Caitlin Moran in the Guardian today

That was for Serenada.

Stephanie Beecham.

Also adding Kate O’Mara.

But what scares me most is that those women are in teaching and perpetuating this idea when for me, Education was the neutral space I never expected to encounter it post primary.

Yes! I went to a school careers day to talk about my job a few years ago, some of the girls wanted to be nurses so I suggested that they consider being a doctor, cue raised eyebrows from the young teacher and one of the girls saying "Boys are doctors, girls are nurses". I swear there was steam coming out of my ears as I commented on it to the teacher.

@Floisme

Lady Penelope!!!! Emma Peel!!!

Who was the actress in Hart to Hart?

Also, Charlies's Angels had one who looked like she wouldn't take any s**t from anyone, especially not Charlie!

There were lots of minor characters in TV shows that were realistic portrayals of women, too. The background they occupied wasn't overly sexualised or unrealistic.

This review from The New Statesman makes the point about her acting as if she invented feminism.

Now , having got half way through The Female Eunuch a couple of years ago I have as much interest in reading feminist theory as I have in reading about say the history of the fuel injected engine, yet "stuff" for want of a better word, has permeated in to my brain. So how can she an actual self- proclaimed feminist be so ignorant?

www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/hasty-rehash-frances-wilson-caitlin-moran-s-new-novel?amp

I also wasn't sure if the first paragraph was an actual joke, because it reads like one? It sounds like a really bad fiction writer who has never met a teenage girl imagining one:

One day, back in 2011, I was on the train going into central London, when a big group of 14-year-old girls ran up to me, like a gang of giggling meerkats, shouting, “Are you – are you CAITLIN MORAN? You wrote How To Be A Woman? Oh, my God! We learned about masturbation from that! Dude, it’s amazing! We’ve all started doing it now! We’ve formed a gang! At school! It’s called wank club! And we come in every morning and say how many times we did it last night – and then high five each other! In the playground! Shouting Wank Club! Can we shake your hand?”

Tell me about it...it's really annoying. It's right up there with the women who think it's OK to be bad at Maths and almost boast about it. I could easily claim to be crap at Maths as I was useless at it at school and it's never going to be my main subject in any quiz but I was sick of feeling bad at it so did a 3 month long Maths module at uni and passed, I've never let myself say I'm bad at Maths since even though it was bloody hard work and cost me a fortune in Kleenex

@lucylocketspockets

Yes!
My brother is actually a bit of a maths prodigy and is absolutely on this about maths and girls. I realised I had fallen into that stereotype and let that side of myself flounder so have also actively tried to fill in the gaps.

But what scares me most is that those women are in teaching and perpetuating this idea when for me, Education was the neutral space I never expected to encounter it post primary.

I'm so glad I found this thread. I read CM's piece this morning and genuinely felt like perhaps I had lost all sense of time because how could she be talking about 2011, the 2011 that was nine years ago? I was 24 in 2011 and absolutely nothing she was talking about was new to me or any woman I knew. I did read The Female Eunuch when I was in my teens (finding it on a book shelf at home, reading it and then realising my mum must have read it was probably the first moment when I realised my mum was a person), and a lot of feminist works after that, but I was the only one of my friends who did but absolutely all of them held opinions on everything she mentions as 'unspoken about' back in those dark days.

And younger staff are lapping it up. One graduate I knew would bust a gut baking for her job only she couldn't bake so she would buy very expensive filo pastry and stress herself out the night before trying to follow a recipe.

It was so clear to me that she was following a role of making herself useful at work by what she could bring in rather than the skills that related to her job. Seems very retrograde to me.

I've wanted to talk about this for a while but I have noticed (in teaching of all places) a real learned uselessness in some of teh women I have met.

