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It’s now a month since my partner popped the question. Yet despite making the decision to betray the sisterhood by joining the patriarchal institution of marriage, I’ve never felt so feminist.
Why? Because I’m not wearing an engagement ring, and going by the incredulity this provokes, this makes me some kind of radical.
On hearing my news, the first response of pretty much every woman I’ve told has been “ooh, let me see the sparkly!”.
I have to break it to them that not only is there no sparkly, but There Will Be No Sparkly. The reaction this gets from other women has been bizarre to say the least.
They look at me pityingly, assuming I have a bare finger because either my partner is too tight or the pair of us too poor to afford a ring. This isn’t the case; we have simply chosen not to buy one, because I hate engagement rings – both in theory and practice.
First, I’m not one for ostentatious displays of wealth; I don’t wear any jewellery besides some simple earrings, and really don’t fancy the thought of a £2,000 rock on my finger. I’d rather not wear my fiancé’s taste and credit rating on my left hand, thanks. Knowing me, I’d probably lose it anyway.
I particularly hate the trend toward bigger, bling-ier rocks, worn by WAGs and the like. One acquaintance of mine even went so far as to ‘upgrade’ her ring after five years of marriage to one costing enough for a deposit on a house. Which just proves the point that for many brides it is about flashiness and not a simple reminder of a special moment in one’s life.
One onlooker – a complete stranger, to boot – even suggested I should get a rock as some kind of insane insurance policy “in case he backs out”. Do people actually do that? That’s tragic, if so.
Not buying a ring means we can spend the money instead on the holiday of a lifetime. Spending six weeks together in South America will give us both considerably more joy, pleasure and happy memories than a diamond ring ever will.
Moreover, my decision not to sport a solitaire means my fiancé isn’t contributing two months’ salary to prolonged wars in Africa, nor the death and displacement of millions of people caused by the harsh realities of the diamond trade.
To me the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity, signifying the woman as passive ornament and the man as provider. So it seems strange to me that feminism has made progress on many retrograde customs, but scarcely mentions the sexist practice of publicly marking a woman as “purchased” and “off the market” while requiring no such relational signifier of the male partner.
So with apologies to J-Lo: don’t be fooled by the rock I ain’t got. Instead I’ll have a clear conscience, some amazing holiday memories and no ‘insurance policy’.
And at our wedding ceremony next year, we will both give and receive rings as a symbol of our love and commitment. Those rings will be loaded with meaning, for both of us, and I hope we will wear them for the rest of our lives.
In this piece in today’s Guardian, Deborah Orr asks where the women have gone in contemporary literature.
All of the top five bestselling titles in this week’s Sunday Times Bestseller list included the word Girl. Not woman, but girl. As Orr notes:
In the 1970s, there was a groundswell of opinion suggesting that “girl” was a highly pejorative way of describing a female who was over 18, used to belittle her and rob her of status. Yet these books all lay claim to celebrating female power. Perhaps “girl” is being reclaimed, like the n-word before it.
But in these books (and in popular culture more generally), the term ‘girl’ isn’t used in an ironic or confrontational sense. It isn’t being appropriated to undermine its pejoritive sense; instead, it infantilises its female characters, labelling them as as immature and unthreatening.
While some might say the use of the term girl to describe adult females is harmless – flattering, even, with its implications that the subject is still young and pretty. But we’re now 15 years on from the era of Girl Power, and still I find it patronising and belittling when used to describe a grown woman. When, at work last year, someone referred to me as ‘girl’, the implications were clear; they weren’t referring to my clear(ish) skin – they were questioning my maturity and professional experience.
The message from these book titles, says Orr, is that women are dreary and past-it, while girls are dynamic and exciting. She worries that, in popular culture “women are being infantilised, and that they prefer it that way”.
To me the argument is a little more chicken-and-egg than that. Do women really prefer to be infantilised? Or are we conditioned by popular culture to believe being young and infantile – being a girl – is preferable to maturity and womanhood?
Carrie Bishop asks why we see the same people – men – speaking at conferences:
…it’s not about women being better qualified to speak on the basis of their gender – no one wants the idiot quota to go up at events. Rather, we want good quality speakers that reflect a diversity of opinion and it’s impossible to get that with only one demographic slice. Women often have a different take on things (not better, not worse, just different) and I like to hear different perspectives. The more demographically mixed an audience is, the better for challenge, difference of opinion, different cultural assumptions, and energy.
She sets out a few possible solutions for getting more women’s voices heard. What do you think?
This article argues that Etsy.com – the ebay-style site for people to buy and sell handmade crafts – has become a women’s ghetto, full of hobbyists making little or no money from the site.
The proportion of male sellers on Etsy is less than 4% – smaller than in nursing.
“I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.”
Research at Reading University has shown women leaders are more likely to censor the language they use at work to avoid being judged.
Students interviewed 10 senior female and 10 senior male leaders from FTSE 500 companies about how they speak to colleagues.
They found that women consciously police what they say so they neither sound too feminine, and therefore weak, nor too masculine, and therefore assertive.
Link in the title. I thought this research was an interesting counterbalance to the Deborah Cameron book we’re reading for the next meeting.
Josephine Grahl
Sharon O'Dea
scarlettmcqueen
