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Girls behaving badly
Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray was one of Britain's leading feminists 40 years ago, fighting for equality - and she's dismayed by today's binge-drinking ladettes with their sex and drink culture. Here she asks 'What went wrong?'
It's a warm summer day – the kind that generally breeds optimism after a long, grey winter, but there's not much to feel cheery about as I read the morning's newspapers. Gwyneth Paltrow teeters on heels vertiginously high, matched with a skirt even shorter than the extended belts we wore as teenagers in the Sixties.
Good lord, I hear myself muttering, it won't be long before her back's shot and, for goodness sake, she's in her thirties and a mother. It's clear she's desperate to revive her career after a long absence being a full-time mum. How sad that she feels she can only attract attention by playing a pubescent girl out on the pull.
There's nothing to applaud in the crime figures either. There's a marked rise in violent behaviour among girls and young women. Thoroughly depressed, a colleague and I decide to take ourselves out to lunch at a nearby restaurant where we can sit in the sun on the pavement and cheer ourselves up. Nothing doing, I'm afraid.
From a distance, rising above the din of London traffic, we hear the unmistakable sounds of good-time girls behaving badly. Squealing, giggling, cat-calling, swearing of the kind you would never want your mother to hear. A stretch limo pulls up in front of the restaurant behind a long line of cars held up at the lights. There's a gaggle of them, metaphorically hanging their knickers out of the windows and literally displaying their no doubt augmented breasts via the sunroof. Glasses of champagne are waved at the passing crowds and obscene suggestions made to young men who stop, amazed, jaws dropping in delight.
My friend and I are ashamed on their behalf and on our own. Ours was the generation that took feminism by the horns and vowed to make equality of the sexes work. It's 40 years since we were galvanised into action by the demonstration at the Miss America pageant where a sheep was crowned the winner and bras and stiletto heels were dumped into a bin. (Contrary to press reporting of the time – no bra was ever burnt!)
I was 18 in 1968 and determined I would not follow the flock. I and thousands like me would flaunt our brains, not our beauty and our sexual allure. We would take our place alongside men in the workplace and not be confined to the rigours of the domestic environment or the trappings of femininity. We would stride out in our minis and comfy shoes – ready for anything.
I never quite abandoned the bra or the high heels. The stilettos of the Seventies went as age progressed. The bra returned over much the same timescale – needs must. But the Miss America event, publicised all over the world, seemed to herald a new time for women – a sisterhood was born and we were filled with a fighting spirit. So, we wondered, as we watched those girls disgrace themselves, where had it all gone wrong?
There's no doubt that embracing feminism was a tough call – it still is. The press had a field day, rubbishing the whole project, and those of us who joined the women's movement with enthusiasm were invariably ridiculed as dungaree-wearing man-haters – a tough call for a young woman who hadn't worn dungarees since she was six and was rampantly heterosexual. And, of course, we had to deal with those second-wave feminists who rejected what they regarded as standards of female beauty, created by men for the subordination and objectification of women.
I remember reading Beauty and Misogyny, a book by the radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys. In it she wrote, "In 1973 I gave up beauty practices… I stopped dyeing my hair 'mid-golden sable' and cut it short. I stopped wearing make-up. I stopped wearing high heels and, eventually, gave up skirts. I stopped shaving my arms and legs."
Thus, there was a crack in the sisterhood from the start – for many of us such sacrifices were simply too extreme and we concentrated our efforts instead on equal pay and a woman's right to choose. And that's what we did; we can look back proudly on what has been achieved. We may not have equal pay yet, although the battle continues, but boys and girls have equal opportunities in education and the workplace and are beginning to find ways to share their responsibilities for childcare.
They will never have to endure the humiliation I went through when I applied for a mortgage in 1975 and was told I was unsuitable without the signature of a father or husband. Eventually I invoked the Sex Discrimination Act and got it, but it was a wearying battle.
But how, my lunch companion and I wondered, are we to deal with the "ladette" culture that seems to have pervaded this new generation of young women and makes them crow about how much they enjoy porn, how there's nothing like getting legless with your mates and how Jordan is a feminist role model because she's made millions out of flashing her enormous breasts at all and sundry?
It was perhaps inevitable that they should demand that equality meant the right to behave as badly as the boys – a trait, as the TV series Men Behaving Badly showed, generally regarded as somewhat amusing and attractive in a man. We have, over the years, rather sentimentalised the idea of the sisterhood and ignored the fact that women are not necessarily, as the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, put it, "gooder than men’". She had written, in a novel called Cat's Eye, about bullying between schoolgirls – and we know how cruel they can be.
Today's girls and young women are also victims of a sustained backlash against women taking their rightful place in society – there are still triumphal articles in certain newspapers when a female CEO gives up her job to take care of her children. Then there's the pressure of commercial interests that have cashed in on liberal thinking concerning pornography, boob jobs, lap dancing and the lads' mags.
My generation knows from bitter experience how hard it is to negotiate one's way through the nightmare of being accused of being joyless or prudish if you dare to raise your voice in protest against women still being used as sex objects in so prominent a place as Page Three of a national newspaper, or at Playboy being allowed to sell pink pencil cases bearing their infamous logo to little girls. It must be very tough to say no if a young man you're madly in love with suggests a mucky movie might spice things up in bed.
We were, I fear, neglectful. We failed to give our girls the knowledge to build an argument. We failed to give it to our boys too. A friend of mine was asked recently to speak in a debate at the union of a major university against the motion "Jordan is a feminist icon."
She pulled no punches about the impact such images have on the way we are all perceived and remarked on the misery revealed in Jordan's autobiography about her previous relationships with men, who saw only the breasts and never the woman behind them. She was dumped, usually after one or two nights, by man after man and was even left to rear a disabled child alone until she finally met Peter Andre – a good one, it seems, after all the bad.
My friend won the debate and was astonished at the end to be bombarded by grateful young women, thanking her for pointing out arguments they hadn't heard before. And there's the rub. We have not taken seriously the need to pass on the history of the greatest social revolution ever witnessed to the next generation.
I was struck twice by the degree to which we have failed in relation to my own sons. When I was looking for a school for them, I asked every head teacher how they handled the need to make children aware of the impact of the social changes brought about by equality between the sexes. Only one had any clue what I was talking about. I sent them to his school. When my second son was studying politics for A-level he came home with a textbook on 20th-century politics in Britain and I was horrified, as, thank goodness, was he, to find that the suffragette movement and the winning of the vote merited barely a mention.
It's time for change in the classroom. Let's abolish sex education and put the business of reproduction into biology, where it belongs. Let's then introduce gender education and teach them the history of the women's movement and the indignities women suffered before the law began to protect our most basic rights.
Let's give them the chance to discuss who washes the dishes, who cares for children, why rape is so prevalent, but so hard to prosecute, and why there may be a problem with Page Three, porn, lap-dancing clubs and becoming insensible every Saturday night. Let's give them the education – whether they're boys or girls – and the armoury to make their own morality. We owe them that at the very least.
* Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter, by Jenni Murray, is published by Bantam Press, £14.99. Available through Saga Books for £12.99 with free p&p. See page 159 of the August 2008 edition of Saga Magazine.
This article first appeared in the August 2008 edition of Saga Magazine. Click here to subscribe.
