A Woman’s Work is Never Done
Is Woman’s Hour Still Relevant?’ Do we still need more flipping books on wimmin? Me too, me too, whine, whine, don’t all lives matter? Those questions have been thrown at me over the past forty eight hours. My answer to all three is a big YES.
Jenni Murray the voice of Woman’s Hour for 33 years is retiring. Her younger, razor-sharp co-presenter, Jane Garvey, has just quit the show. The enormously talented Ms Emma Barnett is to be the next main host. The programme, now 75 years old, draws in listeners of every age, class and race. It’s lively, fun, informative, combative, and utterly relevant.
Secondly, flipping book on wimmin will keep being published because we are still seen as sex objects, dependents, intellectually inferior and subjected to constant judgement and unwarranted guidance. Overt and covert sexism is rife. UN research shows females are disproportionately impacted by Covid and the recession. As the broadcaster Iain Dale says: ‘ though we have come a long way, in the fight for equality, our work is not yet done’.
Finally, all lives do indeed matter. Some of the most fiery feminists have treasured sons, brothers and male partners. Many males in our country are lost, troubled, insecure, depressed and damaged by circumstances. We care about them. That will not placate the men and some women too, who despise challenges to the gender status quo.
My new book Ladies Who Punch has just been published. One pugilistic radio presenter asked why I would write such a book, why not men, on and on, clubbing me till I lost the will. It’s simple. I wanted to honour fifty selected women, past and present, some known, many misunderstood or rendered invisible by those who control information, past and present. I could write ten such volumes and not complete the list.
Think about this: research shows that women leaders are managing the Covid crisis far better than most male leaders. The media should be all over this story, but can’t be bothered. Farage and the misogynist Tony Abbott, our new trade envoy get the attention. It was always thus.
Did you know that Elizabeth Heyrick and Lucy Townsend and thousands of other females were committed abolitionists and that chauvinistic William Wilberforce took their monetary contributions but actively kept them out of meetings? Or that the first woman ever to get to study law in this country was Cornelia Sorabji, a subject of the Raj? Or that Beatrix Potter’s aspirations to be a botanist were crushed? Their stories must not be forgotten, nor those of the feisty I columnist Deborah Orr and novelist Andrea Levy, both of whom died too young.
Among the current Ladies Who Punch are the foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, Sky News political editor Beth Rigby, conductor Jane Glover, Shabnam Chaudhri, the first ever Muslim/Asian detective superintendent in the Met, phenomenal barrister Helena Kennedy, writer/actor Meera Syal, and Penny Mordaunt, a tantalizing Tory. Michelle Dewberry had an insecure childhood, won the Apprentice, walked away from Alan Sugar’s ‘prize’ job, never looked back. I am in awe of young women like Reni-Eddo-Lodge the best selling author of Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People about Race, and Caroline Criado Perez who got the Bank of England to put Jane Austen on banknotes and penned Invisible Women which contains data proving science, technology and medicine are all based on male norms.
Among the amazing mums in the book are Tree Waller-Bridge, who her daughters, Phoebe and Iso and son Jasper say, is their rock and creative ally. And Tim Berners Lee’s mother Mary, a brilliant engineer and computer scientist.
None of these characters set out to be ‘inspirational’; it’s not easy to like some of them and a few hold political views I recoil from. I chose them because all of them broke expectations and did what they had to do. They made me rethink my own feminist judgements. In the past, I had been too quick to dismiss those who accommodated male values and gently upended them, or females who use flirtation and flattery to get their way, or those who describe themselves as ‘unobtrusive equalists’. I now know there are many ways to skin the patriarchy cat.
I also realised how important fathers were or are to many of these punchy ladies. And other supportive males too, who walk with us. We will get there. And for all the ongoing obstacles and setbacks, the journey is exhilarating and there will be no turning back.
I newspaper 9th September 2020