Our generation needs to reclaim feminism

Published: Monday, October 24, 2011

A few years ago, Germaine Greer appeared on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. The feminist sat opposite the pop starlet Gabriella Cilmi, aged 17 at the time. "What do you think of feminism?," Simon Amstell asked Cilmi. Cilmi's response was to giggle, blush and say: "Er, I don't think people should say bad things about women? I don't know."

"It's like it was all pointless, isn't it?" said Amstell to Greer.

The problem is that my generation, like Cilmi, really don't know. Perhaps uniquely since the Pankhursts, we have grown up without any obvious feminist figurehead. Many of my peers take the view that, in the UK at least, women won the battle for equality long ago. Yet this is simply not the case. The attempt by MP Nadine Dorries to give abortion counselling to "independent providers" - i.e. pro-life companies - is just one recent example. Meanwhile, a leading sociologist, Catherine Hakim, in her poisonous book Honey Money, dismisses "Anglo-Saxon victim feminism". All this in a decade where the pay gap between men and women remains at 17 per cent, and my own university college is 70 per cent male.

Click here to read the full article in the Guardian by young writer Freya Berry...