When my grandmother was 16, she told her headmaster that she wanted to study science at university. This did not go down well. Though she had always come first in science in her (co-educational) class, the headmaster was adamant: he was not teaching Higher School Certificate maths to girls. Or chemistry. Or physics. She was allowed to do biology, but apart from that had to choose arts subjects. She managed to persuade the local university that, were they to enrol her, she would teach herself everything she should have covered at school - which she somehow did. My grandmother was 16 in 1932, and whenever I start to think of feminism as unnecessary or irrelevant, I remind myself of how recent that is and how much has been achieved since then.

LRB 27 November 1997 | PDF Download