Two very different perspectives on the issue of women in British politics, from Sarah Sands and response from Zoe Williams.
Sands writes that the negative response of the right to Harman taking on the deputy role is not a matter of misogyny. Indeed, the Conservative party are champion of feminism – a female prime minister testifying to this. Thatcher’s feminism, she writes, more appealing than Harman’s ‘nanny state’.
Williams response (highlights of):
1) Thatcher’s individualism didn’t help feminism.
2) The welfare of women generally cannot be mapped by looking at the trajectories of particular women in Parliament.
3) The ‘top trumps’ trend of seeing which party is the most feminist by counting the women in each misses the point. Rather, politicians and media alike should ‘[l]ook instead at the conditions keeping women out of politics, which are the same as those keeping women at the bottom of any heap. The pay gap, the carer gap, the maternity drain, all the ossified iniquities that fence women into hardship.’
Feminist Philosophers 