11 March 2018

It’s all about women. Thursday was international women’s day and today in the UK it’s mothers’ day. Is the old Weinstein era over? Golda Meir had it right when, at a time of multiple rapes and her advisors proposing that there be a safety curfew for women, she said ‘If there’s to be a curfew, it should be for men - the perpetrators - not the female victims!’ For centuries outstanding women were overlooked in favour of  men. Rosalind Franklin did all the hard work in the discovery of DNA but the Nobel Prize went to two men, Crick and Watson. Many women writers had to hide behind male pseudonyms to be taken seriously. Today many researchers doubt that the plays by Shakespeare were written by one person. Think of the difference between the kingly battle plays and those like As you Like it, where Rosalind dresses as a man. The latter is much more likely to have been written by a woman who knew that the only way to get noticed in a man’s world was to dress as a man. In today’s UK politics, I get irritated when Theresa May is bullied every week at Ministers’ Question Time by an overwhelming number of men in the Commons. No other country seems to do this. I believe there’ll never be global peace until every leader is a woman!