Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE SISTERHOOD? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Innes Bowen BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 05.10.10 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 10.10.10 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN040/10VT10340 Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Lizzie Dearden English Literature Student, York University Catherine Redfern Co-author Reclaiming The F-Word Founder of The F-Word website Angela McRobbie Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London Anne Phillips Professor of Political and Gender Theory, London School of Economics Ceri Goddard Chief Executive, The Fawcett Society Dr Sheila Lawlor Director of Politeia Dr Jessica Ringrose Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Gender and Education, Institute of Education, London FIDGEN: Remember the good old days, when the sisterhood was on the march? Back in 1968, the female staff at the Ford plant in Dagenham set the standard: DAGENHAM CLIP: We’re on the lowest rate in the whole of the bleedin’ factory despite the fact we’ve got considerable skill. And there’s only one possible reason for that. It’s because we’re women. This strike is about one thing and one thing only: fairness. Equal pay or nothing. All those in favour? Yes!!! (Cheers) FIDGEN: The machinists walked out of the factory, and into the annals of feminist history. Their story has just been released at the cinema as ‘Made in Dagenham’. The movie evokes a time when women fought alongside each other, noisily, often joyously. A time when feminism leant itself to a feel-good film script. It did feel good to be a feminist, once. Try being one these days. DEARDEN: Often people make some kind of joke regarding my sexuality. You know it’s “Oh, I didn’t know you were a lesbian” or “Why isn’t your hair shaved off?” Other times people have laughed. Quite frankly, you know I’ve been told to “get over it.” SEGUE REDFERN: People can be very aggressive. You’ll get threats, you’ll get called stupid. Some feminists get rape threats, death threats just purely for writing about feminism. FIDGEN: Hear comments like that and you wonder what happened to turn the tide, from the boisterous activism of the second wave to the beleaguered, low-key feminism of today. In recent times, I’ve noticed friends - including many independent, forceful women - almost recoiling at any mention of the term. Where did all my sisters go? In this programme, we’ll hear from a number of women - campaigners and academics, students and grandmothers - and explore politics, pornography and patriarchy as we try to understand why feminism has sunk beneath the radar. Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, London, and one of the country’s foremost commentators on feminism and culture. She watched, dismayed, as feminism became a dirty word in the 1980s and 90s. McROBBIE: At absolutely every possible moment where the word ‘feminism’ appeared in popular culture - in the press, on television, inside politics - the kind of hideous spectre of the old anti-male feminist was conjured. This was incredibly powerful because it was so associated with being unattractive and being old that most women disidentified with it and particularly young women disidentified with it because, after all, who would want to be seen as this kind of hideous creature? FIDGEN: I’m quite happy to be a hideous creature. I’d been a shoulder pad type of feminist in the 80s: serious about freedom, which felt new and fragile. Then came the 90s, and it was as though we all relaxed, secure enough now in our freedom to be who we wanted to be. Catherine Redfern was a teenager then. She’s a feminist who recently co-authored a book called ‘Reclaiming the F-Word’. She wasn’t impressed by the new feminist accessories - Wonderbras for some, beer goggles for others. REDFERN: You had this kind of idea that women had it all and you had this idea of the ladettes who were kind of being like men, going out and drinking and just having fun. But at the same time, you had this real pushing of this idea that men and women are separate species almost, so you had this sort of Mars and Venus idea of men and women. So we became more segregated and I do think it was a backlash. FIDGEN: The idea that men and women are essentially different to such a degree that they could be from different planets gained support in the 1990s from the academic discipline of Evolutionary Psychology. Crudely boiled down: boys will be boys, and there’s not much we can do about it. The theory found its expression, in popular form, in books such as ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’. No doubt its message influenced plenty of women to accept traditional stereotypes as inevitable. But feminist consciousness didn’t die with the century: As a response to the 90s backlash, Catherine Redfern set up one of the first UK feminist websites in 2001 and called it ‘The F-Word’. She was a pioneer, because the 21st century fight-back is largely taking place on the internet. She’s conducted a survey of 1200 self-confessed feminists. REDFERN: When we did our survey, we found that 63%, I think it was, were in their twenties or under. Younger women are really heavily involved in pushing forward these new feminist groups and new organisations. So to say that younger women generally are apathetic is not true. The internet has played a key role in attracting younger women to feminism. FIDGEN: If