Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?
Rosalind Coward

The women’s movement has transformed British society since the 1960s. In this contentious and controversial book leading feminist writer Ros Coward asks, is it now holding us back?When women set out to change the world and their place in it in the 1960s and 1970s it seemed they had a long struggle ahead. Educational standards for girls were lower, they were not expected to take on serious jobs, women did not get paid as much as men in identical jobs, they were not given maternity provision (not least because they were not expected to work after getting married, let alone having children). Women’s health was not researched as thoroughly as men’s, there were few women doctors, politicians, senior managers…Within a generation, our world has been transformed into one in which women are assumed to be the equals of men. Indeed, many feminists continue to argue that women are superior to men. But in a world in which girls consistently attain better exam results than boys, achieve a higher percentage of university places, are more likely to get jobs and whose expectations – of flexible working lives – are more attuned to the needs of the modern workplace, such a suggestion seems as discriminatory as the world of the 1960s was to women.In this controversial, hard-hitting and myth-debunking book, Ros Coward looks at feminism’s achievements and asks that most un-PC of questions: do we need feminism any more? Or is it damaging of real relations between men and women, demonizing men and denying them the right to understanding and equality in a world that is harsher for them than ever before?

Sacred Cows

IS FEMINISM RELEVANT

TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM?

Rosalind Coward

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_1134dad9-0df4-5dc1-8574-a06a4c7d3dc7)

This book would not have been written without the support and encouragement of certain friends and colleagues. In particular I would like to acknowledge the institutional support given by University College, Northampton and the personal and intellectual support of George Savona of the same institution. Without blaming them, I would like to thank the following people: Karen Binks, Karen Selby, Judy Holder, and Tessa Adams. Jo Dobry, Julian LeVay and Ann McFerran deserve especial thanks for their refusal to let me give up on the project. I would like to acknowledge Barbara Taylor for her ongoing contribution to formulating some of the ideas and more specially for her collaboration with an original version of the chapter, Whipping Boys. Ruth Glaser also gave practical support at a critical moment. I would also like to acknowledge various editors at the Guardian, especially David Rowan, David Leigh and Sally Weale for giving me space to develop ideas and sometimes for ruthlessly challenging them. I owe thanks to Michael Fishwick at HarperCollins and Antony Goff at David Higham Associates for their incredible patience. I would also like to thank my Mother for her continuing support and her invaluable cuttings service. Finally I would like to thank John Ellis. Quite simply, without his support this book would never have been written.

Table of Contents

Title Page (#u7ff747aa-d35d-5bee-9b6c-58cd0ca56ce2)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#uff3adaee-f9be-53b3-b70c-604a769823da)

INTRODUCTION (#u3495046e-3b2d-5d33-a2a5-9b4aae8dc067)

1 THE ASSAULT ON UNEARNED MALE POWER (#u8baa3200-8dac-5b24-851d-17ff494b49e1)

2 FEMINISM: A MOVEMENT BLIND TO ITS OWN EFFECTIVENESS (#u0ab57162-6ea6-5e85-a588-01aab094268e)

3 A NEW GENDER LANDSCAPE (#u91a512fa-ad28-51bf-995e-77df8dbe13a1)

4 THE FULL MONTY (#litres_trial_promo)

5 MALE LOSS (#litres_trial_promo)

6 MASCULINITY: FROM POTENCY TO ABSURDITY (#litres_trial_promo)

7 MASCULINITIES (#litres_trial_promo)

8 SEARCHING FOR THE HERO INSIDE OF US (#litres_trial_promo)

9 WOMANISM (#litres_trial_promo)

10 THE ‘MASCULINIST’ REACTION (#litres_trial_promo)

11 WHIPPING BOYS (#litres_trial_promo)

12 THE REDUNDANT FATHER (#litres_trial_promo)

13 MOTHERING AND FEMALE COMPLICITY (#litres_trial_promo)

14 THE BOY CHILD (#litres_trial_promo)

15 VULNERABLE OPPRESSORS (#litres_trial_promo)

16 POTENT VICTIMS (#litres_trial_promo)

CONCLUSION (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About Publisher Page (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_ef96af9b-e7e7-561b-a482-a36d0000c6dc)

Feminism has been a dramatically successful social movement. It has utterly changed what women can expect from, or do with, their lives. It has also transformed when men expect from sharing their lives with women and how they will behave towards them. Children growing up now simply take for granted feminism’s messages about sexual equality and justice when only thirty years ago such messages were widely opposed as extremist and threatening to the social order. No other social movement has so rapidly revolutionized such deeply held patterns of behaviour. The problems faced by feminism now have nothing to do with getting its ideas across and everything to do with how to face up to the unpredictable consequences of this success.

