I actually burned my bra in the 70s - but young women today have lost the meaning of feminism

I hated Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Here is why: Renée Zellweger’s fixed smile and weird emotional swings; the ludicrous plot; a great, but detached, cast – except for Hugh Grant and Nico Parker – and avoidable slip-ups.

Investors and film-makers are cashing in on the franchise because millions of fans are mad about the girl – now a widow and mum of two, but, still startlingly immature.

A dear friend, a widow, was additionally appalled by the way grief is trivialised. The cure for the pain of losing a loved one isn’t to hop into bed with a toyboy, she explained. “You try to see people. But the person you loved and lost is with you all the time.”

For me, it was most galling to see Bridget, now in her fifties, still dependent on the approval of men. Young women today are sexually free, but captives of beauty myths, the anxieties and the need to please.

That got me thinking about my own feminist journey, which began in 1973, soon after I arrived here from Uganda and began a postgrad course at Oxford University.

I was 23, married to a handsome charmer, making new friends. Some were radical feminists, who believed penetrative sex was rape – bewildering for a young woman who was attracted to her man and wanted to have his babies.

One rad-fem took me to fiery meetings in a small, stuffy room. I wore denim dungarees and joined in. One day, they lit a bonfire in the garden and asked us to burn our bras ceremoniously. I threw mine, black and lacy, into the flames and cried as it was consumed.

I became a lifelong feminist. In the 60s, the pill and abortions were legalised. In the 70s we were liberating ourselves from our own autobiographies and fighting for equal rights for women in domestic and public domains. Among my many influencers were the black writer Alice Walker and Britain’s erudite sociologist and historian, Sheila Rowbotham, whose books, Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Hidden from History (1973) changed my very being.

In her A Century of Women (1997), Rowbotham described the fervour of those struggles; “the resolve to break through restraints, defy the taboos around femininity and become new women was fierce and undeniable. The collective culture of the new movement was springing from individual desires for personal transformation which went deeper than any ideology.” Put simply, the personal was the political for us then.

Margaret Thatcher, not a feminist, was proclaimed as one by those for whom it was all about money and success – such as the Spice Girls. The me-me-me 80s were hedonistic and individualistic. Bridget Jones grew into an adult in this period. In the first film, she’s in her early thirties. It is the 90s. Ciggies, booze, sex, regrets, repeat, is the cycle of her disordered life.

In the sequel, she is less flighty, only just. By film three, she settles down with a good guy, Mark Darcy – played by Colin Firth – and has two kids. In this last one, she is a widow. She loves her kids, but is hopeless at parenting. We are expected to believe that the ditzy Ms Jones is such a brilliant TV producer that they ask her back. Like that ever happens in real life. Happiness, again, is delivered by a man who saves her from herself. This is feminism defanged and tamed.

Step back. Look at how women and girls have been faring in Britain. Yes, we have incredibly powerful females in politics, the media and business. Yet strong females don’t have it all, at all. As Lisa Snowdon confessed in this newspaper of previous relationships: “I was in a vicious cycle of attracting narcissistic characters, the wrong people – ending up disappointed, hurt and just used.” How many women are today in these same traps of “love”?

The tough old feminism I espoused has been replaced by more accommodating, less threatening forms, partly because females fear the fallout and counter-attacks. But modern Britain remains unsafe and insecure for women. Rape, coercion and abuse seem unstoppable. More concerningly, the internet is normalising casual sex, hard porn and some forms of sexual violence.

In an interview in The Sunday Times, Louise Perry, the feminist author whose previous book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution was a bestseller in 2022, argues the sexual revolution has left females exploitable and vulnerable, and that society needs to become more prudish.

Coming from a culture where there are no sexual freedoms, this “solution” is anathema. But I too feel the free-living 60s, bit, by bit, led to Britain getting hooked on personal gratification and dislocated from progressive movements.

Bridget Jones’s latest film revels in apolitical self-absorption. Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian film review writes: “Zellweger looks as if she’s thinking about something else,” If so, I hope it is: “This is rubbish. I must grow up, become an independent woman.”