But school was only school, not real life. Oh, and almost all the teachers were men, too. One or two of them were fond of reminding us that while girls may come top of the class in a rural grammar school, they could never aspire to greatness. Where was the female Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michelangelo? Where was the female Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Bobby Fischer? Women couldn't really do art, only craft stuff like needlework. They might work as scientists but only in a plodding sort of way, and if they wrote it would be crime, romance or children's stories (clearly inferior genres). They might write light or unpretentious religious verse but they couldn't handle the lyric without making it personal and hysterical. Women were just too emotional for the serious, objective concentration needed to produce work of the highest order. Yes, there were novels and poetry and even the occasional play written by women but no one with any self-respect would bother reading them, let alone taking them seriously.
At some level I suspected this was nonsense, but with all the evidence around me to the contrary it was more than possible that this hunch was simply another symptom of the arrogance I was learning to curb. In the study at home, scattered among the important men, were books by Iris Murdoch and Helen Waddell, CV Wedgwood and Storm Jameson, and Anne Frank's Diary.
One insidious effect of all this is that one can come to doubt one’s own judgment – being female, one could not have the requisite objectivity to merit any self-confidence.
It’s a shameful admission, but it took years to start to recognise and deal with this internalised misogyny.
