Leo McGarry, the fictitious White House chief of staff from The West Wing, observed in the episode Five Votes Down, “There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em: laws and sausages.” For some reason this quote popped into my head recently, as I was travelling to work and happened to catch a glimpse of the front page of the Metro. I don’t remember what the headline was. It could have been referring to any number of stories that are dominating the news cycle at the moment: the American Presidential election; Brexit; ISIS; the migrant crisis; Syria. Regardless of how I feel about any one of these stories (one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; one woman’s sexual predator is another woman’s saviour – apparently) I got the feeling that, at the moment, the making of history has become visible.

History is made every day and it is as much a process as an event. It’s in the history of small things and the accumulation of the every day that historians can, with hindsight, piece together the stories of the past, providing a narrative, or more accurately, narratives of what went before and how we ended up where we are now. The people whose present became our past, passed through the every day, so enfolded and enmeshed in the various events, and in the immediacy of their own lives, that history is usually formed unseen. But sometimes there are events so dramatic that they push through the fabric of the present and we become aware of their significance, not just for us but also for the future.

Looking back at the past gives you, with the privilege of hindsight, a bird’s eye view that allows a bigger picture to emerge, but it also hides the grim and gritty reality of the everyday. The trend in recent years for historical recreation programming is still healthily alive if the latest BBC offering, The Victorian Slum, is anything to go by, and while these programmes can be jolly good fun and poignantly revealing, they cannot truly recreate the smelly, noisy, hungry, dangerous and painful reality. Nor should they, because if they did, several centuries of progress, supposedly embodied in legislation and changed social attitudes (hello Health and Safety laws and several anti-discrimination acts), would disappear in a puff of a nineteenth-century coal fires smoke (cue redtop headline: Child forced up chimney for BBC-funded entertainment shock!!)

But right now, it’s not a bird’s eye view we have, it’s that of the worm and with it comes a grim and gritty reality that we can’t avoid. Not only is history being made, but we are witnessing a regression, when old conflicts open up, old attitudes reappear and old ideas are resurgent; reconfigured, but still resurgent.

The results of these events are still unknown. We have no idea what the outcome of the vote by 52 per cent of the British population to leave the European Union will be; if Hillary Clinton will become the first female American President or Donald J. Trump will become one of the most ill qualified. I don’t know when or if we will see peace in Syria; if ISIS will be defeated or will strengthen; if the thousands of displaced men, women and children will ever feel safe enough to return to their homeland, or find peace and acceptance in a new country. For millions of people, their every day has changed forever with the loss of their home, their family and country. For millions more, the consequences of their actions, of exactly in which box they choose place a simple cross, has and will change their future. The accumulation of small things is coinciding with the massive shifts in the geo-politics of nations. In each of these events, history is being visibly made; and like the making of laws and sausages, it ain’t pretty.

Once all the wittering and twittering over the Tim Hunt affair has died down, what are we left with? Ill-judged comments that deserved to be ridiculed, a glimpse into the sexism that female scientists and academics encounter on a daily basis and a well-respected Nobel prize winner’s career clouded in controversy.

As the storm in a test tube begins to abate, what remains is a simple but wearisome idea – women really, REALLY shouldn’t have a presence in spaces that men self-identify as theirs. In the Lab, opined Hunt in his subsequent non-apology, it’s TERRIBLY IMPORTANT that people are on a level playing field. The implication being that scientific playing fields which are made up solely of chaps, will always be level and that class, education, sexual orientation, experience, personality, personal and professional allegiances will make not a jot of difference. No, its the GIRLS that are the problem. Girls (not women) are distracting, they cry if you criticise them and oh, you would not believe the sexual tension that arises over a Bunsen burner. With so many chemical substances already flying around the lab, the introduction of oestrogen into the mix is just too much and it is the poor innocent science that suffers!

It’s all utter nonsense, but perhaps the reason his comments touched a nerve and the whole incident spiralled into Twittermob meltdown is that they typify both the anti-female zeitgeist of our current times and the age-old misogyny that has proved to be remarkably cockroach-like in its ability to evolve and survive.

From Gamergate to Twitter, from campaigning for Jane Austen to be on the £10 note to presenting BBC history programmes, from a presence in the boardroom, laboratory or lecture theatre to any sort of online presence, women are currently being horrendously abused and threatened simply for being there and participating. Since Hunt’s now-notorious speech, we’ve had London’s Garrick Club voting to remain a male-only enclave and Ellen Pao forced out of her job with Reddit due to vicious online abuse, to name but two recent examples of the desperate desire of some men to colonise various places and spaces.

Why? Because of the simple contention that men and women are different and within that difference lies inequality. This is nothing new and the shadow of Eve hangs over us still. For millennia female subordination was predicated on the outcome of the most ill-fated garden stroll in history, and for some, it still is. Even when Enlightened science and philosophy began to undermine the old, long held prejudices, Eve’s legacy lived on in the new ways people found, and continue to find, to justify the subordination of women. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, science began to replace God as the reason for female inferiority and it was biology, rather than sin, that justified women’s submissive role. Women have children and for that reason, their own reason is subordinated to their womb. To produce and raise their husband’s children is both the only, and supreme, role of women.

“The whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honoured by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make the lives agreeable and sweet – these are the duties of women at all times and they ought to be taught from childhood,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1764, summing up the new attitude of a world which was no longer quite so sure of the validity of the old religious truths, but desperate not to allow women to think all the chatter around the new and exciting concept of ‘rights’ could apply to them.

