Dear Sir
I read last week’s Newton News with horror. I wondered whether I had slipped back a century in time.
Mrs Bergg
First I read Mrs Bergg, who told us that women’s sphere is in the home “cooking meals for the family” and that they ought to be glad to have good men to represent them at the Town Council. It is the language of the Anti-Suffrage League, direct from the 1910s.
Surely, if women’s circumstances hinder their participation in politics, we need to be asking whether we can change the way we conduct affairs so as to allow women to participate equally? Is that not worth even investigating?
Arun Chandran
Cllr Chandran, of course, is stuck in the 1980s, so I might have expected him to jump to the wrong idea that the three women councillors were seeking ‘positive discrimination’ – a concept we left behind in the 1980s. But I was left dumbfounded by the gender-prejudice which led him to label his female councillor colleagues “anti-men feminists” for doing no more than asking that, in 2017, female councillors be addressed in the same way as male councillors.
Why do the three ladies not stand for office, he asks. I think their letter made it clear that they were not seeking position for themselves, now, but for a consideration by the Council of how we might achieve a gender balance in the future – how anyone could think this a wrong thing to ask defeats me.
Equality
Most of all, I was horrified that, in 2017, none of the correspondents who attacked the three female councillors could see anything wrong with the fact that NOT ONE of the 14 GATC Committee Chairs and Vice-Chairs is currently a woman!
I am proud to be a member of the Labour Party which in its Rule Book and Manifesto advocates gender equality and believes that – if we are to have a meaningful democracy – we need to have a gender balance on our political institutions. We may argue about how to achieve that balance, but it is shocking that last week’s letters were arguing that we do not need a gender balance, or even to be trying to work towards one.
It is disappointing that this wave of misogyny from the opposition seems indeed to have delayed the submission of the ladies’ motion. But the three women councillors – supported by the whole weight of the Labour Party – will hopefully keep asserting that our goal MUST be that there will be one day a gender balance on the Town Council, both in numbers and in leadership, and to that end I myself am also committed.
Who could have believed that I would have to be defending women’s rights … in 2017?
Cllr John D Clare
