What is a 'Woman’s Place' today?

by Michael Carberry

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

As a boy at school in the 1950s I once had to speak in a debate on “A woman’s place is in the home”.  My own mother had been a housewife all her married life and my five siblings and I enjoyed the fact that she was always there for when we came home from school or from whatever we had been doing. Perhaps because of that I had been nominated by the teacher to speak in favour of the motion.  Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable with the idea.  I had been struck by a quote from George Bernard Shaw writing at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that “Home is the girl’s prison and woman’s workhouse.” My mother was an intelligent and energetic person who believed passionately in the education of women – an education she herself had never received. With hindsight, I can see that she was frustrated and unfulfilled as just a housewife.

Being confined to home did not mean that women did not work.  On the contrary, for most women – especially working-class women – looking after a family was a full-time job and very hard.  In the post-World War II years, my own mother had to bring up six children with very little money in a house with no central heating or domestic appliances of any kind.  Indeed, for the first few years there was not even any electricity, hot running water or inside bathroom!  With no transport (the nearest bus was about a mile away) she had to carry heavy loads of shopping every day to feed her family as well as doing all the washing, ironing and cleaning by hand.  It was backbreaking work and never ending.  In the countryside many women also had to work in the fields alongside their domestic chores.

Unsurprisingly, this division of labour - men going out to work while women stayed at home to look after the family - gave rise to perceptions about the role of women which became culturally entrenched and were accepted, even by women themselves, until well into the twentieth century.  My mother-in-law, who came from an affluent middle-class family and attended a private ladies college, told me how the girls were educated to be wives and mothers and support their husbands.  It would have been unthinkable for them to go out to work.  In the early 1960s  the career advice given to her pupils by my sisters’ headmistress was, “Get into a good tennis set, girls”, so that they would meet the right kind of husband. Working-class women who were obliged from economic necessity to work in factories, or cleaning jobs or as field workers were often looked down on by their peers. When, in 1973, I found myself sharing a hospital ward with a group of old retired coal miners, they were all fiercely proud of the fact that their wives had never had to go out to work.  It has only been since the mid-twentieth century, in my own lifetime, that control of fertility, labour- saving devices and universal education have enabled women to compete on anything like equal terms with men in the world of work.

The situation is now very different but that did not happen of its own accord.  It required affirmative action by governments.  In the UK this really began with the Equal Pay Act by the Wilson government in 1970.  This was the first piece of legislation in the UK to address pay discrimination between men and women and was later incorporated into the Equality Act of 2010.  Pay was not the only, nor indeed the most significant, barrier to women achieving success in the world of work.  More important were the “glass ceiling” and “glass wall”, those invisible barriers which meant that women were not promoted to the highest-level jobs or considered suitable for certain types of occupation.  At Sheffield University in the early 1970s, where approximately half the six thousand students were studying engineering, two female friends of mine were the only women in the large mechanical engineering faculty and had to put up with a lot of ribald teasing from their male colleagues. 

The same was true in politics and government.   Again, it took the Wilson government to bring in the first female Cabinet Minister in the UK.  As Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity Barbara Castle intervened on behalf of the women sewing machinists on strike at the Ford (Dagenham) Motor plant and then went on to bring in the Equal Pay Act. But Castle’s attitude was not shared by all women in politics. Margaret Thatcher may have been very proud to become the first female Prime Minister of the UK, having succeeded in a man’s world and overcome the misogyny in her local Conservative Party. But she did absolutely nothing to help other women.  As a famous photograph of the Thatcher Cabinet illustrates, she much preferred to surround herself with men. It took Tony Blair’s Labour Party with its all-female shortlists for the election of May 1997 to transform the gender imbalance in Parliament.  A male Conservative MP recalled the shock of coming into the House of Commons for the first parliamentary session after the election and seeing the government benches filled with women in brightly coloured clothes instead of the usual rows of men in grey suits.  Of course, the Conservatives were quickly obliged to follow suit and have now had four women leaders of the Party, including three Prime Ministers (even if the tenures of the last two were brief and undistinguished).   The present Labour Cabinet has no less than 46% female membership, the largest on record.

Today we are accustomed to seeing women in very senior positions around the world - prime ministers, presidents, government ministers, senior officials, judges, and chief executives in major businesses.  Moreover, education and the changing nature of work has opened up fields of employment to women which were previously regarded as predominantly for men, such as science, engineering and technology.  That is perhaps most notable in the armed forces where women are now deployed in combat roles. In the  UK, women in the Royal Air Force can fly fighter planes and female naval personnel can go to sea including in nuclear submarines.

