“I don’t like the sound of her voice.” A friend, a woman in her 60s, says this to me. “I would vote for her if she HAD divorced her husband,” says another friend. I’m reading for the first time The Golden Notebook, a gift from my mother this Christmas (as it usually is). On page eight of the introduction, Doris Lessing writes of the Women’s Movement, and that while it's gaining traction: “All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: “I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.” She writes this in June 1971. Thirty-seven years ago. "I don’t like the sound of her voice." A newscaster refers to a young woman as a streetwalker. “Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird way.” She’s “likeable enough,” says the man who can’t be bothered to look up from his podium to address her in the eye. Her hair is awful. Her clothes? Anna Wintour suggests an entire wardrobe change in Vogue. She’s the wife of the wrong man...
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