THERE WAS GREAT rejoicing in the purlieus of power this week when it became known that feminism was officially dead. The weavers of links for radio and television indulged in an orgy of celebratory alliteration. F-f-feminism was f-f-finished! Bra-burning was burnt-out, they cackled, and their talking heads, always one male coupled with one (younger) female — evidence of “equality” achieved if anyone required it — relayed their feeble witticisms to a bemused nation. We were not told whether any of the millions of women toiling unpaid for children and aged relatives, or the families of the two women killed every week in this country by their partners or ex-partners, or the millions of women on low pay or the women sacked because they were pregnant, thought this good news. The hacks rejoiced. Balls would be broken no more.
Feminism was a certified dirty word and anti-feminism would be the official style of Carole Caplin-style nipples-akimbo not-very-new Labour henceforth. Page Three was safe.
The occasion for this brief spasm of misogynistic celebration was the publication of a pamphlet, eked out by spacious printing and lots of airy headings to a scant 55 pages. It is called Talking Equality and what it demonstrates is that talking equality is for all purposes the same as talking rubbish. This is a view with which I sympathise but, instead of making the case, Melanie Howard and Sue Tibballs, the writers of the pamphlet, stumble again and again into a morass of category mistakes and flat inanity. “Most people, however, do not think of themselves as experiencing inequality.” People know which groups are considered unequal, but they do not necessarily agree with this. “Some actively questioned whether all of these groups actually experience inequality at all. There was little support for the idea that women, as a group, are unequal in society today.”
Not surprisingly the unfortunate respondents, subjected to such a semantic battering, shied away from any kind of equality discourse, rightly divining that discrimination is not the same as inequality, and that egalitarianism might be one thing, but equality is nothing at all.
Under the heading “The research: Who we talked to”, which gives a pretty good sample of the way of Howard and Tibballs with grammar, we learnt that “we”, presumably Howard and Tibballs, talked to four focus groups, none of which contained more than eight people, and set up as well “in-depth paired interviews” with four couples, “recruited to provide as much diversity of experience as possible”. If this project design had been submitted by an undergraduate sociology student it would have been rejected. Any student who submitted as part of her course work a report that interpreted remarks made under prompting by a random sample of 35 people as evidence of the way “people”, “most people” and “many” think, could expect a low mark, perhaps a failure, even in these non-failing days. One of the selected couple of empty-nester lesbian women is reported as saying: “We had suffragism in the 20s, feminism in the 70s — we need something else for women in the 90s.” So what have we here? An old student thesis on the Iraq dossier model, sexed up by Howard and Tibballs?
The Equal Opportunities Commission commissioned this fatuity from the Future Foundation. The Future Foundation is by its own definition “a consumer think-tank” which advises “organisations on how to plan for the future by meeting developing customer needs and contributing to the wider environment in which they operate”, whatever that may mean.
Melanie Howard, formerly head of IT and media consulting at the Henley Centre, co-founded the Future Foundation in 1996; Sue Tibballs, formerly executive director of the Women’s Communication Centre, then women’s affairs campaigner for the Body Shop, is projects director at the Future Foundation. We can only wonder how much the Future Foundation charged the EOC for the report; we learn from an announcement signed by Ruth Anderson, London tax partner of the auditing firm KPMG LLP, that the costs, or some of the costs, of the publication were paid by them.
Apparently the EOC decided to go ahead and publish Talking Equality because its conclusions chimed with the commission’s own impressions, that “inequality”, that is, discrimination on the grounds of sex, was alive and well but that the mass of the population was reluctant to admit the fact, and believed that women were worse paid and worse treated by nature, and that they only did infinite quantities of unpaid work because they chose to and therefore had no one to blame but themselves.
What the EOC has chosen to put its name to is no more nor less than a suicide note, and probably not before time. In a fairly typical recent debacle, the commission funded the case of a lesbian teacher who was forced to give up her job after five years of unremitting homophobic abuse from her pupils, but lost the case when the House of Lords found that the Sex Discrimination Act related to gender, not sexual orientation. It has taken four years, and untold expense, for the matter to be decided.
It is surely right to extend anti-discrimination campaigning to include discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but even that will not provide for the incrimination of an employer for the actions of a third party. Whatever happens, there will never be any possibility of putting a persecuted teacher’s classes on trial. If we’re “talking equality”, children constitute the most unequal group in our society; they are unable to seek redress even for the gross physical abuse known as corporal punishment, let alone bullying, neglect and invasion of privacy.
By declaring itself no longer relevant, the EOC is preparing the way for yet another sweeping reform by new Labour, in which all the three existing anti-discrimination commissions, the EOC, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission, will be integrated, and expanded to deal with discrimination on the grounds of age, sexual orientation and faith. Heading up this new monster would be a perfect job for Cherie Blair wearing her Cherie Booth human rights lawyer hat (designed by Carol Caplin). The new body might as well be known by the name of Equal Opportunities Commission as any other, for the title makes no reference to sex. A more dynamic EOC could have captained its own expansion into a larger anti-discrimination body over the 25 years of its existence.
The unexpected announcement by Patricia Hewitt, who is the visible one of the two ministers for women in Blair’s Cabinet, of yet another sweeping reform by this Government, in the abolition of compulsory retirement and the banning of age-specific job descriptions, might yet bury the latest evidence of the EOC’s intellectual bankruptcy. Certainly Hewitt’s swift intervention materially advanced the case for institutional action against age discrimination, which had been thought some way down the pipeline.
Feminism is far from dead; what has been moribund from the first is equality feminism, which is essentially conservative in that it seeks merely to induct women into existing masculinist structures, where success depends upon conformity. Equal pay is predicated on an empty concept of equal work, which is itself defined by prejudice. If male apprentices in engineering and construction earn £115 a week, and female apprentices in social work earn £60 it is not because one kind of work is intrinsically worth more than the other. The work that women do is devalued simply because women do it.
