Feminism was bad for two out of three women, says Weldon
She Devil creator sets off storm over working mums
AUTHOR Fay Weldon has risked infuriating fellow feminists by claiming their cause left two-thirds of British women worse off.
In an interview in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today, Weldon, 85, says the feminist revolution had adverse implications by ‘halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family.’
That meant some women had to get jobs, even if they would rather have been at home with their children. ‘Women had to work to support the family. So for two in three women, it really was a problem.’
Elsewhere in the interview, Weldon also launches an astonishing attack on the ‘bad’ women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment. She argues that the US President’s ‘foolish’ and ‘neurotic’ accusers are trying to make a fast buck out of the situation.
‘I suspect the kind of women who Trump molests are not necessarily against the molestation but hope to make money out of it,’ she says. ‘Because not all women are good women. There are as many bad women as bad men.’
Weldon, who worked in advertising before finding fame as a novelist in the late 1960s, claims that behaviour now classed as harassment was looked upon differently in her day.
She adds: ‘In my youth, what is now seen as sexual harassment was seen as welcome attention. Actually, if men took notice of you in an office, you were very pleased.’
Her views on Trump will anger fellow feminists who have come to regard him as a hate figure because of his alleged treatment of women.
But Weldon says it’s time women stopped seeing themselves as victims. ‘This was right and proper 20 or 30 years ago when they couldn’t earn, they couldn’t work, they couldn’t join the professions. Well all that has changed.’
It is not the first time Weldon has courted controversy. In 1998, she provoked uproar by claiming that rape wasn’t the worse thing that could happen to a woman.
She is also likely to ruffle more than a few feathers with a sequel to her best-known novel, The Life And Loves Of A She Devil. In the Death Of A She Devil, the She Devil’s grandson Tyler undergoes a sexchange operation so that he can get his hands on her fortune.
And like Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, Weldon says she came to the conclusion that men who have a sex change can never really become women.