We’ve come a long way (or have we?)

To be honest, having fought a few equality battles in my time on behalf of the sisterhood and looking back now, sometimes I wonder what all the fuss was about.

It’s either that – or that I find myself worrying about what modern young women are doing with the hard-won advances that we put ourselves on the line for three and four decades ago.

I never had much truck with feminism of the ‘we hate men’ variety. Well, okay back in the day some of us got a giggle out of gags such as “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, but the truth is/was always that I actually enjoyed the company of men simply as people sufficiently that I could never sign up to the separatist movement.

These days there are skirmishes continuing over maternity rights, a woman’s right to take time off work for family or other reasons and then return (and most recently the fact they lose out in promotion and salary stakes), the quest to get more women into the boardrooms of FTSE top 100 companies- and indeed other ‘glass ceiling’ issues – but then I look the other way … and gain the impression that young girls today are as confused and indecisive as they ever were.

Sexting, self-harming, dieting and anorexia/bulimia problems, 1 in 7 young women being unhappy with their lives are all stories that have featured in the media recently.

Not much changed in thirty years, then.

And please don’t get me started on the celebrity gossip magazines and the fashion for ‘reality television’ shows bedecked with air-head floozies obsessed with fake tans, cosmetic surgery, Botox and fake boobs, all of whom seem to be making a very nice living thank you out of launching personalised fragrances, fitness DVDs, clothing and lingerie ranges and then selling updates to the tabloids on their lurid sex lives and relationships, miscarriages, abortions and weekly break-ups with their latest – equally vacuous – beaus.

It wouldn’t surprise me if someone conducted a poll and discovered that 40% of all schoolgirls under the age of eighteen regarded ‘soccer WAG-dom’ as their number one career path of choice.

Has it really come to this just half a century after the Women’s Lib awakening of the 1960s?

What concerns me greatly is the possibility that it just might.

Speaking of which, here’s a link to a deeply-shocking report by Harry Cockburn on the results of a recent survey by the Eve Appeal gynaecological charity that appears today on the website of – THE INDEPENDENT