stop them’ (Jack O’Sullivan, in G. Dench, Rewriting the Sexual Contract [1998]). But to feminists active at the time, it did not feel like that. To push over the traces of the old society, to transform tradition into a desire for democratic and equal relations, to win that moral and ethical high ground, feminists were in constant argument and meeting constant opposition and hostility. I have an outlaw mother (how can you have an in-law if you are not married?) who still finds it hard to forget I am not legally married.
It is also easy to imagine that because the changes look so inevitable now, 1970s’ feminists were unnecessarily po-faced and extreme about getting their ideas over. Anyone who doubts how hard that struggle was should take a look at the interviews with leading feminists in Susan Mitchell’s book Icons, Saints and Divas (1997). The women she talked to all wrote books in the 1960s and ‘70s which ‘changed’ lives; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1971) coined the idea of the ‘zipless fuck’ as a symbol of women’s sexual freedom; Phyllis Chessler’s Women and Madness (1972) is the definitive study of how women’s struggles against oppressive institutions were often categorized as madness; Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) runs through English literature exposing the utterly damaging stereotypes which surrounded women; and Robin Morgan, editor of Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), coined the phrase ‘the personal is political’, also popularizing the idea of sisterhood. These are all books which exerted massive cultural influence, yet the frustrations and slights accorded to their authors show just how much hostility could be expected and how few personal rewards were on hand.
Interestingly, most of these authors reject the idea that there has been real change in women’s position. Mostly they endorse Susan Faludi’s theory that contemporary society is characterized by a backlash against feminist ideas. As Erica Jong puts it: ‘We’re a long way from having a truly equal society where both genders have equal input intellectually, financially, politically, sexually; a long, long way. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever have it.’
This attitude is typical of what happened to feminism in the 1980s. Feminists barely acknowledged the significance of what we now know to be the momentous changes which were taking place around them and because of them. The changes were seen as either not deep enough or in danger of being overturned. At the very moment when feminism could have changed its rhetoric as many of its objectives were being met, there was instead a reassertion of its basic propositions. Why?
Certainly one significant factor was that changes were not always easy to see, especially if you were in the thick of them and experiencing more resistance than benefit. Robin Morgan says:
The real changes have occurred in consciousness, in lifestyle, in the labour force, in consciousness about work, in consciousness about violence against women, about sexuality, about recognising different kinds of families. There has been an extraordinary shift in consciousness in what is historically a very short period of time. When it’s your life it seems like a damned long period of time and you think, ‘Let’s get on with this. I’ve only got one life here, I’d like to see a little progress.’ (In S. Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 1997)
In addition, visible changes were not always easy to interpret as progressive. The increase in numbers of women working did not seem to have appreciably helped women’s lot; in the 1980s feminists became much more aware of how motherhood affected women’s role in the economy. Statistics showed that women were simply not reaching the same levels as men, and the difficulties of combining childcare and work seemed almost insurmountable. There was no real evidence that childcare would become a political priority. So, throughout the 1980s, most feminists insisted that the changes were superficial. Women, they pointed out, continued to earn on average only 75 per cent of the male salary. Career women met a ‘glass ceiling’ in their professions and corporate cultures. Increased career opportunities, without a redefinition of men’s role in the home, looked like a double burden for women rather than a liberation.
Some of the improvements in female visibility were also double-edged. Feminists often disagreed about whether a female icon like Madonna, pushing at the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ sexual behaviour for women, made them more powerful or exploitable. Sexual liberation seemed to have jumped out of feminists’ hands and become a much more problematic force, sometimes even producing hardcore pornography and films of grotesque violence against women. In 1984, Dressed to Kill coincided with the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper in the North of England, suggesting that whatever gains feminism might have been making on equal opportunities, expectations and cultural representation, misogyny was still rampant. And cultural representations aside, women’s interests were still poorly represented in politics and law; women and girls still could expect hostility and even defeat when bringing charges of harassment, rape, domestic violence or child abuse. Superficially at least, not much had changed since Germaine Greer had provocatively declared that all men hate women.
Certainly, what these phenomena seemed to require was a greater depth in the understanding of both overt and covert oppression. Women were clearly constrained by more than overt discrimination; they were also constrained by deep prejudices and their own internalizing of negative attitudes. Policies to challenge these would help women achieve equality.
So although formal equality was coming within reach, there was no retreat from an analysis of male power. Rather, this was the period when it was extended into more personal areas such as domestic violence, pornography, rape and sexual harassment as work. These were all seen as areas of women’s ‘oppression’ which had previously been invisible and had to be pulled into the light of day. Like domestic violence, they had been hidden through shame, or, like sexual harassment, rendered invisible because they were accepted as a natural part of relations between the sexes. Aspects of taken-for-granted male behaviour came under scrutiny: sexist attitudes towards women as inferior or available to be used by men; domestic violence where men felt they had a right to chastize and control their wives; rape where men sometimes claimed that they knew better than the women involved what their victims had wanted; or sexual harassment where a man might use sexualized behaviour or language to degrade or humiliate a woman. These seemed to embody the deeper obstacles to achieving total equality, rooted in assumptions about masculinity and femininity.
This was not inventing problems where there were none. Women were drawn to feminism not only because of issues like pay differentials but also because it made sense of bad experiences in their personal lives where they had been restricted, belittled or even brutalized by traditional assumptions about masculine behaviour. Feminism insisted that the analysis of male power, originally mobilized to tackle overt discrimination at work and in the family, was relevant to these deeper areas; these activities expressed the contempt and hostility which was directed towards women because of their inferior status. Power, they said, was working at the points of most intimate connection between the sexes, and in the 1980s most feminists agreed.
Natasha Walter in her book The New Feminism (1998) suggests that present-day feminism should ignore this former preoccupation with challenging masculine and feminine stereotypes and concentrate instead on the ‘material inequalities’. But she is ignoring important insights. Oppression based on the expression and exercise of conventional notions of masculinity in sexual relations is not only more subtle and deeper than the overt discrimination practised in the job market, it is often more damaging and demoralizing. Eating disorders, for example, are rampant among girls because of the emphasis placed on women’s sexual desirability defined in terms of her conformity to the prevailing body ideal. Disregard for the contribution a woman makes in the home and as a mother can lead to her being badly exploited and treated with contempt. Assumptions about what is ‘normal’ in sexual relations can lead to instances of harassment and justifications for the use of force and fear. All show the deep way in which personal, emotional and sexual interactions can be an expression of the hostility and contempt directed towards women in an unequal culture.
These are important insights still not fully integrated into perceptions of society, but the politics which flowed from some of these concerns were
