Women

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

It’s easy for MPs to miss the humiliating treatment of their own constituents

If you wanted an easy illustration of the importance of a Parliament that looks vaguely like the country it works for, look no further than a tiny consultation issued this week by the Home Office. In it, ministers suggest new guidelines on the treatment of women in custody who are on their periods. This sounds like quite small fry – and the sort of subject that makes at least 50 per cent of readers recoil from going any further. But it’s important, not just in itself, but also because it shows what happens when more women join the House of Commons. For years, female detainees who are awaiting a court

Thursday

Toby Young

Oh, the insane world of identity politics

According to a poll of 538 experts on women’s issues, the United States is one of the ten most dangerous countries in the world for women. Admittedly, America is ranked tenth, but it’s still considered more dangerous than 183 other countries, including Iran, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Bangladesh and Myanmar. That’s quite a claim when you bear in mind that Iranian women caught not wearing a full hijab are routinely sentenced to 74 lashes, that an estimated 94 per cent of women in Sierra Leone have had their genitals mutilated, and that thousands of Rohingya women and girls have been raped by Myanmar’s soldiers and militiamen

Wednesday

Emily Rhodes

Love’s myriad forms

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve. In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 15 March 2018

We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about that roof.’ I looked at the roof, baffled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the roof.’ Genuinely, it’s the last bit of the lorry I have ever worried about. I tend to worry more about the floor, given that that is the bit the horse is standing on. I had the floor fully

Thursday

Steerpike

Truss takes over No 11

To mark International Women’s Day, Liz Truss took over the Treasury for one night only. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury kicked off the celebrations at No 11 with a speech praising Destiny’s Child, the American girl group: ‘I can’t put it better than Destiny’s Child when they sang “all the honeys making money”‘ While Truss’s speech was primarily focussed on encouraging the women of the world to open their minds to finance (and liberty) – it also appeared to have a message for Philip Hammond. Truss told a room of female businesswomen and hacks that there was still much work to do for women’s progress. She noted that while

Judith Green

The real war on women

How hard is it for women to talk freely about sex, gender and the law? Not very, I used to think. I’d heard about a few no-platforming incidents on campuses, where speakers including Germaine Greer were blocked from appearing because of their views. What I hadn’t realised was just how far the problem has spread. In the past few months, I’ve discovered firsthand that political debate is narrowing for everyone — and that fear and intimidation are being used increasingly to curtail free speech. I am one of a small group of women who get together to discuss proposed changes in the law on sex and gender. We’re called Woman’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What I learned about women from a burst water pipe

‘It’s always me who gets the worst of it,’ said the Fawn, surveying the wreckage caused by the burst water pipe. I did not disagree a) because I would have had my head bitten off and b) because it’s true. Though I wouldn’t say I was completely useless: who was the first to spot the water gushing through the ceiling of the guest bedroom, eh? And who was the first to find the stopcock using the time-honoured method of running up and down the stairs for ten minutes screaming: ‘Where the hell is the stopcock?’ But it’s probably fair to say that the Fawn bore — and continues to bear

Wednesday

Steerpike

Is ‘Lib Dem Pint’ sexist?

Young Labour members have made headlines today after calling for a ban on alcohol at CLP meetings to ensure the party can ‘become truly inclusive of women and other minorities’. Now it seems the Liberal Democrats could be next in the battle against patriarchy-fuelled booze. Speaking at a Grassroots Women panel this week at the SMF, Jo Swinson raised concerns over her party’s regular social gathering ‘Lib Dem Pint’. Although the Lib Dem deputy leader said the pub meet-up – which sees activists come and hear a speech then mingle – was a ‘great thing’, she raised concerns over the use of the word ‘pint’ and whether it would alienate

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How I miss Auberon Waugh

Every now and then one suddenly misses somebody. I miss Bron, who died 17 years ago last month. There’s an Auberon Waugh-sized hole in British satirical journalism. Listening to the radio last week — it was all about famous women, women in history, women’s suffrage, sexual harassment of women, equal pay for women at the BBC, women this and women that — I felt vaguely irritable. Not that I seriously disagreed with anything being said, or wished to rain on any suffragist’s parade, or have ever been remotely sympathetic to inappropriate male behaviour towards women … no, I’d place myself on the ‘politically correct’ side of the argument on every

