Of Women by Shami Chakrabarti

Author:Shami Chakrabarti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241296356
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

I must return to the United States, for a reminder of how the financial crisis born of the sub-prime mortgage scandal inflicted its own devastation on the right to adequate housing in so many parts of the world. Women were already at the bottom of the pile when it came to financial security before this disaster built on political short-sightedness and financial speculation and greed. They were and remain among the groups most likely to be vulnerable to predatory lending and more likely to face foreclosure and homelessness as a consequence. Then the bitterest of pills, as the economic recession that followed brought yet more unfair, discriminatory and counterproductive results. A number of wealthier countries, including the US itself, have cut both domestic social and housing programmes and vital foreign development aid. This seems to me as desperately illogical as punishing the victims of crime or trying to stay warm by burning down the house.

Yet, vital though effective economic, legal, land and housing policies are, they are not the whole story as far as ‘home’ or the most personal sphere is concerned. Of course there is both the natural and man-made universe of the physical world and how its resources are shared and societies constructed and governed. However, as human beings, it is also our lot to explore and inhabit the inner universe of our minds. Sometimes I think this may be an even more challenging ‘final frontier’ than the outer space explored by so many real and fictional heroes of recent decades. As social creatures, how we feel about ourselves inevitably affects the lives of others, and this is never more true than in the case of those with whom we share our closest relationships.

It is hard to believe that we are rapidly approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970. This book rocked the world. It is still read and re-read, offering so many insights to generations of women and, I have no doubt, many men as well. Greer has subsequently been the first to admit that much has changed (both for the better and for the worse) since she wrote this seminal twentieth-century feminist tract. In later editions and other writing, she acknowledges the importance of the fall of the Soviet Bloc in extending consumerism and diminishing social care for a great number of women. She appreciates why the advent of HIV/AIDS has rightly caused a necessary rethink around 1960s ideas of sex without question or commitment. In 1990, she wrote in a foreword to a new anniversary edition:

Twenty years ago it was important to stress the right to sexual expression and far less important to underline a woman’s right to reject male advances … The argument … is still valid, none the less, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances.

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