PETRONELLA WYATT: I'm single, childless and alone. Feminism has failed me and my generation By Petronella Wyatt Published: 21:20 EDT, 19 May 2024 | Updated: 21:20 EDT, 19 May 2024 e-mail View comments Every Monday I meet with a group of female friends in a London restaurant. We sit at a table near the window and discuss our lives.
We have many things in common. We are all in our mid-50s and highly educated career women. But there is a vacuum in our lives.
We are all single and childless. I increasingly feel, as do many of my intimates, that feminism has failed our generation. I grew up with its beliefs.
No, strike that. I was force-fed them. By the age of 13, Christmas presents from my Women's Lib aunt were books by Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir, considered the mother of modern feminism.
(My aunt was one of those militants who had famously disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest). My peers and I watched Mary Poppins, idolising the determinedly single nanny (never noticing the occasional sadness behind her eyes), and sympathising with suffragette Mrs Banks, while wondering why she didn't leave her dullard of a husband. The feminism I was spoon-fed in my youth made the error of telling members of my sex to behave and think like men, writes Petronella Wyatt Our heroine was Margaret Thatcher, who, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto.
In one of those encounters that make life instructive, I met Lady Thatcher at my late father's house (my father was the p.