Wednesday

Robin Oakley

The turf | 13 December 2017

It has been a good year for the girls. The filly Enable was the horse of the year, winning not only the Oaks, amid a thunderstorm, but also collecting the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, in scintillating style. Jessica Harrington trained the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Sizing John, and Josephine Gordon became only the second woman ever, after Hayley Turner, to ride 100 winners in a calendar year. I have been banging on for 20 years about giving women riders more opportunities, but even so I was surprised to discover, when researching Sixty Years of Jump Racing

Thursday

Taki

High life | 19 October 2017

I may have spoken too soon last week when I defended my old friend Harvey Weinstein. It now looks very bad for him, with even Hillary Clinton joining the Greek chorus condemning him. It is not just boorish behaviour towards the fairer sex that he now stands accused of; it is also rape, something that he and his lawyers strenuously deny. Mind you, I’ve always thought that someone was innocent until proven guilty — but that does not appear to be the case in these hyper-feminist times. And the idea that Bill and Hillary were unaware of Harvey’s shenanigans — not to mention the sleazy bunch that is Hollywood —

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Kill your friendships

I am not a bad friend. I enjoy my mates, and I am generous, showering them with fun, money and sympathy. But I do not crave their company when I am without it, for whatever length of time, and should we lose touch, I do not miss them. In fact, I find there’s a profound pleasure in parting with a chum, whether by their hand or by yours. We should all have the courage to admit it when a friendship has become more work than play, more duty than beauty. Maybe my origins led me to feel this way. I was an only child who, at an early age, became

Thursday

Steerpike

Philip Davies leads by example on equality

In the last Parliament, Philip Davies received a lot of flak after he was elected on to the Women and Equalities Committee. As Davies has vigorously campaigned for men’s rights to be given a better hearing and raised doubts about the intentions of some feminists, some questioned his intention. However, at least Davies remains committed to the committee – which is more than can be said for most Conservative MPs. Davies has the dubious honour of being one of only two Tory MPs (the other being Kirstene Hair) to put their name down for the committee. This means there is no contest and there remains two Tory vacancies for the committee. On the news,

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Why western women are now the Islamists’ target of choice

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women

Thursday

Jane Ridley

A feminist trailblazer

On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery, high above the chamber in the House of Commons. Suffragettes had previously hit the headlines by chaining themselves to the railings at 10 Downing Street and, emboldened by this success, the leaders of the women’s movement planned an even more outrageous demonstration. The Ladies’ Gallery was surrounded by a metal grille, and this had huge significance for the suffragettes, as it symbolised their exclusion from the patriarchal political system. The plot was for two of them to chain themselves to the hated grille. One of the women chosen for the

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Of course a man hasn’t had a baby. Let’s not pretend otherwise

You know a Man Having Baby story really would be a story if it were true. But the latest Man Mother story is only true if you accept the notion that the mother in question really is a man. And that depends on whether you go down the whole notion that being transgender involves biological reinvention, rather than hormonal/surgical intervention plus credulity and the creative use of language. Two people with wombs, ovaries and XX chromosomes, conventionally known as women, have had babies. As it happens, one of them has taken drugs to suppress lactation on the basis of an unwillingness to breastfeed, but, you know, it took drugs to

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Mother Theresa

Tory activists last week were heard to refer to Mrs May as ‘Mummy’. No Corbynista calls their hero ‘Dad’. The human race is guided by myth as much as by logic, and mythology explains people to themselves more vividly than economics. The agony expressed in the liberal intelligent press is understandable. The sensible people who all voted Remain direct much of their fury against the Corbynistas who have taken over the Labour party. Fair enough. Interestingly, however, they attend so closely to what Tony Benn liked to call ‘the ish-oos’ that they ignore the bigger mythological picture. Last summer the country voted — very unwisely according to the sensible 48

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 April 2017

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result

Wednesday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 April 2017

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into a seat beside a young chap who was turned sideways and chatting with the fellow behind him, who was leaning forward. They were speaking in English, quietly, about Melania Trump. The chap beside me was French; the one behind us, Turkish. They were agreeing on how good for her age she looked. She hadn’t had any ‘aesthetic’ surgery either, as far as he could tell, which was a brave choice, thought the Turk. She was Czech, wasn’t she? ‘Slovenian,’ said the French guy authoritatively. ‘Yes, they look after themselves those

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Girls

Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before he knew it, Today got some American academic on air to denounce him. ‘We know, looking in the dictionary,’ she said, ‘that girl means a young woman only up to the age of 11 or 12.’ This bossy woman should get a bigger dictionary to look in. There is plenty of evidence that girl has