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Women: know your limits! 80 years after winning vote, women's rights dubbed more fragile than ever




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Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/ writes in the New Statesman today that equal voting rights haven't meant equal power for women 80 years after women won the right to vote at the age of 21 (before that men could vote at age 21, but women had to wait until they were 30 - less chance of that pesky womanly irrationality setting in once you hit the big 3-0 apparently...)

In fact, the UK today could be considered a worse place for women than it was 80 years ago.

Rape convictions are down, the pay gap is barely closing, men are still all-powerful in media, business and politics, children are offered ever-narrower ideas of what it means to be a girl (pink and passive!) or boy (blue and bolshy!), there are more lap dancing clubs than rape crisis centres, women's bodies are open to everyone's scrutiny and everyone's criticism, and tens of thousands of women lose their job every year simply because they're pregnant.

Is it weird that this anniversary is getting more attention in the US press than in the UK? Except for the, um, Halifax Courier... http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/features/Eighty-years-a...

Are we royally screwed, ladies (and gentlemen)? Is real equality just a pipe dream? Or is it just not worth the effort?
LindseyIndigo

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