Women

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Of course a man hasn’t had a baby. Let’s not pretend otherwise

You know a Man Having Baby story really would be a story if it were true. But the latest Man Mother story is only true if you accept the notion that the mother in question really is a man. And that depends on whether you go down the whole notion that being transgender involves biological reinvention, rather than hormonal/surgical intervention plus credulity and the creative use of language. Two people with wombs, ovaries and XX chromosomes, conventionally known as women, have had babies. As it happens, one of them has taken drugs to suppress lactation on the basis of an unwillingness to breastfeed, but, you know, it took drugs to

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Mother Theresa

Tory activists last week were heard to refer to Mrs May as ‘Mummy’. No Corbynista calls their hero ‘Dad’. The human race is guided by myth as much as by logic, and mythology explains people to themselves more vividly than economics. The agony expressed in the liberal intelligent press is understandable. The sensible people who all voted Remain direct much of their fury against the Corbynistas who have taken over the Labour party. Fair enough. Interestingly, however, they attend so closely to what Tony Benn liked to call ‘the ish-oos’ that they ignore the bigger mythological picture. Last summer the country voted — very unwisely according to the sensible 48

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 April 2017

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result

Wednesday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 April 2017

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into a seat beside a young chap who was turned sideways and chatting with the fellow behind him, who was leaning forward. They were speaking in English, quietly, about Melania Trump. The chap beside me was French; the one behind us, Turkish. They were agreeing on how good for her age she looked. She hadn’t had any ‘aesthetic’ surgery either, as far as he could tell, which was a brave choice, thought the Turk. She was Czech, wasn’t she? ‘Slovenian,’ said the French guy authoritatively. ‘Yes, they look after themselves those

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Girls

Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before he knew it, Today got some American academic on air to denounce him. ‘We know, looking in the dictionary,’ she said, ‘that girl means a young woman only up to the age of 11 or 12.’ This bossy woman should get a bigger dictionary to look in. There is plenty of evidence that girl has

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Spot the endangered species: white men grab the chairs while Hogg loses her job

Tesco chairman John Allan provoked feminist fury by telling would-be non-exec directors, ‘If you’re a white male, tough: you’re an endangered species’ — then claimed he was really trying to make the opposite point, that ‘it’s a great time for women’. But to the contrary, this was a week in which tough white males grabbed the corporate prizes, while one high-flying woman from an oppressed minority was hounded out of her job. First, the blokes. HSBC announced, for the first time in its history and to the satisfaction of governance zealots, the appointment of an outside chairman. Incumbent Douglas Flint is to be succeeded by Mark Tucker, a former professional

Wednesday

Helen Nugent

New £5 million fund to help mothers returning to work is long overdue

There’s a lot happening today. It’s International Women’s Day, Discover What Your Name Means Day, and we’re right in the middle of National Pie Week. Oh, and it’s the Spring Budget. Mindful of at least two of these events, Theresa May has revealed a new £5 million fund to help mothers return to work after a long career break. Making the announcement on Mumsnet, the Prime Minister said: ‘Returnships are open to both men and women but we should acknowledge that, more often than not, it is women who give up their careers to devote themselves to motherhood, only to find the route back into employment closed off, the doors

Thursday

The Spectator

Lost boys | 23 February 2017

For a body supposedly committed to eliminating inequality between the sexes, the Women and Equalities Select Committee don’t exactly lead from the front. Only three of the 11 members are men. To some, this will be a welcome corrective to the still male-dominated House of Commons. To others (such as Philip Davies, one of the three male members), it is a sign of how, in Westminster, the cause of equality is narrowly focused on the interests of white professional women. There is not a single ethnic minority representative on the committee. This week, committee chair Maria Miller announced her ‘deep disappointment’ that the government has not adopted their proposals on

Wednesday

Ruth Sunderland

The importance of financial independence: don’t rely on a man

‘Never give up your career for a man.’ These words of my mother’s rang in my ears throughout girlhood, adolescence and young womanhood, until, about a decade into my marriage, she finally accepted I wasn’t going to. The very opposite of an Austen-esque Mrs Bennet, desperate to engineer a good marriage for her daughter, my mother’s belief was that any woman in possession of a brain must be in want of a job. A room of one’s own? Certainly. And a bank account, a pension and some shares. Although I have on occasion mused about how lovely it must be to be supported by a doting husband, my mother, as

Thursday

Taki

High life | 16 February 2017

Gstaad One’s unpopularity on account of calling it a night diminishes in direct proportion to the severity of the next morning’s hangover. I was literally booed by Geoffrey Moore and co. for asking the wife of a friend to drive me 200 yards to my chalet. Co., not Geoffrey, had other plans for the lady, and I will give you, the readers, two guesses what those plans were. It was 5.30 a.m., the friend’s wife did look awfully charming — desirable is closer to the truth — and co. was getting touchy-feely, so I opened my big mouth and asked her to drive me home. The next day, all sorts

Thursday

Andrew Watts

In praise of pink Lego

There aren’t many toy companies that could make headlines in the business press merely by expanding their London offices — ‘Lego blocks out Brexit concerns’ — but Lego is not like other toy companies. Last week it was named the world’s most powerful brand by the consultancy Brand Finance; this week the second Lego movie is opening in cinemas; the University of Cambridge will shortly be appointing its first Lego professor of play. For a company that, a decade ago, was losing $1 million a day, this is a remarkable reconstruction. But Lego has spent those ten years regaining ‘belief in the brick’, according to its new British chief executive, Bali

Deborah Ross

Mother superior

Unlike with buses, you wait ages and ages for one fabulous film as framed by the older female perspective to come along and then there’s absolutely no saying when the next one will be, or if there will ever be another. (Indeed, a recent study of 2,000 films found that women in the 42–65 age bracket are given less and less to say while dialogue for men of the same age actually increases.) So don’t let this pass, and don’t do so having dismissed it as ‘a feminist film’ because it’s emotionally smart about everybody. It just takes in that portion of the human race usually left out, is all.

