Nothing has changed
It turns out that it still doesn’t come naturally, putting women into government. The chaps tried—a bit. They scratched their heads and ransacked the cupboards anxiously and came up with four new ministers. Presumably they all scratched their heads too.
As they surveyed the tidal wave of feminine ability storming up the beaches of work and life, they presumably knew that the fact of more women at university doing better, more women in the civil service and in the city, more women in journalism, law and medicine, meant that they had to do something about putting a female face to politics that did not contemptuously involve a nice hairstyle and a maternity dress. But it feels as if it felt a bother.
They may even have been dimly aware that out there in the badlands of the economy, a long way away from the glossy strains of middle class professions, most women now work. It may not yet have occurred to them—but it ought to—that all those cuts to public services we need are likely also to disproportionately affect women .Women are going to be on the front line of an acutely unpleasant reshaping of society and economy. So you might have thought, on those grounds, that reaching for a female to represent these people might have felt a bit more necessary. Apparently not.
But quite the most dispiriting thing about the election, and the end of the Labour government before it, is that the women are not there as equal citizens: they are parachuted in, pasted onto the face of government. They were never part of the campaign, which was jolly interesting but oddly pallid with few great piercing revelations of values. For better or worse, none of the new women in government have the irritant populism of a Clare Short or a Mo Mowlam. No doubt one or another of them will emerge as a slightly disapproving headmistress in the Virginia Bottomley or Patricia Hewitt mode. No doubt the search for some females to put in place will turn up some inadequate or banal women.
I am instinctively anti-tokenism; I thought we had got beyond that. I was the kind of feminist who liked men (and so was beyond the pale in the seventies). I was the kind of feminist who wanted to be able to write and think about anything: yes, women and children, but wars, policy, and politics as well. I did not think that there was a “lads’ end” of the playground of ideas that I was not allowed into. But hold on a minute. Without tokenism, the chaps, it seems, just forget women. And the women do not seem to have marched into politics either. But this is all trivial. The real problem is how, in the 21st century, women have become so marginalised from the political bloodstream? Put your thinking hats on folks, because politics without women is quite simply dangerous for democracy.
And I am really fed up with throwing shoes at the Today programme.
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No, we aren’t, because there are, in fact, 4.
Apologies. This has now been corrected.
Four women are quite enough to keep the place clean surely? Joking aside,I’m glad they haven’t just placed a token women in the cabinet. I would rather see a women with some substance and fire. Labor don’t think twice about the candidate as long as they fit the image its fine. That is rubbish and demeaning to everyone. It may be a while until the right people come along and that is how it should be the right person.
Here here Jean. “Male, pale and stale”, a description applied elsewhere, seems pretty apt for the Cabinet generally (although good to see Baroness Warsi included)
While you are quite right to bemoan the lack of women in frontline politics, it might also be worth flicking to the front of any issue of Prospect and counting the female versus male contributors. Commissioning this piece is, sadly, purest (and I fear blind) hypocrisy.
Neither do the government seem to want to engage much with women outside of parliament or look at issues that affect us. As a widow/carer/former nurse/academic/campaigner/researcher specialising in the field of health/human rights I would have thought I had something to offer. As winner of the 2009 Economic and Social Research Council Michael Young award I have tried repeatedly to meet with Deartment of Health Officials…Why?…To disseminate my research on the “worst medical treatment disaster in the history of the NHS” the infection of haemophiliacs with HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C through contaminated NHS blood and its impact on wives, carers and widows. Shall we say obtaining a commitment to look at this issue is akin to drawing blood from a stone…
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/about/CI/CP/societynow/issue4/blood_trade.aspx
I thought long and hard about posting this, but decided that the historical record must be defended if we are to be serious about re-thinking or evaluating feminism.
You identify a pattern, but, I am afraid, you are also part of the problem because of the way you airily trivialise the feminism of the 70s as a matter of ‘not liking men.’
This is one of the most powerful and persistent memes in anti-feminism.
This characterisation of the feminism of the 70s and your relationship to it is a gross misrepresentation: “kind of feminist who liked men (and so was beyond the pale in the seventies”
The feminist movement of the seventies and early eighties was incredibly diverse, with socialist feminists, liberal feminists (who both very much worked with men), radical feminists, radical-separatist feminists. “Liking” men was not the issue dividing or linking feminists or distinguishing feminists from non-feminists. There were very different analyses about gendered power and yes different aims and strategies. There were a host of vibrant campaigns, from supporting the organisation of night-cleaners to ‘reclaiming the streets’ to anti ‘beauty contests.’
I was involved and the history of this period is well-documented. I also encountered you many times during that period; you chose not to get involved with feminism for many reasons: your own analysis that it wasn’t the ‘primary issue,’ as well as because of the attitudes of your ‘political social circle.’
There were many problems with the feminist movement of the 70s and its legacies, but
this is just -well – silly and ill-informed.
You have unbounded rights and opportunities to express how you personally ‘felt’ about the feminist movement of that period, but to contemptuously fly in the face of historical evidence is not serious politics or scholarship or good journalism.