One of the many fascinating aspects of Gen Z – those in their late teens and twenties – is the way they talk about intimate health. Which is with great gravity, sometimes even an air of proprietary fondness – and entirely without shame. This applies particularly to young women. Whereas previous generations, mine included, experienced ailments, mysteries and discomfort of the reproductive organs with private “Eww, this is a bit gross” anxiety, today’s young women are fully at ease publicly discussing details of their severe period pain, the agonies of endometriosis, or polycystic ovaries (less so herpes or thrush, so there’s still room for improvement). I know one woman aged 26 who runs a fabulous Instagram feed of her lusciously saucy pole-dancing routines, with frequent pauses to post about her bloating and runny tummy from IBS, and the pyjama days necessitated by “my endo”. None of this is to mock young women for their openness; it is rather to show how far things have come.
Sometimes, however, it can feel as if there are endless accounts of female pain and disorders in mainstream newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, so that if an alien landed and read the papers it would conclude that to be a woman in 2020s Britain is to be born into a mess of physical, social and sexual misery.
In fact, it is the very opposite. Unpopular and gauche as it has become to say, things are actually pretty good for women just now, and as International Women’s Day hoves once again into view on 4 March, I am inclined to be positive.
There are many reasons for optimism and satisfaction, and female health is a good place to start. As we have seen, the strange, oft-dismissed and under-studied agony of endometriosis, taking place deep in our once-scary womanly parts, is now jauntily referred to as “my endo”. Women may experience pain or discomfort, but they can talk about it now, and (usually) expect to be taken seriously. In short, the whole freighted edifice surrounding women’s health has been transformed – with spectacular emotional and physical results.
There are many reasons for optimism and satisfaction, and female health is a good place to start
Our mothers grew up when medical schools retained sex quotas, which continued into the 1970s, when only one in seven doctors was female and gynaecology remained male dominated. As late as 1978, in the view of Nancy MacKeith, author of the New Women’s Health Handbook, close self-examination of genital problems by women was seen “by many people” as “a sexual perversion and an obscene interest in ‘private parts’… To some people a woman knowing her cervix and her vagina is too powerful a tool for her to cope with…she might get an infection…[become] dangerously frightened…[and see threatened] her relationship with the medical profession.”
Then there was the welter of judgement visited either on women with unwanted pregnancies seeking termination or those who struggled with new motherhood. One by one these zones of previously acceptable misogyny have been eroded.
Across the West, young women are drifting left far more violently than their male counterparts
It’s not that we ought to be grateful for receiving the most basic respect, just that we might take a minute amid the itemising of our discomforts to thank our lucky stars that we, and our daughters, live here and now – and can itemise merrily (and productively) away. I am expecting a daughter in the middle of the month and when I think of her future, and the sorts of things I worried about for myself, and that my mother probably worried about for me – from HIV to other unwanted effects of sex, including the virus that causes cervical cancer (for which there is now a vaccine) – I feel relatively relaxed, secure in the knowledge that there’s a solution now for most of the physical and sexual problems she will face.
There is a growing tendency to be overly negative about women’s prospects in other domains too. Capitalism and patriarchy, to listen to some feminists, are more toxic and in cahoots than ever before. Theorist Nancy Fraser reflexively and nimbly connected the two in her iconic 2009 essay, Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History, spotting a “disturbing convergence of some of [feminism’s] ideals with the demands an emerging new form of capitalism – post-Fordist, “disorganised”, “transnational”.
This template has stayed in place and suspicion of the “systems” in which we live now is especially strong among young women. In the UK, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs, a whopping two-thirds of Gen-Z prefer the sound of socialism to the kind of market economies that made them more prosperous and safer at birth than any of their predecessors in history. Across the West, young women are drifting left far more violently than their male counterparts. According to John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s data reporter, the left-right gap between men and women aged 18-30 in the UK is 25 points, while in the US, Gallup data shows women of that age are 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries – a gap that took only six years to open from a position of relative parity. Germany shows the same-sized gap as the US, while in Poland last year only a sixth of eighteen to 21-year-old women backed the right-wing Confederation party, compared to almost half the men.
There’s nothing wrong with being a progressive young woman – it’s far better than the right-wing alternative with its retrograde view of women’s rights – but such progressivism does tend to come with an exaggerated sense of victimhood, and the adherence to role models who, like the pixie-esque journalist Laurie Penny in her 2022 book, Sexual Revolution, insist with gloomy anger that patriarchy is “what we are living in”.
This set of views is in stark contrast to the cheery, work-hard-and-get-ahead liberal feminism of Sheryl Sandberg and her “lean in” philosophy, which is now utterly discredited. Everywhere from Slate to the Washington Post to the New York Post, Sheryl has become the ultimate bogeywoman of feminism: the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the cynic, the shill for patriarchal capitalism. “Sandberg…is little more than another Silicon Valley monster, monetising her personal story while exploiting everyone and everything she can. Feminist leadership was just Sandberg’s Trojan horse. It still is,” snarled writer Maureen Callaghan.
Whatever one’s feelings about rich businesswomen like Sandberg telling working women without affordable access to childcare to “lean in”, I still think the message is positive and the loathing heaped on her seems out of place. After all, as any woman who has lived through several generations will gladly tell you, patriarchy’s claws have been unstuck and the monster all but neutralised. While some of this was thanks to progressive legislation throughout the mid-20th century, it was helped by the onward march and liberalisation of the marketplace. Why should we think the success of people like Sandberg is bad, when it exceeds the wildest dreams of our foremothers, and does nothing to stop other women from living differently, or with different values?
Not everyone thinking about the state of women today will want to rejoice in neoliberalism and indeed that would be a weird thing to expect. But some transformations transcend the politics of the market, and in that spirit why not flag, and enjoy, the fact that women’s educational attainment – better than men’s for several decades in the West – coincides with a close alignment of the gender pay gap for people in their 20s and 30s. And whether they agree with capitalism or see it as a sword of patriarchy, I have yet to meet a young woman who does not enjoy her earnings rising – or who would be in any way content to find her direct male equivalent earned more than her simply because of his sex. Yet this was the omnipresent reality for time immemorial, only fading significantly in the 21st century.
None of this is to suggest that the game has been won: there is much work still to be done. Women in their 40s earn less than men because of the unfair burden (but also pleasures and power of) maternity; girls are still staying away from STEM subjects, and mental disorders of self-esteem appear to be hitting teenage girls as hard as ever, if not harder. Domestic abuse and the murder of women remain a hideous facet of all societies. And while things in the West are better than ever, there is a devastating and perplexing lack of change in women’s prospects elsewhere in the globe; in some places, like Afghanistan, Iran and most Muslim countries, things have only got worse.
But our gain is not their loss; on the contrary, bolstered by our own fortune and strength, young Western women should be in the best position possible to enact their progressive beliefs through hard work on behalf of their sisters living under regimes we have thankfully left behind.
Zoe Strimpel is a columnist and interviewer for the Sunday Telegraph and a historian of gender in modern Britain
