A feminist father? That’s a man who lies to his daughter
IT’S A touching tableau. Hunky telly historian Dan Snow is taking his kiddylitter on a weekend outing to an aviation museum, as you do. ‘My daughter was walking down rows and rows and rows of these black and white pictures of Spitfire racers,’ Dan explained on a parenting podcast, ‘and she was going, “Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy.”’
REMINDER: All historians’ reputations rest not on their telegenic soliloquies but on their records for accuracy. So Dan did what anyone with a heart would do when faced with the cold, hard facts on the one hand; and on the other, a perplexed little girl he wanted to shield from the brute reality that it was a man’s world during the Second World War (and it still is now).
Dan, bless his cotton socks, lied his head off to Zia, six.
He told her that women flew on the front line, too (even though he knew they didn’t), then showed her photos of female delivery pilots on his phone and told her they were fighter aces.
Everyone made the obvious point that, as a historian, he had shot himself in the foot by admitting he lies to his three kids about the past. But he’s sticking to his guns.
‘I’m bringing her up in a way that she’s hopefully seeing her gender as something that is not an obstacle to doing anything,’ he says.
He’s right. We might have a female PM, but even she is happy to admit ‘There are boy jobs and girl jobs’ because she knows this is how we still sort of think, even if it’s unfashionable to say so out loud.
Studies show that gender bias both within and against little girls starts as young at six, the age they begin to disqualify themselves from ‘demanding majors and fields’, according to analysis published in the US Science journal last year.
And why wouldn’t they, when there were, until quite recently, purple babygrows for girls saying ‘I hate my thighs’ alongside navy ones for boys with slogans like ‘Future footballer’ and ‘I’m super’ (since withdrawn after an outcry). Which reminds me. When I was around Zia’s age, a family friend asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. ‘A wife and mother,’ I replied, as that was the only job I’d seen women do. I remember my father frowning at my tragic lack of oomph. He turned to my brother next. ‘World King,’ Boris, eight, said bouncily.
After that, I knew better. The next time anyone asked, I said ‘a journalist’ (because I read Tintin). If I hadn’t had that exchange in 1972, I would not be writing this now.
Even today, decades later, every time another female power list or a book celebrating fantastic, amazing women is published – these are quite the thing in the #metoo era – part of me rejoices but part of me feels embarrassed.
It’s a reminder that mighty Vogue magazine can find only 25 British women to laud, or Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls can drum up only 100 ‘extraordinary’ women in the whole of human his/herstory to inspire children at bedtime.
FATHERS play a critically important role in enabling their daughters, and punching them past cultural conditioning, gender and pay gaps, and millennia of being the second sex. I know this. Dan may put the Snow into snowflake to rewrite history as he did, but he’s my kind of snowflake, for lying to his daughter that the sky’s the limit for rebel girls and always has been.
I call that good parenting, Dan old man.
DEAR Germaine Greer, here’s the difference between bad sex and rape: consent.