-Caveat Lector-
>From TheNewStatesman
http://www.consider.net/forum_new.php3?newTemplate=OpenObject&newTop=19990927000
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Cover story - Women don't deserve to be on top
Cover story
Fay Weldon
Monday 27th September 1999
When 101 female MPs were elected two years ago, we thought history was
made and politics would change. We were wrong, writes Fay Weldon On that
euphoric morning we thought we'd got there. Women had breached the final
bastion of male power. In the face of our gorgon stare, politics itself
had capitulated. That was 2 May 1997. Through the seventies, eighties and
nineties we had put on hard hats and pushed and pushed, out of housewifery
and into the professions - medicine and law were the first to go - to
become engineers and architects, to run businesses and quangos, to be top
bitch in museums and opera houses; we were in the City - trusting women
with money had been a real problem for the men - and now finally this: we
had got to the heart of the evil empire, politics itself. One hundred and
one female Members of Parliament. We were to transform not just the House
of Commons but the nation itself. The world. Those of us who thought women
had special virtues men had not - such as common sense, tenderness and an
instinct for negotiation - saw a new dawn of reason and justice throughout
the land: there would be no more locking of male antlers, pointless
confrontation, sleaze, backbiting, boring the public by blaming the
previous administration. (Men have a great capacity for blaming others:
women tend to go too far the other way.) And what happened? What did you
do? You did what women always do: you fell in love. En masse, you fell in
love with Tony Blair. From the very first morning, you were collectively
known as Blair's Babes, and rightly so. You don't resist or deny the
title: it makes you feel cosy and safe and female; you belong. I'm not
carping or complaining, only noticing. I wouldn't be any different.
Feminists (and more than four-fifths of the new women MPs described
themselves as such, but these days it's a difficult thing to deny) always
were their own worst enemy. In the early days of the movement, it was just
the same. Activists kept falling for men and losing their judgement. Aware
of it, they tried to cure themselves by turning into political lesbians
but they could never hold out for long. It was back in the end to the male
bed, the male hothouse. So what's changed? Now it's yes Tony, no Tony,
smile at me, Tony. How wise and wonderful and powerful you are, Tony - and
Alastair Campbell's pretty good- looking, too. Blair's Babes, on message,
day and night, in the hope of a kind word or a fleeting glance and a spot
of promotion. At least, that's how it's coming over. Open your pretty
mouths and a sound-bite learnt by heart flows out. Look, I'm not saying
the men have done any better - when Margaret Thatcher was in power, gender
got her male cohorts in the same way - but that's not my point here. I'm
talking to those MPs with bosoms and bums who are ruled by oestrogen and
the cycles of the moon, not men with hairy chins and legs and testosterone
surging in their veins. Let them look after themselves. When you think
about it, the women who make the worst photographs make the best
politicians: they're the ones we know and trust, who carry the people with
them. Mo Mowlam, Clare Short - though since she found her son and
consented to a make-over and turned pretty she's been somewhat sidelined -
and Ann Widdecombe. Yes, I know she's officially a Tory, but out here in
the real world we do have a problem telling both parties apart. The few
wilder sequinned sexy sisters on board do pretty well. Diane Abbott's
terrific. But the moment you others get nicely coiffed and smartly
skirted, you turn into bleating hypocritical sheep, spouting a party line
you don't necessarily believe. You're worth more than that. Tear your hair
and rend your clothes, if that's what it takes. Hypocritical? Yes, I do
say that. You and your war on drugs: there's a Canadian woman in Eastleigh
women's prison doing 11 years for importing marijuana, and what's that I
smell in the Stranger's Bar? I think drugs are loathsome, personally, but
the answer is not to take them. Then legislate. "Morality is not about
words, it's about setting examples." (Tony hasn't said that yet, but it's
the kind of thing he says.) We had such high hopes. Back in May 1997, the
electorate's complaint about the Conservative Party was that it talked to
us as if we were children, told us what was good for us, interfered with
