Caroline reassesses her feelings about feminism.

Since graduating University, I’ve had to revise my stance on feminism. Honestly, it’s come as a rather unsettling surprise. During the three years I spent studying for the evidently useless BA I convinced myself was all-important, feminism was considered as more of an antiquated case study then an ongoing struggle. It popped up in my courses repeatedly, like a particularly easy spot to squeeze. You answered questions on it like you approached questions about the Vietnam War: a fight long since fought, and with confusing results.

As an English student, feminism was useful. If I ever felt too lazy to conceive my own ideas on the subject, it was okay, because there was almost certainly a painting-by-numbers feminist response that I could plagiarise from somewhere else. As far as every paper I turned in was concerned, Kathy and Heathcliffe were feminists. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a feminist, too. Essays on Jane Austen practically wrote themselves. It worked in reverse, too. I could lazily label something misogynist as easily as I could feminist, and that could cover Wilde as effortlessly as it did Hemmingway. 

But University ended, I moved away to London, and since then certain fragments of my poorly written essays have come back to haunt me. Female friends were slaving away at entry level positions for years, and watching men they started with getting promoted two, three, four spots above them. I express outrage, having naturally assumed that this kind of stuff just didn’t HAPPEN anymore. The predicament was neatly summed up by my friend: “As long as we keep taking maternity leave, we’ll keep being a liability”, she shrugged.

Being nowhere near a job that would require any kind of ‘promotion’ – head bottle-washer, perhaps? – it’s fair to say that this element of discrimination doesn’t touch me. But it seems the older I get, the more glitches in the system I seem to notice. When I tell people about my blog – an ongoing project that tentatively calls itself a ‘humour’ piece – I still get the old sting. “But women aren’t very funny, are they?”