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This week I've been wondering if we're back in the Eighties. Or possibly the Twenties. It started on Saturday when I went to see Her Naked Skin, a play set during the suffragette era. It's been held up as the bright future of theatre because it is the first by a woman - Rebecca Lenkiewicz - to make the main Olivier stage at the National.
Frankly that is a bit shocking. Even my Tube driver this morning was a woman. But when a play's flagged up as groundbreaking in this way, you expect a few surprises.
Instead it was like a feminist studies lesson: lesbianism - check, oppressive bourgeois marriage - check, cartoonishly offensive men - check. Is this what everyone was getting their bloomers in a twist about?
I remain baffled as to why the National chose such hackneyed subject-matter to debut an undoubtedly talented writer. I'd so much rather have seen a great play by a woman, not one that symbolises the struggle. Have we not moved on at all, I wondered?
Apparently not. New findings indicate a growing scepticism of the benefits to family life of working mothers. Thanks to the female academic behind that study, we're now debating whether women should be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, or Prada suited and booted in the boardroom. It's like post-feminism never happened.
These are issues I thought already settled 16 years ago when I was in my first journalistic job - as editor of a feminist magazine. Back then I reported on rape laws, abortion rights and workplace discrimination. Like one character in Her Naked Skin, I stitched a banner and marched to further the rights of women.
But few can argue progress has not been made. Not only do we have the vote my grandmother campaigned for and the education my mother won, but also the careers my own generation battled office politics to achieve. Marriage and children are now choices, not social expectations. Turning back the clock is not an option.
So let's stop saying it's symbolic that a play about suffrage breaks down boundaries in the arts, and get over the fact that women work as well as breed. Instead we need progress on issues that matter, like how to achieve a better quality of life. That means women sharing the burden of wage earning as well as men helping more at home.
One thing I've learned since my first feminist days is that equality will be won only by enlisting the help of men. Unless we do that, women really will be stuck in the past.
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The one thing you can be certain of is that women will never ever be satisfied. Dis-satisfaction seems to be their default mode.
- John, Bangkok, Thailand
