Sisterhood Revisited

I feel as though I’m answering for the whole of the UK at this point.

There is much I’ve heard in the last 10-15 minutes that I completely agree with, but given that I’m here slightly as a devil’s advocate I’ll begin that way.

I’m 50 now, I’m going to be 51 in about six weeks’ time and I think one has to go back to 1970, which was year before we started Spare Rib.

There was a very good story that Jenni Murray, who presents Women’s Hour, told me the other day – I’d forgotten about this but I knew it at the time – Jenni in 1973, not even 1970, was buying her first flat. She had a job in the BBC, she had a salary, she paid taxes, she was allowed to vote, she’d been to university, she’d been a good girl – they wouldn’t give her a mortgage.

“Where’s your husband?”
“I haven’t got one.”
“Well, then your father’s got to sign.”

It’s not that long ago, but you forget it. I have an eighteen- year old daughter and when I told her that story she looked at me as if I was discussing Mars. It was foreign. We needn’t sit here and pat ourselves on the back, but when feminism began we had a lot of the ideals that people here are talking about.

I remember when my partner Martia Rowe and I sat down and wrote the first ever editorial of the first issue of Spare Rib. And we said: this is about both sexes. We think that men, who have to get a job at eighteen and carry on until sixty-five, with only two weeks’ holiday a year, commuting to work every day, being totally financially responsible for their two point two children whom they never see – have just as much of a strait -jacket of a life, as what happens to women. They had no choices.

What we were looking for then was genuine choice about the way you wanted to live your life. Whether you wanted to be a worker, or a mother who stays at home. Ditto for men if they wanted to be able to be softer, less aggressive, they could come over.

Men vanished very quickly as feminism took off. The concept of sisterhood too I see as very sadly lacking, certainly in my daughter’s generation. Actually, many of the things that you are brought up with as Muslims, looking at our Western culture, were dealt with then by sisterhood.

Yes, we had lots of big problems. There were virtually no women doctors, virtually no women lawyers, certainly no women in the city. There were glass ceilings everywhere. Yes we still have glass ceilings but my gosh, in a very short space of time, really a generation, they’re breaking and falling everywhere.

The problem about freedom is that once you throw it into the air, you have to embrace it all, and there are a lot of down sides to this freedom that people have mentioned. But I, like everybody here, want the freedom to choose.

I don’t want to see women in a new kind of strait-jacket ­– it actually horrifies me to see it. This concept of the superwoman, meaning all the things that you [Anita] were talking about – I must have the best home and the best job and also be size ten and cook Nigella’s food and all this stuff. As you said, and I love the way you said it, the sums just don’t add up. The choice has become very bewildering.

In the process of all this we’ve also run down motherhood as a career: I have a chilling memory from a long time ago, about 1977, of being at a rather ghastly dinner party, where nobody knew each other. Everyone was telling each other what they did: there was one woman who was very quiet. Somebody said:

“what do you do?”
“I don’t do anything. I have six children”

And you think ‘horror!’

I remember sitting there, thinking I am partly responsible for the fact that this woman sitting at a dinner party, among people with quite smart jobs in the media, is feeling awful. That was terrible.

Two years later Shirley Conran publishes Superwoman, a book I regard with great distaste, although I quite like Shirley. But the idea was that within ten years of a really strong sense of socialism being involved in feminism, you [Sarah] were talking about poverty being the real repression. That’s true here too.

Our ideas of repression in our nice middle class jobs are very different from those of people who live on the poverty line in this country let alone the people and the women who live in Afghanistan. I think that we all have a problem when it comes to Islam because to us the veil represents everything that we fought about 30 years ago. It represents the idea that you do what your husband does, that you’re five steps behind – that you don’t really deal with the outside world.

And yet I know that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that because I was lucky enough, at the end of the ‘seventies, to go and work in Kuwait for three years. I lived there at a very interesting time to me because it had suddenly gone Western. All the women had jumped out of veils and into expensive designer clothes. Old style Arabic furniture had been thrown out in favour of modern stuff shipped in from Paris.

All the blokes were trading in their Arab women to have European mistresses, Johnny Walker Black Label was being smuggled in over the border, there was gambling every night, everything you could imagine.

The women were the ones who stood up and said ‘Hey, this is rampantly out of control, we’re completely losing track here, in the space of the blink of an eye’. Many women I knew started wearing a headscarf again, to send out the signal ‘Don’t look at me as a sexual object, I don’t want to be like those women in the West, which is all to do with how short they can wear their skirt, whether they are size ten, whether they’ve got sexy clothes. I am worth more than that’.

It wasn’t, and this is what interested me, to do with saying ‘I am less than a bloke’. It was saying ‘Value me for my mind, respect me, and treat me as a proper person.

And I like this occasion tonight very much, and am really pleased to be here, because I think we can have a dialogue that will look at these kinds of points.

We all had our heads blown open by what happened on 11 September. I know and you know that these things aren’t going away; it’s actually about how we deal with the whole world. We all have to look after each other. I think that we have set up terrifying things– like the fact that Rupert Murdoch is allowed to beam his trash soap operas into every house around the world. You can now show people that apparently there’s this place called the West where everybody drives cars and has five bedrooms and all you’ve got to do to get there is somehow climb in the back of a truck.

This is really scary, it’s what’s going on and people don’t talk about it or think of the consequences. The consequences are only just beginning.