“I AM WOMAN,” she sang, “hear me roar.” And so, with infectious exuberance, we did: “I am strong, I am invincible, I am wo-maaaan!” Heady, healthy days; by the time Helen Reddy’s anthem became the singalong of the early 1970s, we already had the contraceptive pill, we had legal abortion and the youngest among us, at least, had choices far fitter and fatter than those of our mothers.

We reclaimed the night, we grew shaggy armpits, we had a blast. In 1975, Parliament finally caught up with the prevailing mood and so, 30 years ago today, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed and the Equal Pay Act came into force: a decent crack was ours for the taking and woe betide he who would deny us.

As things turned out, however, it wasn’t to be a he who dimmed the lights; it was a she. Moan all you will about glass ceilings and the still tenacious grip, in some quarters, of Neanderthal man; the terrible truth is that while it was women who fought for — and won — a historical advance for their sex, it was also women, thereafter, who blew it.

The overwhelming achievement of these three decades of feminism and its worker bees in the “women’s movement” has been to turn our triumph on its head. What was once about women’s strengths is now about their weaknesses; where once we celebrated what women can do, we are asked, now, only to make allowances for what they cannot.

The purpose of the new law was to ensure what might loosely be called fair play; it beggars belief, looking back, that its proponents ever expected to see it invoked in so many cases that are, frankly, pathetic. Scarcely a week passes without some female high-flyer running to a tribunal with tales of men being beastly; in one memorable case this year a woman used in evidence the fact that her male colleagues often went to the pub without her. You might think that equality involves an equal chance of being disliked — she called it sex discrimination. (And prevailed.)

Being excessively liked, mind, causes as much grief: vast sums are paid to those propositioned by a sexually uppity colleague, as compensation for the gal being so traumatised that she is forced to retire and spend more time with her stress counsellor. Women in the Armed Forces seem especially attracted to this milch cow, with 2,400 of them last year complaining of harassment — in other words, the very women expected to produce superhuman effort under enemy fire cannot, apparently, be expected to produce a robust rebuttal of a smutty overture.

So here we are: victims all. Can’t help ourselves. And proud of it. You will remember Sara Thornton, who stabbed her husband to death as he lay boozed into coma. She was entirely free to leave him, but given that he’d kicked her in the self-esteem she couldn’t be expected to do that. And when the usual women’s groups fought to have her released in 1995, she emerged from prison gates, clenched fists aloft, to applause fit for a heroine.

You won’t, however, remember “Ann” — even if you did read the story I wrote about her in the same year. She was tied to a brute by lack of money, education, hope, opportunity and, oh yes, three small children. Nevertheless, on the day she determined that she had taken her very last fist, she bundled up her children and left, for ever, to and with nothing. An astoundingly brave move, from my kind of heroine — but, regrettably, only 20 years after the Sex Discrimination Act, a heroism of already unfashionable hue. Nobody even asks now, another ten years on, why a battered woman doesn’t up sticks. Or stand up for herself: research suggests an average of 35 beatings before the first call to the police.

I am strong, I am invincible?

Of course, we are never allowed to forget that it’s hard to be strong when cussed by oestrogen. Where once the menstrual cycle was discreetly left to euphemistic allusions in intimate company, now it demands exemptions fit for war wounds as premenstrual tension has become an excuse for all peculiarities of behaviour. I recently heard an ambitious woman, who doubtless prides herself on being thoroughly modern, boldly blame her temporary ineptitude, to a male superior, upon her “ time of the month”; in other words, “I’m as good as the men, gissa job . . . even though, by the way, I shall be howling at the moon one week in four.”

Still, if our hormonally challenged flesh is weak, it is as nothing compared with our minds. This season’s heated debate, for example, has concerned whether a woman’s consent to sexual intercourse is valid if she is drunk. Feministas are adamant that it is not, arguing that a man who “takes advantage” of a woman rendered compliant by a few pints of snakebite is a fully-fledged rapist; again, their argument weakens us.

Allowing for the tautological assumption that “date rape” takes place on a date, and allowing therefore that both parties probably enjoyed several sherries before engaging in sex, what this means is that a man may be held responsible for his inebriated actions — but a woman need not be. A curious equality, is it not, that disallows an equal right to make our own mistakes?

The undermining of essentially female stoicism does, admittedly, benefit some: workers in equal ops quangos and viragos of agitprops, for instance, are bound to regard the naturally independent strengths of women with the same horror that a tenured environmentalist sniffs clean air.

But those who follow their self-interested lead really must be daft as brushes. The evolution of the “can’t cope, won’t cope” philosophy has done most of us no favours at all — and it was not to make helpless wusses of ourselves that, 30 years ago, we grouped and moved, and marched and sang.

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