Tell me about it...it's really annoying. It's right up there with the women who think it's OK to be bad at Maths and almost boast about it. I could easily claim to be crap at Maths as I was useless at it at school and it's never going to be my main subject in any quiz but I was sick of feeling bad at it so did a 3 month long Maths module at uni and passed, I've never let myself say I'm bad at Maths since even though it was bloody hard work and cost me a fortune in Kleenex

I've wanted to talk about this for a while but I have noticed (in teaching of all places) a real learned uselessness in some of teh women I have met. Particularly my last SLT who just hung around waiting for the largely incompetent overgrown school boy who also worked in a senior capacity to take the lead. It is as though they feel it is inappropriate to be in control. In the staffroom, the talk somehow ended up on baking and I was asked how I prepared my meringues. Well, I thought, I pick them off the supermarket shelf and when I get home I unwrap them and drown them in cream. There's not much to it. But that wasn't what they meant. They were scoring points on who made the best meringues a la Mary Berry-, their idol. I felt like I had walked into the 70s we had managed to avoid growing up. Like an alternative universe that you knew existed but used all your strategic skills to avoid.

[quote Thripp]@lucylocketspockets That's interesting. I don't at all remember it as an academic pressure cooker (went there from 5-18). However, I do know they were very selective, even then. There were something like 80 girls competing for 20 places at the age of five. Though I didn't realise this at the time![/quote]
I remember being tested, I had to count from 20 back down to zero and read something from a book. I can't remember what else we had to do now though

I just wasn't their type of girl, I'd do irresponsible things like stop at the sweet shop opposite the bus stop where I changed buses and buy American cream soda and a licorice stick which apparently was appalling behaviour. Then there was the most unladylike piling up the autumn leaves between the wall and the trees to set up hurdles and run and jump over them. That combined with my academic inadequacy which they made sure I knew about meant I wasn't welcome and an alternative school was suggested at the end of primary.

I think it's fair enough for every generation to want their own icons - and incidentally I can't believe I'm not seeing any name checks for Emma Peel and Lady Penelope.
I think though that by the time you're 45, you should have realised that your parents' generation were no slouches either. Otherwise you're in danger of sounding like a parody of that Philip Larkin poem.

Feminism wasn’t “fashionable” in the 00s and 10s

I think this is, sadly, true.

Feminism - at least in mainstream popular culture - went from Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin singing “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves” to Rihanna singing “Rude Boy Are You Big Enough?”

Somewhere along the line being a strong woman became all about dancing in little clothing provocatively because you choose to and making men salivate being a form of female power. Conforming to the shallow gender stereotype (you must like pink, you must obsess about handbags and shoes) became a feminist action.

@lucylocketspockets That's interesting. I don't at all remember it as an academic pressure cooker (went there from 5-18). However, I do know they were very selective, even then. There were something like 80 girls competing for 20 places at the age of five. Though I didn't realise this at the time!

In the 70s and 80s - and maybe early 90s before the reformatting - The Guardian used to have a Women’s Page which was feminist and informed and informative. My mother and all her friendship circle would read that and get their daughters to do so too. There seems to be dumbed down, empty content nowadays which is such a waste.

Exactly this, Serenada. I can only think that Caitlin Moran didn't have this kind of education if she thinks that Mrs Thatcher and Miss Piggy were the only role models around in the 70s and 80s.

She is, however, a bit prone to think that she invented feminism herself.

@Thripp

I went to a Convent - I remember clearly our HT (a nun) telling us that everything second of our lives was accountable - to make our lives worth something significant.

She was inspiring then and still is now. There were no barriers in her eyes, for what we could achieve in terms of our role in the world and the school echoed that - very academic, high standards, very interesting trips abroad - Russia, Lebanon, etc

You may not have heard of the women but you should look into them. It's great to be inspired by someone funny and contemporary. And even better when you find out that women have been writing these things for decades.

I like her. I was a teenager in the mid and late noughties and have only vaguely heard of the women mentioned on this thread.
At the time I'd never heard of them at all.
I certainly wouldn't have taken it upon myself to read Germaine Greer. Feminism wasn't "fashionable" in the 00s and 10s but CM was one of the women who made it so. She certainty didn't invent it but her writing introduced many young women to it. Plus, she's funny.