Paradoxically, however, as an increasing number of feminists reach ever more powerful positions, they seem determined to breathe new life into the original tenets of feminism, insisting that female oppression is just as real now as ever before. In the UK and America there are powerful feminists in government who call on the female populace to back them up in a continuing struggle. ‘At last’, they seem to say, ‘you have someone to take up your cause, to fight for women’s rights. And what a hard fight it will be because nothing has really changed.’ Recently I told a well-known, highly paid woman novelist the sub-title of this book: ‘Is feminism relevant to the new millennium?’ ‘Of course it is,’ she said without missing a beat. ‘We still don’t have equal pay.’ Everywhere, powerful women repeat this mantra. Even Germaine Greer now says nothing has really changed. Influential feminists insist that because there are still many individual areas of injustice or unfairness, there is still an overarching system of sexual injustice with men always advantaged and women disadvantaged. One injustice, like the inequality which exists between the average pay of women and the average pay of men, is supposed to prove the rest. But this is no longer true in any simple way. Of course, women still suffer many injustices, discriminations and sometimes even outrages but it is no longer a simple coherent picture of male advantage and female disadvantage.

There are many social practices and attitudes which still discriminate against women. I encounter this regularly in my own life as a journalist and in the media. In these areas, men still tend to dominate. They are still more interested in each other and in each other’s interests than in women – a sort of unconscious marginalization which women have long noticed in business. It is still more difficult for older women or intellectual women than it is for older or intellectual men. While this is galling, it is not part of a coherent picture of male domination and female subordination as it once was. At least now there are many women working in the media. Some are not simply successful but very powerful, such as Rosie Boycott, editor of the Daily Express. In some areas of the media, to be young and female is a definite advantage; in the late 1990s the fashion has been for female newsreaders. It would be wrong to suggest male domination is the most significant unfairness. Now the dominance of the media by a certain class, certain families even, and the absence of ethnic minorities are much more striking. There are now different unfairnesses coming from different places and causes. When gender is significant, it is not always women who are disadvantaged.

Some people recognize that reality has changed, that something is up. Invariably this recognition leads to questions such as ‘What does it mean to be a feminist now?’ or ‘What can feminism tell us about this new reality?’ The publishing world is full of editors hunting for the young feminist who will galvanize new audiences with a contemporary version of the old theme of female oppression. In other words, there’s a search for a feminist ‘take’ on contemporary society. But feminism will never be relevant in that clear-sighted simple way again. Gender remains a crucial division in western society but in a much more fractured and inconsistent way. Sometimes when gender division is relevant, it is men who are disadvantaged not women.

These thoughts go into new and uncharted territory and there is not a huge amount of encouragement to undertake such a journey. Feminism is still a subject which provokes passion and, it has to be said, unreason. ‘Are you for it or against it?’ is the most common question. But such polarization is now unhelpful, obscuring an understanding of what feminism has achieved, what has changed, and what role gender now actually does play. It also prevents us asking an even more fundamental question: Is feminism relevant at all now?

It took me a long time before I allowed myself to ask this question. My intellectual and political formation were in feminism and it feels a bit like casting myself adrift and betraying friendships which have formed me, but for the past few years I have had a growing sense that, at some point, for my own benefit as much as anything else, I would have to look at feminism afresh, to settle my own accounts with it. I needed to understand why feminism had once been so important and why I now felt it had become a straitjacket.

This was no overnight revelation but a growing sense of unease. Over the years I have regularly had phone calls from newspapers or magazines, or received letters from research students, asking me one or all of the following questions: Do you think feminism has achieved its goals? Would you still call yourself a feminist? Is feminism dead? I used to answer these questions reasonably confidently. Women still have a very long way to go before they reach real equality so, yes, they still need a political perspective which attends to women’s specific needs. Yes, I’m still a feminist. No, feminism is not dead.

