A postage stamp shows Eleanor Roosevelt, the longest-serving first lady, reading to children (AS photo family/Shutterstock)
Earlier this year, Reform UK announced that it would introduce a “Women and Motherhood Protection Act” if elected. The proposed law would offer various forms of protection around pregnancy, breastfeeding and fertility treatment. Suella Braverman, the party’s education spokesperson, declared that “a Reform UK government would be the most pro-woman, pro-mother, and pro-family government in British history”.
Yet the contradictions are obvious. The protections promised by Reform already exist in law and, by repealing the 2010 Equality Act, it would actually remove the right to equal pay for equal work, reverting to the narrower standard of equal pay for identical work. And let us not forget that Reform was happy to have James McMurdock – convicted aged 19 for assaulting his girlfriend – as an MP from 2024-25. A “pro-woman” party this is not.
On the left, meanwhile, there is increasingly a similar, but distinct, biological fatalism, which is also inadequate. Put simply, bio-essentialism is the notion that sex differences are rooted, immutably, in bodies. It is less interested in how culture and social life produce divergences in the experiences of men and women; when discussed at all, they are reduced to expressions of deep-seated hormonal and genetic coding – witness recent calls for paid menstrual leave.
Instead of lapsing into either pseudo-scientific ‘just-so’ stories about men and women, or flat-out denial of biological reality, social democrats need to devise stronger answers than the right.