The founder of a ground-breaking feminist movement has challenged the people of Perth to question traditional gender roles and think again about buying pink toys for young girls.
Launching the Fair City’s second WOW (Women Of the World) Festival, Jude Kelly CBE said she hopes the two-day event will help break down barriers and change perceptions. She has called for more men to get involved.
Speaking at a breakfast hosted by the Perthshire Businesswomen’s Network (PBN) on Friday, Jude explained why, as artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre, she launched the festival in the capital nine years ago.
“There were so many young women coming to see me, to be mentored, and they kept saying to me: ‘I’m not a feminist but…’
“And they would speak about injustices in their lives. So I decided to revive the idea of having conversations about girls and women, by celebrating what has been achieved and having the optimism to say our work isn’t finished yet.”
She said: “At the time that we started WOW, feminism was associated with em-battlement and negative ideas about men, and people wanted to come away from that imagery. For some, it felt like they’d already ‘got there’, they’d ‘done it’ and achieved everything.
“In the end, it’s a bit like civil rights. It doesn’t happen overnight, you need to be having these conversations continually.”
She said: “You can’t simply change thousands of years of imagery, conditioning and attitudes.
“For example, people still feel that the symbol of being a fully resolved woman is that they have a child. Its a symbolic idea.
“But if you get to the stage where you didn’t have children, then you will feel strange or hard-hearted, and that is a real burden for women. Men don’t have that burden.
“It requires society to start thinking of the family as a shared obligation. And you might want to think about giving girls pink toys.”
Explaining how WOW launched in Perth, Kelly said: “We were looking at places around the country where you would say people aren’t as vividly engaged as they are in, say, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Perth has less obvious moments where its own citizens are coming together and talking about these things, and that means change doesn’t accelerate as quickly here.
“We felt the women in Perth have exactly the same needs as everyone else, and why should they be left out of the conversation.
“The commitment was to do this in Perth for three years and see what difference it can make.”
She said: “The whole programme is very mixed so we can look at issues like why it’s always women being killed in horror movies, to discussing what is the legacy of Nicola Sturgeon and female politicians.”
Kelly added: “When you say that something is about women, men tend to say: ‘Oh, well it’s nothing to do with me then.’
“But all the men who do come along, love it and get a lot out of it.”
The festival continues on Saturday and Sunday with a packed programme of events, presentations and workshops at venues around the city.
