouTube bloggers generally welcomed the format but objected to CNN choosing the questions: 39 were selected from almost 3,000 clips sent in.
Typical of the format’s directness was Jordan Williams, a Kansas student, who asked Mr Obama whether he was “authentically black enough”. Mr Obama said he had suffered the same difficulties as other African-Americans in hailing a taxi in New York: “You know, when I’m catching a cab in Manhattan in the past, I think I’ve given my credentials.” He also asked Mrs Clinton if she was “satisfactorily feminine enough”. She replied: “Well, I couldn’t run as anything other than a woman.”
It’s 114 years since New Zealand women got the vote, Helen Clark is our second female Prime Minister, and women are starting to dismantle one of the few remaining bastions of male supremacy.
A small but growing number of women are passing their own surnames on to their children, rather than their husbands’ or partners’.
While this practice is well established in situations where the father is absent or unwilling to be involved with his children, it is increasingly being considered a viable option when the family unit is intact.
Suzanne Broadbent, 37, of Pakuranga in east Auckland, gave 8-year-old daughter Tessa her surname.
“It was purely a logical decision,” she says. “It wasn’t an emotional thing. It wasn’t a feminist thing.
“It was just: this is silly, that boys and girls get their father’s name.”
Suzanne’s son, Taylor, 9, has the surname of her partner, David Rooney, 35. “He may have preferred to have both his children with his name, but there’s always got to be a little bit of compromise,” she says. “Obviously, I’ve compromised by my son having his father’s last name.”
show_ad_tag(‘http://ads.apn.co.nz’,’NZH’,’SEC’,’NATIONAL’,’STY’,’300X250′,”,”);Both of 36-year-old Nelson woman Sharon Gibson’s daughters – Milla, 4, and Stella, 2 – have her surname. Before the gender of their first child was known, she and husband Wayne Pool, 46, decided girls would be given Sharon’s name and boys given his. “That seemed fair. It seemed odd to us to accept the fact that your children get the husband’s name,” she says. “This works really well. The only down side is that I figure people who don’t know us might think that Wayne’s not the father.”
Feilding mum Rachael McLaughlin, 24, passed her surname down to daughters Leah, 3, and Shania, 2. Pragmatism rather than ideology drove the decision.
Around the time of Leah’s birth, a convicted murderer from Masterton with the same surname as her partner Martyn Howse, 27, was back in the media, and Martyn was keen that his daughter not be associated with that high-profile case.
“He wanted to give our second daughter his last name, though,” says Rachael. But having grown up in a household as the child with the odd surname out, she promptly vetoed that suggestion.
“It was horrible. I’d never put that on a child.”
Maureen Molloy, women’s studies professor at the University of Auckland, says she’s observed a raft of unconventional naming options, including using the mother’s name.
“I guess the message is that people have more choice. It’s partly feminism, that kind of egalitarianism that women are no longer absorbed under their husbands’ identity.”
Chairperson of the Auckland branch of the Celebrants Association of New Zealand Kerry-Ann Stanton believes it’s a trend that is likely to gain momentum. While she hasn’t personally performed a naming ceremony for a child receiving its mother’s surname, she knows of instances where that has occurred.
“As more women keep their maiden names, I imagine, it will trickle through into giving children their surnames, especially as more women start to realise it’s only a social convention that a child is given the father’s surname,” she says.
So entrenched is the patriarchal naming tradition, it’s often believed that parents are legally obliged to give a child her or his father’s surname. In fact, the Department of Internal Affairs advises that a child may be given any surname, provided it doesn’t cause offence or bump the length of the full name over 100 characters.
What happened to the traditional way of hyphening your surnames?
JoanneC 213
In these two pieces from the UK-based Guardian newspaper, Polly Toynbee and Kira Cochrane tell of the newspaper’s long-running women’s page, its history and they offer arguments as to why such feminist spaces are still needed. The posts following these articles are as interesting as the pieces themselves.
What do you think? Are feminist ‘spaces’ needed? Are there feminist spaces in your lives?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2128820,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/50years/story/0,,2128681,00.html
Why does the Guardian still need a women’s page? Because the feminist revolution is only half made
Polly Toynbee
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Guardian
How did the Guardian women’s page become so influential? It helped that as the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s got under way, Private Eye regularly sneered at the page, with male newspaper columnists writing biliously about hairy, dungaree-wearing, lentil-eating, man-hating Guardian wimmin. There were reams of articles in the tabloids and rightwing broadsheets back then about why men should now slam doors in women’s faces to prove that women couldn’t have it both ways – not chivalry AND equality. And that vitriolic backlash proved the making of the women’s pages.
The section raised all the difficult issues – battered wives, the menopause, women prisoners giving birth while chained down. It asked why girls were put in pink, what’s hard-wired and what’s not, why sex was often rubbish for women, why men were often rubbish but women had no means of escape. Why should women always do the housework and why shouldn’t they do anything a man could do? Back before the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the unions insisted on lower rates of pay for women doing the same job as men in the same factory. Back before the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, all kinds of jobs were forbidden to women.
It’s hard to recapture the shock and fury that feminism caused but, never forget, these were, and still are, revolutionary ideas. The very notion that women, that mothers, can be equal in everything reaches down into the heart of family life and questions everything. And there is no denying that feminism caused a soaring divorce rate and an explosion of single motherhood. Women walked away from bad men. Bad said: “If you want equality, then I can abandon my family responsibilities and pay no maintenance.” So it is still an unfinished revolution, where women’s attitudes changed fast, but men’s only slightly, and society has done too little to accommodate this great eruption. The economic system still demands a male wage to bring up a child – jobs aren’t flexible enough and women’s pay is too low for mothers alone to be breadwinners.
