This piece started with the assumption that in 2017 we would have a feminised global stage: there’d be Hillary Clinton in the White House, Theresa May in Downing Street, Angela Merkel in the Bundeskanzleramt, and Marine Le Pen in a hollowed-out volcano. I wanted to know: what would such a spectrum of women in power, with their various viewpoints, tell us about “women’s politics”? Is there such a thing? Is it a good thing? And how do you square a feminist desire for female leaders with the ascension of non-feminist ones? But it didn’t quite turn out like that. Now, those questions seem peripheral.

When Donald Trump won, the notion of a broad, instinctive female solidarity was brutally exposed as myth: open misogyny in word, demeanour and the shape of a dozen sexual assault allegations deterred only a minority of women voters.

But now that we are in the grip of strongman politics, it is impossible to give up on the notion of “women’s politics”. We face a gender equality crisis. The sharp end of this is that any authoritarian politician, from President Trump to Ukip’s Paul Nuttall, tends to be anti-abortion, having correctly identified that the best way to dominate a woman is to take away her choice of when to be a mother. But that’s just the beginning: big daddy politics seeks no consensus, brooks no resistance, acknowledges no pluralism. We no longer have the luxury of time, which means ditching nuanced debate in favour of action. But action how?

Already Trump’s inauguration has generated one response, the thing people do when they must do something but don’t know what: they take to the streets. Today’s Women’s March on Washington, planned by a woman named Bob Bland, references both the March on Washington of 1963 and the Million Woman March on Philadelphia in 1997; a UK version is also taking place in London.

When I spoke to the organiser, Emma McNally, a 47-year-old artist, I thought she was being evasive on the “women’s politics” question. It wasn’t evasion, she said, it was a resistance to oversimplification, which, she says “infantilises us and makes us very malleable. If we know who we are, we know who we belong with, then we feel strong, we can act with certainty.” In other words, you can’t just meet the simplicity of the tough guy with the simplicity of the elemental woman.

You’ll waste a lot of time if you get mired in a discussion of what women’s values are – cooperation, empathy, humanity, solidarity – and whether or not one gender has a right to annex them. This is what Sophie Walker, leader of the new-ish Women’s Equality Party (WEP), remembers of the unfeminist 90s. “We were always being diverted into a conversation about what feminism was. We couldn’t ever get to the point of what a feminist does, because we had to spend all that time talking about what one looks like.” The challenge now, she says, is to “look at all politics through the lens of gender, because that’s the only way we’re going to build a country that functions properly, in which everybody is seen and everybody is heard.”

When Donald Trump won, the notion of a broad, instinctive female solidarity was brutally exposed as myth. Photograph: John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images

Twenty-one years ago, a series of postcards appeared in the Body Shop, which in those days wasn’t a way to kill time in a station, but rather the embodiment of progressive consumerism. Its founder, Anita Roddick, was a feminist and an environmentalist who, with activists Bernadette Vallely, Sue Tibballs and others, asked an open-ended question: what do women want?

Their methodology was not dissimilar to Shere Hite’s 1976 report on female sexuality: you could be anonymous or not, and the sample was “whoever replies”. The flaws in this approach – basically, that it preselected women who could afford to arse about in the Body Shop, and could also afford a stamp – have been exhaustively pointed out. The fact is, with 6,000 replies, containing 46,000 suggestions, it remains the biggest independent survey of women ever undertaken in the UK. At the end of 2015, Tibballs and others launched it again, and their What Women Want 2.0 is still in train; the Women’s Equality party has been collecting some of the responses while canvassing.

I worked on the original report, in a very peripheral capacity, and not for the right reasons (I was chasing a guy; it was quite circuitous, but it worked). I didn’t believe in the report, not at all: the language felt soft and victimy; it was all about childcare and maternity leave, which is not at all interesting when you haven’t got children; and violence against women, which is – of course! – vitally important, but couldn’t harness or accommodate the politics of optimism that prevailed at the time. I was waiting for a world in which children weren’t a “women’s issue”, given that half the bloody things are male (and half of the making is done by men). A recurring demand for “a healthy planet and respect for our planetary resources” seemed to imply that women, by our very natures, cared more about the future. Elsewhere in the report, “a National Health Service with proper funding” got rolled into “support for positive and alternative health”, as if socialising medicine and believing in homeopathy were one and the same.

I wasn’t the only sceptic: famously, the 1990s saw a dip in the popularity of feminism. At the Evening Standard newspaper, where I then worked, it was not unusual to get letters from readers saying, “Yes, I agree with equal pay and abortion rights. But would I call myself a feminist? No thanks!”

