Everyone adored Felix Mendelssohn’s compositions; Queen Victoria even sang her favourite song, Italien, to him when he visited her court. Embarrassed, he eventually admitted it was his sister, Fanny, who had composed it — only, as a well-brought-up 19th-century German woman, she couldn’t take credit for her own music.
Fanny was possibly the more accomplished sibling, producing an astonishing repertoire of 450 works and being praised to Goethe as “playing like a man”. Now the documentary maker Sheila Hayman has turned the spotlight on her ancestor, focusing on Fanny’s greatest, until recently unacknowledged, piano composition, the Easter Sonata, written when she was only 22, in a film about the other Mendelssohn.
But in many ways Fanny was lucky. Although her father insisted that she must give up a public career to marry and her brother said her first duty was to “regulate” her household, her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel, encouraged her to compose, providing her with blank manuscript paper and urging her to found her own choir and hold concerts at home. Finally, she is gaining the recognition she deserves.
• Britney Spears: the teen dream that turned toxic
This travesty could never happen now. And yet in many ways, the singer Britney Spears, living nearly 200 years later, has suffered worse, without even the benefit of an encouraging partner. Her autobiography, The Woman in Me, published yesterday, sounds medieval rather than Victorian. From the age of 16, Spears was dressed as a sexy yet virginal schoolgirl and told to perform, making her male producers and the paparazzi very rich.
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Her first boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, she writes, expected her to have an abortion, but she was the one who was vilified when they split up, deemed a witch by the global village. When her mental health understandably spiralled, Spears was incarcerated under her father’s “conservatorship” from the age of 26 to 39, and her children were taken away from her. All personal, economic and legal decisions were made for her by her father and his lawyers. This was in 21st-century America, not Afghanistan.
The music industry is a bad example, you may think; it has always been misogynistic, although Madonna and Taylor Swift have managed to break free. In most other professions and arenas in the West, from politics to writing, the media, medicine, law and academia, women have almost caught up with men.
But there still isn’t real equality. Ask Claudia Goldin. This month the 77-year-old Harvard professor became the first solo woman to win the Nobel prize in economics. Guess what she won it for. Studying women’s progress in the workforce and uncovering the reasons for the continuing gender gap in pay and participation at work. It reminds me of my great-grandmother, who was allowed to study science at Cambridge only if she wrote her dissertation on the feminine subject of soap suds.
That’s not to dismiss Goldin’s work or tenacity; she was the first woman to be offered tenure at Harvard’s economics department in 1989 and immediately began delving into the evolution of female work over the past 200 years in the US. It wasn’t until the revolutionary 1970s, with the availability of birth control, that the majority entered the workforce. At first the wage gap could be explained by education and occupation, Goldin showed, but now the earnings difference is most conspicuous between men and women in the same jobs, particularly after the birth of a woman’s first child when duties “on the home front” often cause a “career penalty”.
It’s easy to say just legislate. Labour’s Harriet Harman has been trying for decades. Campaigners can demand all-women shortlists, more women in the boardroom and the BBC can be shamed into paying its female presenters the same as the men. But such moves often feel forced rather than consensual and they haven’t been effective enough. In the UK, men now enter the workplace with lower qualifications than women, but they still earn 8 per cent more per year on average, according to the Office for National Statistics, and they are far less likely to be burdened by unpaid work such as caring, cleaning and cooking, with women doing 60 per cent more domestic chores.
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Exorbitant childcare costs affect women disproportionately. Victoria Atkins, the financial secretary to the Treasury, had to tour the radio studios yesterday morning with her 11-year-old son because he was on half term.
• Iceland’s women go on strike over gender inequality
Even in Iceland, ranked the best country for gender equality by the World Economic Forum for the past 14 years, the prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, yesterday cancelled her cabinet and joined the kvennafri or women’s strike in protest at their gender pay gap and lack of equality in domestic tasks. Women across Iceland refused to do any paid or unpaid duties for their employers, colleagues, partners or families, although a few said they’d capitulated and prepared some meals in advance.
The women of the country last went on strike for a day in October 1975; Icelandic men still call it “the Long Friday”. The strike propelled women into better-paid, more high-powered jobs and they gained new respect but it didn’t go far enough. The prime minister explained: “We’re called an equality paradise, but men still don’t do their fair share.”
Should British women stage their own kvennafri? I suspect we’re too conditioned to keep the show on the road and disillusioned by other strikes. But as the Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin said: “We’re never going to have gender equality until we have couple equity.”
