Why 2024 was the year when women decided they had finally had enough

The early victories of 1970s feminist campaigners have proved to be fragile

A few weeks ago, while standing in the full glare of the African sun, a young woman looked me straight in the eye. She had just told me and my colleague Charity that if she was not in receipt of a scholarship to attend secondary school, she and her friends would be “selling sex”. I asked, “young or old men?” “Oh, older men,” she said, and then half smiled. “But I am now in school, so I don’t have to.”

Unicef estimates there are 87 million girls around the world who do not receive a secondary education. Their schooling comes to an abrupt stop at the end of primary school, when they are forced to find work, get married, or trade their young bodies for money to buy food and shelter.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

In Afghanistan, women and girls are not only denied an education, but even the right to speak outside their home. Their lives are ruled by a male regime, the Taliban, who regard women and girls as lesser humans than men. The international community appears impotent in the face of such male cruelty.

Supporters of For Women Scotland and the Scottish Feminist Network protest outside the Scottish Parliament (Picture: Lesley Martin)Supporters of For Women Scotland and the Scottish Feminist Network protest outside the Scottish Parliament (Picture: Lesley Martin)
Supporters of For Women Scotland and the Scottish Feminist Network protest outside the Scottish Parliament (Picture: Lesley Martin) | PA

Litany of injustices

And here in Scotland, only this month, the First Minister described the behaviour of men and boys as “chilling” after he heard children as young as ten tell him that violence against women was one of the biggest issues facing the country. In 2024. This in the country that helped change global thinking about sexual violence with the ground-breaking Zero Tolerance campaign, more than 30 years ago.

The litany of injustices against women seems never-ending. A few days ago, Britain’s first female Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told the Waspi women, who had been hit by an increase in the pension age, that she didn’t think compensating them for their loss of income was “the best use of taxpayers' money”.

When she was in opposition, she used the Waspi campaign as political ammunition against the then Tory government, telling the House of Commons in 2016 that for many women – particularly those on low wages and in part-time work – the pension changes had had a “devastating impact on their finances, families and life plans”. This week, Reeves turned her back on those same women.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Women still paid less than men

It’s not just women in their 60s and 70s who are losing out financially because of their sex. A study by University College London published a few days ago shows that Millennial women in their 30s are paid less than their male peers of the same age, in the same type of jobs, with similar levels of education. Barbara Castle introduced the Equal Pay Act in February 1970. It came into force in 1975. Fifty years ago.

And unless there is a significant and dramatic change to pensions in the UK, these young women will be significantly worse off than their male colleagues when they retire. Research by the Women’s Budget Group shows that women have only around 10 per cent of the private pension wealth of men. Yet private pension schemes, which are subsidised by successive UK governments, put women at a disadvantage due to their domestic roles and lower pay.

Sex matters, in every aspect of a woman’s life, but still we found ourselves in 2024 having to argue about our legal status. Last month – nearly 100 years after women won the right to vote on the same terms as men – campaign group For Women Scotland found themselves in the UK’s highest court asking judges to decide on the legal definition of a woman.

The law seems to know what a woman is when it comes to her pension rights, but is oblique when it comes to the 2010 Equality Act – the very piece of legislation that was designed to protect the fundamental rights and interests of women.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Optimism

But even as I stood beside that young woman in Malawi, who is dependent on the generosity of strangers to avoid a life of prostitution, I felt optimistic. Even as I sat in the Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago and listened to a doctor describe in clinical detail the impact of non-fatal strangulation during sex, known colloquially as “choking”, a practice that is now commonplace, I felt optimistic.

And even as I read the grotesque details of the abuse that Gisèle Pelicot suffered at the hands of her husband, and perhaps hundreds of other ‘ordinary’ men, I felt optimistic. Why? Because everywhere I look now there are strong, loud, powerful women. Mostly of a certain age.

Gisèle Pelicot, 72, shunned anonymity so she could transform her unspeakable abuse into a powerful message of women’s liberation. "It's not us who should feel shame, but them," she told the world.

The Waspi women, born in the 1950s, may have lost for the moment, but their campaign has highlighted the inequity in pension provision in a far more powerful and effective way than any trade unionist or politician. For Women Scotland, a trio of Gen X women, have risked their own financial security to settle a pressing question that legislators should have answered long before now: what is a woman?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

No less angry

The women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was largely led by young women, fired up with the energy and passion of youth. They burned their bras while breaking down the barriers to equality. But the decades that ensued saw a complacency creep into feminism as mostly middle-class women enjoyed the benefits won by their older sisters.

As we have learned the hard way, those early victories were fragile, with some of the ‘equality’ laws not worth the vellum on which they were written. The women’s movement is no less angry than it was in 1970, but we are older and wiser, and this was the year when we finally decided we had had enough.

Related topics:

Comments

 0 comments

Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.

Dare to be Honest
Follow us
©National World Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.Cookie SettingsTerms and ConditionsPrivacy notice