Don’t Menshn Feminist T-Shirts

The Mail titles are clearly not finished kicking the Fawcett Society, which was involved in producing and promoting those “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts, as witness yesterday’s headline “Self-righteous. Narrow-minded. A mouthpiece for the unions... Why I quit feminist society behind THOSE T-shirts: Blistering attack on The Fawcett Society by its former vice chair Joanne Cash”.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

Who she? Ms Cash is a failed former Tory Party parliamentary candidate: at the last General Election, she set out to pick up the seat of Westminster North, but dropped it. And she was, briefly, a vice-chair of the Fawcett Society. It was such a brief tenure that her Wikipedia entry does not mention it. But she decided that the Society was full of rotten lefties, and that’s good enough for the MoS.

This did not go unnoticed somewhere in reassuringly expensive and upmarket Manhattan, where (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch went into raptures over the hatchet job, crowing “BRILLIANT piece re Labour front group [Fawcett Society] – fauxminists supreme – by [Joanne Cash] on why she quit them”. That Ms Cash is prone to disagree with others and walk out is not told.

She tried to do just that in the run-up to the last General Election, and it needed Young Dave’s personal intervention to steady the local Tory ship. Ms Mensch, though, was away with the fairies: “Been telling you for ages the [Fawcett] Society have nothing to do with women or feminism”. Think they do, actually, Louise. Anyone not sure about that can check their website HERE.

Meanwhile, Ms Mensch loses it totally and starts saying things that are not true: “[Fawcett Society] board member and vice-chair [Joanne Cash] had to resign as it was just lefty front group”. She didn’t have to resign, and “lefty front group” is the personal opinion of Tory Party supporters, the kind of folks who think the BBC is a hotbed of socialism. And hello Louise, that’s not Ms Cash’s Twitter handle.

Ms Mensch ends her typically batshit rant with “Like other Conservative feminists, [Joanne Cash] discovered that, sadly, [Fawcett Society] switched from feminist to fauxminist long ago”. Sadly for that point of view, the article that she has so enthusiastically cited is full of questionable assertions and just a few whoppers, talking about “exploiting female workers in Mauritius”.

The T-shirts made in Mauritius were not produced in a sweatshop, every assessment of the CMT factory supports the view that it meets a good ethical standard, and all Joanne Cash’s piece does is to show that it is she who is the one who cannot get off her party political hobby horse. Others have different viewpoints to her? Get over it, that’s the real world out there.

A failed politician backing one of her own? No surprise there, then.