Equal pay for equal work is a noble demand, so why does feminism seem so embarrassing these days?
Zoe Williams Tuesday July 1, 2003 The Guardian
The Equal Opportunities Commission publishes a new report tomorrow. It has rather a broad reach, but its main points are that women earn less than men and, furthermore, undertake the lioness's share of domestic chores - not because we are forced to, but because we choose to. It's only natural; having cash in our pockets ruins the line of most quality garments and, besides, why do you think we have smaller feet? So we can get closer to the sink (oh, the old ones are always the best - I'll tell you why dogs are better than girlfriends in a minute*).
If this doesn't sound terribly equal, nor, for that matter, loaded with exciting opportunity, don't blame the commission. All it did was assign the survey, which was undertaken by the Future Foundation, and contains a wonderfully mysterious quote from a Young Southern Woman: "Every time I think of feminism, I just get this really awful feeling." And that's all there is to explain the absurd claim that women "choose" lower pay for the same work - to complain about it would be feminism, which is kind of icky.
Now, the word "survey" is misleading, given that the sample was only 35. This is rather like Research As Conducted By Columnist ("I went to a dinner party, asked all my chums, and this is the way life is"). Its author, Sue Tubules, deals with this by calling it "indicative" rather than "representative". Furthermore, its findings are shored up by similar surveys. Only last week, the Office for National Statistics found that six out of seven mothers would rather be at home, looking after the kids, than working.
Before we take all this to indicate the terminal decline of feminism, we should consider the possibility that it's an indictment of work. Domestic work and childcare have always had a low status compared with the fabled "career" option, and feminism, rightly, undertook to redress this by storming the workplace. But truthfully, every job, however high-powered, is principally made up of talking to people who aren't really listening, and moving bits of paper.
Quite how this differs from tending children is unclear, except that you get paid for the first, and not the second. Since most pay packets (even before the 19% pay cut you get for having breasts) are cause for resentment rather than rejoicing, it's hardly surprising that thinking people are re-evaluating the nature of worthwhile toil.
But this isn't biological or natural, it has nothing to do with hormones or body clocks. It is, if anything, a neo-Marxist rejection of wasting one's finest years on employers to whom we are all completely interchangeable. I bet men feel exactly the same, only people rarely ask them whether they'd be happier doing childcare, and even if they were asked, they couldn't say yes, since it pleases the modern world to think of all men who like children as irredeemable perverts.
And yet, we're still left with feminism and the "really awful feeling". There is no doubt that people are, if not renouncing, certainly distancing themselves from this movement. Young women, according to the EOC "survey", see it as dated and ball-breaking. The men involved see it as an excuse to marginalise the elderly (by which, one assumes, they mean elderly men) in the workplace. Speaking more generally (from a sample of my dinner party friends - this is indicative, not representative), young women no longer describe themselves as feminists, preferring "post-feminist", which boils down to a trenchant demand for parity, while at the same time reserving one's right to wear push-up bras.
The women's movement has been castigated for more than its underwear choices: it is also the malign force behind boys doing badly in exams; behind the wider crisis in male identity; behind the pain of accidental childlessness (this theory is most rabidly advanced by Americans. If you're ever having a flat day and want to re-energise yourself with some heart-stopping misogyny, I refer you to Baby Hunger, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and the Miseducation of Women by James Tooley). Feminism has been reduced to one of two crude stereotypes: the humourless, lentil-eating battleaxe who won't swallow and the power-dressing, self-seeking career bitch who uses the movement to justify and advance her relentless amassing of cash.
Maybe there's a grain of truth in these, but they are irrelevant sideshows to the point of the movement, which was equality - not grinding down men, not edging them out of work, not missing our fertility window and whining about it, not making any kind of sartorial statement at all, and certainly not possessive individualism.
It was about rooting out an unfairness that was poisoning relationships at both a private and public level. It was about the power and (yes!) beauty of collective action. It was as noble and important as any other civil rights movement, and yet we seem to take no pride in it. We are crazy to disown it like some kind of embarrassing old aunt. If the workplace is a disappointment, that's not a failure of feminism, it's a failure of capitalism.
*Because the later you come home, the more pleased they are to see you