Women's Lib phase 2

The first wave of feminist campaigners have many successes to their name. But the
next wave of feminism has to help to resolve the central paradox they left behind

Gloria Steinem once said of the first wave of feminism: “God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.” There isn’t and nor should there be. This week The Times is serialising Caitlin Moran’s new book, How to Be a Woman, which shows that the quest for female equality, which gathered pace in the 1970s, has not finished yet. The questions, though, have changed.

The feminism of the 1970s was a direct political response to injustice. Patterns of employment, in an industrial economy, were heavily biased towards men. Pay was grotesquely unequal. The place of women in the home was an expectation rather than a choice. A generation of brilliant feminist writers — Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan — came to prominence devoted to undermining the insidious assumption, attacked a hundred years before them by Mary Wollstonecraft, that woman was defined in secondary relation to man.

There is no doubt that, for many women, this period brought a liberation. With the slow decline of manual work, the idea that employment was a male domain was revealed as the prejudice that it always was. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 codified the labour market rights that women were already beginning to exercise. In the 40 years after 1971, the rate of women in work increased by 11 percentage points while male employment fell.

Women won the freedom to detach themselves from feckless men. The Divorce Reform Act 1969 allowed women to cite irretrievable breakdown to end a marriage. The daughters of the first generation of feminists married later than their mothers and, thanks to the widespread availability of the contraceptive Pill, delayed childbirth.

Not all the problems of the era were solved and not all the solutions were without problems. For all the successes of feminism, there cannot be any complacency. It is not just free choice that means that 94 per cent of engineers are men. It is not entirely owing to career breaks that, 40 years on from the Equal Pay Act, women aged over 40 still earn 27 per cent less than men. In most large British companies, women are still conspicuously absent at the senior executive level. But even some of the original generation of feminists have expressed their concern about the unintended consequences of changes that, at the time, seemed like unalloyed liberation — the decline of marriage, the rise of the single-parent family.

Over time, feminism has moved to the margins of debate. Some of the issues about the objectification of women, which were common in the first wave of feminism, are amplified today. The free availability of pornography, the proliferation of lap-dancing clubs and the premature sexualisation of young girls are aspects of tyranny that sexual attraction now exerts. This is hardly the liberation that Steinem was seeking.

But a new set of questions now demand a feminist voice. The paradox left from the 1970s was that greater freedom to work was, for many women, added to their responsibilities for a family. The increased scope of possibility could often feel like a burden or an elaborate juggling trick. The task for policy, therefore, is to share the load. Britain has the most expensive childcare in Europe and the Government’s proposal to merge all benefits into one penalises women because a second earner, almost always a woman, will lose 76p of every pound when she takes a job.

There is no sense, in the new feminism, that men are a problem. A new skirmish in the gender wars will do nobody any good. The refreshing of feminism is about creating the conditions for women to work at home or be at home at work or some combination of the two. That the balance between the two is still too difficult shows that there remains plenty to do and that the debate now urgently needs a strong feminist voice.