As International Women’s Day rolls around again we shouldn’t kid ourselves that women in the 21st century are anything but still marginalised and victimised – differently from in the past for many but experiencing the sort of misogyny that’s impacted women’s lives for millennia. Oh sure, legislation has been passed over the past one hundred years to eliminate inequalities between the sexes but look at where we are now – in some parts of the world men still dictate what women can and cannot wear, where they can go, who they can speak with. Women are killed for disobeying men who regard them as property. And not very valuable property at that. Sex has always created divisions and power struggles but currently in western countries it’s sex that’s under attack with some questioning the definition of what constitutes a woman to the extent that men can claim to be women, occupy roles that are designated as women’s and redefine what feminism is – it’s not what women say it is, according to them.
In 1908 International Women’s Day was inaugurated as a protest against sexism and misogyny. However despicable were men’s working conditions, and they were, women’s were often worse. Women and girls faced every kind of unfair treatment purely because of their sex from employment rights to the franchise. The once collective suffrage movement, the Chartists, dropped women from the demand of voting rights because the men thought they had a better chance of success without them. They were still fighting for votes for men over 21 almost 100 years later and by then women had realised if they wanted something they had to do it for themselves.
Hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets worldwide to mark International Women’s Day in 1908. By then a whole slew of women’s organisations demonstrated women’s fury and impatience at their treatment in every facet of their lives purely on grounds of sex. Poor and working-class women and girls fared worst of all and women were drawn to socialist and communist organisations to accelerate positive changes. However when the International Women’s Congress opened that September in Geneva it was under the presidency of Lord and Lady Aberdeen, Scottish aristocrats, but aristocrats with a strong sense of social justice – or at least she had. Lady Aberdeen was an outspoken campaigner for women. She setup the Onward and Upward Association to improve the material, mental and moral position of women, ensuring her own servants at the family seat Haddo House in Aberdeenshire were provided with a range of classes to attend from language to crafts. The main preoccupation at the time for the UK’s middle-class women was their lack of voting rights to influence opinion in parliament. This was also important for working class women whose existence was blighted by unfairness, prejudice and deprivation.
In those countries where women’s lives are constrained and limited by men flogging religion, law or tradition to justify murdering women for their disobedience nothing short of uprising and revolution will do. In the west the harm to women is more subtle and insidious with the attempt to erode sex as a definition of woman based in science and logic and replace it with gender that is being redefined as a fluctuating fancy. If an erstwhile man can merely state he is a woman to be legally accepted as one what is there to stop penis bearers replacing women in everything women want to do? Other than childbearing – the point where the penis bearer discovers he’s not woman enough and must exploit a woman to provide a child for him. It is extraordinary that women in governments, in health institutions and all manner of organisations go along with this. But there have always been women willing to sell out their sisters.
Penis-bearers now want their inclusion in Women’s Day. Did I write want? A loud, aggressive testosterone, hectoring, insistent demand that comes of the male trait of not taking no for answer. Male entitlement that we used to equate with differential pay grades and the like has moved onto stripping away from women any sense of womanhood beyond the most ridiculous parodies of what it is to be a girl or woman – parodies steeped in sex stereotyping. The entitled male often adopts a cartoon-like name, has a penchant for photographing himself in a women’s lavatory and employs a lexicon of abusive, sexist language against women who question his new identity. Heavy duty misogyny. There’s the notorious case of Adam Graham, a double rapist, who decided he was Isla not Adam after being charged. Initially he was sent to a women’s prison and only placed in the male estate after a huge public outcry. The idea that the correct place for a rapist to be is in a woman’s prison beggars belief. As for that risible statement made by the deputy First Minister of Scotland, Shona Robison, that there a is
“. . . no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour”
Not only is there proof but the instances of it are increasing. And that can only be bad for women. In 2023 Pink News ran a story about a women, a ‘cis’ woman because women cannot be women nowadays without a prefix we are assured by men, murdered because her killer took her to be trans. The implication being this was an attack on a trans person not the tragedy that a woman lost her life at the hands of a brutal man. That’s misogyny.
Women victims of crime have long been subject to contemptuous comment. Press and police behaviour over the murder of a young woman called Emma Caldwell is nothing short of abhorrent misogyny. Emma’s life was reduced to being a prostitute. Such foul prejudices have not moved on one iota from the days of Jack the Ripper in the 19th century and his 20th century equivalent the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. At Sutcliffe’s trial the Attorney-General said
“Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women”.
For years we have witnessed a never-ending stream of male officers employed at the Met known to be sex pests at the very least. The organisation has shown itself to be incapable of tackling hatred of women. Among its ranks the humiliation and belittling of women has been treated as funny, a game. Wayne Couzens was known to his Met colleagues as a guy who targeted women but got away with his bestiality for so long because his behaviour was regarded as normal among his colleagues. The force was stunned at the public reaction to their officer’s abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. It promises, again, to learn lessons.
Misogyny is as old as the hills. Those ancient Greeks liked their monsters to be female so they could be tamed and kept in line by men. The ancients had a thing about women. Aristotle dismissed them as irrational and intellectually weak on a par with children or slaves – and slaves were reviled. Dismissing women as weak in the head as well as body hasn’t quite been eradicated as a source of misogyny. The philosopher Socrates was an outlier in that he didn’t reckon there was much to separate the sexes except in physical strength. Far too many current sports organisations disagree with old Socrates for now they bow to needy men’s demands to access women’s places in sport. Well, to do otherwise would hurt a male participant’s feelings and we know through experience that female feelings carry less weight – or no weight.
