but it was a rare man who liked us. And if he did we despised him for his softnessI remember the fate of the New Man who looked after the crèche while the women had their meetingshow he would be spurned by the booted foot of passing feminists.
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In the mid-seventies I wrote a novel
Praxis
. My protagonist was ambivalent about the new women. Here she bemoans her fate and their nature:
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 | | I, Praxis Duveen, being old and scarcely in my right mind, now bequeath you my memories. They may help you: they certainly do nothing to sustain me, let alone assist my old bones clamber out of the bath.
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| | Last night, doing just that, I slipped on the soap and cracked my elbow. This morning the pain was such that I took the bus to the hospital instead of the park.
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| | My erstwhile sisters, my former friends: I did what you wanted, and look at me now!
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| | You have forgotten me.
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| | Two years in prison have aged me two decades. I should not regret the new grey wiriness of my hair, the swollen veins in my legs, the huddling lumpiness of my figure, the faded look in my watery eyes. But I do, I do. The eyes of the world look quickly past me, beyond me, and I am humiliated.
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| | My fingers are stiff and sore with what I suppose to be arthritis. Writing has become painful. But I will write. I am accustomed to pain. And pain in the elbow, the fingers and, since my abortive journey to the hospital, pain in my stamped-upon toe, is nothing compared to that pain in the heart, the soul, and the mindthose three majestic seats of female sorrowwhich seems to be our daily lot.
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| | I do not understand the three-fold pain: but I will try. Perhaps it serves a useful purpose, if only as an indication that some natural process is being abused. I cannot believe it is a punishment: to have a certain nature is not a sin, and in any case who is there to punish us? Unlessas many dowe predicate some natural law of male dominance and female subservience, and call that God. Then what we feel is the pain of the female Lucifer, tumbling down from heaven, having dared to defy the male deity, cast out for ever, but likewise never able to forget, tormented always by the memory of what we threw away. Or else, and on this supposition my mind rests most contentedly, we are in the grip of some evolutionary force which hurts as it works, and which I fear has already found its fruition in that new race of young women which I encountered in the bus on the way to the hospital this morning, dewy fresh from their lovers' arms and determined to please no one but themselves. One of the New Women trod me underfoot and with her three-inch soles pulped my big toe in its plastic throw-away shoe (only I, unlike her, cannot afford to throw anything away, and am doomed to wear it for ever) causing me such fresh pain that when the bus broke down and we all had to be decanted into another, I lost heart altogether, abandoned the journey and limped home.
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