"Her weekly column became an icon of all that was hairy and terrifying to men who found the women's movement a threat to their security. She was parodied, ridiculed and attacked. Mostly, though, she became a focal voice of women all over Britain who wrote to her in their thousands and took courage from her to look at the truth about their lives. ... Her radicalism never wavered but her honesty demanded that she explore the ambivalences feminists like her were scarcely able to confess to themselves, let alone to the world. The result was "Letters From A Faint-hearted Feminist", a new series of columns in which issues of central feminist ideology were put through the same critical wringer as the unthinking patriarchal orthodoxies that had been in her earlier columns. Could not you wear high heels with a boiler suit? Were beautiful clothes a gorgeous prison, or a legitimate choice for independent women? Was monogamy inevitably a road to servitude? The cleverness of those columns was Jill's ability to admit to ambivalence, to weakness and to changing her mind without compromising her beliefs in equality, independence and the destructiveness of stereotypes. In their way, they were a bridge between the revolutionary battlefields of the 70s and the next generation who rightly took their freedoms for granted and saw no reason whatever to agonise about boiler suits or PhDs."
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Liz Forgan "For the love of a faint hearted feminist" The Guardian (18 April 2000)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jill_Tweedie
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Jill Tweedie
1969 – 1988
Jill Sheila Tweedie (22 May 1936 – 12 November 1993) was a British feminist, writer and broadcaster. She wrote a column in The Guardian on feminist issues (1969–1988), "Letters from a faint-hearted feminist", and an autobiography entitled Eating Children (1993). She succeeded Mary Stott as a principal columnist on The Guardians women's page.
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