Why Does the Guardian Still Need a Women's Page? Because the Feminist Revolution is Only Half Made

By Polly Toynbee
The Guardian UK

Wednesday 18 July 2007

How did the Guardian women's page become so influential? It helped that as the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s got under way, Private Eye regularly sneered at the page, with male newspaper columnists writing biliously about hairy, dungaree-wearing, lentil-eating, man-hating Guardian wimmin. There were reams of articles in the tabloids and rightwing broadsheets back then about why men should now slam doors in women's faces to prove that women couldn't have it both ways - not chivalry AND equality. And that vitriolic backlash proved the making of the women's pages.

The section raised all the difficult issues - battered wives, the menopause, women prisoners giving birth while chained down. It asked why girls were put in pink, what's hard-wired and what's not, why sex was often rubbish for women, why men were often rubbish but women had no means of escape. Why should women always do the housework and why shouldn't they do anything a man could do? Back before the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the unions insisted on lower rates of pay for women doing the same job as men in the same factory. Back before the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, all kinds of jobs were forbidden to women.

It's hard to recapture the shock and fury that feminism caused but, never forget, these were, and still are, revolutionary ideas. The very notion that women, that mothers, can be equal in everything reaches down into the heart of family life and questions everything. And there is no denying that feminism caused a soaring divorce rate and an explosion of single motherhood. Women walked away from bad men. Bad said: "If you want equality, then I can abandon my family responsibilities and pay no maintenance." So it is still an unfinished revolution, where women's attitudes changed fast, but men's only slightly, and society has done too little to accommodate this great eruption. The economic system still demands a male wage to bring up a child - jobs aren't flexible enough and women's pay is too low for mothers alone to be breadwinners.

The Guardian women's page had a huge influence in spreading revolutionary ideas. The secret was that it alerted one of the most powerful, but usually all too politically dormant forces in the land - the women's magazines - to what was being written. The Guardian was the conduit for ideas from the US, from Rosie Boycott's Spare Rib, Virago, the wages for housework campaign and some dottier ones too. Suddenly the editors of Woman's Own and Woman took up these themes and popularised them for a mass audience. I doubt any revolutionary ideas were ever spread as far, as fast and as effectively as by those magazines, read by women under men's noses. Glossy magazines became the underground press for women. The trouble was, men didn't get it, didn't read it and didn't understand what was in the air. They were startled to find women growing discontented and demanding. Where were they getting these ideas from?

Sometimes we were startled too. There was the woman who wrote a card to Jill Tweedie, the greatest women's page writer, sent from a remote caravan park: "I've done it! I've left my violent husband and taken the children and we're living in a caravan. What should I do now?" Jill was appalled. What did she know? No one wanting advice would have taken Jill's own life story as any kind of template. But her insights into her own life became the anvil on which she pounded out what she knew of how life was for women in general - and it turned out she knew a lot and was funny and wry about it too.

By the time I started writing a column for the women's pages in 1977, the battle lines had been drawn years before, starting with Mary Stott. But the perennial question was asked then as now - why do you need a women's page? Isn't it a harem that confines and diminishes women, as if the rest of the paper was not really women's domain? For journalists, it was a problem. I was a reporter on the Observer, covering strikes and industrial relations when, out of the blue, I was offered the column. I suspect nervous male editors and features editors kept trying to find women to edit and work on the pages who were not known for feminist writing.

Although it was a great honour, I'm ashamed to admit that, like many others, I hesitated before joining. Although I was always a feminist and never a feminism-denier, I worried I'd be branded a single-issue women's columnist, a bit frivolous, no longer fit for the men's newsroom. Would I ever get back to the "mainstream"? Lurking somewhere beneath was that old fear of being branded as a bra-burning harridan.

Well, I stayed for 11 years, some of the best years of my working life, and it changed my view of the world. All through those Tory years there were fierce battles to be fought.

I might be on the women's page still if I hadn't unexpectedly been offered a job as social affairs editor at the BBC. Would I ever have made the jump from Guardian women's page to Guardian comment page without leaving first? The fact that I even ask this question shows that the word "women" still signifies what it always did - "other", "second class", "not serious", "not one of the boys". That - paradoxically - is exactly why we still need a women's page. The revolution is only half made, and sometimes it seems to go backwards. Who else will keep banging the drum?

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