CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Feminism, it seems, needs a make-over. This week's report by the Future Foundation for Britain's Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), says that few women want to be called 'feminist' now.
The word, apparently, connotes an image of humourless, bra-less, men-hating women in duffel coats tramping and yelling on protest marches.
Talking Equality was issued to mark the 75th anniversary of women winning equal voting rights.
The term, if not the concept, is apparently as unfashionable as a duffel coat. While only a misogynist could believe that women don't deserve equality with men, one female interviewee told the Future Foundation "the word "feminism' has become as outmoded as the suffragettes".
Thus the popular image of feminism has been caricatured and remains frozen in the 1970s. In fairness, the strident feminism of the period, with its public displays and grand conflicts, has the attraction of an archetype. But the media too is partly responsible for this dominant image; it recorded and publicised it. When women quit marching, the cameras and reporters moved on too. The conflict left the street and became confined to the workplace, the courts and, as ever, the home.
Although women have made many gains since the days of public strife, inequalities remain. These are most evident in the distribution of domestic labour and often too in workplace promotions, which contribute to a diminishing yet significant male-female wage gap.
Anyway, the goals of 1970s marchers have been partly but not fully achieved. Thirty years ago, feminists argued that bias against women needed to be addressed by society as a whole. That however was before the rise of feminism"s Frankenstein monster - Margaret Thatcher - and her dictum that, really, there was no such thing as society anyway.
So, political as well as media trends have conspired to privatise feminism, as they have privatised so much else. "There is a phenomenal pessimism among women about all political parties," says the writer and broadcaster Beatrix Campbell. No doubt there is but that is not a pessimism confined to one gender.
Perhaps the most bitter irony is that the term feminism, with all its connotations, has become a fashion victim. "It's almost a fashion thing," says Sue Tibbals, co-author of the EOC report. "It's not that the experience of women has changed or that people think everything is solved but the idea of inequality has become old-fashioned." Pummelled by a prevailing ideology and a media which stress individuality, today's young women don't want to be targeted as part of mass groups. They prefer to be seen as individuals. Given the ineffectiveness of mass movements to change things - Britain, after all, still attacked Iraq despite gargantuan demonstrations against doing so - perhaps they're right.
The stress on individuality (not only among women but among men too) has made it deeply unfashionable to be political. In a world that lionises individual "initiative" and is anti-community and union-busting, people are increasingly left to fight their battles alone. Problems are considered to be personal, not political, so "feminist" has become an unfashionable label.
The report, which, not surprisingly, has attracted criticism because it was "qualitative research" based on the opinions of just 35 "key" respondents, also noted a class dimension attached to the word "feminism". Terms such as "gender-equality" and "work-life balance" were routinely perceived as applying only to "high-flying" women with work careers.
Class, it seems, remains a more accurate predictor than gender of the way life is likely to unfold for people. Certainly, women forced to accept society's more menial jobs have generally made fewer gains from the women's movement than their middle-class sisters. Perhaps women (and men too, of course) could benefit from more cross-class contact.
Whether so-called post-Catholic, post-nationalist Ireland is also post-feminist is impossible to know. British surveys can shed light on matters here but there are always differences too, some large, others mere nuances. It's reasonable, however, to believe that young Irish women think similarly, at least in broad terms, to young British women.
It's tempting, too, to wonder if the current generation of young women, who seek to distance themselves from "feminism", would like to ditch its hard-won gains along with its label. The suffragists who won women the vote, and the derided "feminists" of a generation ago who won employment, maternity and sexual freedoms, must recoil at the ingratitude of the current crowd.
Ultimately, perhaps everybody takes things for granted. By the late 1990s, feminism had popularly transmuted into the "girl power" of the Spice Girls. They, quite conspicuously, didn't wear duffel coats. Instead they cavorted in the kind of tarty rig-outs that 1970s feminists condemned. If they represented female liberation, it was of a nakedly different hue.
It may be impossible to make the term "feminism" fashionable again. But its core belief - that women matter precisely as much as men - hasn't gone away, you know. Nor should it. Perhaps the only hope for the word now is to emblazon it in sequins on outrageously-priced, navel-baring T-shirts with the "right" label. Sad, but at least it would be postmodern.