Liz Hodgkinson

Have we forgotten about feminism? Or do we imagine the fight is long over? Certainly there have been many gains for women in the past 40 years or so. We have access to effective contraception, equal education and we have long been able to secure our own mortgages and bank loans and set up our own businesses. In fact, in the secular world, the gains have been spectacular.

But in the religious world, women are still seen as secondary. I can’t believe the fight that is going on to ‘allow’ women to be bishops, especially now that most (as it seems to me) urban and rural vicars are now female.  What difference does the gender make? After all, bishops dress up in female clothes and always have done. To my knowledge, there is not yet a female Catholic priest, although there are now female rabbis. Nor do Muslims have female clerics – again, so far as I am aware.

It has always been religion which has held women back and it was not until mass secularisation, after the second world war, that women began to make significant gains to control their own lives and their own fertility. Until then it was seen as the natural order of things that women were inferior to men and this was reflected in society at large.

I’m sure it is the lingering effect of religion which is, to this day, preventing women from achieving full equality.  For instance, it is STILL common for a woman to take a man’s name on marriage, but how often does a man take a woman’s name? A woman still becomes ‘Mrs’ on marriage, yet a man’s title does not change. The wife of a Lord automatically becomes a Lady, yet the husband of a Dame does not become a Lord. We still have the situation where to be the wife of a leading politician is seen as a job in its own right, even though these women are unelected and as such, can play no active part in government. 

Sarah Brown has a popular twitter promoting her husband, but does he have a twitter promoting her?

After a prolonged lull, it seems that feminism now has a new face, new champions and let’s hope they will manage to achieve what we in the 1970s did not quite achieve – full and total equality for men and women and no underlining of secondary status by changing names or titles when forming a partnership with a man.  And no reflected glory or proxy status, either.