This Week for Women

I am going to try and include this post every week (ambitious since my last blog post was months ago!) but this is supposed to be the purpose behind this blog. I'd like it to act as a paperclip pulling together current affairs concerning issues that are important to women; like The Week but for women.

The first article is poignantly penned by Laurie Penny in The Guardian and is a letter addressed to Rebecca Adlington pledging support for her and the way her appearance has been negatively described in the media. Written in response to tabloid reports that Adlington has had cosmetic surgery on her nose, Penny's words expose the unequal treatment of sports men and women, soberly reminding us that 'whatever women and girls achieve, we are nothing if we do not conform to society's demented definitions of beauty'. Despite its depressing contents, it is heartening to read a public pledge of support for a woman wronged.

On Tuesday's Woman's Hour (11 minutes into the programme if you want to catch it on iPlayer), Bea Campbell discussed how she believes equality for women is stalling or maybe even going backwards. She said that change is 'palpable but pitiful' and had some striking statistics to back up her argument: European men have increased their commitment to housework by a paltry 30 minutes over three decades! This equates to an extra minute per day, per year over the last 30 years - not exactly rapid progress. On a brighter note, the Woman's Hour Power List has launched for 2014 with a theme of identifying the top 100 female Game Changers  - get involved on Twitter using #whgamechangers.

Triggered by a statement recently on Radio 4's Open Book programme, Beulah Devaney's post on The Guardian Books Blog, makes for interesting reading on how under-represented women are in the book reviewing press. It is hard to believe the defeatism inherent in a quote in a related statement issued by the editor of The London Review of Books (Mary-Kay Wilmers) who thinks (or thought in 2001) that 'women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces. They just can't get it all done. And men can.' Clearly this has always been a problem but if there is a female editor of a magazine as influential as the LRB, you would hope that they might be more driven to redress the cause of the imbalance by looking for solutions to the problem, rather than deciding it is probably impossible to even up the gender coverage.

And finally, congratulations and much respect to 17 year old Fahma Mohamed, who has secured a pledge from Michael Gove, the education secretary, to write to schools about female genital mutilation to raise awareness of the terrible reality of young girls being taken abroad in summer to be cut. Read Alexandra Topping's article about it here.

As women, to take on Mary-Kay Wilmer's statement cited above, if we can get some of it done all of the time and all of it done some of the time, then we can still make some great changes to stave off inequality, and that can still have considerable impact on changing the world for the better.

Extreme Sorts - Celebrating Diversity or Creating Division?

I read with interest, Janice Turner's article regarding the rise of alpha females or 'XX women in the Sunday Times Magazine. Whilst it is undoubtably positive to draw attention to high achieving women, is it really necessary to draw up a dichotomy where if you are not x(or xx workaholic in this case), then you must be y (stay at home mum)? I am glad that there are a group of women out there, blazing a trail through the glass ceiling that other women can follow, we need plenty of these role models, but it is important to recognise that if you aren't quite as career driven as members of this emerging elite, it doesn't automatically mean that you are content to devote your entire self to domestic drudgery. I entirely agree that aspects of domesticity are 'thankless', repetitive and boring': I'd have a cleaner straightaway if it was economically viable but I'm not happy to give up the time I personally feel the need to spend with my children as they are growing up. As many other women choose to do, I juggle part time work with family - not necessarily the best of both worlds - but a necessary compromise as far as I see it.

However, gripe aside, the article would have lost it's focus if it set out to examine all points on the female continuum. The best point Turner makes is that women would be more understanding of these extreme positions 'if we recognised we are different but equal beasts'. We should always celebrate high achieving women, it's a social imperative, but we should also be considerate and understanding of women who make different choices. As the article points out 'until just a few generations ago the experience of all women - regardless of wealth or social class - was intrinsically the same...largely domestic'. Today we have choices and rather than standing on opposite sides of the domestic/work divide, we should unite in the shared understanding and relief that we have options. These extremes are not to be derided but shared as examples of the freedom of choice we have gained and must keep pressing for.

I was pleased that in an interview on Channel 4 News last week, Sheryl Sandberg (clearly an archetypal XX woman by Turner's definition) declared that she was a feminist, although had not always been comfortable with that label. Feminism, like career and lifestyle choices, should not be about extremes and immovable dividing lines. It must be all encompassing and accessible, empathetic and empowering. There is always a continuum of opinion and we should not lose sight of this. As Lisa Appignanesi puts it in her contribution to 'Fifty Shades of Feminism' (an excellent read):
'We're at the mercy of our descriptions...For women's lives to change, it was important to take more of that power of description into our own hands. The descriptions would hardly ever be uniform, we would disagree with one another vehemently, but at least they wouldn't all come from our colonizers.' So perhaps the extreme label of 'XX woman' is not so controversial as I first thought, it's intended as a positive descriptor for successful women, and that is never a bad thing.