Do femmes need their ism?

"Feminism has been a dramatically successful social movement," begins Rosalind Coward in Sacred Cows . She sounds like someone calling you into her office to say you have done a good job but that your services are no longer required. Has feminism been handed the black bin-liner and do those of us who still support the movement need to be escorted off the premises?

Coward seems to think so. Sacred Cows raises some valid, thought-provoking and highly original questions as well as successfully observing and charting social trends. It is in answering these questions and using the feminist movement to explain these trends that Coward seems to come unstuck.

Throughout the book she relies heavily on sensationalist media hype and ascribes her minority views to the entire movement. I am as tired as she is of the mud-slinging element in feminism - but I do not see this as reason to question feminism's relevance in toto .

In a chapter entitled "A new gender landscape", Coward discusses the decline of male-dominated industries, such as mining, and charts the increase in female-dominated service industries. Coward links the substantial increase in male unemployment to increases in male suicide, depression and homelessness as well as a shift in family dynamics.

The remainder of the chapter seems to be devoted to disputing "the old feminist equation that being a woman necessarily entails low income and low status". We are told that "among childless couples with degrees, it is normal for women to provide half the income". Fine, so childless women with degrees are not necessarily going to experience low pay and low status. But where does this fit into the wider picture of feminism?

What makes this chapter even more peculiar is a later statement that "becoming a working woman seems like a valid goal in itself for girls. It doesn't even matter what job she does, her status will be enhanced just by becoming a working woman, something which is so highly rated in this society. Boys have to find a different source of self-evaluation." True, the working woman has become a very media-friendly figure. Changes in employment law and the feminist movement have encouraged women to establish themselves in the workplace. This is not to say that all women feel as though they have just stepped out of the latest Kenco advert. Many women work in poor conditions for poor pay and their children may have to do the same. Enhanced status is by no means automatic for working women.

Coward's fear that boys "have to find a different source of self-evaluation" is, again, not particularly well supported. Consider the figures she quotes in her chapter "A new gender landscape": "In 1997, 52 per cent of new solicitors were women ... and per cent of buyers, brokers and sales reps." The percentage of new male recruits suggests that boys who have grown up in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s can still find self-fulfilment in careers. She is right to say that cases such as the Stephen Lawrence and James Bulger murders often make boys "the focus of the most pervasive worries of the last decade", but she fails to uncover any relationship between such trends and feminism.

If Sacred Cows claimed to be a book exploring social trends and the influence of popular culture in the last three decades, it would rate highly. Unfortunately it does not. Coward sets out to establish the relevance and consequences of the feminist movement as we approach the millennium. It is a mighty task and, to be fair, she does not really claim to answer her own question. The book concludes on a typically puzzling note: "The famous glass ceiling still has to be broken through ... it does not necessarily amount to a situation where all women are more in need of support than men."

Katrina Wishart is editorial assistant, The THES .