This inconsistency is a little uncomfortable to discuss for feminists on the left, who favour a movement which places more emphasis on issues such as poverty, precarity, racism and inequality than on concerns primarily affecting middle-class women. Media-friendly feminism has often been tone-deaf or worse on issues of class or race, and this tendency can be seen in a constant emphasis on the need for affordable childcare to assist mothers to return to work – an emphasis which often entirely overlooks the pay and conditions of the mostly women who work in the childcare sector.

Incredibly and against all odds, my modest writerly dreams, for what they were, came true. But culminating in my early thirties, prime child-bearing age, they coincided with the births of two children, complicating things in the way that parenthood has been complicating the lives of men and women forever.

Two books came lovingly wrapped to the breakfast table on Father’s Day. The first was Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and the other was Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. At first glance the two books appear to have very little in common. I am a fan of the […]