Women can be as violent as men, says Lessing

Doris Lessing, the novelist and feminist icon, said that women could be warmongers and as violent as men, in a speech yesterday.

Speaking at the Hay on Wye Festival, Lessing, 87, said that although history suggested women were peaceful, some of the worst crimes had been committed by females.

"There is a lot of sentimentality about women. We like to think that women are kind and motherly and are not going to go to war. But it's not true, is it?

"History suggests women are peace loving and law abiding - on the contrary some of the worst crimes have been committed by women," she said.

Promoting her latest novel, The Cleft, Lessing was asked by a woman in the audience how men could be stopped from constantly taking the world to war. "Well, I never noticed that women who get to be Prime Ministers are particularly peaceful!" she said, in what appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to Margaret Thatcher, the former Tory PM who was leader during the Falklands War.

Her latest book is about a mythical society free of males in which a member suddenly gives birth to a male.

As an author who has been strongly identified with feminism, her remarks are likely to offend many of her fellow female writers. However, Lessing has attacked feminists before - in a speech at the Edinburgh book festival in 2001, she defended men against what she called the "unthinking and automatic rubbishing" by feminists.

Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) and was brought up in what was then Southern Rhodesia. She came to Britain in 1949 and became a feminist figurehead with her classics The Grass is Singing, a story set in colonial Africa, and The Golden Notebook, about a female writer's descent into madness. She went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. In April she was nominated for the international version of the Booker Prize for fiction. And in 2001, she won the David Cohen literature prize for her lifetime's achievement.