Beryl Bainbridge: My father would rant and rave for weeks - but he was still superior

By BERYL BAINBRIDGE

Last updated at 22:31 09 February 2008

Veteran novelist Beryl Bainbridge re-opened the battle of the sexes by declaring on Radio 4 that women were inferior to men. Here she explains how her "ignorant" view was shaped by her brave father, who went bankrupt yet still managed to give her a privileged life.

Since saying I thought women were inferior to men on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs last week, I've received numerous telephone calls asking me to explain what I meant by this ignorant and controversial viewpoint. Their words, not mine. So here goes.

Every belief, every opinion we hold, even if weakened by time and change, stems from our upbringing.

Experience can make changes of a sort, but as life goes on, nothing is more lasting, more stuck in the mind, than those lessons taught in childhood; which is why my generation of women felt men were superior beings.

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Or rather, I did, and still do on account of my father.

He married late in his 40s and when he was in what was referred to as "a good way of doing" – meaning he was financially secure.

And then the gold standard fell, there was a slump and he was made bankrupt, something which in those long-gone days was considered shameful.

My parents lost their big house on the Wirral, in Merseyside, and by the time my brother and I were born he was reduced to being a commercial traveller, going from house to house with a suitcase.

This change in circumstances also brought about a change in him – periodically for weeks he became a ranting and raving maniac.

At such times, my brother went to the youth club, my mother took her library book to the station and read it beside the fire in the waiting room, and most nights I went down to the shore to look for jellyfish which, when found, I stabbed with a stick. I told you times were different.

And yet, in spite of this, I attended a fee-paying school, was sent to elocution and piano lessons and later to a ballet school in Tring, Hertfordshire.

My brother was articled to a law firm in Bootle, which cost £600 a year, an enormous sum in the Forties.

I had two aunts, Nellie and Margaret, whom my father also supported.

Whenever he visited them they made him

lie down on the sofa to conserve his strength. How he managed his finances remains a mystery to me, and this is why I think men are superior.

I'm not leaving my mother out of this: she was caring and influential. She was the one who bought me pens and paper, but she didn't earn money.

For years I hated Dad because of his moods and it was only when I'd grown up that I saw how important, how brave he'd been.

I had a brief marriage, in that my

husband left me pretty quickly.

I don't blame him: I wasn't easy to get on with and he'd had a tough time with his father, who sent him away aged five to a boarding school, though that was because his mother had run off to Paris to study art.

As regards money and housing, my husband provided both, which is another reason for thinking men are special. His mother turned up one day with a gun and tried to shoot me, but that's another story.

Years ago, I had a friend in Liverpool called Leah who had been educated

in what she called the "University of Life" and was tormented by what she

had learnt.

Daughter of a watchmaker, her mother had carried her as a baby across the wastes of Russia.

Her life hadn't been all that dreadful, she stressed, it was more that she was her own worst enemy.

Leah had fallen in love with a married man. "Without that man," she said, "my life has been a misery." She explained why she thought men were essential to women.

They were needed to make us feel important, objects of desire. Without them there'd be no children, no sense of well-being, no happiness.

I argued that without women there couldn't be any offspring, but she said that one day men would invent another way of making babies.

I thought she was talking nonsense; now, thinking of medical advances, I'm not so sure.

Times have changed and women are no longer expected to marry early and stay at home polishing and washing. We're presenting the news, writing articles in newspapers and jumping up in the House of Commons to express views.

That's after we've been to the hairdressers and the make-up room.

Meanwhile men, however stout, balding and past their prime, still remain supreme.

It's not that we're less able than men, more that we're programmed differently, better at things that don't come under the heading of cleverness – such as giving birth and making men feel important.

I should add that deep down I have never felt inferior, just that I admired men and knew that it helped them to seem better than me.

Besides, to feel inferior is surely a sign that women are superior to men after all.