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We’re All Equal Now, So We Should Shut Up and Go Home

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Feminism’s over, they say. It’s achieved all its goals. Women are equal now, so we should all shut up and go home. But if feminism has really succeeded, why does it still feel like we’ve got so much further to go?

‘Empowerment’ has been co-opted to mean any choice a woman’s able to make at all, whether or not that’s appearing in Zoo Weekly or having cosmetic surgery to make her body more monotonously mainstream.

Rape and sexual assault is still discussed through the prism of female responsibility, with conviction rates remaining depressingly low. Women are less likely to hold roles in public office or in the public eye at all, with the gender pay gap widening. And that’s just in the West. Women and girls are still the world’s primary victims of rape, violence, lack of education and poverty.

So if this is equality, why does it taste so weak?

Featuring

Clementine Ford

Clementine Ford is a Melbourne-based writer, speaker and feminist thinker. She is a columnist for Fairfax’s Daily Life and is a regular contributor to the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Through her twice-weekly columns for Daily Life, Clementine explores issues of gen... Read more

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The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.