Every time I return to Ireland from England, I hope to God that the onward march of the British tabloid press will be halted over here. The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is as interesting as the story of that emancipation itself, Virginia Woolf remarked. These two sentences are not as unrelated as might first appear for, in England, the history of opposition to women's freedom may be illustrated by looking at the popular press.
Take its reaction to the campaign for women's suffrage. There is a perception that women's issues in Ireland have inevitably lagged behind England, but this was not always the case. In 1918 property-owning English and Irish women over the age of 30 received the vote. Irishwomen had to wait only until 1922 to win the vote on equal terms with men (their contribution to the nationalist struggle and the commitment to equality enshrined in the 1916 Proclamation and confirmed in the 1922 Constitution of the Free State must have been major factors in this victory). But thanks to the popular press, Englishwomen over the age of 21 had to wait until 1928 to get the vote for, between the years 1918 and 1928, sections of the English press ran a sustained campaign against young women in their twenties. They even had a name for them: "flappers" - taking the term from the Victorians, but in the process changing its meaning in a highly significant way.
Dangerous women
According to Billie Melman's informative book Women and the Popular Imagination, around 1870 the term "flapper" had two meanings: firstly, an innocent middle-class adolescent girl with long hair; and, secondly, a very young prostitute. The popular press, in particular the Daily Mail, rather cleverly combined these two meanings - dropping along the way, as one would expect of the gutter press, the innocence. After 1918 "flapper" came to mean any dangerous young woman who earned an independent living, wore trousers, cut her hair short and smoked in public.
Such women were depicted as dangerous and bent on undermining family values. Doubts were cast on their chastity; they were said to sleep around enthusiastically which, given the unreliability and unavailability of contraception at that time, is unlikely. The "flapper" had an upper age limit. It was, not surprisingly, 30. In other words the press, in particular, the Daily Mail, was using sexuality to mask what was really a political argument, namely, that women under 30 should not be granted the vote. One thinks of the way, nowadays, sexual scandals are used to undermine the British royal family in lieu of a proper, reasoned, republican debate.
For much of the 1920s the flapper was a dangerous symbol in the Mail and other papers for the evils of giving females too much power and allowing them to take men's jobs. After 1928, when the vote had been gained, the term "flapper" disappeared from the popular press. It had never been more than a convenient shorthand for keeping before the British public the awful spectre of women gaining access to political power through the vote.
Page three
Some British tabloids still covertly, and sometimes not so covertly, carry on that opposition to women. This is not a specifically anti-male argument: no one believes that the recent appointment of a woman to edit the Sun is going to change things, particularly on page three. And the Mail has continued to be a paper that snipes at women in power. Its unrelenting hostility to that prominent human rights lawyer, Cherie Booth QC, is only the latest of many examples.
We shouldn't be surprised at this. I remember, sitting in an hotel in Yorkshire some years ago, hearing a lengthy tirade delivered by an elderly gentleman to two silent elderly women on the evils of Hillary Clinton. This man had never met Mrs Clinton, knew of her only through the newspapers, yet felt obliged to spend half-an-hour condemning her, saying finally that he was glad her plan for universal health insurance (which might have benefited millions of working poor) had failed.
I remember wondering what on earth this woman, thousands of miles away, had done to him. I concluded he just didn't like the spectacle of a woman anywhere near power. It upset his settled ideas about life. During the Thatcher years, many Conservative men of my acquaintance excused their ardent support for her by explaining that they didn't think of her as a woman. What they meant was that she didn't fit into their construct of femininity.
Yet in the modern world a successful economy goes hand in hand with equal rights. We all know that Japan is in real trouble and one of its troubles is its young women. They just will not get married and produce babies. Why? Because Japanese men are still opposed to the idea of their wives working. Confronted with a choice between this kind of husband and a career, Japanese women are choosing their career and the Japanese birth-rate is plummeting. Similarly, in Ireland in the 1940s, faced with limited employment prospects due to the marriage bar and other restrictive practices, young Irishwomen voted with their feet and emigrated in large numbers. Only in the 1950s did the Irish Government begin to remove some of the barriers.
Real creativity
A few months ago, a columnist in this newspaper, while making the important and valid point that universities need to open up access to working-class students, argued that the outstanding results of female Leaving Certificate students were only to be expected since girls excelled at this kind of thing (dull, routine passing of exams); real creativity and innovation were to be found in boys. Now, as the mother of two sons, I quite like this argument. As a researcher into women's history I know that it's nonsense.
No good at technical innovation? Ever heard of Ada Byron, boys? Or Hypatia, Hedy Lamarr, Mary Andersen, Patsy Sherman, Madame C.J. Walker, Virginia Apgar, Katherine Blodgett, Sybilla Masters, Margaret Knight (to name but a few)? No? Time to go back to school, boys, and pass those exams. Or else you really might have something to fear.