In 2024, I thought a lot about

I am a feminist. 

But I didn’t used to be. 

As a child, my dad told me my life would be harder than my brother’s because I am a woman. “You need to have a good job so you aren’t dependent on a man,” he said. I probably dismissed his words at the time, not realising their importance. In fact, at school, I did a course on women’s studies and the woman who ran it irritated me because it felt like she was making out that everything was about sex and gender. 

But over the years, my experiences have opened my eyes to the inequality between men and women, and the vastly different expectations society has on the sexes. It’s clear we still have a lot of work to do and this realisation has prompted me to become much more active in my pursuit of being a feminist and understanding what that means to me. 

Over the last 20 years, my personal experiences have fed into my politics. 

For example, I’m a woman in my fifties and I have worked in tech for 25 years. A few years ago, a young man at my work asked for my professional advice. When I obliged, he dismissed me and the decades of experience I’d accrued over my career, implying that my advice was based on having a couple of chats with a few people so that didn’t make me equipped to ‘tell him what to do’. 

How old and how experienced do I need to be for people to take me seriously? I thought.

The workplace has made me well-versed in managing other people’s feelings. I’ve spent 25 years stroking male egos so I wasn’t surprised when my younger sister, a legal adviser at a Magistrates court, was recently told to prefix any advice she offered to colleagues with: “As I’m sure you already know…” to avoid offending fragile egos.

I was less reserved during a recent conversation with my mum, though. She said that: “everyone feels the need to talk about the menopause these days” and that she couldn’t understand why women make such a big fuss about it because, "in my day we just quietly got on with it.” 

“Thank god, everyone talks about menopause these days!” I shouted. “It means women finally have enough courage to speak up, and ask why the fuck there isn’t there more awareness and support and research into something that has such a massive impact on half the population!” 

I reminded her that British women didn’t have the vote a hundred years ago and in some parts of Switzerland, it’s been less than 20. “Where would we be if those women had just ‘quietly got on with it’?” I challenged her. 

I was angry, but not at her. Everyone is a product of their time.

This said, I knew my mother, who was widowed young, had challenged the sexism she’d faced. She famously told a doctor who refused to respect her wishes, “if my husband was sitting next to me, we would not be having this conversation.”

Mum reconsidered her point about menopause, and admitted that perhaps she wouldn’t have been bullied out of a job if she’d been more aware of the effects of menopause and peri-menopause on her mind.

My mum’s stoicism isn’t unusual for someone in their seventies, but even women in younger generations still hold troubling beliefs.

Recently I’ve met a few women in their thirties who have told me that I “need to be careful of feminism.” One told me that she’d been learning about it with her male Catholic guru and that feminism is “bad for female energy”, which should be soft and gentle.

What she doesn't seem to realise is that those who uphold sexist attitudes – likely including the man who said that – have long spread distrust of feminism as the 'enemy' rather than a route to equality, partnership, confidence, and strength.

The only people who benefit from fractured feminism are the men who retain their privilege. In the same way that the prevailing narrative would have us believe that as women we can’t be friends, that we are somehow forever in competition with one another, this latest balkanization of feminism seems to be another thing designed to distract us from directing our anger where it belongs: at the men who need women to remain inferior to safeguard their privilege and their egos. 

I have a nine-year-old daughter now and she has made me even more determined to fight for equality. I’m overwhelmed by love for her and a fierce desire to win battles so she doesn’t have to fight them. I don’t want her life to be harder just because she is a woman. 

But this love is bigger than my family. 

It encompasses every woman I know and those I will never meet. It encompasses those from my past, my present and my future. Because until we all have equal rights, none of us do.

Looking back, I recognise that my parents were feminists for their time.

I am a feminist for mine. 

I hope my daughter will be a feminist for hers. 

What about you?

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