Life before feminism

Lynn Barber writes about growing up before the second-wave feminism of the seventies in the Observer last weekend. She says, 'It was fine being clever at school - at any rate if you were at a girls' school, as I was - but being clever outside, when there were boys around, made you a social leper. If anyone wanted to do real damage they would call you a swot - no boy would ever go out with a swot. So that was the first problem - how to be clever at school and stupid outside - which in turn was part of the larger problem that you were expected to behave differently with boys than you did with girls. Boys were the enemy but they were also the goal. You had to catch one eventually or you risked being a spinster like your teachers, and no one wanted that.' She talks about the pressure to be feminine, the lack of sex education, the rules of dating and the 'havng it all' phase in the eighties that just induced, for her, permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.

She ends with some thoughts on what life is like for women today: 'The problem for young women is, as it always has been, an economic one - that just when they need to be pushing ahead with their careers and earning decent money is also when they need to be having babies. It worries me that so many young women now choose to defer the babies, thinking they can somehow magic them up by IVF when they are in their forties. Often they can't, so they have no children to console them when their much-vaunted careers end in redundancy. In an ideal society, I believe, couples would have children young, preferably in their early twenties, when they're energetic and flexible enough to live on little money, and then start the serious career-building in their thirties when the children are at school. The present recession might actually make that easier - if there are no careers for 20-somethings to pursue, they might think it is quite a good idea to have babies instead.'

This article was part of a special edition of the Review section which looked back on the 80 years since the Equal Franchise Act. There's lots more interesting stuff to read here, including a poll on gender attitudes, how men still dominate the top levels of politics, church, business and the media and a review of the best and worst places for women today. Have a browse.