YOU don't hear much about Superwoman these days, but the question of whether feminism is in retreat is raised quite frequently. Mind you, it's doubtful whether Shirley Conran's Superwoman was ever really a feminist. Despite her radical intent, she was far too self-regarding to direct her energy into equality's long trudge through the eighties. Instead, she concentrated on ripping and draping the velvet curtains into a sleek, little cocktail outfit, one more Scarlett O'Hara on the make.
But what links Superwoman and feminism together now may be plain, old-fashioned exhaustion. In between memorising a company report and whipping up a souffle for 12, numerous women who've actually made it to the top executive rung, are suddenly looking around them and deciding they don't, after all, like the view. More significantly, they don't like what they've become: highly-paid work junkies incapable of sustaining life beyond the office. This week the magazine Management Today publishes a report which reveals that one in three women would accept a pay cut to relieve the tensions imposed by workaholism, and one in 10 had passed up the chance to have children for the sake their careers.
Work as a drug is also poisoning men's systems, leaving them too wrung-out to enjoy the very quality of life they're toiling to achieve. And in such situations humanity itself can go rotten: one man even postponed his father's funeral to attend a business conference. Others miss the births of their children or don't cancel overseas meetings when their home partners are seriously ill.
None of this is new, of course, but information technology has intensified pressure and shrunken the workforce to make overload more common than job satisfaction. But the plight of women at work has been dramatically highlighted in recent days by the departure of Tina Gaudoin from the glossy editorship of Frank magazine, and Angela Browning from the Tory front bench, both women now deciding to put their families before their professions.
Some of the seminal figures in the womens' movement predicted such outcomes years ago, when they themselves chose to chuck militancy's foot slog for the slippers of a softer creed.
Germaine Greer, for instance, proclaimed women in the underdeveloped world were more emotionally fulfilled than those in the West, and, inevitably, that disturbed the sisterhood she'd helped to create, the one which had carved Greer's classic study, The Female Eunoch, on its psyche. No wonder it felt cheated. And America's Betty Friedan, having stirred the universe with The Feminism Mystique, railed against her book's apparent consequence, the over-achiever syndrome with its pushy emphasis on total success.
The mistake now, though, is to presume that chronic fatigue afflicts only boss-women. What about those who, out of financial urgency, must hold down three unremitting jobs - wife/partner, mother, and carer of the elderly? The concept of family-friendly employment is now enshrined in a Government white paper, but it will require practically every woman's vigilance to make sure it doesn't become one more benign intention gone to dust.
Today more than 50% of the job market is composed of women, many of them part-timers. Even so, there is a growing acceptance among employers that their performance, no matter the domestic pressures, often outstrips men's. There are two obvious downsides, though: parity of pay remains elusive for many, and women smoke away their stress to the extent that lung cancer and heart disease now ambush their lives almost as much as men's. Is this progress? Is this liberation?
In the sixties, feminism was robustly angry, a hawkish manifestation of flower-power's soppy hope to transform the world, and initially it gave women the confidence to challenge fiercely lop-sided masculine cultures. But the recession, followed by Thatcherism's spivish obsession with money muzzled it and the question now is whether feminism has the spirit for another fight; a fight, say, to ensure honourable facilities for the elderly, most of whom are looked after by women.
The problem lies not so much with feminism but with those attitudes which scorn it. Certain women today couldn't give a damn about creches because they've handed the kids over to a round-the-clock nannie, anyway, and, when the time comes, they'll do the same with their parents.
They're not interested, either, in campaigning for battered womens' hostels because they have the means to drive off and divorce the brute immediately. And, since they believe in private medicine, the widespread provision of cancer screening is regarded as irrelevant. But listen to them squeal now as they face the prospect of taxed Child Benefit.
The time for feminism to expire is when real opportunity of choice applies to everyone. In the meantime, too many women are still burdened by unfairly weighted responsibilities yet there are those for whom the very word feminism carries a message of doom, as if it were some verbal form of chemical warfare. But we're not talking here about a women's network as partisan and manipulative and arrogant as any old boys' network. Feminism is a matter of treating
people fairly. In the end, gender should be the least of it.
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