In The Female Eunuch, the text that woke me and many others to feminism, Germaine Greer quoted Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, Women – the Longest Revolution: ‘Circumstantial accounts of the future are idealistic and, worse, static.’ This is both right and wrong.
No such account makes sufficient allowance for the impact of quakes, natural or of human origin, or the intended consequences that flow even from planned events. Technology is shaking up our lives in ways no seer foresaw (though science fiction writers came close to predicting whole chunks of it). How, for example, can we talk about gender in the future workplace if the workplace – if work itself – might disappear?
The answer cannot be to avoid such discussions, but to recognise the limits of our knowledge and imaginations and to try to expand both. Politics is all about shaping the future, yet political movements succumb too easily to the Happily Ever After syndrome. Gender equality advocates are no exception, focusing on the big, fat, equal wedding of genders, the moment equality is reached, and not what lies beyond. Confetti drifts and then the picture fades.
Knocking on doors for the Women’s Equality Party has proved revealing on that issue and, on occasion, literally. A resident of a Southwark tower block responded cautiously to my knock: ‘Who is it?’ ‘I’m here about the elections.’ ‘Electricity?’ In evident alarm, perhaps fearing I had come to cut his energy supply, he threw open the door, naked.
Campaigning also uncovered a generational split in male attitudes. Men in their fifties, finding WE canvassers on the doorstep, often respond ‘I’ll fetch the wife’. Younger men engage directly. We don’t need to explain this is a party for them, pushing a platform that will also benefit them.
That is encouraging; so too is the enthusiasm we encountered. People have told us they had literally danced when they heard about WE. But from the start they also asked difficult questions that we were already grappling with, both personally and as a party. Would gender equality encourage other kinds of equality? Did we want an improved version of our current society – gender equality within existing structures – or something more radical? How much change might be achieved through nudging? In what circumstances might prohibition or coercive legislation be necessary?
You can see why people would shy away from Equalia if they imagine it to be a brave new world that, like Aldous Huxley’s addled dystopia, requires a sublimation of the individual to a supposed greater good. You can see why they might lack enthusiasm for building Equalia if they sense that it will simply enshrine old injustices within a new pecking order. Would the new race of 50-foot women create a fairer system or form a new elite?
If only we could poke around Equalian homes and businesses, check what’s on the telly and in the news, find out how people are having sex and if anyone is selling it, taste the air to verify that it’s cleaner, and confirm that the shadows of conflict have receded. If only we could find out who does the dishes or the low-paid work in Equalia and whether such work is more highly valued. Will a society that allows everyone to take up as much space as they like produce giants, or might the absence of adversity diminish creativity, or obviate the need for ingenuity? We don’t even know what gender would mean in a society freed from gender programming. So how do we begin to answer questions so fundamental, not just to the Women’s Equality Party, but to everyone affected by the global imbalance between the sexes? And that’s all of us.
The ambition of this book is just that – not to answer these fundamental questions but to begin to answer them. There are clear limits to how definitive any such inquiry can be, not only because of the paucity of hard information, but because of the confines of my own experience. I am a product of my own background and socialisation, of a particular confluence of genes and influences, of luck – or privilege – and half a century of racketing about the planet. For this book I travelled as far as time and resources permitted, interviewed as widely as possible, read and kept reading, thought and kept thinking. I needed to learn in order to find out how much I didn’t know. The Equalia I describe, and the pathways I discovered, are located in the cultures that produced me. It may well be that the routes and outcomes look different in other hemispheres.
My quest took me to Iceland, the nation that comes closest to Equalia, and to countries and continents that have made less progress on gender equality, to ascertain the factors and people promoting or retarding change. Under Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship, Germany has become a better place for women – yes, even for the women of Cologne. Is she the kind of giantess we need, a 15-Meter Frau, or is she to blame for Germany’s current political turbulence? For now it’s May every month in Downing Street but this looks less like a sea change than proof of the so-called glass cliff, the phenomenon first identified by researchers at the University of Exeter that sees leadership opportunities open up to women at times of crisis when the odds against successful leadership peak. If Merkel and May are still in office by the time you start this book, they might not be by the time you finish it, though Merkel is a great survivor. And what should we make of Hillary Clinton’s fate and the rise of Trumpism and related strains of populism in Europe? These signal fresh challenges for women and minorities and to any consensus on gender equality. In France this movement is led by a woman, Marine Le Pen, who in May 2017 made it through to the second round of the country’s presidential elections. Yet the first day of Trump’s presidency also triggered the biggest women-led marches in history, with 3.5m protesters on US streets and millions more in 20 other countries determined to resist the rising world order.
We will survey the predictable changes heralded by science and technology, and by global shifts in power and population. China’s growth is endangered by the legacy of a one-child policy within a Confucian culture that values boys more than girls and, in acting out these preferences, has ended up with a surplus of discontented single men. India has 43 million more men than women. Rwanda’s population tilts in the other direction because genocide killed off scores of men. It now ranks higher than Iceland, indeed highest in the world, on female representation in politics. So, is it a paragon of gender equality?
We’ll examine the media, its power and potential. We’ll go to Hollywood and Facebook. We’ll visit citadels of privilege and ghettos of oppression. We’ll talk to experts, leaders, people in public life and in their most private pursuits. The personal is political and for that reason let us start this journey in that most personal of spaces, at home.
Please join me at my kitchen table.
Chapter One: Gate-crashing the club
DOWNTRODDEN PEOPLES CLAIM superior qualities to compensate for inferior status. Women cling to a belief in essential, female difference. We are emotionally intelligent. We are nurturing. We work together rather than against each other. We can multitask. Want something done? Ask a busy woman.
The early months of the Women’s Equality Party appeared to reinforce this thesis. Each successive gathering of our newly formed steering committee brought a banquet to the table, of energy, ideas, sweet concord and food – so much food.
Sandi came with herrings: pickled herrings, herrings in a sweet mustard and dill sauce, herrings in soured cream, and pumpernickel already cut to carry satisfactory consignments of herring from plate to mouth without need of forks. Others baked cakes from scratch. I supplied alcohol.
Each meeting also brought long lists of tasks completed without reminders, despite multiple commitments tugging at sleeves. One of the most time-consuming jobs involved answering the unstanchable flow of emails that news of WE had triggered. Volunteers often worked through the night, their exhaustion mitigated by the enthusiasm of the correspondence.
‘Thank you for giving me something to believe in again.’
‘At last, something to get excited about in politics!’
‘For the first time in my 14 years of not bothering to vote I am inspired.’
‘I am 16 years old and passionate