Trouble is, women were already thinking exactly that: “If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” asked Mary Astell in 1700, beating Rousseau’s revelation that, “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains” by sixty-two years and signalling the beginnings of the intellectual debate about the basis on which male superiority was built.

Women have always challenged the idea that there are spaces, physical and metaphorical, into which they should not enter and for it they have been sneered at, abused and too-often killed. They have been branded heretics and witches; infuriated the sour-faced John Knox into blasting his first trumpet against their monstrous regiment; likened to hyenas in petticoats, and dismissed as unsex’d creatures. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea summed it up in verse:

“Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to inquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our outmost art, and use.”

The vitriol directed at these women has always revealed more about the insecurity on which the gender hierarchy has been based, than the women themselves, and has largely been based on the notion that there is a naturally ‘right’ way for women to behave, and the natural space in which they should exist is the domestic one. If they should they have ambitions beyond it or don’t behave in the way sanctioned by society as feminine, then they should be made to know their place. They should be threatened, harassed and intimidated back into the dark places of subservience and submission.

Today, after the first, second and third wave feminisms which has fought for and won many victories for the notion that women are, in fact, rational creatures and not children of a larger growth, we find ourselves once again facing the vitriol of gender insecurity. The language is different, but the arguments are the same. Women shouldn’t intrude on the rights of men. Whether it is the right to science, business, politics, the digital space or the public space, somehow we are still labouring under the notion that these are spaces that are presumptively gendered and that gender is male.

Glimmers of hope exist. The Garrick Club’s vote to continue to exclude women didn’t pass without controversy and many of its members were infuriated not that women should be allow in, but that they continue to be kept out. But they are glimmers only, and they are lost in a culture still saturated by a petulant sexism; a sexism that ultimately hurts both men and women in its continued desire to draw rigid and uncompromising lines of demarcation between the genders.

So maybe the real significance of Tim Hunt’s comments is that they have no significance; they are simply a continuation of Eve’s legacy, reminding us of the battles still ahead. But history tells us that too much progress has been made by too many people, men and women alike, for us to sink beneath its shadow now.

Labour MP Chuka Amunna recently commented during BBC’s Question Time that when it comes to politics, people want only black and white answers. As disconcerting as it is to find yourself agreeing with a politician, this echoed a thought that has been bothering me for some time.  If anybody wanders into the public domain and offers an opinion or observation that isn’t bombastic in conviction and absolute in content, they get lambasted or ridiculed. It seems that, unless they come complete with a blindfold, leather whip and incredibly dodgy prose, we really do not like shades of grey.

The problem with this is that most of life is exactly that – grey.  Life is nuanced, problematic and shifting. The issues we face every day, both personally and collectively, often require a thoughtful and balanced response and do not have black and white answers. Yet as soon as you look at the debates around those issues you find strident voices telling you black and white is all you have. Problems with the NHS? Blame the immigrants, No jobs? Blame the immigrants (again), Too many immigrants? Blame the EU, Don’t like the EU? Leave and all our problems will be solved. Society breaking down? Blame anybody – immigrants, schools, working mothers, single mothers, feckless dads, feminism…

And so we come to feminism. Most of the most ridiculous blacknwhite rhetoric I’ve ever come across revolves around feminism; what it is and what it isn’t – its aims, its impacts, its history, its winners and its losers.  The debates into which feminism, both ideologically and practically, can be brought are many and varied, but in all of them it doesn’t take long for blacknwhitism to surface.  At one level the statements, on both sides, are so crude they are laughable; feminism is a Marxist plot (or a capitalist one) to destabilise society; housewives are stupid; feminists hate men; men can’t be victims and so on. But as crude as these statements are, they pose a problem for those of us who do accept and embrace the grey, because they block positive, healthy debate. In this sort of debate, we accept not every one will agree and people may draw different conclusions from the same source. This type of debate, where we have the possibility of gaining insight and change, can only occur if we step into the grey. In the grey, we can discuss why, and if, we needed feminism and where it came from historically. We can explore that history (or histories) and it’s various alliances with other political ideologies, while seeing it as a diffuse and developing idea. We can acknowledge that, while feminism is celebrated by some, others including both men and women, view it only as a negative and argue for its reversal.

As a feminist historian the grey is important to me, because if there are those who argue that feminism has made things worse (a common contention), then you have to accept the past was somehow better. And that is a tricky argument to make, precisely because of the grey. Not only is life nuanced, problematic and shifting, it always was and trying to unearth the historical reality of people’s lives is a complex task. More than that, it is a task that will rarely uncover hard “facts” about those lives from which can be drawn the blacknwhite statements so beloved of contemporary commentators.  “Facts” are notoriously slippery things.  So no, history doesn’t tell us all women were desperate for feminism nor does it tell us all women were blissfully happy under patriarchy, it tells us something far more difficult and subtle; that the truth (another problematic concept, but one for a different time) lies somewhere in the middle, in the grey.

In the grey, the observation can be made that both patriarchy and feminism have a checkered past, but only by looking to that past and the lessons it teaches us can we move forward and try and meet in middle.

So this is a call to arms for those of us who understand that life is not black and white and that it is in the shades of grey that understanding, change and progress is to be found. We will never stop those who revel in blacknwhitism, either because they can’t see the grey or don’t care too. But those of us who appreciate the grey can try and find it in our debates and discussions, and by doing so can make life a little more colourful. Step into the grey and you just might find the rainbow.

And on that note – who wants to discuss religion?