Interview
The Latest Feminist Debate
Rosie Boycott, Photo: Prabir Das
As a champion of feminist writing and an avid activist of women rights Rosie Boycott continues to challenge the status quo. From basic rights of women to own a car or property, to decriminalisation of cannabis, Boycott has fearlessly fought for social justice and equality of the sexes.
In 1972 she co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib with Marsha Rowe. She was also one of the directors of Virago Press, a publishing concern committed to women's writing. From 1992–96, she was editor of the men's magazine Esquire. Boycott was the first woman editor of The Independent and its sister publication the Independent on Sunday (1996–98). She was also editor of the Daily Express from 1998 to 2001. Boycott has presented the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read. She has sat on judging panels for literary awards, notably chairing the panel judging the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. Boycott is a Trustee of the Hay Festival in the UK and in Cartagena, Colombia. In conversation with the Star she talks about the various stages of her career and the challenges women continue to face all over the world.
One thing that is quite intriguing is that - you've been preoccupied pretty much all your life promoting feminist writing but then in 1992 you became editor of Esquire magazine which was supposed to be a men's magazine. How did that happen?
Esquire was a magazine started in America in the 60s and it was all about wonderful writing really; wonderful journalism - The reason I came to Hay was because of Esquire. But I was also very interested in it (Esquire) because in the 90s that was the start of a whole new school of journalism with men talking about their feelings. Up until then it was women talking about sex love, relationships etc.
In Esquire we were able to write all that and it made the men a little more feminine, more thoughtful. I always loved the magazine. It's my favourite magazine in the world because I loved the writing. It was a heavenly job. A super job.
How did you start promoting feminist writing?
I started a magazine called Spare Rib in1972. I was just 20-21. I stayed two years. Spare Rib was the first main feminist magazine. It was very different for women then. You couldn't rent a car or buy a car or get a mortgage for a flat if you didn't get your husband or father to sign.
So I started Spare Rib and then Virago - which did very well.
Where did all that activism stem from? Was it related to how you were brought up or just a personal consciousness that evolved naturally?
It was a personal consciousness. Certainly my early sense of feminism was.
My mother had a very frustrated, sad life. She was very clever, well educated and yet she ended up not doing much. She used to read all the time. She used to say she wanted to do things but somehow was never able to do them. What she did do, whether knitting or sewing she was not very good at those but she was very clever. She would have been very good at a lot of other things. She was not a very happy woman. Initially I was just very keen that I would have a very different life from my mother.
How much of an impact has feminist writing/activism on British society?
Yes everything that has happened 40 years ago has had a huge impact. Women's possibilities have changed a lot .
You had to get the politics to say that there was a law that said women should get equal pay as men, had to have a law that said you could have contraception, abortion, a law that said it was okay to get divorce. Women now have changed dramatically and girls can grow up thinking they can do anything.
Where it hasn't changed in the UK is for women who are poor - they still have no childcare provided by state, communities tend to be fractured so you don't have a situation where your mother or grandmother is there to take care of the child. People tend to get trapped into a spiral of poverty because the state doesn't embrace the notion of the working mother. In Scandinavia, in some countries free child care is mandatory. It means you can work without having to hire a private nanny.
What about women writers, are they being published more?
Yes without a doubt they are. Virago published a lot of writers that had been semi-forgotten - poeple who had a brief period of being known about - but then got lost.
There are more women writers now. But we still have – the Orange Prize for women writers - it's now called the Bailey's Prize for Fiction. Every year there's a row with people asking: why do we have a prize for women?
But generally, if you look at reviews they tend to be men's books; sales of literary books and the books that get the airtime are tend to be written by men.
The Baileys Prize gets terrific writers - not that they wouldn't get prizes anyway - Margaret Atwood, Lionel Shriver etc. I think there's still a feeling among the fraternity that much needs to be done.
At this point in our world what would you say is the most challenging issue in the movement for equal rights?
I think the next international debate is - are we separate but equal and tends to acknowledge more difference.
40 years ago, the issue was - if we could just change the laws it would be enough.
But there are lots of things they (women) don't want to do. Women don't necessarily want to do only one thing. Many women in America who had big jobs turned away from them because they also wanted a life.
I organise the WOW fest South Bank in London and in one of them we had an Indian woman chief of Prisons. In the fest there was a divided feeling- someone said: if we say this - 'separate but equal' it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I remember when we started Spare Rib we wrote 'liberation is for both men and for women. It is just as much of a gender trap to be at home with your children as it is to go to work for 50 years to pay for the wife and those children on your own and for both sides the liberation was - yes there will be some guys who want to share the work and/or have some time at home and some women who want to go to work.
We were wonderfully optimistic, bright eyed but that's what we said in the first issue.
But it became clear that it had to be about women otherwise it would be too wishy-washy, too vague so it became about women.
That's what I liked about Esquire that it acknowledged that we (women) like to talk to each other, spend time with our kids and are multitalented; that the role of a woman is not in iron cast; sometimes they are choosing not to work. And that choice, at the moment in our society, is still viewed as a weakness. We are not honouring it. We still say being a mother- it's nothing. A whole lot of women's tasks have no status.
Was there a conscious effort while at Esquire to promote these ideas?
Yes I loved working with women. I worked at the Independent, then the Daily Express which was a huge paper, I had a lot of women in the paper in big jobs.
The thing that we got all wrong 40 years ago is that we thought we would not be so hung up on make up, looks and fashion. And in fact, now we are a million times more - hung up on them...
Why do you think that is?
It's a combination of marketing and the guilt within women that is very strong. Because we've moved into an area where our role is much less clear, it's very easy to make a woman feel unsure of herself. The most seemingly confident women has at the core this fear - Should I be doing this? Am I right? Am I as good as the boys? I want to leave early to be with my kids... There's always a pressure; there are different kinds of pressures for women who work. And we have colluded with the industry around the notion of 'looks' and looks have become part of the package to look impeccable.
You have campaigned for the decriminalisation of cannabis use by individuals - what was that all about?
Well I think I've gone much further in my thinking. I think we should legalise all drugs. You need to change the way you look at drugs. Say it is world health problem, not a world crime problem. The illegal drug trade has destroyed countries like Columbia and the money is evil. But people make so much money out of a substance that harms people.
There are people in the UK who die of heroin. They don't die of heroin, they die because of the stuff that's been put into heroin by the dealers to make the drug go further.
Actually we've lost the war. Apart from arms, drugs are the second biggest industry in the world. All that money is in the hands of criminals. It's ridiculous. There are more drugs (in the world) than less drugs.
I think in places where it (drug control) has failed it would be better to say it's legal - we can tax it, control it and the money would go out of it. It would return to being a crop and countries (that grew it) could make money out of it.
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