A feminist error

I ReCAll nearly being thrown out of a women’s meeting in the Seventies because I said it was silly for a woman to expect to walk home alone in a see-through blouse and not be attacked.

everyone was furious: ‘we should be allowed to walk anywhere, wearing anything.’ I thought that was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now.

In the Sixties, most ordinary young women didn’t get drunk, because we’d had the potential consequences drummed into us — and I’m certainly not defending those consequences.

we stayed sober and walked home in a group, but then there have always been feminists — the less vocal majority — who believe in women’s rights, but also in common sense.

Not all feminists (an honourable label in those days, not a put-down) take ideas to extremes. Feminists who believe a woman who wakes up and can’t remember what happened to her the night before should assume she’s been raped and go to a support group might be the most vocal, but are not the majority.

In the Sixties, I was fighting for more women judges, more women MPs, more women in the boardroom and equal pay — a fairer world for everyone.

we’re getting there, but some things disappoint me. I have never campaigned for more women to be lying drunk in the gutter or more women thrusting their pumped-up bosoms from every advertisement in our brainless celebrity culture.

we need respect and equality as women. But we also need to respect ourselves and behave with dignity, and not be continually obsessed with what we look like, but with what we think.

DIANNE STOKES, Wells, Somerset.