The girls at Queenswood take feminism and women’s rights seriously. We have had some superb talks by the girls on the topic and the issues are hotly debated in our Debating Societies and Amnesty International.

I recently urged the girls to read Hillary Clinton’s excellent 1995 speech to the UN’s 4th conference on Women in which she stated: “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” Queenswood girls take a very broad view of feminism seeing it as a global concern not confined to the UK and to their own career paths.  

 

In January Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on: What next for Feminism? A broad range of perspectives was covered, including: the nature/nurture debate; what neuro-science has to tell us; the historical evidence on matriarchal and patriarchal societies.  

‘Leaning In Harder’  

The big question was: “Should women lean in harder in their careers? Or do we all need to fundamentally rethink society and the roles we assign ourselves, so that both sexes can break free from traditional gender stereotypes?”  

Anne Marie Slaughter argued that we do need to rethink society and this means that achieving equality is not just a feminist issue but an issue for the whole of society. She argued that there should be a national focus on creating an infrastructure of care to support those with young families and elderly relatives.  

It should be assumed that both men and women should want a balance between caring and pursuing a career. Naturally for both men and women there will be some who wish to concentrate on one more than the other. It should not be assumed that caring is the role exclusively of women.  

Anne-Marie Slaughter caused great controversy when she wrote an article for Atlantic in 2012, entitled “Why Women still can’t have it all.” To be a mother and a top professional, she wrote, women need to be “superhuman, rich or self-employed.”  

Can Girls Have It All?  

In October 2015 it was reported that Vivienne Durham, retiring Head of Francis Holland School, said in an interview, “Sorry Girls you can’t have it all”…  The argument was that we ought to tell girls that there is a glass ceiling and that sometimes choices have to be made, for instance whether to have a career or a family.  

 

Clearly there are still problems around opportunities for women. Women, for instance, make up hardly one quarter of FTSE board members. Unconscious bias in all sorts of areas still needs to be tackled. And there is the serious issue of the sexualisation of girls to address. These concerns definitely need to be raised in schools. But we should be careful with the language we use. We can describe what is wrong, certainly. But the emphasis should be on pressing for equality of opportunity and the approach should be assertive, not passive.  

While these concerns are quite rightly part of the picture for our pupils, we should also ensure that the conversation in schools is not an elite one, centring on middle class women choosing between a high -powered career and staying at home. This narrow approach has dominated much feminist writing. It is important that we do not ignore or exclude huge numbers of women by this approach. Feminism is a global issue and we need to promote an inclusive narrative of women’s rights.