Is feminism a thing of the past... or the future?

A number of high profile women have recently distanced themselves from feminism - but why should they do this when there is still so much to be achieved?

Lily Allen puts the case against feminism...

Lily Allen is right: feminism needs women to stop being horrible to each other

Mary Berry has also chimed in, but Jenny McCartney looks a little deeper to find that the social position of women is regressing, and often for reasons that did not originate with men. Feminism is an unfinished project, a feminism-to-come.

Feminism is still a thing of the future

 And this link looks more closely at the nature of dissent within feminism and its consequences.

Feminist dissent

In the image to the right - Caitlin Moran's riposte to the rejection of the word "feminism" and a call to reclaim it - and the one below, which is a collage of press cuttings to demonstrate just some of the challenges still embedded in some illusions and taken-for-granteds of 21st century living - we get a more populist punch to the perspective.

For those in the UK, the Fawcett Society last year took on the responsibility of producing the "Sex and Power" report previously done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It's a salutary reminder that any workplace advances have been largely confined to the lower and middle reaches of organizations, and that traditional constraints continue to be held in place by social attitudes that need a coordinated and policy led activism to shift. It's hard to think that we could have got this far without feminism, and that we could get any further without it - but what feminism means remains an open question. Feminism continues to be relevant because it is willing to contemplate and debate the possibility of its irrelevance.

Sex and Power

So....... happy IWD.