Young feminists repeatedly ignore the concerns of older women – WASPI women deserve their support

It should be incumbent on younger feminists to stand shoulder to shoulder with those being asked to pay the price for a lifetime of exploitation. The alternative is reaching an age when we, too, shall be written off as having been complicit in our own oppression

Women in their sixties and older are essentially being discriminated against for having been discriminated against in the first place. (AFP)

In 1995 the Conservative government announced plans to increase women’s state pension age to 65. I wasn’t aware of it at the time – many of us weren’t – but had I known, I’d have thought it a good idea. What is the point of feminism, if not to ensure women are treated the same as men? And how can any woman expect equality unless she’s willing to be as self-sufficient and independent as any man?

Fast-forward to the present day and it all feels a little different. I remain a long way from claiming my own pension but for women born in the 1950s, changes first mooted a quarter century ago are starting to have a serious effect.

According to a recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, today’s increasing female state pension age has boosted government finances by £5.1bn per year, but left 1.1 million women in their sixties worse off by an average of £32 per week. The poorest women are being hit hardest. If this is equality, how come it feels so darn unfair?

According to the campaign group Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI), there’s nothing wrong in principle with women retiring at the same age as men. The problem lies with how this is being brought about. It’s all very well to commit to treating women the same as men, but when this is selective – when it only applies when the beneficiaries are those other than women themselves – this is not equality at all.

As things currently stand, a lack of adequate personal notification, a job market hostile to women in their sixties, ongoing caring responsibilities and further increases to the SPA in 2011 have left many women struggling. These older women are disadvantaged both by their present low status, and by the after-effects of a lifetime of overt and covert discrimination.

A woman born in 1951 will have been 15 when she left school to start work; 24 when the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Act came into force; 32 when the Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value Amendment was added; 43 when every working woman won the right to take maternity leave. She will have experienced direct and indirect sexism both at home and in the workplace – marital rape was legal until 1991 – and had little personal or state support in caring for dependants. If she was married, the unpaid labour she contributed in the home will have meant more money in her husband’s pocket, not hers.

In an ideal world, such a woman would be owed compensation for a lifetime of sex-based oppression. Female domestic labour and care work have benefited the economy and come at the expense of older women’s own freedom and emotional well-being. That many women are facing poverty in old age because they “didn’t work” and are now considered unemployable compounds the injustice they’ve endured for decades.

Women in their sixties and older are essentially being discriminated against for having been discriminated against in the first place.

It’s interesting that all this is being done to women at a time of supposed gender revolution. The voices raised in honour of smashing the patriarchy seem strangely muted when it comes to issues such as pensions poverty and the ongoing legacy of women having taken years out of the paid work. If we’re being honest, the WASPI campaign isn’t a very fashionable feminist campaign because it’s to do with the end stages of life, a narrowing rather than a broadening of perspectives. It’s not about sisters but mothers and grandmothers – women whom younger feminists might love, but don’t necessarily want to be. What’s more, there’s a degree to which younger women gain reassurance from deciding older women are at least partly responsible for the predicament they find themselves in.

I used to look at women such as my own mother and grandmother and think “I won’t end up like you”. Feminism was made for women like me, who didn’t identify with self-sacrifice and servitude (which older women, I would tell myself, quite obviously did). It took a long time for me to realise, first, that self-sacrifice and dependency are necessary parts of human existence and second, that no woman is born with a dishcloth in one hand and a sick bucket in the other. That older women have made compromises on behalf of others throughout their lives isn’t testament to their femininity; it’s testament to their humanity.

“It is a simple fact that gender fluidity is on the rise” declares the Guardian’s Matthew D’Ancona, as though it isn’t the case that women have, since time immemorial, endured discrimination due to assumptions made about their inner lives on the basis of their sex. There has, surely, never been a time when a woman’s sense of self wasn’t at odds with dominant beliefs about what a woman is.

This is why it should be incumbent on younger feminists to stand shoulder to shoulder with those being asked to pay the price for a lifetime of exploitation. The alternative is reaching an age when we, too, shall be written off as having been complicit in our own oppression. Why didn’t we earn more, do more, live more? When it came to the theft of our time and labour, why didn’t just we say no?

In 1976’s Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich describes how “thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of […]. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her.”

No woman asks to be born at the wrong time, but each and every woman is. It’s only through acting collectively, on behalf of all generations, that we can end the cycle of women being treated as a valuable but ultimately disposable resource.