Kathy Lette shot to fame in the late seventies when she penned the novel Puberty Blues since then she has had a string of novels that have empowered women.
And she continues that work with the Girls Without Voices which highlights the inequality of women in the developing world. I caught up with her to talk about the aims of the campaign as well as her long and successful writing career.
- You are backing the Girls Without Voices campaign so can you tell me a little bit about it?
Basically what the new research shows, and what we expected, girls in the developing world are fed last and least they are completely second class citizens, I think that they are runners up in the human race. They are pulled out school really young, it’s funny I left school really young; just before my sixteenth birthday and I always joke about school and how the only examination that I passed is my cervical smear test but at least I had a choice.
In the developing world girls are pulled out of school in primary school and that means a life of domestic servitude they are forced into marriage at twelve and have babies at that age so what you realise is that in most countries girls are absolutely second class citizens.
But if you can educate a girl of course she can earn more money for the family, get the family up out of poverty, and also she will learn about contraception, and I always say that the best way to break the poverty cycle is to break the menstrual cycle because they are held hostage by their hormones and copulation equals population.
So if you educate girls the very first thing that they do is learn about contraception, they don’t want to have so many babies, so it just makes so much sense. At the moment we are wasting half of the world’s potential by keeping girls ignorant and barefoot and pregnant in the question.
- Well that leads me into my next question how fair is it to say that education is key to stop pregnancy and the spread of HIV/Aids?
Totally important it’s so much cheaper to educate people, young girls, than to deal with the repercussions of ignorance, which are unwanted pregnancy and the spread of HIV, it’s so much cheaper to do it now because it gives girls a choice, and feminism is all about choice.
I went to Brazil for Plan and went out to the Slums not far from the Amazon and I was so appalled by the things that I saw there; number one the child prostitution, because of the poverty there the girls are put to work as prostitutes as young as eight and nine, it was just so appalling.
And what Plan do, which is brilliant, they are very hands on, you know a lot of charities you give money to and you wonder where the money is going, but Plan is very very community based so they go into the communities and see what their needs were.
Where I was in Brazil the girls, there was a school but it was ten miles away and they had to walk to it every day and it was so dangerous as they often got raped on the way so they would stop going, so Plan built a community school near the village so they could get to school.
Here I am being very blasé about leaving school so young these kids are so desperate to go to school they do it in half shifts, half of them go from 7.30 am until 12 noon and the other half go from 12.10 to 5.00. So they build schools they give them a hot meal every day and teach them about planting vegetables and how to nourish themselves as well as teaching them about contraception.
- So how readily available is education in the developing world and what needs to be done to change this?
They just need a cheap classroom and a teacher and the benefits that you get from that, first of all the world is so overpopulated so the benefits to the world of not having so many people which effects global warming and so on. But also disease if you get people with aids then you lose a workforce, it’s a burden on the economy to keep them in hospital so it’s so short sighted not to address things at this end of the scale.
- A survey done in the UK showed that many women believe that education is key to gender equality when climbing the social ladder so how far would you agree with this?
Oh I totally agree with that. Women in the west we shouldn’t get to excited because it’s still a man’s world we don’t have equal pay, we are only getting 75p in £1, we are still getting concussion from hitting our head on the glass ceiling and we are supposed to Windex it while we are up there.
Even though we make up 50% of the work force in Britain we still do 99% of all the childcare and housework. I have this argument with my own husband I ask him to give me more help around the house and he says’ I can’t because I can’t multitask’ what a biological cop out do you think they would have any trouble multitasking at let’s say an orgy? Hello, no. If any man says that just run that idea past them.
Even in the west I still think that women have a long way to go and I do think that any woman that calls themselves a post feminist has kept her Wonderbra and burnt her brain. But compared to our sisters in the developing world we live lives of total freedom and luxury and choice.
In all my novels, I have written ten novels now, and the gist of all my books is to say to women ‘you can stand on your own two stilettos you don’t have to wait to be rescued by some knight in shining Armani.’
Also what I want to say is that women are each other’s human wonder bras, uplifting, supportive and making each other look bigger and better it’s just an extension of the way we look after our girlfriends, our sisters and our mums lets extend that arm of friendship to the girls in the developing world who have no one championing their causes.
