On International Women’s Day, Kerry Hudson writes she is hopeful for the future as progress has been made, and continues to be made, on equality issues.
I was born in 1980, the first year that Miss World aired on ITV. The winner was Gabriella Brum from Germany. She was crowned with her hair in Farah Facett flicks around her face, in a white dress, beaming with an even whiter smile but she resigned just 18 hours later apparently claiming her boyfriend disapproved.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and my childhood was shaped by what men ought to do and what women should not hope to.
In the working-class communities I grew up in, men and women both worked. In fact, women often worked harder, longer and raised children besides. And yet were still frequently told their place was in the kitchen and that their value should be measured by society’s ideals of attractiveness. I was brought up being told by the wider world I could be useful or fanciable, hell, I could be both if I wanted, but I still wouldn’t be equal.
Still, between the third wave of feminism in the early 90s and my mother discovering Germaine Greer by my teens, I very slowly started to see through the gaslighting of a society systemically opposed to progression of gender equality.
Nonetheless it took me another few decades to completely understand this but of course it would: I spent my formative years playing ‘Barbies’ with Tennent’s cans adorned with their glamorous ‘Lager Lovelies’ and with Sam Fox on page three.
A different world
I’m 42 now and I’m pleased to say that my son is growing up in a very different world thanks to the, often working class, women whose shoulders we now stand on. Because the same year I was born women working at the Hoover factory went on strike against the ‘woman out first’ redundancy plans.
Three years later the Equal Pay Act allowed women to be paid the same as men for work of equal value. And three years after that, Julie Hayward, a cook in a shipyard in Liverpool, was the first woman to win a case under the amended Equal Pay Act.
In 1990, an independent tax sanction for women was introduced and first-time married women were taxed separately from their husbands. Two years later, Betty Boothroyd broke 700 years of parliamentary tradition and became the first female Speaker of the House of Commons.
And yet it wasn’t till I was 14 in 1994 when rape in marriage was made a crime after 15 years of intensive campaigning by women’s groups.
It didn’t surprise me in the least to learn while writing this that the earliest incarnation of International Women’s Day was organised in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America in New York City.
Knowing the grit, tenacity, and intelligence of the women I grew up with, it seems inevitable that the women’s equality movement and class struggle have always been intrinsically linked. Of course, this makes sense.
Women who find themselves in the systemic inequality of the class system will inevitably look around them and see that they were being doubly marginalised by a patriarchal system too.
Gratitude on International Women’s Day
I am deeply grateful to and proud of the working-class women who came before us and celebrate them today.
In recent years we’ve had the #MeToo, Time’s Up and body positivity movements. We watched Weinstein hobbling into court with his tennis ball adorned Zimmer frame and being convicted for a total of 39 years after being accused by over 90 women of decades of sexual assault and rape. In 2018, the Republic of Ireland voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment, making abortion legal.
Closer to home, it speaks volumes that our first serving female First Minister was also the longest serving and that we were the first country to pass a law making period products available to access in public buildings and took that a step further last year by introducing a law to protect the right to period products for all women.
Progress on gender equalities
Of course the fight continues. In the UK the gender wage gap is still extreme. According to the TUC in education alone the pay gap was 22.2%. So the average woman effectively worked for more than a fifth of the year, 81 days, until Wednesday the 22nd of March for free.
We also have no end of work to do to make sure we feel safe on our streets and with those, the police, who are meant to protect us. Across the globe reproductive rights are being dialled backwards by decades and there are still millions of women around the world, including Iran, who still need our solidarity and support.
UK gender pay gap widens as childcare costs worsen ‘motherhood penalty’ https://t.co/WNayAf1Oxf
— The Independent (@Independent) March 7, 2023
But, I see progress. I’ve lived through progress and hope to contribute to it. I’m glad my little boy will grow up in a country that provides educational resources to improve gender balance and equalities, to challenge gender stereotypes, and address unconscious bias.
This International Women’s Day though, though there is still so much to be done, I am hopeful. So, Happy International Women’s Day to the strong women out there, to our male allies, to parents raising powerful daughters and good sons.
And to all those digging their heels in and wishing for a time of pliable Miss World’s answering to domineering boyfriends and Tennents’ ‘Lager Lovelies’? I say, ‘Time’s up’.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays
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