KEY POINTS:
The sisterhood is on death's door. I don't mean that shadowy Helen Clark cabal which allegedly runs the country from its secret underground lair; they seem to be in rude good health. No, I'm referring to the common notion that women are busty chums, generally being a good
egg in a sticky spot or bucking each other up during the long, dark tea time of the soul. In the overall-wearing Bread and Roses-singing 1980s heyday of feminism, this solidarity was taken as a given, as bleeding obvious as the fact that wimmin needed men like fishes needed bicycles. But as feminism mutated, spawned that deformed variant girlpower and became something more often studied at universities than discussed in smoko rooms, the idea that other women were comrades who were to be counted on for moral support started to seem, well, quaint.
In the workplace at least, the them-and-us scenario between men and women has been replaced by tribes of breeders and non-breeders; gender largely irrelevant.
That's because in the corporate office of today, most women without children are now effectively men, but with more interesting shoes.
And there isn't much girly bonding going on in the office if new British research is anything to go by. A study, carried out by a creche chain, asked 1500 working mothers about attitudes towards them in the office. It found more than half felt male co-workers were more sympathetic to the stresses they were under than were women without children.
Since I used to be one of those sneery childless women, this didn't really surprise me. Forget women being from Venus and men from Mars. Mothers and singletons are from different solar systems.
I used to think children were an expensive, time-consuming luxury like a fussy pedigreed dog. So why should their "owners" get any special treatment at work, like getting to go home at 5.30pm sharp? After all, they chose to breed.
The fact children are necessary for keeping the human race going - someone has to have the little critters - slipped my mind. I deserved a good slap.
Anyway, the karma bus is pulling up at my stop, since I now have a three-year-old daughter and another child on the way.
Before children I liked being one of the boys. Now I long for the feminine cosiness of the old sisterhood; the unspoken assumptions that we were all on the same side against fascists, phonies and male chauvinist pigs (remember them?).
You certainly can't make those assumptions now. Alison Pearson captured this lack of feminine simpatico in I Don't Know How She Does It.
When the novel's protagonist finds Brad, a male hedge-fund colleague, has put a shot of vodka in her bottle of expressed breastmilk in the work fridge, she turns to Celia, the female head of HR, who is "childless, charmless, chilly as chablis".
"I approached Celia and asked her, woman to woman, what course of action she suggested taking against a jerk who, when confronted by me, claimed that putting alcohol into the food intended for a 12-week-old baby was 'avina bit of a larf'.
"I can still remember the moue of distaste on Celia's face and it wasn't for Brad. 'Use your feminine wiles, dear,' she said."
Really, it shouldn't be a surprise that the sisterhood as a concept is in such a state of disrepair.
Women don't feel connected to other women, because feminism freed us to become men.
No wonder women who have done that have more in common with other men than with women.
