Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World!. Catherine Mayer
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to say she didn’t have time to help but would do so anyway.
In Sophie we had that most precious of assets – a leader, a natural and inspirational leader. When she spoke, people listened and wanted to listen. She could run meetings, an underrated skill essential to an evolving organisation. She had already cut her campaign teeth pushing for better treatment for her daughter Grace, whose Asperger’s Syndrome went undiagnosed for years, in part because the condition is assumed not to affect girls. Sophie had become a potent advocate and activist, and ran marathons to raise money for autism charities. In her blog, Grace Under Pressure, later published as a book, she documented struggles with public services and schools, and her daughter and herself. Running had also helped to rescue her from depression. Divorced from Grace’s father, and for a considerable time a working single mother, she remarried, acquiring two stepsons and a second daughter. She spoke at the first WE meeting about her experiences of juggling work and family in a system and society that sees childcare as a matter for mothers alone.
Her parents attended university, the first members of working-class families to do so. After state school in Glasgow, Sophie also went to university, Reading. She found a way into Reuters via a short-term contract and remembers her conversation with her future boss when the company decided to move her onto permanent staff. ‘I’m always interested in people who get in by the back door,’ he told her.
Cocozza didn’t see in Sophie a woman who got in by the back door. If the author’s impressions aligned with her expectations, we carried some of the blame – literally. Three ‘white, middle-aged, middle-class’ women, we arrived with bags of white, middle-aged, middle-class food.
Sandi, handing out Pret A Manger sandwiches, appeared to Cocozza’s eyes ‘mum’, whereas I defined myself as ‘the most obvious politician of the three’. This is not a compliment, nor is it ever the business of the Guardian to dole out compliments.
That didn’t stop us from wincing as we read the piece because it reinforced precisely the narrative we’d been hoping to change. ‘Listening to Toksvig, Mayer and Walker, clues arise that suggest they may not be able to hear how their assumptions can shade into complacency,’ Cocozza had written. ‘Their language is encoded with a privilege they appear not to notice … It all suggests difference of the wrong kind: that the life experiences of Mayer, Toksvig and Walker may be alienatingly divergent from the people they want to reach.’
On the day of publication, membership applications skyrocketed. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
While Cocozza and others, ourselves included, worried whether we were too privileged to pursue politics effectively, another school of thought predicted the Women’s Equality Party would dissolve into a puddle of sugar. An article in Spiked greeted our founding with a call for an end to feminism under the headline ‘The Women’s Equality Party: for ladies too nice for politics’. ‘Women’s Equality Party needs a strong dose of Nigel Farage’, advised the Telegraph. ‘The Women’s Equality party has a problem – no one hates it’, a second Guardian piece declared.
If any of us resented these accusations – how dare they call us nice! – we bit back the responses that might have punctured our ladylike image. Several of us had tweeted our criticisms of Cocozza’s piece and then regretted doing so. For one thing, we were determined to treat journalists with courtesy, and not only because some of us were journalists. We were setting out to do politics differently and to develop a style and sensibility distinct from the male-dominated old guard. That difference showed itself in small touches. Sandi accepted the title of ‘MC’, a role hitherto absent from party politics. Would she be master or mistress of ceremonies, I asked her? ‘It depends on the day,’ she replied.
More ambitious was our desire to resist the combative culture that simultaneously unites and divides Westminster hacks and media managers. Like most members of the parliamentary lobby, I’d learned to expect abusive calls and texts from special advisers as part of my job. Parties often employ human attack dogs who attempt to secure the coverage they want by shouting or threatening to remove access. After reading Cocozza’s piece, I couldn’t help laughing at a memory that bubbled to the surface. In 2008, I’d gone to the pub after putting to bed my first long TIME cover story on David Cameron. The feature explained that the Conservative leader looked set to become Prime Minister, but his rise in the polls and a recent by-election win by a posh Tory candidate did not mean that his gilded past had lost the power to haunt him. I’d tracked down a contemporary of Cameron’s in Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club who described a night on the tiles with the wealthy student and his similarly privileged fellow members as ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’. ‘Champagne memories and social deprivation could make for an uneasy juxtaposition, especially in such tough times. Can someone marinated in plenty viscerally understand what it feels like to be poor or excluded?’ I wrote. ‘[Cameron] brushes the question aside with visible irritation. “I don’t have this deterministic view of life that you can only care about something if you directly experience it,” he says. “You can’t walk a mile in everybody’s shoes.”’
Before leaving my office, I’d emailed a copy of the cover image, but not the text, to Cameron’s then director of communications, former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. In UK editions, the cover would run with the gnomic headline ‘Behind the Smile’. Outside Britain we’d chosen a more direct line, assuming people might not recognise our cover star: ‘David Cameron: A Class Act’. Coulson didn’t like the pun at all. He called me to deliver a long ticking off. I recall standing outside the Fox and Anchor as his voice issued tinnily from my mobile phone: ‘Class no longer matters to voters!’
At the Women’s Equality Party, we resolved to handle media politely but also firmly. One of our core objectives is equal treatment by and in the media, a huge and urgent issue for women and for democracy that I’ll explore in depth later in this book.
A small but significant part of that objective relates to the ways in which political coverage skews against women. The gladiatorial contests that broadcasters prefer over reflective, conversational interviews benefit neither politics in general nor women in particular. Why should politicians be judged on their ability to withstand a barrage of questions, or the same question repeated as the interviewer attempts to extract an answer that he – aggressive interviewers are most often men – likes better? Do we prefer leaders who speak quickly or think deeply? This style of journalism reflects male priorities, male socialisation, and even women skilled at debating are always at a disadvantage. Studies show that audiences react quite differently to men and women taking the floor. Men gain respect, women attract animosity.
Hillary Clinton speaks more softly than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, yet she was accused throughout her presidential campaign of shouting. As Secretary of State, Clinton’s popularity ratings were high. They dropped as soon as she confirmed her run for the White House.
This response wasn’t confined to male voters. Women are products of the same sets of social messaging, programmed in varying degrees to defer, to support, and that’s only the start of the problem. The harder we try to slough off patriarchal programming and determine for ourselves what it means to be female, to be a woman, the more our synapses begin to fry. Where does biological sex end and constructed gender begin? What are intrinsically female qualities?
We know that it is an insult to be called ‘nice’ in the political context, yet in that same context, as feminists, many of us would go to the barricades to assert our niceness. We assume it is the superpower the new breed of 50-foot women could bring to bear. We imagine Equalia would be a nice place because a gender-balanced society would enable men to relax and discover their own niceness in a gentler, feminised culture.
The ease with which the steering committee achieved consensus at its earliest meetings seemed to bear out this notion. Then came an argument. We tussled over the future shape of the organisation, and afterwards everyone around the table looked stricken. In raising our voices to defend beliefs, we had inadvertently challenged one of the unspoken shared beliefs that brought us together. True, the disagreement led to better decisions, but maybe the sexes weren’t so different after all.
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