Theresa May – is she better or worse than Margaret Thatcher? Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Last October, at the south London office of the Women’s Equality party, members of the What Women Want team sat down with party staff to compare the original 1996 responses with today’s, and ask what’s changed in 20 years. I expected to hear about newfangled concerns. Cybercrime, perhaps, or polyamory.

In fact, most things haven’t changed, and those that have have changed for the worse. Women still want decent childcare and equal wages, but now they also want to be able to afford the rent; they still want to feel safe in public spaces, but now they would also like, if you please, not to get death threats every time they go online and give a view; they still want environmental sustainability to come before profit, but global solidarity has largely slipped out of the language (though there are positive signs that it’s back again: the recent threat to limit abortion rights in Poland sparked the Black Umbrellas protests across Europe).

In the 90s, women talked a lot about what they wanted from their boyfriends and partners: sometimes help with the chores, sometimes sex, sometimes recognition. Now, there’s plenty about men en masse, how they should be educated about rape and consent; but in terms of the relationships that build their identity, women talk only about their children. This seems completely obvious to the women I speak to in their 20s. “It would be so out of fashion now to hinge my identity as a feminist on my relationship with my partner,” says Priscilla Mensah, members officer for the WEP. Hannah Peaker, the WEP’s chief of staff, recalls one poignant response that struck her: “One woman talking about the disappointment – that moment, either when children come along, or you’re trying to buy a house, when you realise that equality wasn’t real, when you see how sexist things are underneath.”

Peaker is savage on the way the rise of freelance work has impacted women. “There’s been this really clever branding around women entrepreneurs. But if you look at the data, these are women who have been driven to working for themselves because they couldn’t get the flexibility they needed. They’re just doing the same jobs with no rights, no benefits, no maternity leave.”

Pensions have about equal prominence in the original report and today, except that then the problem was that the system was based on the male-breadwinner model, and divorced pensioners lost out; now, the 2011 Pensions Act (which brought women’s pensionable age into line with men’s) means that all women born in the 1950s lose out. “The responses were more or less exactly the same, almost word for word: ‘I’ve worked 44 years, and it’s completely unfair,’” says Mensah. “There was a real sense of injustice.” One cannot help wondering whether, if women pushing 60 were as large a part of the body politic as men, this change would have been sprung on them so blithely.

I don't want to change the world any more. I just want violence against women to stop, violence against everybody…

One striking similarity between the 90s and now is the complaints about media representation: the invisibility of older women; objectification; women described according to their looks rather than their achievements. There is no perceptible difference in the importance women place on safety – from harassment, from violence – although two decades ago there was more discussion around international security, the threat of war, the nuclear threat. “I’m struck,” Tibballs says, “by how safety is still such a big thing.” Peaker tells us she has spoken to women, while campaigning, who say “they probably spend about an hour extra a day planning around safety, without even thinking about it”. One woman talked about it as a tax, the way she would have to get a taxi after 11pm, to avoid the walk home, or join a gym, because she couldn’t run through a park in the winter.

“It’s such a foreign issue to men,” says publicist Will Hill, who has been involved in the new survey. “I did a focus group with young teenage girls in Brighton, asking what they wanted. I was expecting better access to music, tech, all that. And they all said, ‘Street lighting.’”

Angela Merkel – a way point as a leader.

Photograph: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

Alison Shergold was one of the original respondents, and at the time a fundraiser for Rape Crisis London: in 1996, she wanted “statutory funding bodies for rape crisis centres throughout the UK”. Now, she works in an upmarket commercial estate agent and says ruefully, “I’ve sold my soul to the corporate beast.” She resists the urge to generalise about anything. “I was in a lesbian relationship when I did the first survey, and my girlfriend was a separatist, very anti-men. I wasn’t: I know some lovely men and some bitch women.” Some things have got better, she thinks; others not. “I don’t think any of the goals were achieved. [Rape] conviction rates haven’t changed, or preventing it. I don’t even want to change the world any more; I just want violence against women to stop, violence against everybody.”

The project’s cofounder Tibballs, meanwhile, takes a Kipling-esque approach to triumph and disaster, describing success and abject failure with the same cheerful straightforwardness. There is something intellectually wholesome, tireless and timeless about her, like a lady poet of the 30s or a Victorian explorer. “The job that the project did, 20 years ago, was that it made it absolutely clear that you cannot, as a political party, not have a position on women and equality. Childcare wasn’t in a single manifesto – it wasn’t part of the conversation. We put it on the agenda.” And yet, she counters herself, “Where the hell are we?”

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Perhaps we shouldn’t be defining women’s issues or perspectives, but rather highlighting those that are distinctively male. For instance, since the financial crash of 2008, there has been a political fetish for hard work. Families are legitimised by the prefix “hard-working”; immigrants divided into net contributors to the taxing state, or beneficiaries of it. Citizens are weighed by their economic activity, with moral disapprobation attached to those who are inactive.