it’s mainly happening on the internet though, is there a danger possibly that the women who are going to those websites - or the men indeed - are already people who are interested in feminism? REDFERN: Not necessarily because on the F-Word, for example, we get emails from people saying oh you’ve changed my mind actually. I’ve been reading all these feminist blogs. It’s had a major impact on me. Now I’m a feminist, it’s been great. FIDGEN: Better virtual activism than no activism at all. But of the feminists Catherine Redfern surveyed, an astonishing 90% were educated to graduate or post-graduate level. A far cry from the Sixties Dagenham strikers. This doesn’t prove that modern feminism is now an elitist sorority, but it does go some way to explaining why current debates are so cerebral, conducted mainly in internet chatrooms and in universities rather than on the car factory floor. Lizzie Dearden is a young feminist and in her final year of an English Literature degree at York University. She’s also a contributor to the F-Word website. What’s her experience of feminism on campus? DEARDEN: I’ve encountered maybe one or two people of my own age at university who openly identify with being a feminist. That isn’t enough for a sisterhood. And all the activism is online. Sometimes I think the concentration of activism that’s there isn’t that helpful. You’re sort of detached. There doesn’t feel like there’s a collective group working for a collective aim anymore. The lack of direction makes it difficult for people to want to be involved. FIDGEN: It’s perhaps not that surprising that Lizzie’s friends aren’t engaging with the feminist fight because the battle appears to be won. They’ve grown up with an unparalleled amount of legal equality. But according to Anne Phillips, Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics, young women are in danger of taking their position for granted. PHILLIPS: I don’t think there is an enormous emphasis on fighting for gender equality. I think that people have sort of slipped back into an idea of sort of gradual improvements - more equal pay, more equal political representation, more visibility of women in various kind of positions of influence. You know actual equality just seems a long way off people’s agenda. Clearly one of the really big changes that’s happened over recent decades is the change in terms of men’s and women’s participation in education. I mean that’s been an extraordinary transformation - the fact that girls are now more likely than boys to stay on at school, do well, a higher proportion of women than men in universities. And maybe in some way that’s kind of creating a sense of complacency about all the other things that are going on. FIDGEN: One of those things being the fact that women are going to suffer disproportionately from the budget cuts announced in June. Perhaps the complacency that Professor Phillips detects is the reason why there are no banner-waving women descending on Parliament Square. But the professional campaigners are concerned. The Fawcett Society is Britain’s highest profile women’s lobby group. Its chief executive is Ceri Goddard. GODDARD: We know that the emergency budget raised about 8 billion in revenue - of which over 5 billion, just over 70%, is going to come directly from women’s pockets. And I think that will impact on all women, but particularly some of the women who already have least - single parents, black minority ethnic women, women who are living in poverty. It could literally shift back women’s economic independence a generation. FIDGEN: And that’s not counting the further cuts to be announced on the 20th of this month. Not all economists agree on that 70% figure which came from research commissioned by Shadow Minister Yvette Cooper from the House of Commons Library, but they do agree that it’s going to be much tougher for women than men. Ceri Goddard believes it’ll push back women’s independence - and she may well be right - but the reality is that women as a group have never escaped financial dependence, whether on men or on the state. Why? Professor Anne Phillips from the LSE. PHILLIPS: Women remain the carers in society, and what that means is moving into part-time work, greater dependency on benefits and welfare systems. That’s kind of one aspect. But the other aspect is that it’s been the case in pretty much all across Europe that the public sector, which to some extent replicates the work that used to be done in the family to the extent that it’s kind of care work, it’s teaching, it’s looking after people, is largely staffed by women - which for a period has been not such a bad thing because there’s been a security of employment in the public sector. FIDGEN: Not any more. I should say that when it comes to the recession as a whole, men are faring very badly, too. They’ve lost more jobs so far than women have - mainly because it’s the private sector that’s taken the hit until now. The OECD has referred to it as ‘the mancession’. But the budget cuts are now hitting the public sector, which employs twice as many women as men. In addition, women draw more of the benefits that are being slashed as well: pregnancy grants, obviously, but also child and housing benefits. Dr Sheila Lawlor, who heads the right-of-centre think tank Politeia, was worrying about benefits back in 2006, when she wrote a pamphlet called: ‘Forever Enslaved?’ She argues that the risk to women’s equality comes not from cutting benefits, as the Fawcett Society believes, but from dishing them out in the first place. LAWLOR: Many feminists have seen men as the patriarch on whom women were forced to depend for income, for status, for ownership, for any freedom in society. However, I think that as that position has been eroded, the state has moved in to take its place. This may sound a good idea, but in fact what you tend to find when government singles out a certain group for specific treatment, it turns them into dependents and it weakens their positions as members of the human race. Now we see women dependent on the state for top-up benefits; for certain opportunities (albeit very limited opportunities) to work; for the re- jigging of the law where the state treats them as a separate race a gender apart, just as men in the old days by custom law, tradition, treated their wives or their daughters as a race apart. FIDGEN: Here we go again - Mars and Venus, institutionalized in policy. But is it a problem if women look to the state for support? Lizzie Dearden doesn’t think so. DEARDEN: I grew up with a single mother and it was just me and her. My mum worked full-time - she always has - but we lived on working tax credits, we relied on free school meals. We had quite a lot of allowance from my school and provisions put in: you know school uniform, help with trips, grants, that kind of thing. If I’d grown up with less support, I doubt I would have reached this level of education or this standard of living. FIDGEN: The benefit cuts won’t affect only those dismissed as ‘welfare scroungers’ by some ministers, but also people like Lizzie Dearden and her mum. That’s what the Fawcett Society is trying to avoid by seeking a judicial review of the budget. Chief Executive Ceri Goddard. GODDARD: There’s a very clear law in the UK the government had a duty to consider how the budget would impact on men and women and whether or not it would further or worsen women’s inequality. The budget was decided without any consideration, we believe, as to whether it would make women’s equality better or worse. And this is very much a feminist issue. You think about policy generally, but in particular economic policy. Women’s rights tend to be at best on the margins, and actually we are over 50% of the population. It’s not just gender blind. I’d say it’s actually gender regressive. FIDGEN: Why take this particular course of action? Why pursue a legal case? GODDARD: What we want to achieve is a recognition by government and a declaration by the courts that the budget as stands is unlawful. Pursuing a legal case at the Fawcett Society was a really big decision. We’ve been around since the 1860s in the campaign for the women’s right to vote and we’ve never taken a legal challenge before in our history. We took a legal challenge because we were so concerned at the potential threat to women’s rights and women’s inequality posed by the current budget decisions that would impact on women and men’s lives for a generation. And I know for a fact that as a direct response to the legal challenge, all departments in government have been looking again very carefully at what their equality duties are. FIDGEN: All the government is obliged to do is consider the impact on equality of its decisions. Once that box has been ticked, there’s no legal mechanism to prevent parliament passing a budget that disproportionately disadvantages women. The Fawcett Society is pushing for a public discussion of these issues. It says that its headline- grabbing campaign has given it a fillip: Membership is up and donations from women of all ages have been coming in. But there haven’t been protests, Dagenham-style. Lizzie Dearden isn’t surprised. She says young feminists have other goals. DEARDEN: I’ll know the aim of feminism has been achieved when I can go out wearing a short skirt and someone won’t grope me, or a prostitute can get raped and someone won’t say they deserved it, and you can walk down the street on a dark night and not fear the man walking behind you. I think that’s what we’re aiming for now: equality, safety and freedom from blame really. FIDGEN: Some second wave feminists look at younger women and say this is not what we were fighting for. They think they are sexually liberated. In fact they’re colluding in their own oppression. DEARDEN: I don’t know how to respond to that because for all I know I could be one of the people colluding in oppression and not knowing it. To me, it’s a massive grey area. I think if a woman is genuinely following her own desires and her own urges and acts on it how she would you know with sexual partners, wearing what she wants, you know even being a lap dancer or a sex worker - if that is purely her own desire, to me that’s okay. But if on any level the woman feels the expectation to sleep with lots of people, the pressure to wear revealing clothes and the reasons for what she does comes from outside society, I think that is negative. SEGUE McROBBIE: This young woman is actually quite right in saying that it’s important not to stigmatise lap dancers, not to see prostitutes as victims. FIDGEN: Professor Angela McRobbie of Goldsmiths College, London. McROBBIE: At the same time what slightly troubles me is this idea that life comprises of choices and that individuals, as long as they can kind of tally up what they are doing is the outcome of their own volition, then it’s okay. It completely implies that society compromises of choosing individuals for whom society ultimately then has no responsibility. FIDGEN: What do you