Over the last few years, though, my answers have become more and more convoluted and hesitant. I found it increasingly difficult to say I was a feminist. This was not because it was unfashionable to do so, although it was; rather it was because, almost without noticing, I had become disenchanted with the idea of being ‘a feminist’ in such times. I still identified with the feminist objectives of abolishing discrimination based on gender and the move towards a sexually equitable society. I still cared about many of the injustices feminism cared about. But somewhere along the line, my relationship with feminism had come unstuck.

Of course, few feminists, including myself, had ever really seen themselves as fully signed up, uncritical members of some united feminist movement. Feminism wasn’t like that anyway. It was more a loose alliance of women with different approaches to problems affecting women arid a number of different primary concerns. So there had always been a place for ideas to be discussed critically and I had always seen myself as being on a critical wing of this broad church. The religious imagery is not accidental, however; feminism was a broad church and ‘belief’ is an apposite term for its dynamism. When I first encountered feminism in the 1970s, it had the force and attraction of a profound explanatory system. As the old traditional family crumbled and women began to feel the effects of postwar education and consumerism, feminism was the ideology which galvanized women, putting them in the driving seat of these profound social changes.

Certainly feminism made sense of my own experience, emerging as I did, highly educated, from university in the 1970s, yet facing ancient prejudices and discrimination. And having espoused this doctrine, it was exhilarating to be involved in the astonishing changes it made to relationships between the sexes, transforming cultural prejudices against women, knocking on the doors of workplaces and educational institutions to transform women’s opportunities probably for ever.

Because of the importance which feminism had both personally and socially, it took me a long time to recognize just how uncomfortable I had become with that association. By the late 1980s, although publicly still very much associated with feminism, I was also beginning to feel compromised, drawn into interpretations of the world which no longer rang true. Throughout the 1990s I gradually realized I was travelling beyond some invisible boundary. One incident which brought this home to me was the reception given to Katie Roiphe’s book, The Morning After, published in Britain in 1993. In reviews and features it was explained that Katie Roiphe was a young American, the daughter of a woman who had been politically active as a feminist in the 1960s and ‘70s. Roiphe, it was explained, had written a naive book, the result of discovering as a student at Princeton University that the feminism which she had imbibed with her mother’s milk had turned into the sour doctrine of sexual repression dressed up as political correctness.

I heard many conversations about Roiphe’s book. Most were indignant in tone; what were we doing importing a book by a young American student about American sexual attitudes which were so different from our own? Why should we be worried about feminist political correctness in the USA when there were still so many steps towards equality for British women to take? Was the eagerness with which the British media had grasped this attack on feminism part of what many perceived as a growing backlash against feminism?

When I finally read the book it came as something of a surprise. It was naive, but it was also a valid set of observations about the dangers of applying rigid feminist views to intimate human relationships where power does not obligingly belong to one group only. What is more, although it was a vignette of life on an American campus, it was not altogether distant and unrecognizable. What she had to say about the victim culture of feminism, about the problems with a positive discrimination programme, and especially about how relationships between the sexes might be viewed in a new, more egalitarian context, were certainly recognizable to me in the UK.

The reception of that book made me realize that although British feminists always insist that there is no single uniform feminism, only a disparate set of voices addressing women’s issues, there are some no-go areas. Roiphe’s book touched in a naive way on precisely those areas, questioning the fundamental feminist convictions that women can never be powerful in relationship to men and, conversely, that men can never occupy a position of vulnerability. Roiphe argued that on the sexually egalitarian campus, sexual relationships are not always characterized by male oppressors and female victims. So, however broad the church of feminism, it clearly had its limits and, like most other systems of belief, it responded with indignation and accusations of treachery to such challenges.

Feminism’s self-image, as a beleaguered minority, does not help it to tolerate criticism. Women involved with feminism tend to feel they have never really had the chance to explain themselves or make a significant impact with their ideas, so what they really want is more support, not criticism. This is understandable. To call oneself a feminist has never been an easy choice and it has never made anyone popular. It is still hard for individual women to confront the injustices and plain bad behaviour that they meet in life, and to try to do something about them. More often than not, the result is marginalization, designation as a ‘trouble-maker’ and much ad feminam hostility.