This week has shown us how far feminism still has to go
Sometimes you don’t forget a face. And all this week, it has been Sarah Everard’s. When she went missing, any woman who has ever walked home alone at night felt that grim, instinctive sense of recognition. Footsteps on a dark street. Keys gripped between your fingers. There but for the grace of God. She was a perfect stranger, someone I have never met nor had any connection with. But half the women I knew were sharing her image on social media feeds, willing her to make it home. Even though we know that home is where women are statistically most at risk.
Women who vanish stick in our heads precisely because they are rare. It’s men who are more likely to be killed in public places, invariably by other men; meanwhile two women a week die at the hands of their own partners on average, and mostly nobody hears their names. The Labour MP Jess Phillips, who reads those names out in parliament every year, said on Thursday that by her count, six women and a little girl had been murdered in the days since Sarah Everard had vanished. That doesn’t make one form of violence against women any more or less shocking than another. It just means that misogyny takes many forms; and that our primal fear of it bleeds into everything. It turns what may sometimes seem to men relatively trivial street encounters into something darker. It’s why we’re instinctively frightened of feeling trapped, dependent, with no way out.
This hasn’t felt, in short, like a week to hang out the bunting for International Women’s Day. And yet mark it we should, by noting both how far we’ve come and how very far there still
is to go. What would a woman born a century ago make of this world now?
Thanks to the feminist icon Betty Friedan, I’ve been wrestling with that question all week. The Feminine Mystique, her great roar of fury against the lies American women had been sold, was republished this week as an ebook. All the better to reach a new millennial audience to whom she is mostly familiar as the character Tracey Ullman played with gusto in the drama series Mrs America;spiky, difficult, brilliant but flawed.I was asked to write an introduction for it and, since Friedan is no longer alive to do the book tour, the publishers have had to make do with me.
Stepping briefly into her shoes was mildly terrifying, but what interviewers generally seemed to want to know was whether the high priestess of second-wave feminism would view the present condition of women with elation or despair. What would she make of Meghan, a duchess trapped in what, by her own description of it, might as well be a 1950s housewife’s stifled life? Where would she stand on trans rights? Would she think we’d moved mountains since 1963, when the book was originally published – a world where she could be fired with no right of redress for getting pregnant, and had no legal right to abortion – or be appalled at how much hadn’t changed?
The America she wrote about is a distant country now, a world of suburban female desperation slowly unfurling behind closed doors. Women had been told the path to true happiness lay in finding a man, having babies, and then settling down to a life of contentedly sewing their own curtains. Well, Friedan’s book blew that idea sky-high, revealing the frustration, misery and rage seething beneath the surface of housewives’ supposedly idyllic lives. She carried her reporter’s notebook into privileged neighbourhoods where doctors were dishing out antidepressants like sweeties, and diagnosed in these women not neurosis but the pressing need for a job and life of their own.
True, in parts the book shows its age now; some of the language is frankly homophobic and the argument revolves chiefly around the lives of white, middle-class women who could afford not to work, not the millions who had no choice. But to re-read it trapped at home by lockdown, an experience that turned back the clock for too many women but particularly for those with abusive partners, was to feel it come alive again. In the book she boggles at how easily the suffragettes’ gains were rolled back, as their daughters’ generations were persuaded that all the battles had been won; that there was something dreary and old-fashioned now about those first-wave feminists, and that therefore they could relax. Her warning never to get that complacent again feels fiercely contemporary now.
Even Betty Friedan struggled sometimes, as the Duchess of Sussex might say, to speak her own truth. The book and the movement it unleashed made her a household name. But what she didn’t reveal at the time was that while her public career was taking off, her marriage was violently unravelling. Before she went on television to bang the drum for women’s liberation, she would sometimes have to cover bruises with makeup. Yet she agonised in private about whether getting a divorce might somehow undermine the message, playing into her critics’ charge that feminists were bitter women who had somehow failed at life.
Even after the autobiography in which she spoke candidly about all this came out, her by then ex-husband Carl insisted he wasn’t a wifebeater, that they’d both lashed out; and for whatever reasons Friedan herself downplayed the issue in subsequent interviews. For the author of mythshattering books to shatter the myth of her own supposedly happy family life proved unexpectedly hard. I genuinely don’t know what she would have made of Harry and Meghan, publicly ripping plasters off raw wounds in a way that also now feels as if it may be unlocking something bigger. But I think she would have known exactly what to make of those two women who still, on average, die every week at the hands of abusive partners, and of the 50% of young men who nonetheless tell surveys that feminism has somehow gone “too far”.
So what I do want to celebrate this week is difficult women. The flawed ones, the spiky ones, the ones you may not even like, but who have something awkwardly necessary to say. (Odd how it’s millennial snowflakes who are accused of running away from challenging ideas, yet it was Piers Morgan who stormed off air rather than accept that a duchess he finds irritating might still have a point.) The young and the righteous, of course, but also the older ones who don’t always get so much airtime and have lost the patience to tiptoe around the issue. And perhaps, above all, the ones who have been banging on about the same old things for decades now, but only because the same old things haven’t changed fast enough, and women still keep dying of them.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist