On Wednesday I addressed an audience of Sixth Form girls at Wellington College in Berkshire, at a conference designed to explore whether it is possible for girls and women to ‘have it all’ in their lives. My approach was straightforward – the answer is, quite simply, ‘yes’ – they just need to work out what ‘having it all’ actually means! Step 1 in any process of planning to make the most of one’s life must start with a deep exploration and understanding of the landscape.
You barely need to glance at some of our tabloid newspapers or magazines to see that girls and women ‘having it all’ is a hot topic. Hardly an edition of the Daily Mail lands on doorsteps without it containing an article – maybe more than one – on working women and how they manage it – or don’t. The novel by Allison Pearson, ‘I don’t know how she does it’, was only just published in 2002, and of course the film starring Sarah Jessica Parker has not long been released. This ‘having it all’ or not is a big source of debate and controversy.
So why is it so controversial? Well, we live in an interesting period of our social history – a period of transition as far as gender issues are concerned, but one that often masks itself as a period of post-transition. Laws are one thing; people’s perceptions of the world, influenced by their families and friends around them, are quite another. The world of my grandmother’s youth, before women even had the vote, is a real lifetime away, but is in fact inextricably bound with the present through the people we know and who have influenced us in our lives. My grandmother’s understanding of the world was shaped by her early 20th century life, and this understanding has lived on to some extent in my mother, and in me. This pattern is replicated in almost every family in Britain.
The danger comes, of course, when this understanding is left unchallenged, or just accepted as truth, fact or normality. If we are honest, and look with a critical eye at the world around us, we can see these underlying understandings of women’s place in the world in many facets of our world, as often as not fed by the media: the sense lurking in the background that a women’s place is rightfully in the home, that men are the breadwinners, that in order to succeed in the world of work, you need to be able to employ masculine traits. All nonsense, of course, but we recognise them, and they are pervasive.
Where is the right path in all of this? What should women be doing? The point, of course, about this being a period of social transition is that people don’t know the answer to this yet … but the consequence of this, therefore, is that it is all up for grabs. Never before has the landscape been so open to women carving out their own pathways – the rhetoric is there, the everyday acceptance of equality is there, embedded in daily communication, and some quite interventionist legislation hovers threateningly in the background – talk of quotas in parliamentary parties, and an obligation on boards of FTSE 100 companies to bring up the proportion of their female directors to 25% at least by 2015.
In truth, no-one wants quotas or targets that are met by artificially promoting women just because they are women – successful companies only want the best, and no-one wants to feel as though they are being given a position not on merit, but because of their gender. But what is significant is that the threats are there in the first place, driven by government and a ruling social class which determines the direction of our thoughts. It is the ‘done thing’ not only to think that equality is a good thing, but also to be seen to be doing something about it.
This is fertile ground for girls to be able to achieve whatever they might want to achieve. And in this climate, we are meanwhile emboldening girls in our schools to feel that there is nothing that they cannot do. But they do have to be bold, they do have to be brave, and they do have to know themselves and what they want, and this is exactly what I was saying on Wednesday.
