In the first passage journalist and broadcaster Joyce McMillan, in an article published on the 2nd of January 2000, discusses how the role of women changed in the twentieth century and assesses the future of ‘feminism’.
The 20th century won itself a ghastly reputation in many areas, from genocide to the creation of ever more horrific weaponry. But it was also, decisively, the century of women’s emancipation. It was the century when the majority of us — at least across the economically developed world — began to win the education, the legal status, the voting rights, the growing economic power and the control over our own fertility, that would free us from our 4,000-year status as ‘the second sex’; and the century when old religious and quasi-scientific beliefs in the concept of male superiority began to give way, in the age of human rights, to the self-evident truth that women are as fully human as men. It brought a new sense of freedom to millions of women.
Even those unsympathetic to the changes of the last generation now rarely talk about turning the clock back. For one thing, we have come to recognise that a society that systematically excludes women from public life simply sacrifices too much talent and condemns too many people to a life of frustration and bitterness. And for another, in the age of environmental crisis and mutually assured nuclear destruction, it has become impossible to believe, as many of our grandmothers’ generation did, that ‘men know best’ in matters of state and policy.
So it’s tempting to conclude that we are now on an irreversible forward march towards a much more female future, in which men and women will at last stand shoulder to shoulder in running our society. But it strikes me that, on at least two grounds, there is no room for complacency.
In the first place, it would be foolish to believe that the massive changes of the last 30 years mean that the battle for equality is over; on the contrary, throughout most of the world, and across huge areas of our own society, it has barely begun. Although women are now close to becoming a majority of the British workforce, for example, they are still heavily concentrated in low-paid, part-time, low-status and insecure work. Even when they are in comparable jobs to men, they typically earn 20 per cent less. And they are still grossly underrepresented in almost all areas of high-level decision-making, from the boardrooms of British business to cabinet-level politics everywhere.
Nor are the reasons for this continuing male dominance difficult to grasp; for both in Britain and worldwide, women still carry out almost all of the unpaid domestic work that keeps family life ticking over. Motherhood, in particular, devastates women’s earning power, and often knocks them off thecareer ladder to the extent that their professional potential is never realised, even after their children are grown. Of course, men ‘help’ more than they used to with housework and childcare. But the very word ‘help’ betrays the extent to which these areas of life remain a female responsibility.
The truth is that for the vast majority of women who want to become mothers, equal opportunities for participation in public and professional life mean nothing unless society is willing to provide them with a whole battery of positive support and sympathetic regulation.
And it’s precisely the tension set up by women’s exhausting effort to ‘have it all’ that represents the second, and perhaps the greatest, threat to our chances of a genuinely equal society. The movement towards women’s emancipation was always made up of two strands, one demanding equal chances for women to compete in the world of men, and the other demanding equal respect and status for those spheres of life that had traditionally been regarded as ‘female’. And what has happened, over the last quarter-century, is that the first half of the agenda has romped away towards the finishing line, while the second has been brutally shoved into the margins.
In a sense, our whole society has become hyper-masculinised, with a generation of young professional women in spiky haircuts and severe suits outbidding even the most competitive of men for aggression, abrasiveness and control-freakery, while no working person of either gender has much time left over to cook a meal, bake a batch of scones, play with the baby, visit granny, tidy the linen-cupboard, or cultivate a relaxed and joyful sex-life of any kind.
Looking back over the 20th century, in other words, we can see clearly enough what women have gained. But we can also measure distinct losses, around those areas of life women were once expected to guard and to represent.
Above all, there has been a loss of time and space for the real enjoyment of motherhood, for a straightforward embracing of those few brief years of total immersion in the business of caring for, loving, responding to one’s own little children, and of soft, sensual surrender to the rhythm of life itself. And the danger we face now is simply this: that if we do not begin to make space in our fast-moving, high-achieving world for those old ‘female’ concerns of homemaking and nurturing on one hand, and fun, glamour, flirtation and joy on the other, then somewhere along the line, the stretch between the two halves of the feminist project will become too great, the elastic will snap and families or whole societies will begin to reclaim some of that dimension of life for themselves through the old strategy of sending women back into the home.
In the second passage (adapted from an article published in The Independent in August 2002) writer and journalist Natasha Walter comments on a survey which seems to suggest that women might be turning their backs on ‘feminism’ in favour of more old-fashioned beliefs which accepted that women were inferior to men.
According to a recent survey, nine out of 10 women now expect to have doors held open for them by men. This bit of news has been taken in some quarters as suggesting that a return to a more traditional society might be on the cards, although the finding may look rather suspect from the start, since it arrives yoked to other unlikely conclusions, such as that 80 per cent of people would like to say good morning to strangers on the street. Still, it was enough for one newspaper to see in it proof that people in Britain now want ‘manners to be taken more seriously’.
It’s not surprising that some journalists see the news that women want to be ushered through doors as rather reassuring. Even now that it is assumed that a woman should work, earn her own money and live independently, you will always find newspapers that are ready to berate women when they stray into unmannerly behaviour, whether it’s a TV presenter sunbathing topless or a reality TV show contestant who admits to getting legless most weekends.
So such journalists find very attractive any suggestion that all women are, deep down, dying to return to older traditions of social behaviour. This may explain why the media fell so comprehensively last year for a young Canadian woman who argued that women still really, under all that independence, expect men to invite them on ‘dates’ and to pay for them, and are disappointed when such formalities are not on offer. How charming! How traditional! How unlike those brazen British hussies who ask men out themselves and hand over their own hard-earned cash for their drinks!
But the more interesting finding from the survey was that 97 per cent of respondents approve of the freedoms that women have now, compared to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ days. In other words, don’t mistake the vague nostalgia that sometimes rears its head for any real desire, on the part of women young or old, for a more old-fashioned, ‘chivalrous’ society.
Even if it sometimes looks as though young women might be rediscovering some traditional styles of behaviour, they are doing so on terms that have changed completely over the last few decades. What many young women of this generation are learning is that it is possible to pick up some of the most enjoyable bits of traditional feminine behaviour without feeling constrained by them. And the same is true for etiquette: girls and boys can hold doors open for one another, buy one another flowers and pull out chairs for one another, and few of them will find it puzzling.
Yet there are still real battles for feminism to fight — but they aren’t over etiquette.
These battles are going to be fought over pay, power, working practices and child care as this generation grows up and expects to see expectations put into practice. It was always a simplistic view of feminism that women were really ready to get offended by men who held open doors. No, what really offended women was not the manners themselves, but the fact that they were fake at the core — that men were ready to help women
through some doors, and then to slam the ones that really mattered in their faces. And for many women, this hasn’t changed.
The abysmal lack of change in the number of women occupying the powerful and well-paid positions in society will also remind us that there are doors that lead to corridors of power where women are still not welcome. At those doors too many women are still pushing in vain.
Show some manners, now, boys, and let the ladies through.
Five Mark Comparison Question on both Passages:
To what extent do you find these two writers agree about the level of equality between women and men in Britain today? Refer in your answer to key ideas of both passages.