Don’t upset ‘the Sisters’
Scared of sexists? Try upsetting the feminists
How the author came up against censorious feminists
It is a fear that persists, and it is the core of self-loathing inside every unreconstructed feminist. It is the terror that by very virtue of their sex they will one day, through weakness or forgetfulness or just sheer exhaustion from all that pretending to be tough — betray The Cause. Then, like a second-rate horror movie, the Sisterhood will turn up at their front door and daub ‘Useless Girl’ in scary red paint across it before forcing them to write ‘Is This What Brave Emmeline Pankhurst Was Force-fed For?’ 100 times over while listening to the entire Joan Baez canon. Oh yes. If you think the patriarchal supremacy can be scary, you should try upsetting the Sisters.
Unthinkingly, unintentionally and entirely by accident, I invoked their ire this summer. I co-wrote The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls. Children’s books editor Rosemary Davidson and I penned what we thought was a light-hearted response to the Dangerous Book for Boys. It is purple and gold with pretty, retro illustrations. It is full of things for girls aged roughly eight to 14 to do with their friends, from putting on a play to making hummus. It is, in all honesty, fairly innocuous stuff, a summation of the sort of things Rosemary and I got up to during our own childhoods and a manual for entertainment that doesn’t involve a computer, television or nagging your parents to death. We thought the little girls would like it. And they did: it reached number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list.
And yet: what fury it caused among the so-called Sisters. Rosemary and I were reviled not just for jumping on the Dangerous Book for Boys bandwagon (fair dos, actually, but it doesn’t mean the book is rubbish), but for even daring to suggest that girls might like different things from boys. It was dismissed as sexist propaganda, a reversion to the 1950s. One even asked me if having a chapter entitled ‘Needlecraft’ was a ‘conscious act of aggression’. An act of aggression? Are these women mad?
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