Don't forget the F-word

Erica Jong on how the hope she had for women in 1968 has been extinguished Saturday April 12, 2008,

The Guardian

It's an artifice of journalism to choose a given year and pretend that year "changed everything". We constantly hear in the United States that 9/11 "changed everything", yet - for most of humanity - life is still as nasty, brutish and short in 2008 as it was in 1008 or 2008 BC. If it is so for man, it is doubly so for woman - since women and children are the main victims of war - if we go by numbers. But can numbers measure pain? Probably not.

It is a good time for me to be thinking about feminism over the past 40 years, as this week I am in Rome with other writers, thinkers and artists (including Bernardo Bertolucci, Joschka
Fischer and Slavoj Zizek) for a festival of philosophy to mark the anniversary
of 1968. In 1968, there was a great feeling of hope that things might change,
that women might escape from beatings and rape and malnutrition in the
developing world, and that, in our supposedly civilised world, they might find
law degrees, medical degrees, political advancement and economic parity with
their brothers and fathers. Not to mention their husbands.
But it has not come to pass.

Yes, women have law and medical degrees in great number, write books by the carload and are good at it (why should we be surprised, when our first
great poet of love, Sappho, was a woman?), but the world is still not a level
playing field. Women are still not safe on the streets or in their own homes.
And they comprise, with children, most of the world's poor.

Read the rest of Erica Jong's essay, and much more besides, by linking to the excellent Guardian site here.....