From the archive, 7 September 1974: Equality for the sexes
Originally published in the Guardian on 7 September 1974
Mr Jenkins’s White Paper on Equality for Women is the right move in the right direction. Its timing, of course, is a political matter. White Papers published on the eves of elections always are political matters; but this one has merits of its own which ought not to be lost in the jeering. In the first place, as Mr Jenkins said yesterday, the title “Equality for Women” also implies equality for men. Its aim is not to exalt women into a privileged world of their own but to forbid and if possible to eliminate the domination of one sex by the other. This is not something that can be done by law alone. Anyone who tries to raise the standards of public behaviour by legislation must run the gauntlet of some fearsome precedents. There was the public school headmaster who told his boys to be pure of heart or he would flog them. Threats do not purify hearts. And in any case how did he know whom to flog?
Mr Jenkins is wiser than the headmaster. He did not claim yesterday that legal sanctions could enforce equality. This could only be achieved by a change in the attitudes of people. On the other hand, Government intervention, he thought, was necessary in order to “push along” the process by which prejudices have been eroded over the past 70 years. The law cannot do the trick alone, but it can help.
The trick is to change society’s frame of mind into the concept of a society of equal people free to use their talents as they wish. The problem is more complicated than one of equal pay for equal work. Equal opportunity is just as important as equal pay. The White Paper advances into several fields which have so far only been discussed – education, terms of employment apart from pay, the granting of credit, and the provision of housing. In all these fields women are worse off than men.
In raising a loan or a mortgage, women are at a disadvantage either because of their sex or because of their marital status. The White Paper says, in effect, that banks and building societies must accept that a woman’s money is as good as a man’s. Which it is.
There are, of course, many more creeping injustices which no law can do anything about. Because less than one seventh of Britain’s doctors are women, many people suppose that women make bad doctors. Because there are only 46 female professors and nearly 3,000 male ones, many people suppose that women are stupid.
People take the effect to be the cause. And the women suffer.
These are disadvantages which no law can wipe out.
Need a Loan? Visit Secured Loans Broker.
