In April, Natasha Walter wrote an odd column for the Independent complaining essentially that women were not acting enough like women. Walter lead off her column by complaining that,
Where women appear in public life right now in the West, there seems to be nothing distinctively female about what they are doing.
. . .
Does this mean that one of feminism’s old arguments, that more powerful women would make the world a better place, has stalled? After all, you might ask what the point is of going on agitating for women to get into public life — if they are indistinguishable from men once they get there.
Where do these people come up with this stuff? Walter writes as if men and women are completely different species — and to her that’s the feminist point of view. Talk about women as the other!
But not to worry. The only reason there was a war at all is because there is no true equality and men were calling all of the shots. Walter is certain that sexual equality in the United States is a myth, for example, because “just 13 percent of American politicians are women.” She is referring to Congress there, where 13.6 percent of House of Representative member are women and 14 percent of Senators are women. At the state level, women only 25.3 percent of all elective state positions nationwide and constitute 22.3 percent of state legislatures.
But, alas, even in the United Kingdom Walter is likely to be disappointed by women who are acting too much like men. Writing on April 3, Walter wrote of attitudes about the war against Iraq,
THe latest polls on the war show that women in the UK have not been won over by the supposed requirement to support our soldiers in action. A third of women, as opposed to a quarter of men, believe that this war is going badly. . . .
Given the kind of fighting that is now going on in Iraq, that means more and more women are being alienated from what is being done by our forces. Despite the fine words of the coalition leaders, we can see that this war is being fought by trigger-happy soldiers who cannot — or will not– distinguish military from civilian targets, and that the primary victims of this war are injured children and weeping parents.
You do not have to believe in any old-fashioned myths about women naturally being peace-loving to understand why more women than men might tell pollsters that they find this unacceptable. While the gap between the people who do caring work and the people who are powerful is still so great, politicians will go on taking decisions that will alienate more women than men.
Walter must have been sorely disappointed by follow-up polls after the swift conclusion of the war which was clearly fought to minimize casualties on both sides, Walter nonsense to the contrary notwithstanding.
An April 15 poll commissioned by The Guardian found that 60 percent of women polled supported the war — only 23 percent of women said they opposed the war.
Apparently the only serious alienating going on was the alienation of Walter from her stereotypical views of male and female behavior.
Source:
Would there have been this war if there was true equality for women? Natasha Walter, The Independent, April 3, 2003.
