Quality | 2009.06.10
The farce ceiling | Hadley Freeman
Our CEOs and celebrities may struggle to get it, but it\'s not hard to see why this feminism thing exists
Feminism has been in the news a lot recently. This never fails to surprise me. Maybe I was raised in a particularly progressive household, or just a simplistic one, but the basic tenet of feminism – men and women should be treated, and paid, as equals – always struck me as so stark staringly obvious that whenever another female celebrity – Hilary Duff , Shakira , the list is illustrious – insists that "I wouldn\'t call myself a feminist", what I actually hear is: "Yes, I\'d call myself a racist. And the person I\'m racist against is me."
But people like to complicate things. Several recent interviews have provided examples of how to get in a tangle by misunderstanding the obvious.
Marks & Spencer\'s Stuart Rose, for example. It takes a brave, middle-aged, white CEO, or a spectacularly anachronistic old duffer, to come out with the following : "There are really no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time … What else do you want, for God\'s sake?" Determinedly refraining from replying, "Well, I\'d like you to stop addressing female journalists as \'darling\', Daddy-O," I will suggest that Rose makes the common error of assuming that just because Nicola Horlick exists, all hurdles have been elegantly scaled.
Yes, childbirth is, as Rose says, "a biological fact". But that women still earn £369,000 less than men during their careers, according to a recent BBC documentary , is not. Nor is the tenacious universal attitude that the woman should bear the major brunt of childcare, even if she works just as hard as the man.
But let\'s not bully poor Rose. Let\'s instead turn to an interview with the author Martina Cole , who is a "self-confessed feminist". Great! She\'s officially less stupid than Shakira. Unfortunately, it comes directly after this other confession: "I have a housekeeper. And it\'s fantastic. It\'s like having a wife, it really is." Call me crazy but I don\'t think that equating a "wife" with a "cleaner" is quite the feminist dream.
There is a surprising number of women who display total incomprehension of what feminism means, even while claiming to stand under its banner. During the recent Oxford poetry palaver, Jeanette Winterson called Oxford "a sexist dump". This may well be the case, but what ended Ruth Padel\'s brief reign was not misogyny, but that she behaved like Tracy Flick, the hilariously overambitious student in the film Election, by sending emails about her rival to journalists. This is not sexism. This is culpability – and to confuse the two does no one any favours.
But it is in America that feminist commentators are really directing their hate at each other. It started during the presidential campaign when writers such as Linda Hirschman bewailed that women who voted for Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton did so because they "related on a subconscious level … to [Michelle\'s] Jimmy Choos". Isn\'t that a nice view of female voters? A recent article by Hirschman on a recently launched "woman-focused" website focused not on abusive husbands or rapists, but the fellow women\'s website Jezebel. Both websites are now engaged in a battle that the latter has described as "Who you calling a bad feminist?" . Good? Bad? Who\'s going to be the first one to call the other one fat?
One should be wary of those who use "feminist" as a misleading Band Aid. But really, this feminist thing isn\'t complicated: it isn\'t a get out of jail free card that absolves you from responsibility, and lets you equate cleaners with wives or be vindictive about other women. It\'s about equality; and that only 9% of directors of the UK\'s top 100 companies are women suggests it hasn\'t quite happened, so maybe we should focus on that. Kind of obvious. But I\'m a woman and I need to keep things simple.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/02/feminism-sexism
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