No one doubts that The Fawcett Society’s campaign for equality for women is laudable and sincere.

Or that its much-discussed T-shirts bearing the motto ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like’ are a neat piece of political sloganeering – making the point that feminism and equality should concern all of us. That they are not a niche interest for the militant fringe.

But as a woman who has devoted my life to the rights of women, both as the founder of the ground-breaking feminist magazine Spare Rib and as the editor of two national newspapers, I am ashamed and appalled that the society has scored such a monumental own goal – and betrayed its own principles – by having the T-shirts manufactured in a Mauritian sweatshop.

T-shirts with the motto 'This is What a Feminist Looks Like' are made at the CMT factory just outside the capital of the island of Mauritius

And in my view a sweatshop is precisely what it is: not least because that is how a Mauritian union official on the ground described the factory.

While London fashionistas and point-scoring politicians brag about their right-on credentials by wearing the £45 shirt, the predominantly female migrant workers who actually make them have to work a gruelling 45-hour basic week, live in barrack-style dormitories, 16 to a room, and are paid a derisory 62p an hour to make ends meet.

For The Fawcett Society to respond to The Mail on Sunday’s revelations by saying ‘all workers are paid above the official minimum wage’ adds insult to injury.

The minimum wage they are so proud of is just a third of the official ‘living wage’.

Furthermore, the society claims that the workers’ wages ‘reflected their skills’ and that ‘staff turnover levels were low’. Where do they expect them to go? We are talking about some of the poorest women in the working world, sending what little money they earn back to their desperate families in Bangladesh and India.

Such conditions would never be allowed in this country and should not be supported and endorsed by The Fawcett Society just because they are out of sight and out of mind.

The £45 T-shirts are made by women earning 62p an hour at the CMT factory (pictured) in Mauritius

The principle could not be more important: the crucial difference between empty words and real action.

There’s nothing remotely feminist about having T-shirts made by poorly paid migrant workers in the Third World. And there’s nothing remotely feminist about defending the conditions those workers endure, as The Fawcett Society did last week.

Feminism is too important to be failed like this.

The issue of women and low pay is critical to the feminist cause.

Even 45 years after we founded Spare Rib, there is still discrepancy between the pay of men and women.

The lowest paid people in our society are women on fixed-term contracts.

They have no security and no back-up. But they are still the ones who are left to raise the children and care for the elderly.

The same is true across the world – in both the developed and the undeveloped world.

So for The Fawcett Society to commission T-shirts without going to the trouble of finding out who exactly is going to make them and what they are going to be paid, is not only foolish but also deeply insulting.

How much better a political statement would have been made if a substantial proportion of the £45 price tag went to give a decent wage to female garment workers.

Surely it would only have added a few pounds to the cost?

And instead of trying, as The Fawcett Society did, to defend the decision to have the T-shirts made in Mauritius and the conditions endured by the workforce, might it not have been better to apologise and resolve that future production might empower women with decently-paid work?

I'm appalled at this huge own goal. We expect better

If we, as women in the West, cannot extend that generosity both of spirit and of bank-balance, then we should question just how far we have got as feminists ourselves.

It is an interesting sidenote that no one from The Fawcett Society has bothered to go to the factory, while the journalists from The Mail on Sunday they seek to discredit have.

I remember going with a union leader called May Hobbs to talk to women who were cleaning toilets at Heathrow Airport in 1972. They were paid disgracefully – this was before the minimum wage – and they couldn’t compare their pay with male counterparts as there were no men in the same job.

Sadly, this same exploitation seems to be de rigeur in the modern fashion industry.

Even clued-up consumers often turn a blind eye to far-off exploitation embodied in the disposable fashion sold for a few pounds in the pile-em-high sell-em-cheap end of the high street.

But when you pay £45 for a T-shirt espousing a high-minded feminist cause, you expect better.

What seemed clear to me in 1972 in the toilets of Heathrow seems equally clear now. There can be no rest for the crusade of feminism until every woman is fairly paid.