I was shocked when I read the statistics that show that they are fed last and least, they are expendable, when you read the statistics of how many girls go missing every year at birth because they are female it’s just horrifying, it’s not genocide it’s femocide.
I think you judge a country on how they treat their women because we are not a physically strong. However we are more verbally dextrous we can shoot from the lip we can quip lash and deflate a man from a hundred paces with a perfectly positioned barbed retort.
I always say get a black belt in tongue fu so you can karate chop a man with a great one liner and when I give talks in schools I always say to girls never go out without a lone liner tucked up your trouser leg.
But in the developing world the girls just get raped, beaten and forced into prostitution so we just want to shine a little light on this problem and say it’s time that girls were treated as equals and not sequels, it’s time.
- How and why did you get involved in the campaign?
Well I have always been very pro-female and I have done it with all my books if you can disarm with charm then you have a much better chance of getting your message across than being fiercely feminist.
And women always tell me when I go on a book tour they always say that they will be reading a book in bed like How To Kill Your Husband and the husband will be looking very nervous and she will be killing herself laughing.
But then he will ask her to read a bit out and he will go ‘that’s not funny’ but will then say ‘read me another bit’ and by the end of the week the book will have disappeared because he will have taken it into the loo, you know how men think that sitting on the toilet is a leisure activity, and I think how great if I can get men to slip between my covers and see what women are really thinking , because I think if I have any skill as a writer it’s putting into worlds what women are thinking but may not have the confidence to say out loud.
But also I write down how women talk when there are no men around and I do all my research in a very scientific fashion of cappuccinos and girlfriends. But when women are together we strip off to our emotional underwear, and it’s a psychological strip tease that reveals all as we are so candid, and I think it’s a great male myth that women aren’t funny but I think men are just worried about what women are being funny about, they must think we sit around talking about the length of their members which isn’t true because we also talk about the width because after childbirth it’s very important.
It was a very natural extension to get involved with Plan because if I’m championing women in the west it’s only logical that I would try and help women in less advantaged places. Also women we are a very strong force when we mobilise, once we utilise together we are very powerful. When I went to Brazil and saw how Plan helps and how it’s grassroots and very community based, sometimes when you give aid it ends up just buying guns for army fraction in Africa, but it’s not like that it’s very very female orientated so I thought this really does work, I saw it work.
I met the mother’s who had learnt about contraception and were now secretly taking the pill, their husbands didn’t know because they would be taking the pill, but they were secretly taking the pill and teaching their daughters about contraception. And that’s the way to give them some autonomy over their lives and improve the world for us all.
- You have enjoyed a very successful writing career and finding success early with Puberty Blues so was writing something that you always wanted to do?
I did yeah I mean I was winning writing competitions when I was ten and eleven I just loved it I loved word play, see I always say world play is foreplay for women. When we are together we use something like 450 times more words a day then men, we are more verbally dextrous we just are.
But it was kind of odd having that first book being such a big success because I went from obscurity to overnight notoriety, my father didn’t talk to me for five years because the book was so candid about what was happening to teenage girls in Australia, but I thought to myself what a great job you get to work in your pyjamas all day, you can drink heavily on the job, you can have affairs and call it research what’s not to love? So yeah I have been lucky that way.
- You have touched on this already but you do tend to write novels that feature very strong women and hint that women should strive to reach their potential. Why do you choose to empower women?
Because it’s still a men’s world, I do comically knee-cap men all of the time and I will continue to do so until we get equal pay, when we do get equal pay I will turn my attentions elsewhere but until we do get equal pay I think women have the right to blow raspberries, have tantrums and stomp all over men in stilettos we need to make a noise about because it’s outrageous. So I do try to empower women with humour and try and laugh them into awareness.
But I don’t always start with a strong character, my last book To Love Honour and betray the women is left by her husband for her best friend, which happens with astounding frequency, so she started off in that book with a self esteem that was lower than Britney Spears’ bikini line and that book she gradually learnt that she didn’t need a man in shining Armani and that she was worth something,
I don’t always start them off strong but they learn to be strong in the end with their girlfriend’s support. I think that a lot of what is called Chick Lit now is just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, it’s still about being rescued by a man, if you find love fantastic but it should be a bye product of everything else that’s going on in your life it shouldn’t be your one goal.
