Watch Out

Formerly prestigious sectors where women come to dominate will see their prestige eroded and their earning levels decay, as has happened historically in nursing and teaching, and is happening in medicine. Equal pay for work of equal value makes no sense because work has no intrinsic value; work is worth only what the employer can be forced to pay for it. Three-quarters of the working women in England are in the low pay sector; in terms of earnings, conditions and job satisfaction, most men would consider the jobs women have no choice but to do not worth doing. Equally men refuse to do the unpaid work that women do; housework, which expands to fill the time available and is always only to do again, is just one kind of work that men refuse to do.

Long ago I said that anti-discrimination legislation would do nothing to make me feel more at ease within my woman’s body. In the past 30 years women’s dissatisfaction with their own physicality has become an obsession, out of which fortunes are made for some of the many clients of the Future Foundation, who include Nestlé. Tibballs and Howard did not interpret their respondents’ statements that they might as well stop moaning and get on with the life they had as acceptance of inferiority, which they preferred to call inequality, and they were unduly reverent with an ignoramus called “Glasgow DE Man”, whose specialty was feeling sorry for himself.

There is an equivalent of racism that operates against women in every sphere; it is universal and constitutional misogyny which affects even women in their dealings with themselves. Equality as a strategy was doomed from the outset; women could and did force entry into masculine institutions and functioned within them adequately when it came to doing the job, but the power eluded them. It was not that they wormed their way up through the echelons and suddenly encountered a glass ceiling; rather they were scaling a glass mountain. They were outsiders, never involved in the gut operations of the system, the brokering of patronage and the grooming of confederates.

Mo Mowlam told me recently that when she was due to retire as US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said to her: “What’s to become of me? The boys won’t take care of me” (as they take care of each other, understood.) Baroness Thatcher could have asked the same question. Not for her a series of lucrative sinecures on the boards of this, that and the other multi-billion-pound corporation, only a tough trot round the lecture circuit. What keeps the corporate world alive and relatively invulnerable is male bonding; women, even if they have a decent golf handicap and can get on the links on the same days as their male colleagues, will never have any part of it.

Equality was an empty notion, which always threatened to cost women far more than it gained for them. Women’s liberation was as radical as equality feminism was conservative, its vision a new world where women could blossom into full self-realisation, and exert new kinds of potency in protecting life against the forces of death. On that long journey we have got precisely nowhere. That future still awaits its foundation.

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Where does feminism go from here?

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