Why do we need Woman's Hour when the Battle of the Sexes is over?
On Friday morning, listeners to the Radio 4 morning news headlines woke to the glum and gloomy little story that women who put on weight after a first pregnancy are inviting all sorts of horrors for their second.
Hardly earth-shattering stuff, and certainly only of interest to a minority of its audience. But if I worked on Woman's Hour, I would be afraid. Very afraid.
The significance of the item was less in its content than in its position: right up there, the very first story in the mainstream news bulletin.
As recently as ten years ago, such an obvious 'wimmin's issue' would have been lucky to make the main news agenda at all; it would have been shunted off to the women's pages of newspapers or to Woman's Hour on the radio.
It is a measure of women's triumph in what we once called the battle of the sexes that no such indignity, now, is dealt to a medical story just because it involves the nether regions of the female form.
But it does rather beg the question: as Woman's Hour celebrates its 60th birthday this week, what, these days, is the point of the programme?
When it was first broadcast on October 7, 1946, it had a purpose, albeit not the one the BBC is now claiming it to have been: "A programme designed to celebrate, entertain and inform women."
Far from it. Its mission was, in fact, to oppress a generation of women who had, frankly, become rather too uppity for the chaps' liking.
The war years, hardship and heartache aside, had been good to women.
They came out of the home to work the farms, drive the buses and run the munitions factories, they found new strengths and, yes, fun in their jobs - and then, just when they had got really skilled at it, the plug was pulled.
It was as if someone had said: "the war is over - let the battle commence."
Propaganda
On the one side were the returning soldiers, wanting their old jobs back; on the other were the women who had fleetingly tasted independence only to have it snatched away.
No wonder that during the first year after the bombs stopped dropping on their heads, an unprecedented number of them took their own lives instead.
The men played a dirty battle, funding domestic propaganda programmes like Woman's Hour and a slew of little-lady magazines designed to put women back into their pinnies.
The women were smarter - they took what they were given, on airwaves and in print, and slowly but surely, as the years became decades, they turned them into power bases for their own advancement.
Women's media became the platform for women to rally and campaign and fight their corner; nothing was sacrosanct in the heady mix of demands for rights, exposes of injustice and appalling jokes at the expense of men.
Oh, happy days! But that was then and this is now - and between the two a funny thing happened: we won. The battle is over.
Not everything is fair yet; there are still adjustments to make and at our peril do we take our eye off the ball.
Nevertheless, in almost every area that really matters - law, health, reproduction, education, work, pay, marriage, divorce - our progress has been astonishing.
The irony is, however, that the very people who worked so hard to achieve so much are those who now work just as hard to pretend it isn't the case.
There is an industry, largely staffed by salaried women, dedicated to persuading us that our lot is still at least as dismal as it was (good grief, do these ladies not have memories?) as they keep frenziedly drawing new battle lines in the sand.
The Equal Opportunities Commission, no doubt privately fearful for its continued existence, publicly encourages women to believe that a sexy joke told by a man in the workplace is tantamount to an assault by an oppressor and, as such, worthy of the time and effort of industrial tribunals - not to mention the compensation awards that result.
Strident
I cannot imagine where they find all these oppressors; hand on heart, in my own life I do not know a single man with the interest or energy to oppress.
I know bullies, of both sexes, who will bully for the hell of it - but their victims are of both sexes, too. Then again, my wages aren't paid by the EOC.
Then there are strident voices, most shrill among those who earn their keep in the Left-wing press and radical theatre groups, who continue to portray all men as actual or potential rapists.
Again, in my own life I know only men so bewildered by the shifting sexual mores of our time that they err on the side of caution; even feisty broadcaster James Whale admitted to me during a radio discussion last week that these days he will not get into a lift with a woman on her own for fear of a "misunderstanding".
I listen to Woman's Hour most mornings, although this is largely, I suspect, because wild horses cannot shift my dial from Radio 4. (Might similar addiction, I wonder, be a simpler explanation than conscious choice for why 40 per cent of the programme's listeners are men?)
To be fair to it, there is nowadays a good measure of what they call a celebration of women and womanly talents on the programme.
Still, it is also fair to say that it is the only forum, anywhere at any time, where I still hear words bandied about like 'discrimination', 'misogynist' and - always, but always misused - 'empowerment'.
One can understand, of course, why these women continue to plough this anachronistic furrow: theirs is a vested interest, given that their livelihoods depend upon it.
You might as well ask a salaried environmentalist to declare that global warming does not exist as ask these foot-soldiers of the battle of the sexes to lay down their arms.
But what is less understandable than the women who sell the old whine is the number of women who still buy into it.
These are the women who equate femininity with helplessness, relics of a bygone era who are simply too scared or too stupid to face up to the responsibilities that came hand in hand with their 21st century rights.
Minority
There are, we know, women who are genuine victims and who need all the support we can give them; victims of rape or domestic violence or familial abuse. They are, however, as they have always been, a minority.
Within the large majority that is the rest of us, the only victims these days are those who, for whatever perverse reason, choose to be - and they are not victims of the old enemy that was the male of the species, but of themselves and their refusal to keep up with change.
I'm not betting that they will all repent any day soon.
But the tide has turned, whether they like it or not - and when they finally wake up to that simple fact, I bet that Woman's Hour, bless her and all who sail in her, won't make it to its hundredth birthday.
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3rd-October-2006