our freedoms, classified and categorised us, assumed we all wanted to live
in the same way, dared to castigate single mothers, encouraged us to abort
our children in order to save the state money, while burning it up in
fireworks and planning impossible and grandiose millennium projects. So
sisters, what have you changed? What's different? True, there aren't so
many fireworks. But as for keeping out of our private lives, this month
the new state has put out a booklet encouraging fathers to be fathers,
sponsored by Bounty and Sony, which claims that children filmed by Sony
Digital camcorders as they emerge from the womb tend to be brighter and
sharper than those who are not. There are 101 of you. Since you've been in
the House, the place itself has been increasingly marginalised. Is this
because of you or in spite of you? I hope to God it is the latter, and not
some male conspiracy, or because, as some would have it, that when
professions become feminised they lose status and credibility. "We are
only fulfilling our manifesto, on the basis of which we came to power," is
everyone's parrot cry, male or female, as directives pour out from the
top, bypassing parliament. Oh yes? New Labour came to power because old
Labour voters believed it wouldn't keep its promises. My mother, now in
her nineties, lifelong socialist, daughter of a founding member of the
Fabian Society, sister- in-law to a one-time Labour foreign secretary,
Michael Stewart, said to me before the election: "Tony Blair is saying
what he must to get votes, to get the Conservatives out. When he gets into
power, he'll show his true colours." It was a very popular delusion. Did
we ask for curfews on our children, or for two hours' homework for them
every day, or an exam culture that makes them anxious? Do we want
welfare-to- work schemes that oblige women to hand over their children
into "childcare" - to another woman, in other words, who may be "trained"
but may be neither pleasant or moral? Do we want our children taught about
sex by people whose sexual attitudes may be very different from our own?
Have the 101 of you looked these matters in the face? Perhaps you have,
but prudence about your own prospects of promotion stops you saying what
you really think. What else can you do? You who wanted to save the world
have seen politics turned into a "career path". There are to be no fine
speeches or passionate declarations, no stirring of the masses. Back to
your constituency, woman, to act as another layer of social worker, while
we men get on with running the country. Have you noticed the shrouded
Islamic women in our streets who walk two steps behind their menfolk? What
about their rights? You can't say anything: you will have the finger of
racism pointed at you. But that's why we elected you. To do something
difficult and right: not clean up a few massage parlours, catch out good
old Joe Ashton, fiddle around with benefits and claim it as a great
victory. Have you looked around at the tired faces of the workers in the
bus queues? Seen the depression of the Underground, as we go about our
daily, insecure lives? Looked at the children now begging in London
streets without a parent in sight, let alone a social worker to care? It
is Dickensian. Did you discourage the leader you love from dropping bombs
on hospitals in Belgrade and creating 100,000 more refugees on the Serbian
border? No. You let your hearts overwhelm your reason: you followed Tony
Blair in what we always believed to be a male trait. Following top dog, in
this case Bill Clinton, defending the new state religion of
multiculturalism, which we now impose on others at the point of a gun.
You, the noble 101, with a few brave exceptions, turned white-feathery at
the first drop of a cluster-bomb: you were the equivalent of those women
at the beginning of the first world war who handed out white feathers for
cowardice to any young men who happened not to be in uniform. Go it, Tony,
you called, you who were once CND, firmly there behind the
cultural-imperialist, militaristic cause, bringing the foreigners to
order. Do it! Drop 'em! I'd thought all that was the past, and women
turned self-righteous only because they were kept out of public life, out
of power. I was wrong. The men may not be fit for the top jobs; now I'm
not even sure about the women. But courage, sisters, courage! You'll get
your act together yet. You have to. Just think of Barbara Castle; don't
dream of Tony Blair. The writer's "Godless in Eden" is published by
HarperCollins, �16.99
{{<End>}}
A<>E<>R
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