In the eighties a joke word was doing the rounds: “cattleperkin”. This was a gender neutral version of “cowboy”. Cow, being female, is neutered and becomes “cattle”. “Boy” becomes “person”, but because “person”, to the etymologically tin-eared, contains the word “son”, this has to be changed to a sexless relative, namely “kin”.

Wimyn’s groups, with genderless chairpeople, personned the barricades in the fight against male oppression. That is all history – sorry, herstory. An herstorical interlude, perhaps.

Harry Mount writes in The Telegraph on “the death of feminism at British universities”:

Quietly, without much fanfare, women's studies has disappeared from British universities.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s, thousands of students across the country took the subject.

Over the last five years, numbers have dropped by 75 per cent and only 35 students are doing it this year. This summer, the last place offering the course, London Metropolitan University, is stopping women's studies altogether.

The main feminist struggles have been won, and the more ludicrous ones - bra-burning, the insistence that all men are oppressors - have been quietly dropped.

I know no man under 40 who insists that his wife give up her job and cook him dinner every night. Who's now surprised to have a female boss or a female doctor? And there's not much point in studying, say, women's politics rather than just politics, when a woman has been the most powerful Prime Minister ever.

With feminist victories absorbed into mainstream thought, hardly anyone calls themselves a feminist these days. It's as dated as drenching yourself in patchouli or tie-dyeing your jeans.

"Women’s Studies" may have run its course. If so, I am not sorry. Most courses with "studies" in the title seem to be second rate. But is feminism really dead?

Ten years ago, you would regularly hear women say, “I’m not a feminist, but…” and go on to say something feminist: “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in equal pay,” or “I’m not a feminist, but women have the right to dress as they wish without being accused of inviting rape.” At the time, I would have said that these women were feminists, because I believed that feminism meant equality. To them, however, feminism was a dirty word, meaning hairy, dungaree-clad, man-hater. Men of a certain age never used the word feminist without the epithet “strident”; eventually the “strident” went without saying.

I thought this was silly, and until recently proudly called myself a feminist. Now I am having doubts. This is not because I have discovered my inner Stepford wife. Equality of the sexes is not negotiable. Moreover, I am sceptical of the “equal but different” argument. Yes, men and women are different, but “equal but different” is generally used to mean that women are worse; if they are better, then mysteriously they are better at something men don’t want to do, like washing up or changing nappies. No, I haven't suddenly turned into a surrendered woman.

My doubts about feminism have arisen because of feminist attitudes to Muslim women. Erica Jong, so vociferous on the subject of “pink men”, has nothing to say about honour killings, stoning of rape victims, polygamy, divorce by repudiation, and the many other injustices faced by Muslim women. Germaine Greer, High Priestess of feminism, supported the Luton schoolgirl’s “right” to wear a jilbab, and has even said that Westerners should not try to combat female genital mutilation.

Islam is the most regressive ideology on the planet, and the principal cause of women’s oppression. Yet feminists remain silent. So I may re-consider my membership of the “feminist” category, not because I don’t believe in women’s liberation, but because I do.

Harry Mount glibly, smugly says: “I know no man under 40 who insists that his wife give up her job and cook him dinner every night. Who's now surprised to have a female boss or a female doctor?” He has clearly never been to Bradford, or Tower Hamlets, where Muslim men in their twenties display a chauvinism that our great-grandfathers would have been ashamed of.

By the way, did anybody really burn a bra? Is there any supporting evidence?