Caitlin Moran in the Guardian today

Leaving aside anyone well-known, I went to a GDST school in the 70s and 80s. Sexism simply didn't exist there. The idea of not doing something because we were female was never, ever mentioned. We didn't need big-name role models. We were taught, by well educated and capable women (and a couple of men). The curriculum was entirely academic - no sewing, cooking, or anything "female" (the local school had cooking and sewing for girls, and woodwork for boys). We were expected to become doctors, engineers, vets, lawyers, company directors, etc, etc.

Oh, and there is a world of difference between having hippy parents who home educated you while you lived on a council estate and having parents or a parent who worked their fingers to the bone to try and scrape together enough for you to eat and then going to bed hungry themselves.

Yes.

I’m exactly the same age as CM.
I first heard about Germaine Greer when the Female Eunuch was mention in Adrian Mole.
Although I’d not read the Female Eunuch I’d heard of it and knew enough about it to understand the comment.
I knew about the women of Greenham Common. I remember the showing and later cancelling of Miss World.
As a teen we read Mizz, Just 17 and More. We read Judy Blume and discussed it. I remember it becoming socially unacceptable to pinch a woman’s arse and I clearly recall calling a man out for it in a pub when I was about 20. I remember the change in the law to criminalise rape within marriage.
I recall a lot of things that aren’t acceptable now that were common place, like not walking into a pub on your own and if you did getting quite a look if you ordered a pint (some pub had special lady beer glasses).
Because of AIDS there were a lot of conversations around safe sex, as a generation we were more open about sex.
Also we didn’t care about our pubes. The only women who removed them all were porn actresses, and then it was specialist porn.

Yes Thatcher was a huge female presence and often used as a ‘look what happens if you put a woman in power’, but there were other women about doing great stuff, not as many as there could or should have been but they were there.

Oh, and there is a world of difference between having hippy parents who home educated you while you lived on a council estate and having parents or a parent who worked their fingers to the bone to try and scrape together enough for you to eat and then going to bed hungry themselves.

I'd forgotten all about the book Kinflicks until mentioned on here , read it when I was about 17 in the 80s.

My friends and I devoured Deenie & Forever and discussed in detail!

I remember us at 13 passing Forever round the class, back in 1986.

@Blackcurrant66

Yes but there is no attribution, that's the problem. Bringing stuff down to a pulp fiction level is great but you have to keep the space open so that people can move up and explore - else it is just fast fashion. There was always a narrative that you could follow that led you to something more substantial and it is that narrative that has been severed - now everything has been put on this one dimensional, superficial level it is easy to dismiss. People have got a mental picture of the content, can put it in context and move on - it isn't the thought provoking stuff that actually changes you. It has no substance and instead is written in a throw away, magazine style manner rather than a grounded, clear analytical slice through complex theories and perspectives.

I have said this so many times but this stuff just makes it harder for the real intellectual jumps to be made in one's mind. It is synthetic in quality and leaves people feeling temporarily satiated but, ultimately frustrated with the topic so that they give up.

I read that too! I was excited that someone else had read it. No other reason for quoting/replying to you.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0054743/
The Children's Hour (McClaine & Hepburn)

This film came out in 1961 but I only saw it around 2007.

We have always had some independent women portrayed in cinema - Bacall, Hepburn, etc

Yes the world was different then but she didn’t invent writing about women. Yes much feminist writing was heavy weight and was sold as being feminist and not for young girls and women but Judy Bloom was very much out there.

If she was joking about being the first person to write about any of this then she could have just acknowledged that it was a joke.

I think the best argument you can make in her favour is that she took these topics into the mainstream with an easy and entertaining book.

Much of ‘How to...’ is cribbed from The Whole Woman. I read them almost back to back and it was staggering, but how many people read Greer without having previous knowledge and awareness of feminism? Moran’s book was a mass market best seller.

I confess I am woefully lacking in feminist education, but at least I bloody know about it. This thread has been fantastic, I've got books lined up on kindle and tabs open on google for later.

Shooting from the Hip - Lesley Gore

@DidoLamenting

if it wasn't born digital, it doesn't exist

I meant, it isn't seen as relevant or significant to them.

Grace Jones.

Yes, it is not just 'famous' women either. Something has really unnerved me in the last 20 years with all this girl stuff. We have always had very strong women in society who fought on equal terms and were respected as such yet a book came out that was for girls that listed iconic women and it was treated as though it was a completely new concept. Well, in the void of ignorance, anything new is something, I guess but it is though a frame is being built around certain material that excludes so much of what has gone before.

I have thought about this so much, thinking perhaps there is something i am missing, something key but when I speak to the people I meet I find that they don';t actually know of this history. It is not deliberate, it is just our expectation that if you enter a certain space - academia, media, spotlight it is a given that you know the history of your subject and what significant things happened to get us to this point, yet many of the people now inhabiting that space don't have that history or awareness of it. It is seen as a middle class perspective? perhaps, but ironically, the material existed in the wider sphere precisely so that it wasn't monopolised by one class.

I personally am finding this a dangerous thing as it is obliterating so much progress and I am met by so much apathy, it scares me.

I suspect the self-aggrandising stems from the fact her lifestyle is now just that of any another well-off forty-something - husband, 2 children and even Botox - so she's desperate to hold onto some kind of 'edgy' credentials

Get Botox if you want, but don't try to present it as an empowering, feminist decision. Like millions of others, you've bowed to the younger = better narrative thrust on us by men who have no use for middle-aged women.

In the past, whether you had studied formally or not, this knowledge was in the air - we had it and somehow, we have now got a situation where by if it wasn't born digital, it doesn't exist

That's no excuse for Caitlin Moran. She was born in 1985 - well before everything went digital.

The way she said “hi” was iconic.

@serenada

Yes to your list of women! They loomed large in the 1980s! Now everyone is so self-absorbed and talentless....

It is also little girl playing at grown up in an often, sexualised way, rather than woman owning her space. And completely playing to a male audience that is petrified of women and can only deal with 'girls'.

It frightens me that, in a house of 3 women and one man, when the man hid a camera and secretly recorded us, none of the other women were alarmed and the landlady did nothing. I was the only one angry and contacted the police who told me there was nothing that could be done, it was the landlady's responsibility.

I really feel we have lost ground, and power. I was fearless in the past - now I feel that we cannot assert ourselves and have to 'ask' permission timidly for everything. Although, I can see some men are in the same boat so it seems to me a social issue as opposed to just women's rights.

Ohhh, Annie Nightingale! I used to stay up listening to her show on a tiny little portable radio. I wanted to be her when I grew up, knowing so much about music and stuff. I wrote into her show once but when my request was chosen she was on holiday and Mark Ellen read it out instead - I was gutted

She’s just trying to make herself seem important. She’s too safe and lightweight to ever be of consequence.

What the hell is she on about. Tons of women in the 1980s, and especially famous sportswomen - could do with a few more prominent ones now.

Thatcher and Miss Piggy were great role models. They took shit from no-one.

Caitlin Moran is very safe in her life, and if she wants to make history she’s going to have to get out of her comfort zone.

Annie Nightingale!

Janice Long

Liz Kershaw

Kirsty MacColl

Was there no other feminist, working class, young women writers with an interest in music around in the 1980s? No “hip, young gunslingers”?

It’s a head scratcher.

CM should look at my aunt, she wrote a newspaper column because she travelled round the world in the 1940s when few women did this. She was from a 2 up 2 down council house family and worked to pay for a boat passage abroad then got a job and worked to raise money to go somewhere else. She's dead now but carried on travelling until she was 90.