What drove me to feminism fifty years ago was the myth that men were the breadwinners and women kept house and looked pretty. Male work colleague to me: You mustn’t take promotion. It’s taking the bread out of a working man’s mouth. Female Tax inspector to me: But you’re a married woman. What you earn […]
August 2013
The battle began when I was sixteen and told my teachers I wanted to be a doctor. I was moved into the science stream, never having had a science lesson in my life. We’re talking about a good girls’ school in the 1940s. The chemistry teacher had reached her 90th birthday and had been let […]
Nobody asks the children… We are told by the Daily Mail that mothers who stay home to look after their children are ‘happier than women who go out to work’. They don’t ask what kind of mother, what kind of work, so it doesn’t tell us very much. ‘Mother’ is so overwhelming a category, it […]
For me clothes began as a source of anxiety, rather than of pleasure. Would it fit? Would there be anything that would fit? I arrived in England on my fifteenth birthday, a child from New Zealand too well-fed on butter and meat, into a war-torn, hungry England. Relatives looked at me askance. It was 1946: […]