Feminism

Are you a politically correct pervert?

20 October 2018 9:00 am

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender,…

Little Women, Chapter IX: ‘Meg Goes to Vanity Fair’. Her sisters help her pack

150 years on, what makes Little Women such an enduring classic?

20 October 2018 9:00 am

The great thing about Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women is that it has something for everyone: stay-at-home types have…

Sian Brooke and Alex Hassell in 'I'm Not Running'. Photo: Mark Douet

Women should boycott David Hare’s slanderous new play: I’m Not Running reviewed

20 October 2018 9:00 am

Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to chronicle the history of the Labour movement from 1996 to the…

‘Pit Brow Lasses’, 2015, by David Venables

Women’s toplessness caused less offence to Victorians than their trousers

20 October 2018 9:00 am

‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled…

A woman-child of dangerous assurance: Allison Cook as Salome in Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera. [Catherine Ashmore]

A fascinating failure, but a failure nonetheless: ENO’s Salome reviewed

6 October 2018 9:00 am

Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of…

Can my inner feminist cope with another restaurant named after a prostitute? Cora Pearl reviewed

6 October 2018 9:00 am

Cora Pearl is the new, and second, restaurant from the people who made Kitty Fisher’s in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. Kitty…

Stop calling me ‘a privileged white man’ – I’m more than that

25 August 2018 9:00 am

I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who…

Like Jon Bon Jovi struck by lightning: Garrett Lombard as Lucky in Waiting for Godot

Washed-up junkies, Trump the director and a cash giveaway: Edinburgh Festival round-up

11 August 2018 9:00 am

Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on…

A proper old-fashioned stinker: ITV’s The Bletchley Circle – San Francisco reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In…

Girl power – or groupthink in written form?

Who really wants to read feminist children’s books?

30 June 2018 9:00 am

A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’,…

Rod Liddle is wrong: if anything we still hear too much from male presenters on Radio 4

16 June 2018 9:00 am

I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up…

Paying women for housework? Here’s a feminist proposal I actually like

16 June 2018 9:00 am

According to a new study published by some feminist academics at the Australian National University, women risk damaging their health…

Meg Wolitzer. (Rex Features)

The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer reviewed

2 June 2018 9:00 am

It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me…

Terf wars and the ludicrous lexicon of feminist theory

5 May 2018 9:00 am

Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited…

Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes

28 April 2018 9:00 am

The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…

Closing the Queen Elizabeth Hall invigorated the new music scene. Why reopen it?

21 April 2018 9:00 am

Imagine the National inviting RuPaul to play Hamlet. Or Tate giving Beryl Cook a retrospective. The London Sinfonietta offered a…

Ramblings takes an unexpected turn

24 February 2018 9:00 am

This week’s edition of Ramblings with Clare Balding did all the usual things: a walk in the country (cue breathy…

Sometimes men deserve to be paid more

10 February 2018 9:00 am

It is 100 years since women got the vote and I have been joining in the celebrations, on public transport…

Conservatives gave women the vote – but you won’t be reminded of this

3 February 2018 9:00 am

A hundred years ago on Tuesday, King George V assented to the Representation of the People Act. Women got the…

Can I be taught how to become a #MeToo Man?

3 February 2018 9:00 am

These are tough times for what I call the #MeToo Men — those white, liberal, high-minded men who pride themselves…

The #MeToo fury has spilled over into a feminist war

27 January 2018 9:00 am

The #MeToo movement began, I thought, primarily to allow women to speak out about harassment from men, which they had…

Who is Sylvia – what is she?

7 October 2017 9:00 am

In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…

A feminist trailblazer

12 August 2017 9:00 am

On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery,…

Roxane Gay: ruminative, repetitive and solipsistic

A cacophony of complaint

29 July 2017 9:00 am

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…

When did the war on men blight all sides of politics? 

24 July 2017 12:50 pm

When did being a “mediocre white man” become a crime in Australia? When did it become the acceptable butt of…