Women want the doors of power opened for them

Nine out of 10 women now expect to have doors held open for them by men, according to something called the Future Foundation. This bit of news has been taken in some quarters as suggesting that a return to a more traditional society might be on the cards. The finding may look rather suspect from the start, since it arrives yoked to other unlikely conclusions, such as that 80 per cent of people would like to say good morning to strangers on the street. Still, it was enough for The Daily Telegraph to see in it proof that people in Britain now want "manners to be taken more seriously".

It's not surprising that some journalists see the news that women want to be ushered through doors as rather reassuring. The most clearly expressed fears about feminism in the past have often been about details of personal behaviour, such as whether women would go about without bras and would expect to pay for themselves in restaurants. Even now that it is assumed that a woman should work, earn her own money and live independently, you will always find commentators who are ready to berate women when they stray into unmannerly behaviour. Right now, Ulrika Jonsson is getting a hard time from the tabloids for taking her top off on a beach, while the aspect of Big Brother that attracted the most bile from some commentators was the pure naughtiness of Jade's drinking and partying.

Such commentators find very attractive any suggestion that all women are, deep down, dying to return to older traditions of social behaviour. This may explain why the media have fallen so comprehensively over the last few weeks for a young Canadian woman who has explained in various newspapers and magazines that women still really, under all that independence, expect men to invite them on "dates" and to pay for them, and are disappointed when such formalities are not on offer. How charming! How traditional! How unlike those brazen British hussies who ask men out themselves and hand over their own hard-earned cash for their drinks!

But the more interesting finding from the Future Foundation was that 97 per cent of respondents approve of the freedoms that women have now, compared to their mothers and grandmothers. In other words, don't mistake the vague nostalgia that sometimes rears its head for any real desire, on the part of women young or old, for a more circumscribed society. Well, we could have guessed that, couldn't we? After all, who would mistake the raised eyebrows of the tabloids for the true opinions of the majority? While the tabloid commentators may be telling Ulrika off for showing her breasts, most British women are happy to do the same the minute they step on to a beach flooded with sunlight; while the newspapers might have fulminated against Jade's behaviour, the viewers kept her in that house until the final night.

Even if it sometimes looks as though young women might be rediscovering some traditional styles of behaviour, they are doing so on terms that have changed completely over the last few decades. After all, even if a woman chooses, one weekend, to follow Nigella's recipe for chocolate fairy cakes, she may expect her boyfriend to respond with Delia's chocolate soufflé the following weekend.

While a woman may spend an hour on Saturday dolling herself up in the most gorgeous and feminine clothes for a party, she may still go to that party arm-in-arm with her closest girlfriend and decide to come home alone. What many young women of this generation are learning is that it is possible to pick up some of the most enjoyable bits of traditional feminine behaviour without feeling constrained by them. And the same is true for etiquette – girls and boys can hold doors open for one another, buy one another flowers and pull out chairs for one another, and few of them will find it puzzling.

If you caught the documentary Sex, Guys and Videotape earlier this week, in which two young women invited a camera crew to follow their dating games, you would have been struck by how everyone in it took social freedoms for granted. These women may have been looking for boyfriends, but they weren't going to give up any of their freedoms on the way – they earned their own money, they paid for their own flats, they had their own friends and they also met men on their own terms. There was no demure behaviour here, no following of The Rules, no chivalry. "If you played hard to get, I might chase you," said one man to one of the women at one point. "I don't want you to chase me," she said, puzzled. "I don't fancy you."

To be sure, the result for these particular women wasn't happiness, and it's true that it isn't always easy or comfortable being part of a generation with so many new freedoms. But, as young women and men seem to understand, happiness was also elusive in more mannerly societies, and just because, say, Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice hid her disappointment in love under a veneer of perfect etiquette, this doesn't mean that she was any less miserable than the women who can comfort themselves with a night out with the girls.

In fact, the dark inequalities that once underlay those formalities have become more unacceptable than ever. A majority of young people, according to the latest YouGov poll, expect that their female peers will do at least as well as their male counterparts in their careers. There are still real battles for feminism to fight, but they aren't over etiquette.

These battles are going to be fought over pay, power, working practices and child care as this generation grows up and expects to see those expectations put into practice. It was always an apocryphal view of feminism that women were really ready to get offended by men who held open doors – about as meaningful to true feminism as the idea that what really got women worked up was the way to spell "woman" or "history".

No, what offended women was not the manners themselves, but the fact that they they were fake at the core – that men were ready to help women through some doors, and then to slam the ones that really mattered in their faces. And for many women, this hasn't changed. For instance, the recent strikes of the low-paid in the public sector have brought home to us once again that too many people – most of them women – are still locked out of the rising wealth of our society.

The monolithic lack of change in the number of women occupying the powerful and well-paid positions in society will also remind us that there are doors that lead to corridors of power where women are still not welcome.

The new novel by Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It, reminds us – if we need reminding – of the kind of sacrifices that women have to make in order to squeeze their foot into those doors and to try to keep them wedged open: sacrifices of family life and peace of mind that men rarely make. At those doors, the doors of wealth and power, too many women are still pushing in vain. Show some manners, now, boys, and let the ladies through.

n.walter@btinternet.com