There’s never been a time, surely, when women have not been as capable as men when given the opportunity. – philosophers, rulers, blacksmiths, authors, painters, goods carriers, composers – but still folk are surprised to discover there ever were women capable of any of the above. Expectations of women’s abilities have always been low, achievements often dismissed as second rate and unworthy of comment. It’s a talent women have – of being invisible.
Highlighting the plight of women has differed since 1908. In 1927 in Hankow in China factory women hobbled the streets in bound feet to mark International Women’s Day, accompanied by hundreds of young girl factory workers who toiled 12 hour days for miniscule wages. In the west in the 1960s the Day’s issue focused on sexuality, reproductive rights (the pill and abortion), domestic roles as well as the ongoing battle of sex discrimination in the workplace. Thirty years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act came into force in the UK that useful invention to justify lower pay for women, ‘women’s work’, was given by the Labour Party run Glasgow council as the reason its lowest paid women employees earned less than their male counterparts. The council fought them for over a decade and spent over £2 million to deny women justice but in the end lost that disgraceful misogynist argument. The Equal Pay Act was brought in because male-dominated trades unions colluded with employers to keep women’s pay lower than men’s. Even those earnings were not deemed a woman’s own until 1990 in the UK. Until then a married woman’s pay was considered part of her husband’s income. If a wife paid too much tax her rebate was paid to her husband not her.
From highlighting pay discrimination to lack of enfranchisement to sex rights to gender fluidity International Women’s Day emerges with different emphasis over the hundred plus years of its existence. One thing that never changes is the loathing and disrespect that characterises the experience of so many women. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women bows down to the male echo chamber by enabling men who identify as women to speak for women. Make no mistake women are well and truly under the cosh of misogyny now so deeply institutionalised. Wherever you look men are pictured representing women. These people irrespective of how they identify have no idea what it is to be a girl or woman. None at all. Slipping into a dress is not the same as living as a woman. They live as men imagining what life is for a woman. In 1996 the International Olympic Committee altered its charter to promote equality in sport through enabling women to advance at all levels. In 2024 it turned the clock back by opening the door to any male athlete claiming to be a woman to complete alongside women and to take up places meant for women in female competitions. The antithesis of equality. Undermining women negatively impacts on their lives and is one facet of misogyny.
International Women’s Day has witnessed the best of times and the worst of times. It began as an outlet for women to give voice to their mistreatment in a hostile world and offer hope to each other through collective action. The trope of gender equality that has sneaked into conversations surrounding women’s lives detracts from what should be positive action by women for women. Sex is now a four-letter word and gender rules – that shape shifter with a penis. Men are welcome to act collectively alongside women but not speak for women. Women are quite capable of speaking for themselves. Men’s views of what’s good and what isn’t for women is not acceptable when it is a man insisting women wear a veil or a man insisting he is a woman and so can represent women, often aggressively. Every woman and girl I know has grown up experiencing sexism and misogyny to varying degrees. Girls and women learn to deal with it. It’s the kind of experience no man identifying as a woman has or can ever have. Psychology Today, 12 February, 2014 published an article How Men Bully Women: Bad Tempers and Tantrums. On aggressive men
“these men are more focused on their own feelings and image of self-importance and power than they are focused on how anyone in a relationship with them feels.”
When the president of West Yorkshire Federation of the National Association of Schoolmasters argued in 1952 against equal pay for men and women teachers his misogyny slipped effortlessly out of his gob –
“ …the women on the staffs (of some schools) did their work successfully because there were men on the staffs whose presence maintained an over-all discipline necessary to successful teaching…”
Given that sort of pervading nonsense it is hardly surprising that three years later when a mere woman had the audacity to imagine she was capable of reading the news on television she lasted less than a year before the forces of reaction had her sacked. This was Barbara Mandell on ITV in 1955. In 1960 the radical experiment was repeated by the BBC with Nan Winton but she fared no better and was dropped because viewers asked how they were meant to take news seriously when being told it by a woman, after all a BBC spokesman explained –
“It was felt that a woman could not remain impartial when talking about disasters and tragedies”
It wasn’t until 1974 that women were judged to be capable of reading off an idiot board without bursting into tears and distracting viewers with their clothing and hairstyles with the appearance of Angela Rippon on the BBC.
This year while women celebrate (or don’t) International Women’s Day there will be men who use it as a vehicle for their obsessive bullying of women. Women must stand strong and not be defined by men. Those women who took to the streets to mark the first International Women’s Day in 1908 were not submissive, were not deferential towards men with their rapacious appetite for controlling women’s lives. The marchers in 1908 were confident of what they and women like them needed, deserved – empowered through equal access to work, equal pay, education, suffrage, property rights and respect. While women’s lives have been transformed in so many ways over the past century misogyny has never gone away. It probably never will. Stay strong sisters. Remember those women who over time have struggled to be heard, struggled to be taken seriously, struggled against the tide of misogyny. It’s ever-present in our day-to-day lives – the corrosive banality of misogyny that creeps into everything. Resist. Resist. Misogynists are never your allies.
lenathehyena
Lenathehyena's Blog from Lorna Corall Dey 
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