Fittingly, in the run-up week to International Women’s Day, it was the ‘gender’ week on the first year undergraduate Focus On Britain course I teach at Kingston University. The module is a lively one where topicality makes it forever changing: students are encouraged to keep an eye on newsworthy events that document our changing society. The syllabus dictates set weekly tasks for seminar discussion, but more telling are the topics raised by the students who tend to be a generally worldly lot on our courses rather than the sheltered bookish sorts I encountered (and was) at their age.
Officially then we were (i) dissecting ‘patriarchy’ and (ii) those present were encouraged to select and defend which strand of feminism might be most preferable to them from the radical, Marxist, black feminist and liberal varieties. Associated topics that arose voluntarily included that of WAGs and the recent row involving Sky News punditry. Notwithstanding the fact that sociology tends to be a subject largely studied by females, there was wide divergence of opinion amongst the three groups I conducted. For one week the obviously outnumbered men seemed slightly muted in their opinions.
Most students tended to position themselves in the liberal feminist camp which accepts that change towards reversing the male-dominated status quo will be gradual but there were also takers for Marxist and black variants. It is a strength of these positions that they recognise disadvantage as multiply constructed and not just a function of gender. It’s easy to forget that today’s 18-year-olds were born in 1993 under the grey years of John Major. One of the class confidently stated ‘but we’ll never have a female prime minister’ before realising her mistake at the laughter of the rest. Perhaps for those of us that lived through Thatcher’s reign it’s equally easy to forget that she was in any way a sister given her disregard for women’s issues. Lowering her voice and power-dressing made her one of the boys in many respects.
Another faction of the freshers were baffled by the set questions. Were we not already an equal society, they wondered. Was there a need for any kind of feminism at all? I was reminded of the old HEA advertising campaign to promote contraception awareness with a pregnant man pictured by 1970s photographic trickery with an accompanying slogan suggesting that men would think twice if they could potentially get knocked up in the same way as women. Sexual parity cannot be truly achieved in part because of biology but strides have been made: until 1928 the entire so-called fairer sex were considered too thick to put an X in a box every five years. Maternity pay recognises the domestic work of initial childbirth and rearing. Child benefit too was a factor in women’s independence although the Tories are chipping away at it, hellbent on destroying its universality in direct contradiction of their pre-election promises.
The week ended with the shocking news of the parlously low number of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies: a fifth have none at all, a proportion that seems stubborn to budge. Proof if proof were needed that in the second decade of the second millennium women are still not taken seriously enough. Ed Miliband did say in his first Labour conference speech that even though Labour now faces its first period in 13 years in opposition, there is no need to oppose for the sake of it where circumstances dictate. I can’t say there have been many instances that I have seen the need to follow this through but here is one area that might satisfy that criterion. I see diversity in seminar rooms all the time. If the government does go ahead with the introduction of quotas we could be in for some welcome change ahead at the top boardrooms of the land.
Three thoughts: One, are women also to ‘blame’ for failing to ‘step-up’? Two, has society really changed from a patriarchal to a more equal one in terms of gender roles played out in reality? Three, the laddettes of thugery and volgarity, copying the boys in all their testone driven diversity, are doing what Lady Margaret Thatcher did – pretend to be a man – or more seriously, act out as a man would; though to be fair she got away with a lot because she was a woman, most parliamentarians, at first, did not know how to relate to and behave around a woman of power.
Thatcher was no woman of power she was a dingle dangle dolly does the dirty work for blokes as per ,whilst the fat cats hid behind the mice who could only run around playing politics!