I feel as though I’ve spent the last few weeks tumbling down a rocky slope of broken feminism.

I’d been reading Hilary Mantel’s graceful memoir, finding out what it feels like for a writer of historical fiction when characters from a past you are researching finally come alive in the cellar of an ancient house, bringing tears of joy. As well as fascinating insights into her own writing and research, the book collects together some of her most intriguing commentaries on life in our country (and, for a while, in Saudi). But also…

… I was quite stunned by what happened to our now much-lauded author when she was a young woman at university, suffering from ‘women’s troubles’, while she attempted to get herself educated. Her GP’s first offer was anti-depressants. His second was “wouldn’t you be happier if you went home and had babies?”

It was some years later she discovered that what had been dragging her down, and had continued to do so, was endometriosis. Soon after that, she was waking up in hospital sans womb, sans ovaries. ‘I felt like a stranger in my own body’, she wrote. And then she wrote about what may have been a miscarriage some time before, and what may have been the ghost of a child who was never to be.

And then I came across this, on social media…

… next thing I knew, due to one of those follow-your-nose rambles around the library, I was revisiting Shelagh Delaney, courtesy of Selina Todd’s brilliant biography…

… every time I read about Delaney, something different hits me between the eyes. For those who haven’t discovered it yet, the title of Todd’s book refers to Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey — a precious piece for a number of reasons but probably the issue of most interest to Selina Todd’s readers is that in the late 50s, Britain had just begun to nervously allow a bit of working class history to show on the London arts scene but, until Delaney came along, it had been working class men writing about working class men. Delaney, whose play was not only about Black and gay characters, but also — working class women and girls! With opinions! And objections! Demands, even!

But here’s the thing. I’ve read before all those critics’ ridiculous writhings and strugglings, as they tried to find reasons why they shouldn’t be having to hear about Delaney’s women but this is what got me this time: by the mid sixties, as the arts world began to decide it wanted her after all, more than one commentator started to call her lazy, because she just wasn’t producing enough new work after getting everyone in a state by becoming a single mother.

There it is, leaping up and down on the page of Todd’s book – she wasn’t lazy — “she was being a mother”. Because whilst society has slowly and reluctantly accepted that unmarried women can be forgiven for having children, what it did not and does not accept — in any circumstances — is that being a mother — really being a mother — does not count as ‘not working’.

And then this leapt out of social media at me…

… and I was back with Hilary Mantel again, and with the considerable number of women I’ve spoken to over the years who’ve woken up without quite important bits, and wondered why no-one expects them to find it all a bit much.

… and THEN Gloria Steinem died, and among the obits and articles, I came across this…

The write up — from an organization calling itself Feminist News — tells us Steinem “wasn’t perfect” — never a forgivable state for a woman, eh? Their chosen imperfection is that “A 1977 essay she wrote about transgender women aged badly” but apparently “she spent the rest of her life on the right side of that line.”

So I went looking for that 1977 essay. What I found was, in my view, a more accurate and useful critique of transgenderism than is 99% of what the so-called ‘gender critical’ movement has put out in the last few years. Here’s a recording — have a listen…

She picks up on the fact that people who had long proved their misogyny by fighting hard against, eg, women’s inclusion in sports, fought equally hard to ensure men who ‘transitioned’ were immediately allowed into women’s competitions. She points out how a national media that found it so easy, for so long, to ignore actual women’s actual problems positively rolled out the red carpet for these new, male, women.

What is so terrible about Steinem’s article? She doesn’t wish harm on trans people, she even does the kindness of using ‘she’ for transwomen. She merely reserves her right to hold her own opinion about what it means, and why sex matters. She was, after all, a feminist, advocating for women, so when interviewers wanted to talk about Renee Richards (a then famous sex-changer in the US) she “simply defended [Richards’] right to change her own body if she wished but pointed out that she was an exception that had little to do with the plight of most women”.

She also pointed out something I had all but forgotten. That “only male to female transsexuals were famous”. Stonewall’s notorious “transwomen are women” campaign hit us in the UK around 2016, and it was literally several years before a lot of us turned round and said, “hang on, why is this all about males wanting access to women’s world?” It was only then that Stonewall went into a huddle and came out saying transwomenarewomentransmenaremenandnonbinaryidentitiesarevalid.

Steinem said, back in 1977, that “the only sort of sex change many interviewers could accept or imagine was for a man to give up his superior role and become a woman … for a woman to rise out of her inferiority and achieve manhood was unthinkable, impossible, just too big a job” and Stonewall absolutely proved that, by completely failing to mention trans men (ie females who transition) until we cottoned on to the trick.

But what Steinem said then is still true now. The whole trans thing is primarily a new way for men to get whatever they want, and for misogynists (men and women both) to tell feminists to shut up and, if anyone disbelieves that, I would ask them to think about Steinem’s final observation in that article, one that has been a key point about gender ever since Cinderella’s sisters struggled with that glass slipper…

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot? After all, Steinem’s 2023 essay only really apologised for one word of her earlier article, the word ‘mutilate’ and quite frankly, for as long as wounded young women turn up at women’s rights meetings saying things like this I’d say that word is valid, too…

I don’t know about you, but I long ago figured out I’d rather find some comfy shoes than chop bits off my feet — but then I had the advantage of growing up in the 1970s, when those second-wave feminists were out there fighting for us.

Feminine?

Actually, it’s not just the shoes. I quite like what my daughter calls ‘mum jeans’, and big old jumpers, and my preferred hairstyle is that one you get when you chop bits off whenever it gets annoying. Which is one of the reasons I really like Shelagh Delaney. Not because she sometimes looked like that but because she knew that looking like that, and being a mum whilst doing your own thing, is a perfectly good way of being one hundred percent woman.

If society’s definition of you doesn’t fit, change society.

Feminist

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”. But who do we have carrying the banner for feminism now? So called Feminist News writers who require you to be ‘on the right side of that line’ on the topic of men’s right to be women; women’s rights campaigners like Helen Joyce, who called the Women’s Place UK manifesto a ‘Marxist Utopia’; Maya Forestater, who assures us patriarchy does not exist; and the other one, too much of a horror to mention, the one who tried to invent ‘femalism’, which apparently ‘is like feminism but you don’t have to read books’ — and then, for reasons best known to herself, set about publicly haranguing Muslims.

Well actually, while I’m saying it out loud, I might as well say it all. She does that because she doesn’t read books. Women who neither attend to history nor listen to feminists who read books tend to blame Muslims for the religious fundamentalism that plagues so many post-colonial countries.

RIP Gloria Steinem. We can’t afford to forget you.

Oh and by the by, we all know why she wrote that other essay in 2023, trying to blur over what she’d said when women were allowed to talk about what being female really meant. These years have been full of older feminists writing long apology-like things to get trans activists off their backs.

We lost half of feminism when women tried to force it into the trans ideology mold and the other half trying to accommodate Zionism. Personally, I’m sticking with my old fashioned lefty feminist ideas and my comfy shoes.

I’ll just wait here, on what I think is the right side of that line.

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