It is tempting to suggest that women have now mostly reached parity with men, but the reality is more complex.  Firstly, although men are often more willing to share family responsibilities, child-bearing and child-rearing, especially in the early years, still fall almost entirely on the shoulders of women, many of whom have to juggle the conflicting requirements of pregnancy and child care with pursuing a career.  That inevitably puts them at a disadvantage in terms of career progression.  Moreover, despite more than half a century of equal pay legislation in the UK, jobs which are overwhelmingly done by women, like cleaners, teaching assistants and carers, are among the lowest paid in the country.  There is also a marked class divide between women who are competing successfully with men and those who are left behind.  Centuries of subordination have meant that expectations and attitudes regarding the position of women are culturally ingrained especially among working- class or immigrant communities and the more poorly educated.  With low expectations and lacking support and encouragement from their families, young girls from these communities consistently fail to achieve their potential in terms of education or career possibilities.

Not only do women from these groups have lower expectations, the men often see the changing role of women as a threat to their own status.  The result has been a marked push-back particularly from white working-class men against successful women.  Aided by the anonymity of the internet and social media this has manifested itself in a veritable tsunami of abuse from internet trolls against female government ministers, Members of Parliament, television personalities, sports personalities or almost any woman who has a high public profile.  Such abuse is invariably accompanied by threats of death, rape or sexual assault of the vilest kind.   No surprisingly many women have felt compelled to remove themselves from social media and many others have been dissuaded from seeking election to public office or other high-profile roles.  This is not just an attack on the rights of women but an assault on democracy itself as well as on common decency and civilised standards in public life.

Nor is the problem confined to high-profile women. In 1977, partly in response to the horrific murders of young women in Yorkshire by serial killer Peter Sutclife (“The Yorkshire Ripper”), women in Leeds organised the first “Reclaim the Night” march, adamant that they should feel free to walk the streets of their own city after dark without fear. The women were particularly incensed by the official advice from the police that they should “stay at home”, which they felt not only restricted their freedom but tended to put the blame for the murders on the victims rather than the culprit.  Almost half a century on, the marches continue and have spread to many other major cities in the UK but, sadly, very little has changed. Indeed, in the years between 2009 and 2024 despite repeated strategies by the government to address this problem the incidents of rape and sexual abuse of women recorded by police rose from under 20,000 to over 120,000, an increase of 264%.  In July 2024, the UK National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing said that violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a “national emergency”. According to the NPCC, VAWG makes up just under 20% of all recorded crime in England and Wales.  Why should this be?

The relative freedom and greater opportunities which women enjoy today compared to  previous generations have come at a price.  If their lives are less constrained or circumscribed than their Victorian or Edwardian predecessors, they are also less protected and more vulnerable.  Perhaps the biggest problem facing women today is not so much access to equal pay or career opportunities as the de-humanising of women in our society.  This takes many forms: sexualisation of young girls, up-skirting, revenge porn, pressure on female students to “sleep around.” Sadly, popular culture encourages many young women to see themselves as sex objects and that success means conforming to the glamour model image of pop stars and film stars. But perhaps worse is the prevailing attitude of many young men towards the female half of the population. A particularly unpleasant manifestation of this was the Warwick University rape chat scandal of 2019.

The Warwick case involved a chat group with eleven male students, who sent extremely sexually explicit and violent (as well as racist) messages over a long period of time. Messages included graphic descriptions of gang rape and genital mutilation of named women on the campus including many who believed these men to be their friends. Unfortunately, the events at Warwick reflect a pattern which is still visible in schools, colleges and universities across the UK. One survey found that nearly two-thirds of students and graduates (mainly women) had experienced sexual violence while studying at a UK university. Even more shockingly, only 2 per cent of those affected felt able to report the incident to their institution. These students spoke of a culture of “normalised” sexual violence. In a UK television programme on “Womanhood” one commentator argued that the level of sexual harassment, violence and psychological pressure on female students was now such that UK universities were no longer safe spaces for young women.

The fundamental problem would seem to be the objectification of women as sex objects – commodities to be used, exploited or enjoyed - rather than as people. These perceptions and attitudes are enabled by an internet culture awash with often violent pornography and encouraged by misogynist influencers like the notorious Tate brothers or Russell Brand, or powerful individuals like Harvey Weinstein, Mohammed Fayed or Donald (“Grab ‘em by the pussy”) Trump.  The problem is not helped by the dissociated nature of the society in which we now live: the breakdown of the traditional communities which in the past might have provided a degree of protection for young women and girls have helped to make it possible for Asian grooming gangs to sexually exploit young girls in Rotherham while British white men sexually exploit young women and children in Thailand.  The problem is a global one and any solution will require a global response, starting with international regulation of the internet in the same way that we have an international Law of the Sea.  Those extreme libertarians, like Elon Musk, who oppose any regulation of the internet or social media in the name of free speech are in fact promoting a toxic culture which is poisoning societies across the globe.

Meanwhile, national governments are doing what they can. The current UK Labour government has launched yet another strategy intended to halve violence against women and girls within a decade.   That is to be welcomed but given the disappointing results of previous initiatives the goal may prove difficult to achieve.  Ultimately, it may never be possible to completely eradicate this problem but that should not stop us, as a society, from trying.  For as long as women cannot walk the streets in safety or be free from domestic violence, or vile abuse on the internet, then one half of our population cannot fully enjoy the freedom, security and dignity which is the birth-right of every human being.