Saturday

Violet Hudson

In defence of Melania Trump

We all love Michelle Obama. Of course we do. For the last eight years she has been ‘mom in chief’ of America – and the world. She has personified grace, courtesy, warmth, humour and, not incidentally, shown us what a good marriage looks like. Tirelessly supportive of her husband, but successful in her own right, she has become a symbol of what a modern woman can be. She rose from a working-class background to attend Princeton and Harvard. She overcame racism and sexism to become a hugely successful lawyer. As First Lady, she was endlessly elegant and engaged, working to promote healthy eating, educational opportunity and women’s rights. It has

Rob Crilly

Only the right kind of women are invited to march against Donald Trump

The Women’s March on Washington is going to be big. Officials say 1,800 buses have been registered to park in the city today. The subway will open at 5 a.m. (it usually starts running at 7 a.m. at weekends) to accommodate the numbers. In all, 250,000 people are expected to join the rally to show their disapproval of Donald Trump, dwarfing the numbers that attended his inauguration and parade a day earlier. It is fitting that women are taking the lead. Trump’s misogynist language and disregard for half the population has been one of the most shocking parts of his aggressive campaign. So it is a shame that the march

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Is sexism really stopping more women from becoming MPs?

The reliably irritating Women and Equalities Select Committee under its unfailingly irritating chair, Maria Miller, has come up trumps again, with a proposal for increasing the number of women MPs. The committee initiated an inquiry in the summer of 2016 into gender representation in the Commons and it has now concluded that all political parties should set out how they intend to increase the proportion of women in Parliament by 2020. If they don’t, it says the Government should set a domestic target of 45 per cent of all representatives in Parliament and local government by 2030. The goal, it says, should be backed by law setting a statutory minimum

Friday

Katy Balls

Philip Davies interview: I don’t like being bullied

Philip Davies originally wanted to be a journalist but decided against it after coming to the conclusion that he lacked the confidence: ‘It was my ambition in life but I just realised I was too shy. You’ve got to have a confidence that I think I probably never had.’ Now an unruly backbencher, it’s hard to believe the MP for Shipley is one to suffer from self-doubt. Westminster’s pantomime villain, Davies has a reputation for championing unfashionable causes – from talking out bills that help the vulnerable to standing up for men’s rights in the face of ‘militant feminists’. Last month he gave his critics fresh cause for complaint when

Thursday

Graham Robb

Spectator Books of the Year: An autobiography that makes the mundane seem outlandish

My novel-reading year has been dominated by Barbara Pym, starting with Excellent Women (Virago, £8.99). Pym is usually likened to Jane Austen, but her hilarious situation comedies and recurring characters constantly reminded me of Balzac. Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Picador, £12.99) is an all-too-brief autobiography by the novelist Tim Winton. He sees Europe with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial, finding nature ‘impossibly fertile’ and the Alps ‘claustrophobic’. As an unhappy schoolboy in Western Australia, he explored the violent, delicate landscapes which cars have erased, rendering ‘the outlandish mundane’. Winton’s dry, physical descriptions have the opposite effect. Hannah Kohler’s The Outside Lands (Picador, £12.99), the tense saga of an American family at the time

Thursday

Ella Whelan

Glamour’s ‘women of the year’ awards are a feminist farce

Glamour magazine has announced its annual women of the year awards, and, this year, they’re naming a man of the year too. Paul Hewson – or as we know him, the prat in glasses, or, Bono – has been given the award for being one of the ‘most outspoken advocates for women and girls’. Glamour certainly knows how to create a headline. Last year, it was transgender athlete Caitlyn Jenner who won woman of the year; this time round the magazine has gone for a smaller, less stylish, but equally annoying bloke to grab some attention. It was Bono’s ‘Poverty Is Sexist’ campaign, which draws attention to the fact that ‘powerful

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

It’s (still) a man’s world

When Jane Garvey announced to the audience who had just ‘taken part’ in the 70th birthday celebrations of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Monday morning that a woman listener had sent in an email asking, ‘Why do we need a programme like this in 2016?’, she almost caused a riot in the BBC Radio Theatre. A riot of disbelief and horror. What? Abolish the only programme on the BBC entirely devoted to the issues that affect women? Cut down in its prime a daily audio magazine that since its first broadcast in October 1946, and in spite of initially being commissioned and presented by men, has raised provocative questions about

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Unhappy Pill

A study came out last week that should have caused great alarm. For 13 years, researchers at the University of Copenhagen studied more than a million women between the ages of 15 and 34 who were taking a type of drug — one that is popular in all developed countries. Taking this drug, the researchers found, correlated with an increase in the risk of depression. The correlation was particularly strong in adolescent girls, who showed an 80 per cent higher chance of being diagnosed with depression. Usually when a story about women’s health and depression breaks, a phalanx of activists and campaigners pop up all over the media to ‘raise awareness’ of the