By Shami Chakrabarti, Allen Lane, 240 pages, £20
Roshuni Tiruwa was 15 when she died, almost literally, of shame. The shame was not, of course, hers. She had absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. She was simply a teenage girl in a part of rural Nepal still practising a tradition known as chhaupadi, or the isolation of girls and women during menstruation because they were believed to be somehow unclean and toxic.
When they had their periods, girls would be banished from their homes at night and made to sleep alone in outhouses, where they were vulnerable not only to attack from snakes and other wild animals but also from predatory humans. Roshani, however, is thought to have suffocated to death in the tiny, cold hut after lighting a fire for warmth.
Shami Chakrabarti tells the story in her new book in a slightly more matter of fact way than this, but a more thought-provoking one.
It’s part of a chapter that leaps from this extreme and almost medieval form of taboo to the modern western lament about why TV ads for sanitary products have to be so twee, featuring soothing blue liquids rather than shocking red ones.
For a reader who knows all about the fuss over Bodyform ads but has never heard of chhaupadi, this chapter engenders its own twinge of shame; a realisation of how astonishingly lucky western women are, if coy tampon marketing strategies are as bad as it gets for us.
But Chakrabarti doesn’t labour the point or turn it into a lecture, beyond gently pointing out in her conclusion that anyone reading this book is fairly privileged by global standards (for a start, they can read, which isn’t to be taken for granted elsewhere).
It’s easy to feel sad and angry about the barbaric things still inflicted on girls in some parts of the world, she says, “but it is important nonetheless to look at all of our somewhat strange and warped attitudes to the biological cycle of women, without which none of us would exist”.
Women may be suffering to a greater or lesser extent in different cultures but these are all points on the same spectrum. It’s not about playing one more privileged set of women off against the other, but illuminating the underlying question: why on earth is something that happens to half the planet a taboo in the first place?
And that’s the strength of this book, though itis rather dry in places, written almost in the style of an academic essay. There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture.
Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman — middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues — and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’tnecessarily lead her to anyradically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyonce, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won.
Anyone who previously enjoyed On Liberty, Chakrabarti’s story of running the civil liberties organisation through a series of epic battles over human rights law, will find this a rather different book. There is an obvious connecting thread. She maintains gender injustice “may be the greatest human rights abuse on the planet”, given it targets half the population and isn’t limited to any one country or period. She is unashamed about coming at it from a human rights perspective, but this feels like a new direction for the author.
That may partly reflect her transition from running Liberty to being a card-carrying Labour frontbencher and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. Here she embraces more radical ideas such as a universal basic income from the state, allowing both men and women to spend more time caring for children or elderly people if that’s what they want.
Disappointingly, she doesn’t address the question of whether that might lead to women being sidelined into care while men carry on working, nor whether directing generous benefits towards the poorest, who are disproportionately likely to be women, would actually be a more feminist use of the cash.
The story of Liberty, with both a big and small “l”, was one Chakrabarti had lived professionally for years and on which she was a confident voice of authority. In this book, she is sometimes a little too anxious to show she’s done the homework properly. At times the thread of an argument is lost in a wealth of examples, or the argument itself is made too sketchily in the rush to take on the next big issue. Readers could perhaps have done with a bit less exhaustive quotation from UN reports, and more of her own voice.
The book is at its best when she goes somewhat off piste. There is an unexpected and absorbing chapter on the rarely discussed topic of how feminists reconcile their views with various religious faiths (more easily, it turns out, than you might think).
And for every time she is trotting out a routine argument about, say, the importance of sex education in British schools there’s a vignette from outside Britain that brings you up short. In the 10 countries scoring worst on female education — which range from Afghanistan to Ethiopia — the poorest young women had spent less than a year in school, and most of those had never been to school. Pakistan is a sophisticated nuclear power but still doesn’t seem able to ensure that even half of its women can read.
Why are so many of us who wouldn’t even hesitate to call ourselves feminists not more aware of this stuff, more agitated by it, more willing to give it the same space and attention we give to episodes of sexist mansplaining on Twitter? Which is not to say the latter doesn’t matter. But there is a whole wide world out there of things that matter, and most of what we read isbarely showing us the half of it.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
