If I were overweight because I gorged on chocolate, I wouldn’t blame Lindt; in the same way that if I had done a job I hated for the last 40 years, I wouldn’t hold my school careers advisor accountable.
So I have no idea why writer Petronella Wyatt should blame feminism for the disappointments of her own midlife (childless, manless, depressed) as she did in these pages last week.
What is feminism? For me, it is the belief that women are equal to men and should have the same rights and opportunities. It’s not a bad word: it’s a progressive, positive, enriching and empowering belief that has improved the lives of millions of women, including mine.
If, in the autumn of our years, we are disappointed by the outcome of our lives, surely we only have ourselves to blame? We make our decisions in life and we must make peace with the consequences.
Some may say feminism failed our generation: I say it made me the woman I’m proud to be, writes Mandy Appleyard.
Petronella maintains that she feels alone and depressed because feminism taught her to prioritize a career over a family life, reducing feminism to a crude and lazy binary to bolster her argument. The truth is that millions of women who consider themselves feminists are married and have children and grandchildren; It is not an either/or question.
Likewise, millions of single, childless women like me are perfectly happy with lives that seem full and rich, free, spontaneous and bold.
Feminism is about enrichment and opportunity – it’s the reason a small-town, working-class Yorkshire girl like me was able to go to university and then enjoy a long and fulfilling career in journalism that has taken me all over the place. the world. If I had been born 10 years earlier, my destiny would have been marriage and children.
When I was born in May 1960, women still promised to obey their husbands: it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work, abortion was illegal, a man could legally rape his wife, and girls were He said they didn’t need to worry about education because they would get married.
When I was a young woman studying at the University of London in 1979, all that had changed: equal pay had been introduced, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 had been passed and a woman could no longer be dismissed for becoming pregnant.
Feminism – a global movement of brave women fighting for much-needed change – is what separated these two worlds: an old world where women were second-class citizens, and a new one where they had some independence and control over their lives in the way. that men had always enjoyed.
Some may say feminism failed our generation: I say it made me the woman I’m proud to be. Without husband or children, yet I am loved and I love; I am financially independent and free as a bird; I have enjoyed a long and fulfilling career that has taken me to places I never dreamed I would see and the company of people who have become dear friends for life. Journalism doesn’t pay well, but I’m pleased to say that I have a spacious, comfortable home on the Yorkshire coast, I’m debt-free, I’m independent in every way and I’ve never been happier or more at peace.
When I was younger, I hoped to one day get married and have children. I saw that conventional life as a given, without ever making it a priority. There were many relationships, none of them lasting more than seven years, and I had three pregnancies around the age of 40 that ended in devastating miscarriages.
I don’t blame any of this on feminism: I blame my turbulent relationship history on my own reckless decisions, and my lack of children on my biology. Now that I am in my early 60s, I share with many other women my age the condition of being single and without a family.
Behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest population subgroup are women who have never married or had children.
If one argues that “the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else,” as Petronella did, it seems to suggest that only love that comes from a spouse or a committed romantic partner can be recognized and valued. That kind of love is very special, but it is not its only source. Love can come in many forms and from many different people: from brothers and sisters, from aunts and uncles, from mothers and fathers, from friends and lovers. The latter may be fleeting, but even love in the moment can be dizzyingly intense and immensely fortifying. Love enriches us all and it is important that we recognize that it exists in many more places than marriage, none of them inferior to romantic love.
Petronella and I live in different worlds: she is a middle-class product of private education, while I am a working-class woman who went to the local comprehensive school. What we do have in common is that we are women of a certain age who took the road less traveled: a path that has to do with freedom and independence.
However, she seems deeply ungrateful for having grown up in a world where women like us had many more opportunities than our mothers and grandmothers, who were tied to the home by the demands of husbands and children, and for which we surely have feminism to thank. She tells us that financial independence was the feminist ideal, but “in practice it doesn’t happen unless you run a hedge fund or can write best-selling novels.”
I wonder what world he lives in? A golden and expensive deal, it seems, that insults the millions of ordinary working women—nurses and teachers, secretaries and administrative assistants, retail workers and salespeople—who manage to become financially independent. Achieving that can be difficult for many of them, but through hard work and good management, they do it.
My friends are women like these. Many of them may not consider themselves “feminists,” but they recognize the radical, positive changes in the status of women over the past four decades and enjoy the improvements in their lives, both domestic and professional.
The article refers to the fact that “one in 10 British women aged 50 have never been married and live alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.” I say, don’t speak for me, or my friends, or the myriad of women who live their best lives free of husbands, children, and housework.
Additionally, behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest population subgroup are women who have never married or had children. Middle-aged married women, he maintains, are at greater risk of physical and mental illness than single women.
Perhaps we can agree with Petronella’s statement that loneliness is the leading cause of depression among “middle-aged women.” But the vast majority of them are married.
I’ve always thought that the loneliest place in the world must be a marriage in which neither party is happy. And I say this because, although I have never been married, most of my friends are, and they confide in me that spouses become the wallpaper of each other’s lives: that there is boredom, that sexual desire decreases. , that staying married is an act of because walking away, which often seems like the preferred option, causes too much disruption to too many people. And so they stay, bored and dissatisfied but afraid to leave.
The truth is that we all make what we believe are the best decisions on our journey through life, and often those decisions turn out to be unwise. Women like Petronella and me, no matter how different we are, have reached an age where we take stock. Of course there are disappointments, but it is disingenuous and impolite to blame them on anyone other than ourselves. We were not brainwashed or coerced. We had so many more options than any of the women before us.
The argument that feminism made the mistake of telling women to behave and think like men is nonsense. Feminism has opened doors and made new things possible for women of my generation: it brought us opportunities and something closer to equality. Most of us are immensely grateful for that.
