I was sitting on the floor of my study, with pieces of paper stacked up around me. I felt listless and overwhelmed by the history that I did not want… - Natasha Walter

[In an article on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (1999).] Greer's fundamental conclusion is that the pursuit of equality is now doomed. Instead, women must pursue liberation. "Equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation," she says. Is this a valid distinction? I believe that the pursuit of liberation - the peculiar, individual, often contradictory journey to find freedom from the lies and conventions around us - is something that each individual woman can take on for herself. And yet I believe that it is only possible to pursue that liberation if you are not ground down by an economic and political system that systematically discriminates against you.
Inequality in Britain is not a side issue. Inequality locks women out of power, and condemns women to poverty. Inequality prevents women from being fairly rewarded for their work, from being able to speak out and be heard, from being able to bring up their children in dignity, from bringing those who rape and beat them to justice. The struggle for equality is not the struggle to reshape women in the pattern of men, since men's lives too must be revolutionised if equality is to be grasped. Feminism must transform society so that women feel that they can have an equal stake in it, at work and at home. Then indeed we will see the rise of the liberated woman.

This fierce, impatient feminism needs to be recognised. I call it the new feminism because it looks very different from the feminism of previous generations. For a start, it can no longer be confined to any kind of ghetto. It is everywhere. In the Seventies, feminism could be identified with a clearly defined women’s liberation movement. It has since fragmented and splintered; but splinters of it are lodged in the hearts and minds of almost every woman in Britain. We should not be diverted by the fact that few women call themselves feminists into believing that feminist beliefs appeal only to a minority of women. In survey after survey the vast majority of women, especially young women, say that they would like to see more equality between the sexes at home and at work.
I would also argue that feminism today is not just a middle-class movement. It is often taken for granted that modern feminism appeals only to middle-class professional women. As I researched my book and set up interviews with women from all kinds of backgrounds and in all kinds of occupations, I was struck by the fact that real anger at inequality, real desire for change, and a real sense of women’s growing potential, were being articulated by all the women I spoke to. I heard those ideas just as strongly, if not more strongly, from women who worked as cleaners in south London or as members of community groups in Glasgow as from lawyers or journalists or MPs.
My sense that feminism cannot be seen as appealing only to middle-class women is backed up by survey information. For instance, one recent MORI poll showed that women in social groups D and E are more likely than AB women to say that feminism has been good for women.

[Review of Walter's book The New Feminism.] In its bid for sophisticated political adulthood, the new feminism also risks throwing out the most important legacy of women’s politics: the inquiry into personal life. Walter argues that these questions are now 'sorted', that women no longer need to justify themselves in terms of their private behaviour. And it may well be that what to wear and who to sleep with are, as Walter points out, rather passé as political issues, but that's not the end of the story. In my view, the matter of domestic democracy will become the site of renewed private/public struggles, partly because the question of who does what in the home is crucial to the question of who does what outside the home. Another factor to be considered is the growing number of women now employed by the professional classes to do their cleaning, childcare and ironing, often at wages well below any generally agreed national minimum. The old servant problem could come back to haunt the new middle class, itself caught in an ever-intensifying time crisis. Walter is optimistic about men in general – there is none of the male-baiting exhibited by the pop culture girls like Suzanne Moore or Julie Burchill – and particularly about their place in the home. Men, she believes, are ready and willing to take part in the 'unique poignancy' of domestic life.
I would say that Walter was right to outlaw prescription in personal politics – there was something truly depressing about diktat feminism at its height – but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing.