Women have further to fall than ever before
Amid the maelstrom there's value in stating the obvious
In his Jerry Springer-esque round up at the end of a recent episode of Simon Schama’s series The Story of Us the historian decried how we have been trained to fear and/or hate the ‘other’. To subscribe to a tribe and to despise and degrade other identities as part of that process.
It’s a reasonable point. Society feels split into silos. Polarisation is a blight on politics.
It prompted a couple of thoughts.
One is about how far down the road to Tommy Robinson we metropolitan liberal elite must travel in order to defend what really matters. I’ll return to that at a future date.
The second concerns a blinding oversight.
Schama’s observation came at the end of a programme featuring next to no female voices.
Unfortunately that’s not unusual.
Discourse on the state of society and the fractious future facing the world too often overlooks the glaringly obvious. It is men making the decisions, inflicting their opinions and decisions and egos on others.
Whether it’s Trump or Putin or Netanyahu abroad, or Farage and Starmer at home.
I’m not selling this as razor sharp insight. But it bears repeating.
Is the reason Kemi Badenoch can’t get any traction because she’s useless, or is it at least in part because she’s a woman? (Badenoch would recoil at such identity politics of course). Rachel Reeves is the most high profile female politician in the UK and coverage is almost universally focussed on what a bad job she’s doing, often with a demeaning and patronising backhand - ‘Rachel from accounts’.
The fact that Reform - a party of five middle aged male MPs, each of whom resembles an MP straight out of central casting (one wonders if Richard Tice is actually trying to ape Simon Farnaby’s character from Ghosts) - garners disproportionately more attention than the Green MPs, who are a rag bag of styles and backgrounds and who number three women among their four-strong group keeps niggling at me.
The anti-elite Reform look like (and by most definitions are) the elite and so those that share a similar background and look like them are more comfortable amplifying them in politics and media.
When I mentioned in a conversation last week that last year’s riots where overwhelmingly carried out by men, the wonk I was talking to responded that some women have been jailed for their part. Both statements are true. But mine feels more pertinent. Those sent to prison have been overwhelmingly men, yet it’s a woman’s mugshot at the top of an early story about who was responsible for the unrest. The Telegraph carried an article about how women were involved in the rioting (featuring the inevitable expert comment at the end of the copy about how the proportion of women involved was small and not unusual compared to previous episodes.)
But Schama didn’t mean that women are treated as an ‘other’, as a group to fear. Too often society doesn’t even grant women that status. Women are dismissed, demeaned, ignored.
Why does discourse focus on Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs and immigration and largely ignore his previous actions in stripping American women of long held abortion rights?
As always, there are many parallels between history and now. Some encouraged by the likes of Elon Musk’s recent salute.
But what’s different is that women have won more rights than any time in the past.
It’d be nice to think those changes are established and immutable.
But it feels like there’s a frighteningly large cohort that combines those acting to unroll progress for women and those content to tolerate such reversals.
There is further for women to fall. And it feels like we’re looking over the cliff. And the more we overlook the obvious and important gender dimension to the current political discourse the more the progressive ground beneath our feet cracks and crumbles.
Only today another poll finding that young men ‘think feminism has gone too far’ is met with a shrug of the shoulders and demoted in favour of the headline that young people are relaxed about dismantling democracy. If you understand that the successes of feminism are fragile then you’ll care about democratically defending them.
There is much to fret about just now for those of us with a liberal or progressive bent. Maintaining perspective is a challenge when the forces of history are running alongside telling details. But with so much at stake, it’s a challenge we must try to meet.