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Whatever happened to the sisterhood?

All women are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Well, we knew that already, didn't we? Men have been saying it for millennia and they're always right, so it must be true. But, hang on a bit, it's not men who are saying it: it's our own kind. It's other women. Louise Candlish gets to the bottom of why we women are attacking each other

I offer myself as an example. I am a normal working mother. I am also, if a typical morning's experience is anything to go by, guilty as sin - and on three separate counts:

1. Wrong to work. So says a mid-market daily newspaper, although I already guessed this, the press has been saying for ages that my daughter will grow green horns and be served with an ASBO if I so much as glance in the direction of a commuter train.
2. Wrong to use childcare. Again, according to certain columnists, this is a recipe for delinquency (and that's if my child survives death by choking on a cheese string or turkey twizzler, which are, of course, all a non-mother would think to serve).
3. Wrong to be drawing on local council funding (in the form of a nursery grant, new children's playground, and so on). This is the view of a single neighbour of mine who is peeved that all she gets is her bins emptied.

Just as I was wondering if it might be safer to lock myself in the cellar and survive for a while on tinned stocks, the key point struck: my critics are female. What's more, all direct their criticism at me and not my partner, even though all of our choices have been made together.

And I'd feel just as wrong if I were a stay-at-home mother or a child-free careerist, single or divorced, undergoing IVF or sterilisation, getting a bit over- or underweight. All groups are routinely slated - by each other.

How did it come to this? Women attacking women and spending an awful lot of energy on it? Are we so satisfied that the battle for sexual equality is won that we can enjoy the luxury of 'Mean Girls' infighting? Whatever happened to the sisterhood?

Market research, that's what (beware the phrase 'According to a recent survey...'), along with a growing, almost obsessional, desire in society to discuss motherhood. Not parenthood, you understand. Motherhood.

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