Ask any young woman these days if she is a feminist and the answer will often be a wrinkled nose and a shake of the head.
For many women living in the 21st century, feminism can feel irrelevant. The battle for equality has been fought and won and we can leave those angry female warriors firmly in the past.
But a new three-part series on BBC Four called Women is taking this attitude to task, looking at shifts in attitudes to feminism since the women's liberation movement, and asks: "Are women really as free as they think they are?"
British and American feminists of the 1970s such as Germaine Greer, Sheila Rowbotham and Ann Oakley talk candidly about their time organising consciousness-raising events, the direct action they took against beauty pageants and women's magazines.
Finn Mackay, founder of the London Feminist Network (LFN), who helped revive the women-only Reclaim the Night marches against sexual violence, points out: "When the march started in the 1970s, the organisers were appalled that only one in three reported rapes ended in a conviction.
"Today that number is one in 20, so some things have actually got worse."
It is exactly 40 years since the first National Women's Liberation Conference in London, and while many things have changed for the better, Mackay points out that some aspects of women's lives haven't improved or have even worsened since the 1970s.
Male violence against women hasn't decreased, she notes. Two women every week are murdered by their male partner, one in four are living with domestic violence, and there are more than 40,000 rapes every year.
Seventies campaigner Ann Oakley is now a 66-year-old grandmother and a sociology professor at London's Institute of Education.
She insists that despite the achievements of the women's lib movement, women are still oppressed, citing the fact that a disproportionate share of higher paid and higher prestige jobs are held by men, and that it is a widespread myth that paid employment equals women's liberation.
"It certainly doesn't, and it isn't what women's liberationists in the 1970s were fighting for.
"What we were arguing for were structural changes that would break down the work/home divide, give value to domestic work and childcare, and enable both men and women to have genuine choices."
She stresses that while men may do more in the home than they did 40 years ago, they do not normally take responsibility for it.
"Helping is not the same thing as taking responsibility," she says. "The evidence is that women are still valued less, and the work they do is valued less, than is the case for men."
Oakley describes the 1970s as a decade of huge change for women, and says it was "an incredible struggle".
She adds: "We really believed we could change the world for women. We couldn't, not on our own, but if we hadn't believed that, nothing would have happened."
Described as "one of the most influential feminist voices of 20th century English sociology", Oakley wrote seminal feminist work, The Sociology of Housework (1974), which concluded that society unhelpfully defined housework as "an aspect of femininity".
She believes her early books on housework and motherhood brought feminism to a much wider audience, and says: "It helped some women to understand why they felt the way they did, and what was wrong with the way society treated them."
Women series' director, and middle-aged mum, Vanessa Engle, decided to make the film as a direct result of her experiences.
"As a middle-aged mum myself, I noticed that a lot of the women I came across were working extremely hard – especially women who were also doing paid work, who were trying to do everything."
"Their lives were so demanding that they didn't have a great sense of liberation, just a sense that they were trying to hold down demanding jobs and a demanding domestic situation."
Keep up with the latest business news from the region with the Emirates Business 24|7 daily newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter, please click here.