tlsLaura Bates
EVERYDAY SEXISM
384pp. Simon and Schuster. £14.99.
978 1 4711 3157 8

Laurie Penny
UNSPEAKABLE THINGS
Sex, lies and revolution
288pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £12.99.
978 1 4088 2474 0

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter
THE VAGENDA
A zero tolerance guide to the media
304pp. Square Peg. Paperback, £12.99.
978 0 224 09580 8

 

(…) All right, nobody’s disputing it. Women are free. At least they look free. They even feel free. But in reality women in the western, industrialised world today are like the caged animals in a modern zoo. There are no bars. It appears that cages have been abolished. Yet in practice women are still kept in their place just as firmly as the animals are kept in their enclosures. The barriers which keep them in now are invisible.”

 

Brigid Brophy wrote this in the Saturday Evening Postin November 1963. Fifty years on, young women are repeating the point: looking about themselves, they declare this is not freedom. Women can earn more, and climb higher, than ever before, yet those “invisible barriers” remain and are reinforced at every turn. Aiming to pull the wool from our eyes, these “fourth wave” feminists are revelatory in tone. They focus on those of us who have become so distracted by our apparent liberties that we cannot see the injustice inherent in our social structures.