All mouth and no teeth
Claudia Fitzherbert
THE NEW FEMINISM by Natasha Walter Little, Brown, f17.50, pp. 278 Natasha Walter is an old-fashioned equality feminist. She is wary of perceived differences between male and female ambition, and refreshingly dismissive of claims of sex superiority. And while she makes a forceful case for women never having had it so good, she believes that feminism remains central for the simple reason that women remain poorer, and less visible, than men.
The solution, she suggests, lies in a revolution of the organisation of work. Patchwork careers are the answer, for men as well as women. We can have it all, but not at the same time.
The acceptance of career breaks might be the most important single change that could release men and women into a more equal working world.
It might indeed, but how to forge the new ideal? Walters doesn't say. Her method is to establish the absolute truth of an uncontentious point, and then to rest her case.
This is part and parcel of her optimistic view of the achievements of the women's movement to date. Walter exhorts her readers to 'reclaim the history of feminism'. `Ask and ye shall receive' is her reading of what she describes as 'a uniquely happy story'. But the history of the women's movement is more interesting by far than the story of a triumphalist march forward. Walter sometimes seems to imply that wrong turnings into self-defeating ghettoes are an unfortunate aberration of 1970s feminism, but in fact the cause has always been riven with fallouts and discontents and attempts by the extreme minority to exclude the more prosperous majority. `Married women have all the plums of life,'said Lydia Becker to Mrs Pankhurst many moons ago, in defence of a suffrage bill which would enfranchise widows and spinsters only. Nor is it at all easy to prove that which Walters assumes is a given that the vote was granted to the many because the few were so vociferous and so physically courageous in asking for it. The suffragettes were a peculiarly British phe- nomenon, the enfranchisement of women after the first world war was not.
The 'newness' of Walter's feminism does not lie in her materialist agenda feminism has always been at least partly about the achievement of material equality — but in what she is prepared to throw off. She argues that feminism should honour the revolution of its own creation and retreat from the bedroom. The politics of sexuality may have been necessary once but they have become a red herring in an age in which women have learnt to speak their desires. Ditto yesterday's squabbles about decoration: 'Narcissism by the ruling group will always be seen as powerful, narcissism by subordinates as demeaning.' New femi- nists, then, have no truck with the sartorial tyrannies of Greenham women or the `Hey, Mum — I've got my provisional licence!' policing of heterosexual relationships. Indeed men are to be welcomed into the all-embracing fold: that brothers can be sis- ters too is one of the main planks of her platform.
Walter rightly points out that the history of feminism is full of examples of men who stuck their heads above their parapet to argue the women's case, though it is mildly eccentric to single out Ramsay MacDonald, who proved a monstrous fairweather friend to the suffragettes when an appeal was got up against the Cat and Mouse act, for praise on this count.
As for modern men, I wonder whether Walter doesn't take an unduly optimistic view of their desire to be involved in mak- ing an even better world for educated women than the one we have already. At pains to distance the new feminism from `the personal is political' stance of yesteryear, she wisely refrains from giving us much in the way of autobiographical insight. But she does at one point recall being aware, as a child, of her father
writing letters to Spare Rib and the Guardian's women's page under an assumed name, because he wanted to enter a debate that would otherwise have been closed to him.
No wonder, then, that she looks on the bright side, and fails to acknowledge that men have become the problem sex.
Men are, unsurprisingly, completely absent from the one chapter devoted' to telling heartening stories about women surviving against the odds on sink housing estates, joining together on breast- feeding promotion and baby equipment loan schemes. Some would call this `life'; Walter calls it 'feminism'. She describes women as ambitious for their children but doesn't explore, or acknowledge even, that today's mothers fear more for their sons than their daughters, and have more reason to do so.
Anything troubling, in short, is either ignored or brushed under the carpet. Possi- ble links between the consumption of pornography and the prevalence of sexual crime are dismissed in favour of proven correlation between the availability of pornography and women's equality. Of course she has a point — women are freer in freer societies — but a feminism so afraid of appearing puritanical that it no longer dares embrace obvious truths about the worst cases of female exploitation occurring in the seamy underworld of the sex industry is one which I, for one, can do without. Walter's feminism is all mouth and no teeth, with painted lips thrown in for good measure.
Which is not to say that The New Feminism is a bad book. Walter's magpie approach to her material — she casts her net wide, mixing interviews, statistics and history with plot summaries of fiction and film — combines with a graceful turn of phrase to make an engaging, albeit ultimately enraging, read.
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