Women’s issues are for everyone now, not just feminists

Like all right-thinking lefty men who came of age in the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, I always thought of myself as a feminist. But now, thanks to Meryl Streep, I’ve been liberated from the label. Last week I heard her on the radio promoting her new film Suffragette. Asked why the story of the suffragettes hadn’t been made into a film before now, she said that in Hollywood the men with the power to get films made didn’t see this subject as anything to do with them. ‘It wasn’t their fight,’ said Streep. But now things were changing. ‘Increasingly we think that women’s issues and women rights are men’s issues,’ she said. ‘But it belongs to all of us to right this imbalance.’

Last year the actress Emma Watson in her address to the United Nations General Assembly made the same case. ‘Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend you a formal invitation,’ she said.