USA Africa Dialogue Series - Diana Athill: legendary book editor

Diana Athill: legendary book editor

By Diana Athill

Published: December 10 2010 19:29 | Last updated: December 10 2010 19:29

It's difficult for any woman of my age to assess the condition of her sisters in the last decade, because she has spent it in the luxurious indifference to gender which comes with being very old. What I do know is that nine decades have made a vast difference for us. When I was a child, there were no women doctors, no women lawyers, no women clergy, no women publishers, very few women journalists, very few women artists, no men attending the births of their children, and I doubt that any man had ever changed a nappy: it was a different world.

It has not, of course, become easy for a woman to enter any profession hitherto considered the preserve of men. Three years ago a young surgeon I know was horrified by the hostility she met with from some of her male fellow-students. But it didn't prevent her from qualifying and she is all set to prosper. Having clambered over the fence, what women now have to do is learn how to keep on their feet and be nimble on the other side. How they have recently managed it I have to judge from the media rather than from experience – which has put me off the media.

It appears to show that as far as men are concerned the world is full of pig-headed sexual bullies and flocks of hysterical clergymen fluttering off to Rome at the sight of a skirt; while as for women, if grown-up they spend a great deal of time and money having their faces and bodies surgically remodelled; and if young, their ideal is a girl who looks drugged while sprawling helplessly in garments slipping off one skinny shoulder and almost revealing her crotch (this fashion may have belonged to the 1990s, not the 2010s – I'm too old to be sure about fashions). The picture of men is not all that surprising: one has, after all, always known that a good many of them are like that. The picture of women, on the other hand, is saddening. The magazines aimed at young girls are particularly depressing. Presumably they are run mostly by women, but they are focused almost entirely on being sexy enough to catch your man. Judging from the media, a lot of women are now confusing how to be brave and "liberated" with how to invite rape

Equality between the sexes can't be secure until pay is equal. We must, I suppose, go on hoping it will happen one day, but I wouldn't bet on it. What happens in the boardroom ought not to have anything to do with what happens in the bedroom, but given that men are physically stronger than women and can go through any number of sexual encounters unaffected, while just one such encounter has the potential to change a woman's life for good (unless she subjects her body to drastic chemical intervention), how can there not be a connection? A creature that knows itself to be stronger than another creature, and that it can get away with things – has always been and always will be able to get away with things… Well, it would have to be overcome by a truly astounding fit of generosity in order to give up the position of top dog in any field that it believed to be really important. To let such tiresome facts totally govern behaviour, as Muslims do, is obviously out of the question in the west, but still western women ought to remember them and understand that being "liberated" entails working at ways of living with them – and sometimes recently I have thrown down a newspaper in despair, thinking that today's women are giving up the struggle.

Luckily I only have to go out and walk down a high street, meet friends in a coffee shop, buy some groceries and visit the library – and there are all those real people trundling about, looking much as they have always looked, and what is the quality they seem, in spite of their endless variety, to share? It is, thank goodness, common sense. I look at us, and think that although the foolish trends so infallibly reflected by the media do certainly exist, the majority of us disregard them, going quietly on as we always have done – or so we believe. But fortunately our customary way has, in fact, slowly been shaped by what was useful in the trends and upheavals of the past: witness the great changes in how women think and live that I have seen in my lifetime. Surely it cannot be unreasonable to hope that in spite of wobbles that process will continue.

'Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill' is published by Granta Books.