“Would you call yourself a radical feminist?” Asked my then 15-year-old daughter.

 

“I don’t know if I’d say I was ‘radical’.” I answered warily.

 

“Nah, you are. It’s OK, you’ve got the goods to back it up.”

 

This was a couple of years ago when it was momentarily fashionable for pretty girls with good jobs to tell the world they didn’t need feminism.

 

And those of us who were first on the frontline wanted to scratch their f**king eyes out!

 

You see, no matter how cool feminism gets, the generation of ‘radical’ feminists will always be seen by some as the bitches that ruined everything.

 

I had a white man my age say pretty much that to my face just a few weeks ago.

 

Apparently, if I had done what my brainwashed mother brought me up to do (become a secretary so I could marry the boss), men wouldn’t be so conflicted and the world would be a better place.

 

Well, white-middle-class-middle-aged men, anyway.

 

But it’s not just them.

 

It was white middle-class women of our generation and above who stopped Hillary becoming the first female President, after all, she was one of those bitches who became a lawyer to blow up their cushy gig.

 

Look pretty, learn to bake cakes or type letters, find a man, pop out a couple of kids and pretend that housework takes all day (OK, so it did in 1950, but times change.)

 

I get it, I do, but they didn’t have my grandmother – a bitter, miserable, snobby old cow that everyone hated, especially my mother – it was mutual.

 

By some accident of genetics, the women on my father’s side seem to get the brains and the men get the charm. My grandmother watched her less intelligent brothers be privately educated and sent to university, while all she was allowed to do was the School Certificate and become a teacher’s aide till she married.

 

To add insult to injury, her cousin Phillida Frost, who didn't have brothers, was allowed a full education and became one of England’s first female anaesthetists in the 1930’s.

 

Doctor Frost was my godmother, and someone I wanted to be. She was never there at the regular family gatherings, she would just swan in every now and again bring treasures from distant lands, Eskimo slippers, a kimono from Japan, the sort of things young girls never forget.

 

My mother always treated her with the utmost sympathy, she had to sacrifice so much for her ‘career’.

 

I thought my mum had sacrificed everything not to have one.

 

But not as much as my grandmother.

 

She eventually became headmistress and apparently was quite brilliant at it.

 

But when the war was over so was her career.

 

She hated watching my mother attempt to be the perfect wife and housewife, constantly fighting the war on ‘germs’. A propaganda war Grandmama believed was started to get women like her back in the kitchen.

 

And keep girls like me in there.

 

She had a shot at something more than domestic servitude in 1939 and I got mine in 1975 when the sex discrimination act came in. I picked up the ball running.

 

I was thirteen years old, and I wasn’t sacrificing anything. I was going to balance being a mum like my mum and a globe-trotting career woman like Auntie Phil, mixed with a little bit of my grandmother’s bizarre perception and passion.

 

I was going to have it all.

 

No-one believed you could.

 

But Auntie Phillida, who was a far more radical feminist than I will ever be, did get it all. In the end.

 

In her fifties she met and fell in love with a widower with a big loving family. She had her career and the love. It just took a while for Dr Frost to find her soulmate –Dr Fogg.