I think I've earned a gong this time

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/katharine-whitehorn-new-years-honours

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It feels pretty good not only to have been promised an honour but to be included in the first year when there are more women getting gongs than men. We really have come a long way in the last half century – not least in journalism. There have always been women journalists, of course, but unless they were in the slot prettily labelled "female" they were expected to write more or less like the men – not to have a different take on what they saw.

I started out on a little magazine called Home Notes and what I mostly remember about it is the way they did the horoscope. A girl called Chrissie would go round and ask us our sign and then say: "What do you want to have happen to you this week?"

It was heaven to move to Picture Post, after being the model for photographer Bert Hardy's feature in the Post on being lonely in London. This was in 1956, before the great changes to come.

It was Mary Stott on the Guardian who changed women's pages for ever by refusing to stick to clothes and cooking but branching out into psychology and human relations, hospitals and hangovers. And when George Seddon started such pages here on the Observer, he thought he was simply following her; but he took it far further and made unisex pages that were concerned with just about anything that was neither work, nor politics, nor sport.

For it is not just the bits labelled women that are so different now. Camilla Cavendish on the Times was the main force who got the domestic courts open to public view; Polly Toynbee on the Guardian is the journo right wingers are really scared of; Ann Leslie – I should say Dame Ann Leslie – of the Mail has reported on so many trouble spots as a foreign correspondent that she knows how to locate the scene of a massacre by the hungry circling birds.

And, of course, the cooking-and-clothes side of journalism hasn't diminished; women still want to read them, advertisers still want to influence the women. It's just that women's view of everything now has a chance of hitting the headlines in a way that once only men's did. And it's made the papers, in my view, much more fun to read: in the film Blithe Spirit a man asks his wife: "Anything interesting in the Times this morning?" and gets the reply: "Don't be ridiculous, Charles." She wouldn't say it now.

Though, of course, women's attitudes may well be different from men's, so I have rewritten AE Housman's poem about a man who once could not afford the things at a fair as a young man and now found he had changed so much that: "The pence are here and here's the fair/ But where's the lost young man?"

My version goes:

<blockquote>When first I looked in fashion's book few pence in purse had I And long I used to stand and look at clothes I could not buy. Now times are altered; I've a stash of dollars-euros-yen So there's the clothes and here's the cash But where's the lost size 10?</blockquote>

I was offered an honour ages ago, for something I'd done on a government committee, and I turned it down because I thought it would look as if I'd sold out. All right for worthy old dames, I thought, but not for a struggling journalist. So now I am a worthy old dame and glad of it.

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