think the consequences of individualism are for feminism? McROBBIE: Well individualism has been the most negative and damaging and pernicious force within the kind of field of young women’s emancipation. FIDGEN: To be sure, individualism doesn’t naturally lend itself to collective action. Though of course the desire to be free to live on your own terms was a motivating force in the second wave of feminism too. But the cultural climate has changed since the 70s: individualism is now the dominant ideology. Which, Professor McRobbie believes, may make it easier for governments to reassure us that persistent inequalities aren’t an urgent and social problem, but a private and manageable one. She fears governments fob us off. McROBBIE: Obviously women haven’t entirely achieved equality, there still is the glass ceiling, but so much has been achieved that government can be relied upon in this kind of gradualist way to carry on improving women’s position. Not only have governments in a sense said they’ll look after women and, therefore, you no longer need feminism. Consumer culture also pitches in and says you know we can be supporters of women; we can champion young girls and again they no longer need feminism. And one of the ways in which this is done is through a vocabulary of individualism. For example, women’s magazines are completely oriented towards perfecting the self, being in control, reading more self-help books. Feminism was about groups, about a kind of unselfish attitude. There was a kind of ideal of womanhood which was far beyond you know whether you felt low self- esteem. FIDGEN: So low that they’re seeking new and disturbing solutions, according to Catherine Redfern, who established the F-Word website. REDFERN: We’ve had emails from teenagers who’ve been really influenced by what they’ve read on our website and it’s had a positive impact on them. One example I can think of was a girl who read an article which was reviewing a TV programme about labiaplasty. FIDGEN: These are designer vaginas which a lot of feminists are getting very upset about. REDFERN: That’s right, yeah. And she said after reading this review, “I feel like I don’t need this surgery anymore. I’m happy with my body.” SEGUE RINGROSE: Girls at a very young age have eating disorders, body dysmorphia. There’s all sorts of issues around plastic surgery; a huge, massive beauty industry that starts very, very, very young. This is a health and safety issue. FIDGEN: Dr Jessica Ringrose is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Gender and Education at the Institute of Education in London. She conducted a ground-breaking - and disquieting - study of how 14-16 year olds present themselves on the internet. RINGROSE: We’ve had girls that dressed up as Playboy bunny online. We had girls who were calling themselves slut and whore. There seemed to be some kind of kudos around sexual performance. A lot of the times the way they were representing themselves was positioned as like a joke or fun, but then when you started looking at their stories in depth, they still had a lot of concerns over their body image. They had a lot of issues to do with worries over boys, dating. It seemed like there was still a lot of power inequalities. And it seemed also that there was a lot of power plays between the girls. Now this is actually one of the key paradoxes: why are girls so centrally concerned with sexual competition if we’re living in an equal gender free world? Why is this such a consuming part of their identity? Because girls did feel quite keenly that there were pressures on them to perform online - like putting themselves up in their bras or knickers, as one girl said, or their bikini. Now I’m 39 years old. These are the kinds of pressures that I didn’t have to try and navigate when I was a young person. These are whole new suits of pressures. FIDGEN: You say you’re 39. I’m 37. We’re the same generation. Do you think this is something that we can to an extent lay at the door of older feminists who campaigned for sexual freedom, for sexual liberation, possibly without defining exactly what form that should take, and now we’re faced with a younger generation who seem to us to be so sexually liberated that they’re bordering on oppressing themselves sexually? RINGROSE: Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. I think that the language of sexual liberation has kind of been appropriated. What gets packaged as sexual liberation is this almost compulsory like I will do sex, I will perform as sexy, I will be sexy. I’m not trying to make a value judgement on that, but I’m trying to say that if girls are still, if their beauty capital and their erotic capital is still so important, have we reached a stage where we’ve got full gender equality? FIDGEN: Of course, boys and men also compete for a mate, as Dr Ringrose concedes. But she points to the extreme pressures put on girls by what’s come to be known as the ‘pornification’ of society. You only have to look at men’s magazines to see it - all nipples and G-strings and now sold at eye level in the newsagents. One ran a competition for readers to win breast enlargements for their girlfriends. Dr Ringrose’s research discovered the impact it’s having. RINGROSE: The girls were very, very explicit about sexually pleasing boys and men, but they seemed to lack a lot of confidence or knowledge about sexually pleasing themselves. So one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is like we need to have some place for