This book offers a collection of chapters that explores and interrogates gender equality issues, through both the personal experiences of people themselves and the representation of gender and sexuality. Gender equality has been at the heart of feminist campaigns throughout the twentieth century. The early First Wave Feminist campaigns had crystallised around the call for universal suffrage, with most Westernised countries achieving this by 1930. This gave women the platform to raise issues of equality from inside the political system, a process that continues to this day. As Karen Boyle (2019) points out, at the time of writing this book, we are in a moment when feminismâs popularity is once more resurgent. At the same time, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) has argued that this coincides with popular misogyny. And it is not only the binary male/female backlash that is apparent, as other issues of gender and sexuality show a tension between liberation and oppression.
By the 1980s, the political activism of feminists spanning the twentieth century appeared to achieve the goals of equality. Laws were in place in Westernised societies that gave women and men equal rights to employment, education and legal powers. A vocabulary of âempowermentâ and âchoiceâ crystallised into what became known as âpost-feminismâ, a term which implied we no longer needed feminism: we were beyond that. However, many feminists challenged this post-feminist utopia. For example, Angela McRobbie (2009) challenged the basic assumption that feminism had âendedâ in a scathing critique of the myth of female empowerment that post-feminism apparently offered. The various strands of post-feminism shifted in dominance from the âladetteâ who apparently embraced the opportunity to behave as a young man would in terms of drinking, socialising and general rowdiness to the retraditionalisation of femininity that offered women the âchoiceâ to be domesticated and traditionally feminine. This fluctuation between aspects of post-feminist choice can be seen in action in reality TV programmes such as the internationally franchised âLadette to Ladyâ (2005â2008) (see Smith 2011). Diane Negra (2009) has also explored the concept of having-it-all post-feminism of popular culture, with the underlying dissatisfaction in the consumerisation of female aspiration. As we will see later, the demonisation of feminism in the post-feminist concept led to the assumption that feminists are joyless and anti-men, contrasting with the deluded post-feminist woman who has been conned into believing that the sexualising of her body is empowering (Whelehan 2000). StĂ©phanie Genz and Ben Brabon (2010) offer a more nuanced view of post-feminism, suggesting that it does have scope to be celebrated and at the very least that it is a transitional point between the political gains of Second Wave Feminism and what is yet to come. It is this transition that chapters in this book explore.
One-hundred years after some women first gained national suffrage in Britain, gender equality is firmly back on the agenda. The attention given to issues of gender equality achieved international recognition through the #MeToo social media campaigns of 2017 and 2018, which saw the arts and entertainment industries rocked by accusations of sexism and sexual harassment. These claims were led by women, but included the stories of gay participants too, who felt that they had been exploited or assaulted by powerful men in the industry. Gender equality in the twenty-first century now encompasses multiple sexualities in its reach, offering evidence of how far equality campaigns have actually come in that there is now a general acceptance of non-binary sexuality, both legally and socially. That said, there remain parts of the world, including the Westernised world, where attitudes, if not the law, continue to discriminate against those who are not binary, heterosexual identified. This book seeks to explore how these attitudes persist, despite decades of legal changes towards inclusivity, particularly over the last 50 years.
Legislation towards gender equality has been enacted throughout the twentieth century but most recently since the 1960s. The Second Wave Feminist movement in Westernised countries saw campaigns that were broadly grouped under âseven goalsâ as outlined by the UKâs Womenâs Liberation Movement:
- Equal pay now
- Equality education and job opportunities
- Free contraception and abortion on demand
- Free 24-hour nursery care
- Financial and legal independence
- Equality irrespective of sexuality
- End to all discrimination against lesbians and womenâs rights to define her own sexuality
It is telling that, half a century later, there is still legislation being developed even in Westernised countries to act on these goals. For example, from 6 April 2017 employers in Great Britain with more than 250 staff were required by law to publish statistics detailing staff pay by gender, annually on their own website and on a government website. The first full report of this appeared in April 2018 and showed that even 48 years since the passing of the Equal Pay Act (1970) in the UK, women consistently lag behind their male counterparts when it comes to pay. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2017 the gap between what UK male and female workers earned, based on median hourly earnings, stood at 18.4%. This had risen from 18.2% in 2016.
This is against a background of more women being in paid employment than ever before. As Myra Macdonald (1995) and many others have pointed out, this leads to a double bind where women are damned if they go out to work (implicitly neglecting their domestic duties) or damned if they stay at home (implicitly rejecting the hard-fought-for rights for women in the workplace ). Whilst Second Wave Feminist campaigns led to equality in terms of the legal obligations of employers, cultural expectations also needed to change. For example, in her 2017 autobiography, UK Labour MP and former Minister for Women, Harriet Harman, recounts that her mother, who had qualified as a barrister in the 1940s, had felt obliged to give up work when she had her children in order to fulfil the role of housewife. Harman laments that her motherâs barristerâs robe and wig ended up in the dressing-up box, and uses this ignominious act to highlight the inequality in pre-1970sâ society that deprived the world of the brains and skills of highly educated women purely on the basis of the compulsion to conform to domestic gendered expectations (Harman 2017). It is not just the university-educated women whose skills and knowledge were confined to the family on marriage through cultural expectations. My own mother had qualified as a nurse in 1961, becoming one of the youngest women of her generation to be promoted to the rank of ward sister when she was just 21. However, like Harmanâs mother, on giving birth to her first child, my mother also gave up her profession, and the costume associated with her jobâher nurseâs watch, registration badges and silver-buckled beltâalso found their way into our dressing-up box. The inequality of the system affected women at all points of the social class scale, although working-class women were less prominent during the Second Wave Feminist movement. Bridget Cooper explores this in her chapter.
It is now commonplace for women to continue working after becoming mothers, and in many European countries the State has increasingly stepped in to fund childcare (although in post-2008 austerity Britain, this has been sadly diminished). According to the Office of National Statistics data in the UK, the female employment rate has increased steadily from 52.8% in 1971 to 70.8% by the end of 2017 (ONS 2018a). This contrasts with the statistics for male employment over the same period, with 92.1% of men in employment in 1971 (overall employment rate of 72.2%) falling to 79.8% in 2017 (overall employment rate of 75.4%) (ONS 2018b, 2018c). These statistics alone show how far we have come from the social context of the Second Wave Feminist movement which pushed for equal pay legislation and equal access to employment opportunities across Westernised countries. A greater parity in the employment of both men and women is used by some to claim that women are âtaking overâ and âdoing men out of workâ, but this argument seemingly ignores the parallel decline in heavy industry over this period, an area where vast numbers of men were employed prior to the 1980s. Statistics also show that women are now more likely than men to go into higher education (the UK University Admission Service reported young women were 36% more likely to start a degree course than their male peers in August 2017), a trend that emerges across Westernised countries (PA, The Guardian 2017), and 2018 saw the ban on female soldiers serving on the fro...