Toksvig and Walker may be alienatingly divergent from the people they want to reach.’5
On the day of publication, membership applications skyrocketed. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
While Cocozza and others, ourselves included, worried whether we were too privileged to pursue politics effectively, another school of thought predicted the Women’s Equality Party would dissolve into a puddle of sugar. An article in Spiked greeted our founding with a call for an end to feminism under the headline ‘The Women’s Equality Party: for ladies too nice for politics’. ‘Women’s Equality Party needs a strong dose of Nigel Farage’, advised the Telegraph. ‘The Women’s Equality party has a problem – no one hates it’, a second Guardian piece declared.
If any of us resented these accusations – how dare they call us nice! – we bit back the responses that might have punctured our ladylike image. Several of us had tweeted our criticisms of Cocozza’s piece and then regretted doing so. For one thing, we were determined to treat journalists with courtesy, and not only because some of us were journalists. We were setting out to do politics differently and to develop a style and sensibility distinct from the male-dominated old guard. That difference showed itself in small touches. Sandi accepted the title of ‘MC’, a role hitherto absent from party politics. Would she be master or mistress of ceremonies, I asked her? ‘It depends on the day,’ she replied.
More ambitious was our desire to resist the combative culture that simultaneously unites and divides Westminster hacks and media managers. Like most members of the parliamentary lobby, I’d learned to expect abusive calls and texts from special advisers as part of my job. Parties often employ human attack dogs who attempt to secure the coverage they want by shouting or threatening to remove access. After reading Cocozza’s piece, I couldn’t help laughing at a memory that bubbled to the surface. In 2008, I’d gone to the pub after putting to bed my first long TIME cover story on David Cameron. The feature explained that the Conservative leader looked set to become Prime Minister, but his rise in the polls and a recent by-election win by a posh Tory candidate did not mean that his gilded past had lost the power to haunt him. I’d tracked down a contemporary of Cameron’s in Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club who described a night on the tiles with the wealthy student and his similarly privileged fellow members as ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’. ‘Champagne memories and social deprivation could make for an uneasy juxtaposition, especially in such tough times. Can someone marinated in plenty viscerally understand what it feels like to be poor or excluded?’ I wrote. ‘[Cameron] brushes the question aside with visible irritation. “I don’t have this deterministic view of life that you can only care about something if you directly experience it,” he says. “You can’t walk a mile in everybody’s shoes.”’6
Before leaving my office, I’d emailed a copy of the cover image, but not the text, to Cameron’s then director of communications, former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. In UK editions, the cover would run with the gnomic headline ‘Behind the Smile’. Outside Britain we’d chosen a more direct line, assuming people might not recognise our cover star: ‘David Cameron: A Class Act’. Coulson didn’t like the pun at all. He called me to deliver a long ticking off. I recall standing outside the Fox and Anchor as his voice issued tinnily from my mobile phone: ‘Class no longer matters to voters!’
At the Women’s Equality Party, we resolved to handle media politely but also firmly. One of our core objectives is equal treatment by and in the media, a huge and urgent issue for women and for democracy that I’ll explore in depth later in this book.
A small but significant part of that objective relates to the ways in which political coverage skews against women. The gladiatorial contests that broadcasters prefer over reflective, conversational interviews benefit neither politics in general nor women in particular. Why should politicians be judged on their ability to withstand a barrage of questions, or the same question repeated as the interviewer attempts to extract an answer that he – aggressive interviewers are most often men – likes better? Do we prefer leaders who speak quickly or think deeply? This style of journalism reflects male priorities, male socialisation, and even women skilled at debating are always at a disadvantage. Studies show that audiences react quite differently to men and women taking the floor. Men gain respect, women attract animosity.7
Hillary Clinton speaks more softly than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, yet she was accused throughout her presidential campaign of shouting. As Secretary of State, Clinton’s popularity ratings were high. They dropped as soon as she confirmed her run for the White House.8
This response wasn’t confined to male voters. Women are products of the same sets of social messaging, programmed in varying degrees to defer, to support, and that’s only the start of the problem. The harder we try to slough off patriarchal programming and determine for ourselves what it means to be female, to be a woman, the more our synapses begin to fry. Where does biological sex end and constructed gender begin? What are intrinsically female qualities?
We know that it is an insult to be called ‘nice’ in the political context, yet in that same context, as feminists, many of us would go to the barricades to assert our niceness. We assume it is the superpower the new breed of 50-foot women could bring to bear. We imagine Equalia would be a nice place because a gender-balanced society would enable men to relax and discover their own niceness in a gentler, feminised culture.
The ease with which the steering committee achieved consensus at its earliest meetings seemed to bear out this notion. Then came an argument. We tussled over the future shape of the organisation, and afterwards everyone around the table looked stricken. In raising our voices to defend beliefs, we had inadvertently challenged one of the unspoken shared beliefs that brought us together. True, the disagreement led to better decisions, but maybe the sexes weren’t so different after all.
Did we, as women, really bring something unique to the table? The next chapter looks at what happens if those tables are not kitchen tables but Cabinet tables.
IN 2008, A YOUNG Labour Party activist from London travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to help Barack Obama win the White House. Hannah Peaker believed in descriptive representation – that it isn’t enough to elect lawmakers to advocate for us; at least some of our representatives must also share characteristics and perspectives with us if legislation is to be properly attuned to our needs. The Democratic primaries posed a quandary in this respect. Did the United States more urgently require a black President or a female one? Both firsts seemed long overdue, and the debate had quickly descended into rancour.
‘Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life,’ wrote Gloria Steinem in a piece arguing for Hillary Clinton.1 This sentiment from one of the most prominent leaders of second-wave feminism kicked off a self-mutilating game of Who’s More Oppressed Than Whom. After it rumbled on for nearly a month, Kimberlé Crenshaw co-authored a riposte with the author of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, pointing out the false polarity. ‘We believe that feminism can be expressed by a broader range of choices than this ‘either/or’ proposition entails ... For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice.’2
Hannah did not believe that misogyny trounced racism or that getting any woman elected would inevitably help women. Her view was that descriptive representation creates better democracies by more closely reflecting the complexity of the voting populations. However, she had already witnessed in British left-wing politics the magical queuing system that keeps gender from ever reaching the head of the line. She had also seen women held to higher standards than men – and judged more harshly than men – because of their
