Women or Men - Who Are the Victims? (Civil Society)

Throughout history there have always been groups seeking to turn the powers of government to their own advantage. Today, one frequently employed strategy is to claim victim status for members of a group, and then insist on "rights" to be guaranteed by the state. However these "rights" are better understood as legally sanctioned privileges which have more in common with the preferments awarded by pre-democracy monarchs to their favourites. The contributors to this book ask if women are really "victims" of a male conspiracy in the workplace and the home, as some feminist critics have claimed. Shackleton and Urwin argue that difference in average earnings between men and women may be attributable to other factors, such as marital status, and that, in some important ways, the labour market today is much tougher for men than it is for women. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first refuge for women and children who were victims of domestic violence, describes the way in which her standing in the international feminist movement declined when she began to point out that men, as well as women, can be victims of such violence. These essays demonstrate that the group animosity encouraged by the new "victicrats" can never be consistent with an equitable social order. "Single women earn as much as similarly qualified single men, according to research that questions many of the assumptions behind alleged sex inequality at work." The Daily Telegraph