Attack of the 50 Ft. Women
How Gender Equality Can Save The World!
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Attack of the 50 Ft. Women
Buy Now for £16.36
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Narrated by:
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Tanya Moodie
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By:
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Catherine Mayer
About this listen
‘Buy it for yourself, your husband or partner. Most importantly, buy it for your children’ Sunday Express
Essential reading from Catherine Mayer, recently named one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Global Policy on Gender Equality.
Not a single country anywhere in the world has achieved gender equality. In more than a few countries, progress for women has stalled or is reversing. Voters in the United States chose a misogynist over a female candidate for President.
Yet in many of these countries, the majority of politicians and business leaders profess to believe in gender equality—as well they might. One report predicts a boost to global GDP of £8.3 trillion by 2025 simply by making faster progress towards narrowing the gender gap. Researchers point to many other potential benefits too, not least in improved relations between the sexes and a healthier, more peaceful planet.
If gender equality promises benefits not just to women, but to everyone, why aren’t we embracing it? And how can we speed the pace of change? Fewer than nine percent of world leaders are female, but the few women who have broken through include towering figures such as Angela Merkel. Could 50-foot women save the day? These questions have gripped journalist and author Catherine Mayer since she accidentally founded the Women’s Equality Party in March 2015 and watched it grow in months from an idea to a vibrant political force with more than 70 branches across the UK.
In ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN, her insightful, revelatory, often hilarious, and hugely inspiring book, she tackles those questions and many more, sharing inside views and experiences from building a party, and bringing together global research with analyses and interviews based on her own far-flung research.
And she goes further. Campaigning for the Women’s Equality Party ahead of elections in May 2016, she noticed that many people found it hard, in the absence of any real-life examples, to envisage a gender-equal world. So she takes us there, to the place she calls Equalia. What is it like? Does gender equality make for a society that is more equal in other ways too? Who does the low-paid jobs? How does gender express itself in a place freed from gender programming? What’s the sex like? What’s on the telly?
For some fascinating answers and brilliant thought experiments—and a blueprint for reaching Equalia—read ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN.
Critic reviews
“Comprehensive, wide-ranging and journalistically rigorous. Attack of the 50Ft Women is an important and timely book. Buy it for yourself, your husband or partner. Most importantly, buy it for your children” Sunday Express
‘If you’re male, and don’t think you need to read this book, that’s your received culture talking, and it isn’t doing you a favour. If you’re male or female, do yourself and the future a favour: read this book.’ William Gibson
“Barnstorming” Red magazine
“An inspiring, revelatory and often hilarious journey to explore the merits of a gender-equal society” Glamour
“Empowering and full of hope, Attack of the 50ft Women made me feel 50ft tall. Glass ceilings beware.” Sarah Shaffi, editor at The Bookseller and writer for Stylist
“Electricfying. Full of chutzpah, knowledge and vision.” Elif Shafak
“Compelling and deeply researched… Presents the multiple benefits of a gender-balanced world” Lisa Randall, New York Times bestselling author of Warped Passages
“[Catherine Mayer] occupies a well-informed, fully-engaged middle ground [and] quickly gets to the main issue– endemic exploitation, “discrimination, harassment and sexual violence” perpetrated by men and boys against (overwhelmingly)
women and girls […] provid[ing] concise, painful examples of perpetrators’ seeming impunity even when charged for their crimes. [Attack of the Fifty Foot Women] is a weapons store for the battles ahead.” Times Literary Supplement
‘A tour de force of feminist polemic, forensic research drawing on data from across the globe and some fabulously funny anecdotes’ Wales Online
If you could sum up Attack of the Fifty Foot Women in three words, what would they be?
Unique Political Caring.What was one of the most memorable moments of Attack of the Fifty Foot Women?
A woman's perspective of abuse and rape and a full understanding of the effects on all genders.Any additional comments?
Well worth educating myself.Bloody Marvelous.
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I cannot recommend this book enough
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Any additional comments?
I think this is an important book. I think it should be the textbook for the age for the feminist movement, if I’m still allowed to call it that. But that’s too po-faced so don’t be scared off. Because this book is fun with a mattering message. It’s not like Germaine Greer, all revolutionary revocation and struggle between the sexes though still funny when she felt like it. The Attack of the Fifty Foot Women is funny too (starting with the title and the cover from the 1950s movie). It’s sharp too but kinder and more subtle, because the problem that Catherine Mayer, an experienced international journalist, shows seems (falsely) somehow kinder and more subtle but it still isn’t funny.“Gender equality?” (I prefer sex equality, it sounds less like a grammar lesson) “It’s over isn’t it? They’ve got it haven’t they? What’s left to do?” That’s the problem. We can all, in the West, look at the dismal, downright oppression of women in benighted Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan and feel a mighty moral majesty because we got our Equal Pay Act and Votes for Women and stuff eons ago. But Catherine shows that we’re missing the point and the target. There’s still a pay gap; there’s still a good job gap; we still programme boys and girls for different roles. We still don’t do childcare half well enough to make it an equal option for men and women. Catherine’s warning is that nowhere on Earth has equality been achieved though she praises the progress of Iceland. But that’s a nation only the size of Sheffield town and the rest of the globe rolls unbothered, on.
So our author takes us to a place where it does work. It’s a state called Equalia where we, not just 'they', do have equality and we can see that being equal is about being free. So far it’s a land of Mayer, but not mere, imagination. The economy works better for all because the unevenness of inequality is smoothed out; the TV’s better; the sex is much better for everyone. And all sexes count. All? Catherine’s at pains to point out that modern definitions of sexes are not trussed into a twosome. Transgender and non binary and so on all matter and are all of equal validity. Equalia which Catherine conceived as a refuge of youth, has a place for all and threatens no other state because it is a state of mind.
I would have preferred to see a stronger exposé of the so-called ‘great’ religions, Islam, Catholicism and the Evangelical Christian Taliban, still subjugating and effacing women (and every other sex or sexual preference) but that aside, this book is a full and satisfying intake of breath and assuredly and comfortable read by Tanya Moodie.
A Text in Time
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