I’ve been reading Caitlin Moran’s book, How To Be a Woman. Ordinarily, when I find a book that really matters, I put it on the bakery bookshelf, because what’s the point of having something awesome without sharing it? However this is a library book, and I therefore have to share it on a municipal scale. So I’m sharing it here instead.
If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly urge you to. It’s hilarious. And it’s like the bakery, in that it’s about something very, very serious, without taking itself too seriously. If you want people to contemplate Feminism or social injustice, or fighting the powers-that-be, you can’t expect them to do it without enjoying themselves at the same time. Anyone who’s come to the bakery would recognise that I think.
But it got me thinking. We’ve often talked at the bakery about our “gender issues”. Our boards are pretty well balanced, made up of people with skill sets, who just happen to be a mix of male and female. But on a day-to-day basis, the core team of “do-ers” at the bakery are Us Girls And Fred. That would be our band name. Us Girls And Fred.
Now, I went to an all-girl-school, and generally speaking I think of myself as, at most, non-gender (I remember being amazed to discover I wasn’t going on a mate’s stag do, and horrified at the idea of the hen party), but it does feel pretty female at the bakery. We’ve created a workplace that is defined by things culturally associated with the female. Homely, nourishing, hospitable. It’s lovely, accommodating, welcoming.
When you hear about the jobs created in the area by the HMRI, you don’t think “Yes, but are they women’s jobs, or men’s?” because we’ve accepted the lie that we’re living in a post-feminist culture, where we’re all equal and we can stop fighting for “wimmin’s lib.” But the Regeneration is scarily butch. Men demolish the houses, men drive away the lorries full of bricks, men build the new houses. I’ve met the management at Keepmoat, and they were men. The site security are men. And the end result is houses that assume a family is made up of a man who drives off to work in the morning, kids who are in walking distance of their school, who want a garden to play in, and a woman who doesn’t need a parking space, but does need a space for the tumble drier.
Of course women are involved, in offices, in planning and consultation, in positions that the Pankhursts would be proud of. But Regeneration is a man’s game. To say that the jobs created could go to women is generally rubbish. Nobody ever said they would be, of course. But Job Creation, the good news story of the Regeneration, isn’t all good news.
So it’s nice to be part of something that redresses the balance a bit. We don’t intentionally select women, or exclude men, but we seem to be empowering women in a way that the Regeneration doesn’t. Our Master Baker is most likely to be a local girl, our shop manager, likewise. And the creative team on the Tour is made up of a female director, a female writer, a mixed team of locals, and a token bloke*. We don’t think in terms of gender, but neither do we ignore the issue. We treat everybody as an equal, but we don’t assume that equality is something that happens naturally, without effort.
And it’s rather lovely to be Us Girls And Fred, sandwiched between the men in hard hats on the building site and the men in red shirts at Liverpool FC.
*only kidding, Carl with a C!