The Guardian women’s page had a huge influence in spreading revolutionary ideas. The secret was that it alerted one of the most powerful, but usually all too politically dormant forces in the land – the women’s magazines – to what was being written. The Guardian was the conduit for ideas from the US, from Rosie Boycott’s Spare Rib, Virago, the wages for housework campaign and some dottier ones too. Suddenly the editors of Woman’s Own and Woman took up these themes and popularised them for a mass audience. I doubt any revolutionary ideas were ever spread as far, as fast and as effectively as by those magazines, read by women under men’s noses. Glossy magazines became the underground press for women. The trouble was, men didn’t get it, didn’t read it and didn’t understand what was in the air. They were startled to find women growing discontented and demanding. Where were they getting these ideas from?
Sometimes we were startled too. There was the woman who wrote a card to Jill Tweedie, the greatest women’s page writer, sent from a remote caravan park: “I’ve done it! I’ve left my violent husband and taken the children and we’re living in a caravan. What should I do now?” Jill was appalled. What did she know? No one wanting advice would have taken Jill’s own life story as any kind of template. But her insights into her own life became the anvil on which she pounded out what she knew of how life was for women in general – and it turned out she knew a lot and was funny and wry about it too.
By the time I started writing a column for the women’s pages in 1977, the battle lines had been drawn years before, starting with Mary Stott. But the perennial question was asked then as now – why do you need a women’s page? Isn’t it a harem that confines and diminishes women, as if the rest of the paper was not really women’s domain? For journalists, it was a problem. I was a reporter on the Observer, covering strikes and industrial relations when, out of the blue, I was offered the column. I suspect nervous male editors and features editors kept trying to find women to edit and work on the pages who were not known for feminist writing.
Although it was a great honour, I’m ashamed to admit that, like many others, I hesitated before joining. Although I was always a feminist and never a feminism-denier, I worried I’d be branded a single-issue women’s columnist, a bit frivolous, no longer fit for the men’s newsroom. Would I ever get back to the “mainstream”? Lurking somewhere beneath was that old fear of being branded as a bra-burning harridan.
Well, I stayed for 11 years, some of the best years of my working life, and it changed my view of the world. All through those Tory years there were fierce battles to be fought.
I might be on the women’s page still if I hadn’t unexpectedly been offered a job as social affairs editor at the BBC. Would I ever have made the jump from Guardian women’s page to Guardian comment page without leaving first? The fact that I even ask this question shows that the word “women” still signifies what it always did – “other”, “second class”, “not serious”, “not one of the boys”. That – paradoxically – is exactly why we still need a women’s page. The revolution is only half made, and sometimes it seems to go backwards. Who else will keep banging the drum?
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Still so much to do
Kira Cochrane, 2006 – present
Kira Cochrane
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Guardian
It happened to Mary Stott fifty years ago, and it still happens to me now. That moment (usually, annoyingly, at parties) when someone asks – “what’s the point of a women’s page anyway?”
Even before the inquisitor lays out their case, even if I’m on my third martini, I can still guess what’s to come. The suggestion that a women’s page is intrinsically sexist (why no men’s page?); that a women’s page is patronising, ghettoising; that we are living in a post-feminist age of such blinding, cast-iron equality that a section dedicated to women is an anachronism.
Reading through fifty years of the pages, as I have over the past few months, women’s changing status has hit me harder than ever. In the late 1950s, well into the ‘swinging’ sixties, and on into the feminist heyday of the seventies, the constrictions of women’s lives seem, with hindsight, incredible.
Women unable to get a mortgage in their own name; banished from the table at the end of dinner parties; having no access to safe, legal abortion; being told that their career options were nursing, secretarial work or, at a push, teaching; being sacked, quite legally, if they became pregnant; being paid – again, quite legally – less than a man in the same job. Treated like children. Or worse.
Back when the pages started in 1957 there was still a clear split between the public sphere and the home, with women often confined to the latter. In those days the women’s pages had a clear purpose, being the only section that discussed women’s specific concerns. Now, of course, women have entered the public sphere in droves, and, at the same time, coverage of ‘women’s issues’ has found its way onto the news pages, the general features pages, even – just occasionally – the sports pages too.
Is there still a place, a need, for the women’s pages then? Yes (and I’m not saying that simply because I love my job and quite fancy keeping it).
However much women’s situation may have improved, the fact remains that we are still some distance from equality. There is still a 12.6% pay gap between men and women – rising to 40.2% when it comes to part-time work; only 30% of women get a full state pension, compared to 85% of men; rape conviction rates are at an all-time low of 5.6%, down from 33% in the late 1970s.
Equally, while ‘women’s stories’ do make the news pages, men still dominate – and they account for 80% of MPs, 89% of high court judges, and 97% of the Chief Executives of FTSE 100 companies. If the women’s pages – which now run on two days a week – were the only place to showcase ‘women’s’ stories the ghetto argument would be more than fair. In fact though what they now provide is simply a guaranteed space, a space that persists and provides at least some balance on those days when every single major news story pivots around a bloke.
Uniquely among women’s sections, our pages don’t centre around fashion, food or general family stories – we have other extremely good sections that deal with all of those. What they provide is a dedicated space for stories that solely affect women – some of them frivolous (frivolity being essential to anyone’s sense of liberation, I would guess) but many of them political, serious and campaigning.
While other sources are adamant that feminism is over, the women’s pages have recently covered all manner of activism – from the revival of the Reclaim the Night protests, to the rise of anti-pornography campaigns, to the creation of six new British feminist magazines in the last eighteen months.
While others talk about living in a post-feminist age, the women’s pages are still looking forward to a truly feminist age – one in which men and women are treated equally, no more, no less.
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