Feminism turned women into miserable 'wage slaves' just like men, says Fay Weldon



Anti-feminist: Fay Weldon has been accused of losing touch with the aspirations of women

Women have been turned into unhappy 'wage-slaves' by the march of feminism, according to one of the movement's pioneers, the author Fay Weldon.

The novelist, 78, believes only the better-off are able to cope with the exhausing nature of modern life.

Weldon told a literature festival that while the sexual revolution of the Sixties had ended the requirement for women to provide 'sexual, childcare and cooking services', the 'downside' of feminism was a new breed of women.

These women, she claimed, are like their male office colleagues and intent only on scaling the salary ladder.

She said: 'The downside of feminism is that women are now expected to go out to work, which some women would rather do than looking after the children anyway.

'Once it was only the men who were wage-slaves, and now it's the men and the women too. You know, I'd really rather blame capitalism.

'Probably 20 per cent of women are worse off and the enormous number are better off.

'You do feel some qualms for these women who actually have to shove their children's arms into clothes at five o'clock in the morning and get them off to the nursery.'

But Weldon, who has four grown up sons and has been married three times, insisted that feminism was the 'least worst' option for women.

Role model: Katie Price 'empowers women by looking good and making money'



'If you're an intelligent, competent and healthy person it's the most wonderful thing,' she said.

'If you have no aspirations and don't want to do anything except exist, than perhaps the pre-feminist world was better. There's never a perfect solution. There's just the least worst.

'And least worst is feminist society, which is more or less what we're getting now. And people are on the whole happier than they were before Although everybody's much more tired.'

The author, best known for The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, was speaking at the Richmond Book Now Festival over the weekend, where she was promoting her 29th novel, Chalcot Crescent.

She also said Katie Price, the former glamour model also known as Jordan, was a positive role model according to certain people's expectations about how women should 'function'.

Weldon said of the celebrity: 'If it's to look good, then she's fine. If it's to make a lot of money, then she's fine.

'So I suppose she must be empowering for women because one wants them to be prosperous and they like to look good.

'She drinks too much and sleeps with too many people and talks about it too much for common decency, but who of us is perfect?'

It is not the first time Weldon has described modern women as wage-slaves.

In an interview ten years ago, she said capitalism crept in 'under the cloak of feminism' and 'cunningly turned women as well as men into wage slaves, so that 'the employer' not 'the man' is woman's new enemy'.

In 2004, in an essay on the newly-released Briget Jones film The Edge of Reason, she described the main character as a 'wage slave' for whom the feminist revolution had passed by.