Feminists should agree to disagree

Today is the centennial of that happy day when British women finally won the vote. Women over the age of 30, that is, who owned property – only ten years later would we be granted the vote on the same terms as men. A century on, and the most common current phrase used about feminism by its enemies (apart from the flagrantly insane claim that it’s ‘gone too far’) is that ‘X has set feminism back 100 years!’ This can be anything from Kim Kardashian showing off her bum to women having the nerve to complain about unappetising male colleagues taking joyless liberties with them in the workplace; both of these, for some reason I have yet to comprehend, makes both Kim and the complainers ‘traitors to feminism’. How so? To those of us not suffering from that singularly strange psychological defect which makes people frightened by the idea of female equality, the first is just one woman choosing to make money from showing off her bum, and the second just women refusing to let superannuated masturbators get their jollies on the job.

Feminism has never been a monolith; neither has the fight for black civil rights or the struggle for socialism, both of which were similarly composed of different strands – pacifists and Black Panthers, Methodists and Marxists.