A few weeks ago, I heard comedian Sue Perkins being interviewed on
the radio as part of the BBC's celebration of LGBT history month. When the interviewer asked if she had ever had
problems in her career because of people’s attitudes to her being a lesbian, Sue
Perkins replied without hesitation, ‘Not nearly as many as by people's
attitudes to my being a woman.’
Two classroom discussions followed shortly after: the first was
one of those conversations pupils have when they think the teacher isn't really
listening, where I overheard a boy exclaim ''I hate feminists.' The second was when my upper sixth class were
reading a play that contains a violent rape scene, and one of the responses to
this, from a girl, was 'Well she is really annoying, and she led him on'.
When I was at school thirty years ago, casual racism was the norm
and anyone even suspected of being gay had a horrible time. Thirty years ago legal equality between men
and women was still new enough to be precious; when I started university in the
early ‘80s, Freshers’ Week conversations with other girls revealed how many had
only got there after arguments with their fathers that started with the
question: ‘You’re a girl: what do you
need to go to university for?’
Now my children are at university and I can't imagine any of you
girls having that conversation with your fathers, but to end the series of
talks started by Mr Sproat on February 1st, I'd like to go back to
diversity basics and talk about the equality of the sexes, why it still matters,
and why, although we've come a long way, there's still a long way to go.
As with other historical injustices such as racism and homophobia,
our religious heritage and our holy books have a lot to answer for when it
comes to the legal and social position of women. Today's reading from John's gospel - ‘The woman taken in adultery’ – shows an
interesting difference between Old Testament law and New Testament practice.
The Old Testament book of Leviticus has been in the news a lot
recently. It contains the two verses on
which those who want to stop same sex couples from getting married base their
dubious arguments that ‘God hates gays’.
As well as laws about eating shellfish and wearing mixed fibre
clothing, which, strangely, Christian fundamentalists feel are okay to ignore,
Leviticus goes into some detail on
adultery, saying:
"'If a man commits adultery with another man's wife -both the
adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."
At least the god of Leviticus is an equal opportunity smiter.
Five hundred years later, when John's gospel story was written,
the rules have changed: Old Testament law clearly says 'both are to be put to
death' but the religious rulers of Jesus' time brought him only 'a woman taken in adultery'. The story shows Jesus challenging the
self-righteous cruelty of the men who want to stone the woman to death. It also shows us how over time, laws are interpreted
by the people in power to scapegoat the powerless and promote the self-interest
of the powerful.
Death by stoning is still the punishment for women accused of
adultery in Iran, but keeping females powerless is as old as civilisation, and
over the years the men who wrote religious books and legal rules were pretty
clear about why: according to the Bible, it was Eve who sinned first, and then
dragged Adam down with her. Eve was
tempted by the serpent, but Adam's fall was because the woman tempted him.
Sexual temptation was a recurring theme in early Christian writings such as
those of St Augustine, who wrote: "Women should not be enlightened or
educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause
of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.”
We still see this thinking today in cultures which mandate that
women should be covered from head to toe in tent like garments, with even their
faces hidden, in case the mere sight of an ankle or an eyelash causes men to
lose control of themselves. In the
eighteenth century, Dr Samuel Johnson hinted at possible reasons behind the male
need to control women when he wrote "Nature has given women so much power
that the law has very wisely given them little"
Back in 1792 the mother of Feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, was
inspired by the political revolutions of her time to write the book A Vindication of the rights of Women. She was denounced as ‘a hyena in petticoats’
and vilified as blasphemous, but we are fortunate that unlike most women of her
time, she could read and write and so her ideas survived and gained traction
through successive generations of male and female campaigners. In the
last hundred years women in the Western world have gained rights that Mary Wollstonecraft
could barely have dreamed of.
The women's property act of 1870 ensured that women would be able
to keep the right to their own property after they married rather than themselves becoming their husband's property and ceasing to exist as a separate person
in law.
In 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave women over 30
the right to vote; 10 years later it was changed so that women could vote at
the same age as men.
With the contraceptive Pill in 1962 and the Abortion Act of 1967, women
finally gained control over their own biology. Six years after she published
her famous book, Mary Wollstonecraft was dead from an infection contracted
during childbirth, but you don't have to go back as far as 1798: if you ever watch
the BBC drama series Call the Midwife
you get some idea of how desperate things could be for women without access to
contraception and ante natal care, in this country as recently as the 1950s.
In spite of the Equal Pay Act which passed in 1970, in 2012 the gender
pay gap in the UK is still 20%: for every £100 a man earns, for doing the same
job a woman earns only £80.
