MAIL ONLINE: A few weeks ago, I was asked to curate a small exhibit at London’s Fashion And Textile Museum. Just a little thing about fashion in fiction, and how various writers, from Truman Capote to Jilly Cooper, have influenced and reflected the fashions of their day through their books.
We chose 30 Penguin Classics in all, including some of my all-time favourites by Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl.
Re-reading bits here and there, however, the ones that struck me as culturally most significant were Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone and Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room. Two very different writers, both wrestling with the same subject: sexual equality.
Written in the late Fifties and early Sixties, both books explored the unappetising choices faced by young women who dared to challenge the cultural conventions of their day. Rejection, loneliness, poverty, the struggle between intellectual fulfilment and children: all these were hot topics, then as they are now.
Fifty years on, and the passage of time has made the practical path to equality a lot less bumpy; emotionally, however, it’s still a rollercoaster.
In the West at least, women have largely got what we wanted: equality enshrined in law, power and influence where it matters. The question is: has it made us happy?
It’s not a question that feminism often dares to ask itself. In fact, merely typing it might well be construed as an act of betrayal against my own sex.
Nevertheless, it’s an important question that needs to be addressed. Because in the same way that things that make you happy aren’t always good for you (cocktails) it follows that things that are good for you don’t always make you happy (cod liver oil).
Could it be that equality, while desirable, has actually done women more harm than good?
» | Sarah Vine | Tuesday, October 29, 2013
