This is another way feminists get screwed over by history. Women like Barbara Castle and Harriet Harman fought great battles to enact legislation which now seems like common sense. So they get little credit. The mainstream tradition of the party, which once regarded their views as madly fringe, instead rewrites them as pushing on an open door. Men get to be radicals. Women are battleaxes and harridans when they are pushing for change, then irrelevant old biddies, or soft-focus saints, once they've achieved it. In terms of achieving her political agenda, Harriet Harman has had incredible success. And yet the current fashion in Labour is to deride her as an irrelevant 'Blairite', while praising the backbench career of Jeremy Corbyn, which has no significant legislation to show for it.
[London labour organiser] Jayaben Desai nearly suffered a similar neglect. 'I'm sure there are tons of really active Asian women in the trade union movement, but we don't really hear about them,' says [Ayesha] Hazarika. 'I thought, if it would be unusual now for a strong woman of colour to be involved in these type of disputes, I couldn't even believe that a woman back all those years was involved, particularly at a time when Enoch Powell had quite recently mobilised the trade union movement to march.'
Hazarika believes that George Ward, the Grunwick owner, employed South Asian women because he believed they would be submissive, with a strong work ethic, and would 'give him no trouble at all'. Desai's protest, then, smashed expectations of both her ethnic background and her gender.
- Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, London, 2020, p.151
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