Read Between The Line #1

The other day this old chestnut popped into my head — ‘Women have come a long way’.

And it suddenly struck me what an absolute bullshit line that is.

It suggests that women, since time immemorial, have been lagging behind. We’ve been so very backward in every area of life and, only just recently, we’ve managed to almost catch up.

Lines like that drive me to the point of insanity. It’s not women who’ve come a long way — it’s societal attitudes.

Women aren’t ‘getting’ anywhere. We’re here. Always have been. We’ve moved at the same pace as men. It’s oppression and nasty attitudes that have kept the delusion alive that we haven’t. And it’s these attitudes that have thwarted our natural progress and denied us a more significant contribution to the shaping of the world in which we live. I wonder how life would look if we’d never been subjected to such flagrant abuse.

The line should be — Bad attitudes towards women have improved slightly.