How 2018 became the year of the woman, what happened after that Strictly kiss, how we fell in love with Gareth Southgate, Love Island during the hot summer, and so much more!
From Time’s Up to a female Doctor Who, Janice Turner reflects on why the last 12 months have been nothing short of monumental
if 2017 was the year women found their words, 2018 was when they turned to action. The Hollywood actresses who last October made allegations against Harvey Weinstein emboldened women in every profession to expose the sexual abuse – major and minor, decades ago and yesterday – they had endured in silence. But what next?
On 1 January, the new Time’s Up movement answered that question. ‘ The clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment, and inequality in the workplace,’ it pledged. ‘It’s time to do something about it.’ Clad in sombre black at the Golden Globes, stars including Meryl Streep, Emma Stone and Laura Dern brought feminist campaigners and trade union activists along as their dates. Time’s Up raised millions in funding, recruited lawyers, and resolved to fight abusers in court.
The tone was set for a serious year. It felt as if stone after stone was being turned in the establishment, exposing the murk of sexual exploitation hidden beneath. Every day seemed to bring another exposé, another set of abusive men who thought they’d never be found out.
We learned that the Presidents Club hold a charity dinner at which waitresses are told to wear black underwear and sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). An undercover journalist working as a waitress claimed she was groped several times. In February, a report into Westminster revealed one in five people who work there had suffered sexual harassment in the previous 12 months. Then male Oxfam aid workers were alleged to have traded baby milk for sexual favours after the devastating Haiti earthquake.
When the parole board announced that John Worboys, the London taxi driver convicted of drugging and raping 12 women, was about to be released after serving less than 10 years of a supposedly indefinite sentence, women’s anger boiled over. Worboys allegedly committed at least 100 more attacks. Were women, in the midst of #Metoo, supposed to accept he should be free to rape again? Why did men care so little for our safety? A crowdfunding appeal was launched, hundreds donated and the Centre for Women’s Justice, representing 11 victims, fought to keep him in jail – and won.
This was the year, after a campaign by Caroline Criado-perez, that a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett by artist Gillian Wearing was erected in Parliament Square, a rare woman publicly celebrated among hundreds of men. Fawcett’s figure holds a banner bearing her words ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere’. It became the unofficial slogan of 2018.
It certainly applied in Ireland. For decades pregnant Irish women had travelled to Britain to have abortions
– 170,000 since 1980 – many carrying foetuses with serious abnormalities, who could never survive. Most did so in secret, not even telling their families, for fear and shame. But one by one, they gathered the courage to speak out. They did so because the Irish constitution banned abortion in all circumstances except to save a mother’s life. And even that provision was not enough for Savita Halappanavar, who bled to death miscarrying in 2012.
I reported from Dublin during the Irish referendum on abortion in May and was awed by the magnificent, imaginative and tireless Repeal campaign. Every woman I met thought the result would be close, fearing the Catholic Church’s hold over their bodies could never be broken. But in the end it was a 66% Yes vote. A landslide! Now comes the fight in Parliament to extend abortion rights to the forgotten women of Northern Ireland.
In America, righteous anger transmuted from feminist marches into action. Newton’s law of physics that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ applies to politics too. Events like having a self-confessed ‘pussy-grabber’ in the White House and the appointment of a Supreme Court judge likely to overturn the right to an abortion enshrined in Roe V Wade caused an unprecedented number of women – many Hispanic and African American – to put themselves forward as candidates in the US midterm elections. A record 110 now serve in Congress, though sadly, this is still a pitiful fifth of seats.
Every woman brave enough to step forward, and risk onslaught by social media, inspired many more. As it was revealed Britain still has a 9.8% median gender pay gap, the BBC’S China editor Carrie Gracie resigned from her post, citing inequality with male colleagues and condemning the BBC’S ‘secretive and illegal pay culture’. Women are notoriously bad at asking for a rise but she risked her career to demand one – and won. I wonder how many other women have since had a quiet word with their boss.
This was the year feminism moved from the margins to the mainstream. Young women are finding new causes to fight, from period poverty to impossible body images promoted by beauty brands. Bookshops are stacked high with popular feminist treatises from Jo Brand’s Born Lippy: How To Do Female to Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené’s black girl bible, Slay In Your Lane. A best-selling T-shirt at Topshop had the slogan ‘Females of the Future’, unintentionally ironic given that later in the year its owner Philip Green was alleged to have concealed sexual harassment allegations against him with NDAS. Green vehemently denies any wrongdoing.
There is a female Doctor Who; Fiona Bruce will take over Question Time, an august slot thought only befitting of a Great Man. We have had in Theresa May, whatever you think of her politics, a female PM showing resilience as she stood up to enemies on every side, including violent language from her own party about ‘nooses’ and knives.
There are warnings that the progress made in challenging institutionalised sexual abuse will lead to a backlash. But it feels as if the conversation, whether in politics, Twitter or offices across the land, has shifted. A new generation of women has answered the call to courage and anything now feels possible in 2019.
time is up. We see you. We hear you. and We Will tell your stories reese witherspoon