But at least British women can go to school, and science and the
law have largely taken away the power of biology and religion to kill us. In the West, on average, only 1 in 2,800
women now die in childbirth; in sub-Saharan Africa the rate is 1 in 16.
In October 2012, a 14 year old Pakistani girl called Malala
Yousafzai was shot in the head and face by Taliban gunmen while returning home
on a school bus, because she had blogged about the importance of girls being
educated, which the Taliban said was ‘anti-Islamic’ , that is, blasphemous.
Against the odds, she survived and now lives in Birmingham. The Taliban have since re-issued their death
sentence against her and her family.
In 32 countries girls are routinely subjected to female genital
mutilation, a practice too gruesome to detail, which is designed to keep women
‘pure’. According to a 2009 report in The
Times, roughly 500 girls are sent back from British immigrant communities every
year during the summer holidays, to undergo the procedure in their countries of
origin. Although it has been illegal
since 2003, there have been no prosecutions.
In spite of repeated requests for enforcement of the law by women's
groups from within the communities, the police and social services take their
advice from male community leaders who tell them it would be too 'culturally
insensitive' to intervene.
In countries like Somalia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
religion and tradition allow women to be defined only by their sexual status as
virgins, mothers or, fatally, fallen women.
According to Somalian human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, girls
growing up there are told that if you allow yourself to be raped, you should do
the honourable thing and die. If you don't, your father and brothers will
probably kill you anyway.
But before we get too smug about living in the ‘civilised West’,
we should look at some uncomfortable facts.
In 2011 in Britain 43,069 cosmetic surgery procedures were done for men
and women. Of these, women accounted for
38,771. While nose-jobs were the most
common procedure for men, for women it was breast augmentation. This suggests
that here in Britain, while both men and women are concerned to maximise their
physical appeal, only women’s physical appeal is sexualised.
Old fashioned feminists used to get irate about page 3 girls. Now
that anyone can access hard core pornography with two clicks of a mouse, page 3
girls seem like a quaint throwback. [A recent campaign by female journalists
and politicians worried about the potential impact of internet porn on children,
asked internet service providers to change their default settings so that
people have to ‘opt in’ to porn websites.
The campaign was strongly opposed by Internet advertisers, and although
78% of women polled were in favour of the change, 75% of men polled were
not. The only service provider that
changed its defaults was Talk-talk, the only one with a female CEO.]
Internet porn is only an extreme example of how our society also judges
women by their looks and their sexual status in a way that simply has no male
equivalent: Michelle Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, started out as Barack's
boss. Now she's famous for being ‘Mom-in-Chief’ and for her exceptionally well-toned
upper arms. Professor Mary Beard and
twice Booker prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel are forced to defend themselves
on tv for being clever and having opinions rather than children. Meanwhile, having killed off Diana, the
popular press has Kate Middleton lined up as the next People's Princess, with
babies by royal appointment. If you want
to see how our culture reduces women to their body parts and biological
functions, just take a look at the Daily Mail. Or don't, because while it's
easy to blame the media, they only
thrive because we buy the newspapers
and look at the web-sites.
If you're sitting there thinking 'Mrs Cook’s on a bit of a rant’,
you should know that in 2013 that is still a fairly standard reaction to a
woman talking seriously -about almost anything. Anna Ford, a brilliant and beautiful tv
presenter who most of you won't have seen, because she’s over fifty so no
longer on tv, once said "When a
man speaks out, he's called assertive. A woman is branded something derogatory
like 'aggressive' or 'strident' - it's very unfair. " It is
unfair, especially when you consider that being 62, and more than a little
assertive, hasn't taken Jeremy Paxman off our tv screens.
When a recent Wellingtonian
article dared to raise the question as to whether some aspects of Wellington
life and attitudes could still be considered sexist, there were complaints, not
only from boys, that it made its entirely reasonable points ‘too abrasively’.
If we accept that everyday sexism in 2013 is a hangover from
thousands of years of social conditioning, rather than denying that it still exists
we can try to understand how it works, and so find better ways of relating to
each other than falling back into old patterns of blaming and shaming those who
try to move us on with cries of 'Blasphemy!' or 'Calm down dear!'
Two hundred and twenty years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote 'I do
not want women to have mastery over men, only over themselves.' Feminism is not some evil plot by girls to take
the toys away from the boys. A concern
for the equal rights of women is a concern for the rights of all of us: male or
female, gay or straight, we're all some woman's child. To be a feminist is to be passionately
concerned for those who still suffer ancient oppressions in the 21st
century; it is to want equality and justice, the same chances of life and
health and happiness for everyone. The
celebration of diversity starts and ends with treating each other as we would
want to be treated ourselves: like charity, it starts at home.
Denise Cook
March 2013
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