I think that it’s an important lesson for young women I don’t want them to think that they are going to be rescued by something tall, dark and bankable they have to follow a career and get their own intellectual nourishment and hopefully find love along the way, I think it makes you more attractive if you have got intelligence, a career and independence.
- Finally what’s next for you are you working on anything new and exciting?
We are turning How To Kill Your Husband And Other Handy Household Hints into a TV drama; I’m doing that with the guy that did The Royale Family, Cold Feet and the Queen.
I’m also doing a book next year called Men An Owners Manual From Toilet Training to Bedtime Battles I have learnt so much about men over the years, I’ve put in the research darling, I have written so much about men that I have just done this very funny book for women as a kind of guide about the strange species that we have to share the bathroom with.
And then I have got another novel that I’m starting and that’s about it, I think that’s enough.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Kathy Lette shot to fame in the late seventies when she penned the novel Puberty Blues since then she has had a string of novels that have empowered women.
And she continues that work with the Girls Without Voices which highlights the inequality of women in the developing world. I caught up with her to talk about the aims of the campaign as well as her long and successful writing career.
- You are backing the Girls Without Voices campaign so can you tell me a little bit about it?
Basically what the new research shows, and what we expected, girls in the developing world are fed last and least they are completely second class citizens, I think that they are runners up in the human race. They are pulled out school really young, it’s funny I left school really young; just before my sixteenth birthday and I always joke about school and how the only examination that I passed is my cervical smear test but at least I had a choice.
In the developing world girls are pulled out of school in primary school and that means a life of domestic servitude they are forced into marriage at twelve and have babies at that age so what you realise is that in most countries girls are absolutely second class citizens.
But if you can educate a girl of course she can earn more money for the family, get the family up out of poverty, and also she will learn about contraception, and I always say that the best way to break the poverty cycle is to break the menstrual cycle because they are held hostage by their hormones and copulation equals population.
So if you educate girls the very first thing that they do is learn about contraception, they don’t want to have so many babies, so it just makes so much sense. At the moment we are wasting half of the world’s potential by keeping girls ignorant and barefoot and pregnant in the question.
- Well that leads me into my next question how fair is it to say that education is key to stop pregnancy and the spread of HIV/Aids?
Totally important it’s so much cheaper to educate people, young girls, than to deal with the repercussions of ignorance, which are unwanted pregnancy and the spread of HIV, it’s so much cheaper to do it now because it gives girls a choice, and feminism is all about choice.
I went to Brazil for Plan and went out to the Slums not far from the Amazon and I was so appalled by the things that I saw there; number one the child prostitution, because of the poverty there the girls are put to work as prostitutes as young as eight and nine, it was just so appalling.
And what Plan do, which is brilliant, they are very hands on, you know a lot of charities you give money to and you wonder where the money is going, but Plan is very very community based so they go into the communities and see what their needs were.
Where I was in Brazil the girls, there was a school but it was ten miles away and they had to walk to it every day and it was so dangerous as they often got raped on the way so they would stop going, so Plan built a community school near the village so they could get to school.
Here I am being very blasé about leaving school so young these kids are so desperate to go to school they do it in half shifts, half of them go from 7.30 am until 12 noon and the other half go from 12.10 to 5.00. So they build schools they give them a hot meal every day and teach them about planting vegetables and how to nourish themselves as well as teaching them about contraception.
- So how readily available is education in the developing world and what needs to be done to change this?
They just need a cheap classroom and a teacher and the benefits that you get from that, first of all the world is so overpopulated so the benefits to the world of not having so many people which effects global warming and so on. But also disease if you get people with aids then you lose a workforce, it’s a burden on the economy to keep them in hospital so it’s so short sighted not to address things at this end of the scale.
- A survey done in the UK showed that many women believe that education is key to gender equality when climbing the social ladder so how far would you agree with this?
Oh I totally agree with that. Women in the west we shouldn’t get to excited because it’s still a man’s world we don’t have equal pay, we are only getting 75p in £1, we are still getting concussion from hitting our head on the glass ceiling and we are supposed to Windex it while we are up there.
Tagged in Kathy Lette