The names that spring to mind when discussing scouts and guides are boy scouts and girl guides, but actually girls were accepted as scouts 25 years ago, and now one scout in four is a girl. On occasion they have even outnumbered the boys. It is tempting to regard this as a plus, but there is an unresolved dilemma for feminists. Does equality and fairness mean allowing females to join anything that males can join, or is it allowing females to have their own equal and admirable outfit, whether it’s a club or school or college or job?
One remembers the time when so many males were allowed to become nurses that Christine Hancock, former general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, had to insist any delegation of nurses “should include at least one female”. On the whole, I suppose girls are trying to join up with boys rather than the other way round, though Camden School for Girls in London has permitted boys into its sixth form, and Girton College, Cambridge, is now for both sexes. Lucy Cavendish College, however, has it in its statute that it will never stop being for females only.
There are those of us who value all-female outfits, while still kicking the doors of those only for males. All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that I shall go on talking of actresses as well as actors, in memory of Mrs Siddons and Greta Garbo and Vivienne Leigh. And hoping Newnham College doesn’t go the way of Girton and let in blokes, even though it doesn’t complain when an alumna gets employed by a male-dominated college. And that though an excellent editor of this paper’s women’s page was once a man – George Seddon – such pages will always be somewhere for shy girls to read interesting things printed on a women’s page or not at all.
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