Providing childcare, or volunteering in retirement… often, that work brings more to society than its paid equivalent

This is nonsensical, since we all know that everyone is economically inactive for some part of their lives, and often you’re working a lot harder when you’re not being paid (childcare in your prime; volunteering in retirement; caring when there is nobody else to care). Often that work brings more to society than its cash equivalent. Practically speaking, these are political or economic conditions that hit women in a particular way; to respond to them as individuals rather than as a group is foolish – like a thousand atomised complaints about pollution from people who all live on the same A-road.

It would be remiss to ignore conventional politics in this. I asked the Labour MP Margaret Hodge how she thinks “women’s politics” have changed during her near 25 years in Westminster. She related an argument she’d had recently with Harriet Harman about whether Theresa May is better or worse than Margaret Thatcher. “May has done some good stuff, stuff that doesn’t really impinge on her, like [tackling] FGM,” Hodge says. “It doesn’t cost her very much, politically, but I don’t think Mrs T would have done it.” Is a female prime minister who takes FGM seriously, but waves through an austerity programme that devastates more women than men better than one who actively avoids any solidarity with her sex?

If, as Hodge maintains, the “Trump-Clinton contest showed that politicians always tend to have gender-specific approaches to their politics”, this becomes like a puzzle: is it always better to have one woman than no women, regardless of whether she fights for women? Or is politics like a BBC panel show: one woman, described as a minimum, is functionally a maximum? A non-feminist woman is currently occupying a space that would be better filled, for women generally, by someone who went in to bat for us.

How does Hodge feel about the use of the word feminism? “I’m delighted that feminism is back. I’ve called myself a feminist throughout my career – when it was fashionable, when it was deeply unfashionable.” Women over 35 identify themselves to one another this way, a shibboleth of authenticity, like loving the Pixies before they were cool: it’s all very well being a feminist today, but where were you in the 90s?

My own idiosyncratic political position in the 90s was nothing of the sort, but the meeting of two frontiers, which squeezed the feminist space until its pips squeaked. On the one hand, there was the overhang of Thatcherism; it was an ethos in which, as Hodge says, you “proved your brilliance as a woman by beating men on their own terms”. To raise women’s issues was akin to pleading weakness. On the other, there was the 80s residue of career women who had toughed it out, either forgoing having children or returning to work after 10 days’ maternity leave; they were genuinely scornful of that side of the equality agenda. Hodge remembers “terrible resentment against any concessions on childcare or maternity leave. They didn’t want to see these changes: they felt they’d made these sacrifices, and why should we have it all?” It was an era when solidarity itself had fallen out of fashion: and without it, what bonded women? Hoovering and childbirth? No, thanks!

Nicola Sturgeon takes a keen interest in low wages and the systems that create them. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Thinking about it now, I am beset by a sense of failure. I ceded the language of solidarity in favour of individual rights. I took no pride in the women’s movement and its history, and lost that organisational muscle memory. I was happy to argue the toss about whether environmentalism and childcare were female in essence, rather than saying, “Who are you people who think profit is more important than the planet? Who thinks childcare isn’t a group effort?”

Meanwhile, this is the politics that was developing in tandem: the hyper-masculinist language of self-interest, tough talk, militarism, competitiveness and control, all now considered normal. The essential cooperative qualities that any society needs to be halfway functioning are currently considered not only unrealistic but wishy-washy, passé and rather niche. But I do not feel downhearted: this situation can’t last because it is just too stupid.

I was looking in the wrong place for the value of the idea. It was never meant to be a coherent programme of female-friendly actions, to which all right-thinking women would subscribe. It may be that there is no such thing as a women’s issue – but still, on any given subject, there is always a distinct women’s perspective, without which you will never meaningfully understand it. Feminism is always in the detail, in each granular answer, in every individual woman.

Having female leaders is clearly useful. But a woman at the top can never, even with feminist bona fides up the wazoo, bring the complete perspective of her gender. So much of this is about power: how a shrinking state throws its burdens back on to individuals; how those individuals are usually women; how this is ignored by the language of competition and self-interest.

Clinton would have been better for women than Trump, merely by maintaining Obamacare and not redistributing wealth upwards; but not as good as Bernie Sanders, with his more coherent vision for empowering the dispossessed. May is probably no better or worse for women than Cameron was, although her predecessor might have worked harder to keep an on-the-record misogynist (Philip Davies MP) off the committee for women and equalities. Angela Merkel is less good for her gender than Nicola Sturgeon, who takes a keener interest in low wages and the systems that create them.

In the end, all these leaders are way points, not end points. To wish they were better, gutsier, more harmonious feminists is a needless distraction: far better to wish them part of a bigger choir.