What's in a name?

Well, while I’m working here on this blog the dishes certainly aren’t getting done. Shut the door and ignore it.

The idea has its root in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virgina Woolf.

  “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed." 

She summed up centuries of the problem. Women’s historical domestic place in the economy has always prevented us from fulfilling our true potential – poet or otherwise.

80 years later and not many of us are still at home washing the dishes. I have an army of talented and intelligent friends who have embraced the opportunities given us, who have freed themselves from the shackles of the kitchen sink.

Looking at us, you’d imagine that the war has been won.  Our new economic power has given us the independence and freedom to rule our own lives in ways generations before us could only imagine. And yet there are deep rooted anxieties amongst all of us. About our looks, about security, about raising children, about relationships, about our place in the world.

Beyond our little lives there is plenty of evidence that women do not have equal footing with men. Think of the way the female image is presented in the media, the pay gap, the glass ceiling, the imbalance in political representation. I could, and at some point will, go on.

And are women like us outraged by these inequalities? Are we active in tackling them? We are not. Feminism hardly ever rears its head in our self-obsessed lives.

I have often wondered if we’ve let the side down (more of that later too.) Could we, and should we be doing more? Are we happy just accepting what we’ve got without pushing progress further?

And that’s what this blog is about. It’s not militant or overly political. It’s about the ordinary experience of a woman who wants to be feminist, who also embraces femininity; who is at once traditional and radical (sometimes, a bit); who’s trying to make amends for taking too much for granted but who sometimes finds it hard to break free from the weight of convention and conditioning.

And a woman who’s always arguing with her other half about washing the dishes.