'A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water,' Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Her sentiment captured the mood at this morning’s Women for a People’s Vote campaign launch, which brought together a host of high-profile female speakers united in their conviction that British voters deserve to have their say on the final Brexit deal.
'Brexit is a feminist issue,' argued the activist Caroline Criado Perez, kicking off the debate in a suitably stirring fashion. She proceeded to demonstrate the extent to which women’s voices have been sidelined from the national conversation, pointing out that only 16 per cent of those featured on television debates in the run-up to the referendum were female and that women took up just eight per cent of quotation space in print media.
At the same time, women have been poorly represented in the Brexit negotiations themselves: there is a 17 per cent gap between the number of male staff and their female counterparts in the senior civil servant staff group in Brexit departments, and just one woman among the nine-strong team in Brussels. 'The failure to represent women’s voices in the debate is nothing short of a national scandal,' said Criado Perez, 'and it stops now.'
The call for a People’s Vote is not party-political, as the presence of the journalist Rachel Johnson – the sister of Boris Johnson – visibly attested. 'Whatever your political colouring, the People’s Vote is the best option remaining on the table,' she stated, pointing out that Theresa May’s Chequers deal offers Brexit in name only. 'This government is not allowing our people to have another chance to decide whether we want the deal that is on offer – that is a gross betrayal of democracy by definition.'
With polls suggesting that 56 per cent of women now believe we should remain in the EU, it seems unfair that they should bear the brunt of its consequences, particularly those who are at the coalface of public services. The event took place at the Royal College of Nursing, whose council chair Maria Trewern spoke passionately about the threat to the NHS of a ‘Brexodus’ (more than 1,000 EU nurses and midwives have already left the health services and research by the People’s Vote campaign predicts that we will lose a further 4,500 by 2022). 'When you go into hospital for an operation you’re given a list of the pros and cons,' said Trewern. 'Shouldn’t we be allowed that with Brexit?'
Young women also deserve their voices to be heard in the debate, as Lara Spirit, the co-founder of the Our Future Our Choice campaign, emphasised. According to polls, 82 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds – many of whom were too young to vote in the EU referendum – would now back Remain. Yet these are the women who will have to live with the results of a Brexit deal in which they had no say. 'If we get a no-deal Brexit it’ll be us, our daughters and our grand-daughters cleaning up the mess,' observed the political commentator Ayesha Hazarika.
Ultimately, Bazaar’s cover star Cate Blanchett is right when she points out that 'whichever way you voted, you cannot but be disappointed in the way the architects of Brexit have behaved'. The call for a People’s Vote is not just about Leave versus Remain – it’s about protecting our democracy.
To show your support for the Women for a People’s Vote campaign, sign the petition here or join the march on 20 October.
Women's March 2018: 21 powerful images from around the world
