Читать книгу Super Confidence: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 14

The feminist movement has, of course, had a tremendous impact on the lives of women.

But, although women have achieved tremendous advances in their battle against sexism and inequality, we still live in a society in which men hold real power over the vast majority of women. Equal opportunity is really still a dream. In Britain, even after a spell of being governed by a woman Prime Minister, the nation remains ruled largely by men. Women are slowly creeping up the management ladder in industry and the professional organizations, but it will be many years before any real balance of power in the public world is achieved.

Nobody can argue any longer about the rights of women. It’s like arguing about earthquakes. Lilian Hellman

Although we are all aware of the many changes which have taken place, there is also abundant evidence to show that men still hold the real power in most families. This power is often embedded in the family finances.

Nowadays most married women work. But we know that this is still often part-time, temporary and low-paid work. Very few wives are able to earn more than their husbands. Working mothers are particularly hard-hit because not only do they have to battle with the general discrimination against women in the world of work, but they also have to cope with many other practical problems.

Even in the most liberal of families, where equality is genuinely being strived for, you find that choices have to be made. The result is that a woman’s earning power may be reduced. If one partner’s job has to suffer because a child is sick, a child minder is on holiday, or the family decides to move, whose job is protected? Usually it is the man’s, if only because it seems to make sound economic sense to protect the job which pays the most and is the most secure. Even as a successful, assertive, professional woman, this is a choice I have had to make many times in my life, and it is a choice that hurts. It can eat away at your self-esteem, especially if you are already lacking in confidence or have other reasons not to feel powerful and in control of your life.

As ‘Daddy’s little girls’ many of us were raised dreaming of a prince who would be bristling with confidence and who would battle through the undergrowth to rescue us. Colette Dowling has called this the ‘Cinderella Complex’ in her book of the same name (Pocket Books, 1981) and forcibly argues that women must recognize and own this yearning for dependence and desire to be saved.

We must also remember that stereotypes such as this affect our sexual behaviour and those around us.

And in the world of work, I once heard some women talking self-deprecatingly about their role in the workplace (in this case a factory). They said things like, ‘Women can put up with boring jobs, men need something more to occupy them,’ and ‘It’s not a bad life for a woman anyway.’

Somewhere deep in our subconscious, men and women alike often associate being ‘good’ with playing the demure second fiddle to a man. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that men do generally have more confidence if, as women, we perpetuate the stereotypes in our own behaviour and in the way we continue to parent, educate and generally encourage boys and men to possess ‘masculine’ traits, and girls and women to possess the ‘feminine’ ones.