So feminism killed Tupperware? (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

This week, Substack launched a new Twitter-esque feature called Notes, where you can share links, short posts, quotes, photos, etc. I am not yet addicted, but definitely enjoying the relative calm of Notes compared to Twitter. If you want to join me over there, go to substack.com/note. As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll automatically see my notes. You can like, reply, or share them, and you can also post notes of your own. Maybe we can even talk over there about how you are seeing the backlash against feminism manifest? And now, to this week’s reads….

1) Women rose, and Tupperware died

This week the American food storage company Tupperware warned that it could go out of business, triggering a slew of articles about the story of the brand and what has made it so very iconic. In amongst these was an odd piece in the UK’s Daily Mail claiming that “the rise of women triggered the DOWNFALL of Tupperware”. Feminism, the piece argues, brought an end to the firm because the “dutiful housewives” who lapped up the product “no longer exist”. According to the article, “Women’s rise in status diluted their interest in Tupperware.” On the New Statesman, Sophie McBain has a searing takedown of this logic, and proposes a “Tupperware test” for future absurd pieces blaming women for the world’s ills. Also, on CapX, Henry Oliver has written about the very interesting story of Brownie Wise, the saleswoman who invented the Tupperware party, as an elegy to “capitalist feminism”.

2) The yawning gender pay gap

The Financial Times has analysed gender pay gap data from the UK, where companies with more than 250 employees have been obligated to report on this since 2017. As per the piece:

An FT analysis of this year’s data shows that the average gap — or the difference between men’s and women’s median hourly pay, expressed as a percentage of men’s pay — was 12.2 per cent in 2022-23, compared with 11.9 per cent in 2017-18; it was unchanged from last year.

The data showed that 79.5 per cent of employers had a gender pay gap that favoured men in 2022-23, higher than the figures collected both last year and six years ago.

According to the analysis, the average gender pay gap was highest among employers in finance and education. In banks, the reason for the gap was down to the lack of women in leadership. For example, Lloyds reported the following:

“There are comparatively more women in junior roles, and more men in higher-paid leadership roles . . . this is the main source of the overall pay gap, as the lower number of senior women brings down the average pay for these colleagues”.

3) Putin vs. women’s rights

A member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has drafted legislation that would categorise feminists as extremists. In Politico’s Women Rule newsletter, Katerina Pechenkina has interviewed Alena Popova, a 40-year-old opposition politician and women’s rights activist, who had to leave Russia after being labelled a foreign agent. Popova, who helped draft anti-domestic violence legislation that was never put to a vote in Russia’s parliament, says this about the ant-feminist bill:

Everything about it is in line with the same ideology as during the campaign against the law on domestic violence, exactly the same. They had three points back then: feminists are ruining a unique Russian way of life, all feminists are sponsored from the West and all feminists hate men. So nothing surprises me about this.

4) Reproductive justice vs. reproductive rights

As the US continues its downwards spiral on abortion rights (nb today the US Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a ruling by a Texas judge to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone), this resource from the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Germany explains reproductive justice, an approach that goes beyond the safeguarding of reproductive rights. Meanwhile, this piece in Ms Magazine by Andrea Flynn argues there is a crisis in the US of rural maternity units shuttering:

These units are closing at an alarming rate and disproportionately impacting Black and brown women who are already shouldering the heaviest burdens of our broken health system.

…As of 2020, one in four Native American babies (26.7 percent) and one in six Black babies (16.3 percent) were born in areas that are considered maternity care deserts.

Nationwide, one in four Native American women (24.2 percent) and one in five Black women (20.1 percent) did not receive adequate prenatal care in 2020, compared to only one in 10 white women (9.9 percent).

5) Riot grrrl reunion

I’m old enough to feel a twinge of nostalgia on seeing an interview with Le Tigre, the 90s “riot grrrl” band (and on hearing the fact that they are touring the UK later this year). The band had the following to say about gender-critical feminism:

“Let’s go on the record for your newspaper (The Guardian) that we are completely against that kind of feminism, if you want to call it feminism.”

And on the mainstreaming of feminism in pop they said this:

[Frontwoman Kathleen] Hanna was frequently asked questions such as: is it problematic that Beyoncé performs in front of the word feminist? “There’s a million ways to discredit political movements and that’s one of them,” she says.

“I think that a lot of those critiques in the mainstream are basically: ‘Miley Cyrus says she’s a feminist so it’s not real any more and we shouldn’t be associated with it.’ It’s just a clickbait conversation that hasn’t got anything to do with what is really going on.”

Bonus: Angela Saini, author of a brilliant book on the origins of patriarchy (here is a link to my interview with her for the New Statesman) went on the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast , which is hosted by a Mormon woman, and it looks like a fascinating listen. As Saini explained on LinkedIn:

Imagine that you believe the Bible is literally true, that Eve was created from and for Adam, and that men are destined to be society's patriarchs. This is life for many Mormon women in the United States today. So, it was an honour for me to be interviewed by Amy McPhee Allebest, who has bravely challenged gender inequalities within her church, about the origins of patriarchy from my very different perspective as a journalist and researcher.

Thank you for reading and see you next week.