PERSONAL COLUMN

Women beware women

PAMELA VANDYKE PRICE

It so happens that, although I have always been a journalist, I have never been employed full-time on a magazine or the page of a newspaper devoted to what are often termed 'women's interests'. Some re- cent concentrated peering at these pages have almost made me doubt that I am a woman, so uninterested am I in the majority of topics to which they devote space and which, one presumes, are read not only by those who put their feet up for a coffee break mid-morning in the suburbs, before the com- mittee meeting in the shires, but by women struggling on their way to work or, even, when they've got back from it.

Let's be basic. What are the subjects that women might be interested in as women—not just as people?

Fashion? Men are as fashionable as women these days and any man I've ever dressed to please was and is as interested in clothes, mine and his. I'm just as interested in masculine couture. But there must be millions who turn briskly to the financial or racing columns after being surfeited with dolly rags, Regency run-downs and, at the other extreme, the kind of well-bred English classic lady that sends one shrinking from one's countrywomen abroad.

Food? As well as a lot of good cooks being men, there are plenty of people—in gastronomy, as in heaven, there is neither male nor female—who are interested in food (and of course drink). Do we want to mould our aspics or 'give the gourmet touch' to ins- tant puddings? One writer recently advised the bride on a dinner for the in-laws, which featured instant mashed potato and frozen peas. If I'd been that mother-in-law . . but no, she wouldn't have got him to the table, much less the altar.

Drink? You'd be surpriSed how nervous people are about it. Of course 'I leave all that to my husband.' There's one woman editor who won't allow me to write for her 'because one can't have a woman writing on wine.'

(She doesn't get invited to tastings, else I should spit on her shoes.) With women writing about finance, cars, engineering, medicine so as to make these otherwise in- comprehensible subjects both interesting and clear to moronic me, one wonders that the poor old bottle should still be supposed so much a male prerogative

Children? Women can, of course, have them. But men are involved and, I would have thought, interested. I once told a woman's page editor that her pages clattered with the sound of woolly bootees and asked why she didn't stop sitting on a can of cor- ned beef and giving birth, like that dreary pumpkin-eating lady—who came to a bad end, I believe. She thought it was because having children was an achievement to the young women of today. About this I—being childless—would not know, but if I were brat-bound, I don't think I'd want nappy talk in the minutes when I did get a chance to read. For those who must have the shopping info, why. not simply a 'Tots tips' column somewhere regularly, like the weather forecast? Do we all need to be dunked in the afterbirth, like a recent half-page in the 2'imes, which dealt with mothers and babies

and birthmarks?

Children and adolescents? Men need to • know about and, one hopes, to deal with them as well as women. And obsession with the young makes me very evil-minded about those flowery-hatted ladies who approach me to help them get a job—'But of course I must have school holidays free and every fourth Wednesday when I take Jennifer and her

friends to dancing class.' Ladies, if you had to pay your rent, you'd work like the rest of us--and I don't see why you should be pandered to in print because some man's keeping you.

The house (the garden gets its own hetero- sexual section in all papers, please note)? Men have got to cope with this as well as women. Good works? If they're good enough, they should, in my view, be in general features. How can the Guardian, in its 150th anniversary week, justify a page with a feature on battered babies, multiple sclerosis and a nearly half-page feature of an interview with Nell Dunn who, very com- fortably-off indeed, says 'it is a trap and I find it very' difficult to get out of this bourgeois existence'? If you really want to, girl—as we used to say in my cynical youth—you'll find the time and do it. And I don't think it's particularly interesting or amusing to get such a dollop of the drears.

For that is what most of the women's pages are—dreary. There are little paras on new designers, occasional luxuries—the Times has a set of features in which no item was less than £100—and such things as offers for a boat (I can't be unique in feeling this was a bit special), and well reported news items. But would one really want interviews with four people out of work—especially if one was? Would one like—if one was the subject—to have published three rather unflattering pictures? (The girl's a tennis star, but not a natural beauty.) Is it worthy of the noble work of the wvs to have itself relegated to the 'women's pages'—and bog us all down with worthiness by the way the feature is written and laid out?

1 think most women are as remarkable and as good as most men. And I think they deserve better features and more fun the while. It is one of the nastier things that editors bear (too much) in mind that women rush to complain if someone enjoys something, they can't have—like smoked salmon, mink, diamonds and the adoration of men. You get, sigh the producers of Woman's Hour letters pointing out that 'the money she spent on a single dinner would keep a working-class family . . ."Does she realise that umpteen per cent of the homes in this country haven't got a refrigerator ...'

. . per cent women haven't got men to keep them?' • Envy is more conducive to lines in the face and lack of agreeable company than anything—so why should we bother with you, any more than we bother with nasty people—except to leave them alone? Laugh and the world . . . etc. And it isn't just because I now happen to write for it that I think the Sunday Times has the best—I won't call them w omen's pages, but general features—but because a lot of what they contain is fun, funny and lollipop-like luxury such as any normal person enjoys. (And the editor is a man.) The sense of trying to help and do good is strong in women and, I'm told, grows in women's page editors. But good works can often be achieved by means of a steak, a bot- tle of bath essence, a really funny book. someone else doing the ironing or taking the children away from one, or the well-timed improper story. A woman who's worth editing for wants something better than tea and sympathy—she wants contact, even in cold print, with those who've got guts and can give her a giggle.

It may be hoping for much, but I wish that two-thirds of the features that drear down the women's pages could be' perked up into features fit for any page. If the editors know their job, this shouldn't be im- possible. Because there are many other top- ics which—although men might be in- terested—are truly of primary importance to women, and they needn't be treated with that worthy ponderousness that makes me turn over. Is it true that the incidence of cystitis is enormously increased since so many women started wearing tights? Why do architects and health inspectors allow the incinerators for sanitary towels to be put outside the cubicles in women's cloakrooms—and arc

there arguments for and against the internal and external ST anyway? Should women

wear brassieres? (The bra was invented, by a

'Mrs Caresse Crosby, in about the 1920s, I believe, and as my mother was beautiful but

olde worlde in this respect, neither she nor I ever wore the thing—and I don't think it deprived or liberated us much.) What is it that men like about busts, bottoms and legs (because no woman ever knows what turns them on about these)? What differences in metabolism, affecting diet, occur during adolescence, pregnancy and the menopause? What does an international beauty do when she gets a spot? Does wearing a hairpiece harm the hair? (I could go on and on.) Let's allow the contributors to these lady pages to be amusing, witty even. Let's revel vicariously in the experiences—written or reported—of those who say 'Yes!' to life at all levels, rather than risk wallowing in the problems and struggles and griefs that any sensitive adult has either had or is ex- periencing. I don't think that, apart from straight reporting, the blood and tears of humanity should be given more space—in columns that can help—than the laughter and achievements. Women—and women editors—will worry. But this will not enable them to relieve the problems about which

they worry—any more than a doctor having a sleepless night will make him better at dealing with a series of tiresome, boring, stupid patients the next day.

'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,' said the minister to me, after mY doctor husband had died in front of my eyes.

And it does. Don't we all have those ac: quaintances who come with their 'troubles', slopping them over us until we are saturated—and the 'troubled' merely go on to drear down somebody else? The women of Britain wouldn't be human if they hadn't many real and terrible troubles—as men have. But I don't think that dreary women s pages will help them. Remember what the gold-digger says to the wife in Clare Boothe 5 play? 'Let's face it, Mrs Haynes, you're the hell of a dull woman!' I'm not sure whether the dull women make the dull pages or t'other way round. But dullth and dreartb never achi6ed anything.