8 Fenella Greenfield discusses WiP's vision

Transcript:

I don’t remember feeling angry, I just remember feeling astonished that I’d never noticed before a lot of what these women were talking about.  For example, at one of the Women in Publishing meetings, a woman called Dale Spender came and she’d written a book called Man Made Language.  It was just mind blowing, because she had gone through the English language and had analysed words, and I remember it, this Women in Publishing talk she gave.  She said things like there were something like 390 words for prostitute and only two words for a male prostitute.

Well, you know, we didn’t know this because nobody had said it.  So we would go to these meetings, people would talk about these sorts of things and when somebody points it out to you, you don’t have to be very intelligent to start seeing something’s terribly wrong.

So I never felt angry, but I felt that if we worked hard we could change things.  Our vision to change things was clear and achievable.  I think we felt if we just have our meetings, and we just tell everybody what the facts are, and we fight, you know, for equal pay whatever it is – things will change. I think we all felt we’re just going to change things.  It’s going to be fine.  They’re going to be changed.