girls’ pleasure and desire within the sex education curriculum, for example. Now that’s kind of seen as quite controversial, but I would push very, very strongly for getting away from the just kind of disease and parts and plumbing curriculum. We can look at it in media studies, we can look at it in English or History - talking about sexual decision- making, pleasure. Is there sort of this kind of imperative coming from the normalisation of pornography from lads magazines and from Cosmo - please your man? FIDGEN: Can you imagine selling that to parents - you know we’re going to teach your teenage girls about sexual pleasure? RINGROSE: I think obviously age is a sensitive issue here, but these kinds of issues are on the forefront of young people’s minds anyway. FIDGEN: It’s hard to see the syllabus changing any time soon to educate young women in how to get more out of sex. Second wave feminists like Anne Phillips from the LSE wonder whether that’s what they were fighting for. PHILLIPS: I’m surprised that there isn’t more agitation among young feminists about what seems to me the reinforcement of very strict codes of femininity and masculinity. If you look at kind of what goes on among younger people, there’s actually a reinforcement of some quite rigid gender scripts. They’ve loosened up and there have been a lot of challenges to them. For me very much the ultimate aim is precisely a society in which we’re kind of freed from the weight and the burden of having to play out being female or play out being male. FIDGEN: That seems more of a pipe dream now than it has for some time. Looking back, the 80s and 90s seem blissfully androgynous compared with the invigorated sexism of contemporary culture. Dr Sheila Lawlor of Politea believes feminism has undermined itself. LAWLOR: I suppose I would be much more sympathetic to the view that it’s very important for girls to be able to fulfil themselves as full human beings from the earliest age, and anything in society which prevents them from doing that should be tackled. I would have been looking for the vote, yes definitely, and I may even have gone with the demonstrators. I would have been looking for equal rights. I belong to a family where one member of the family who was a doctor would have had far lower pay than a man doing the same job and may not (because she was a married woman) have been appointed full-time. I would have wanted equal pay for equal work. And so all of these things - equality under the law is very important, but I think feminists of the more recent school have got it wrong when they think women should be treated separately because that’s put them into a ghetto. FIDGEN: Ghetto is a strong word, but let’s revisit the evidence. Only one in five of our MPs are women, and just one in ten of directors on the boards of FTSE 100 companies. Women still shoulder the burden of caring for the young and the old. They are three times more likely to work part-time than men. And, forty years after the Dagenham workers triggered the Equal Pay Act, the gap is still such that women effectively work November and December for no money. Sheila Lawlor completes the grisly picture. LAWLOR: They’re just eeking out a living - getting the train, getting the bus to work, taking cleaning jobs, doing factory jobs, doing basic jobs and rushing back to mind the family. And at every level of society, you find women doing a job who are over qualified. Every piece of research shows that. But above all, after the birth of each child it takes 15 years to get back to the level of earnings that they had before the baby was born, and in fact the studies show they never make up the pay gap. But even worse, they are not accruing pension rights, so they have a very poor old age to look forward to. FIDGEN: If a freemarket feminist, as we might call Dr Lawlor, is depressed, so too are the collectivist feminists at the other end of the spectrum. Professor Angela McRobbie of Goldsmiths College, London. McROBBIE: There is no contemporary feminism in mainstream political culture. It’s almost unimaginable to think of a party leader saying well you know I’m very in favour of feminism. It may well be that certain kinds of feminism did have their day, but there really is also a place for respect for the memory of feminism and respect for the struggles that were fought. And there are many areas of contemporary political life which really require that memory to be reinstated. FIDGEN: The budget cuts and their disproportionate impact on women ought to be one of those areas. But can the sisterhood - fragmented by individualism and demoralized by pornification - be rejuvenated? McROBBIE: One always has to be hopeful about the possibility of new feminist movements emerging. Whether or not this coincides with the budget cuts, with the cutbacks in the public sector, it’s really hard to say. It’s been so long since there has been a vocabulary of women organising by themselves. It’s been so long since there’s been anything like a woman’s group set up to support cuts in the community. I’m a grandmother, so I would be very in favour of you know Feminist Grandmothers for Community Care and Nursery Provision. I’ve even thought of setting up such a group actually. FIDGEN: Maybe that’s what it’ll take: feminists of Professor McRobbie’s generation to come out of activist retirement, dust off their banners, and lead the younger generation out of internet forums and into the mainstream. Maybe we could even burn some Wonderbras in celebration.