anti-harassment and positive discrimination campaigns in the 1980s. These were about legislating around the perceived relationships of power and oppression. If there had been problems before with applying civil rights rhetoric to the situation between men and women, they certainly got a whole lot worse when applied to these more nebulous areas. Even before drastic changes in sex roles, there were problems with converting perceptions about male power into actual campaigns about personal sexual behaviour and attitudes.
The personal may be political but should the political involve itself with the personal? In the intimate connections between men and women, where attitudes and behaviour are more relevant than economic and legal status, oppression and discrimination become much more difficult to prove. Away from obvious economic and legal discriminations based on gender, the intimate connections between men and women are more muddied by individual differences and lifestyle, by emotional agendas. Prescriptions for appropriate behaviour become difficult in this context. Not all relationships are built on the same chemistry and anyway there is the question of how much the ‘feminine’ draws out its masculine counterpart. As Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander pointed out in the New Statesman (1980): ‘The ropes which bind women are the hardest to cut, because they are woven with so many of our own desires.’
It was the extension of the model of male power into more nebulous aspects of behaviour which eventually lost feminism much of its wider support. But by then feminism was in no mood to consider that its analysis might be ham-fisted and inappropriate for the subtle differences in how individuals negotiate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ roles in their own lives. By the mid-1980s, Thatcherism, with its ferocious ideological drive against the ‘nanny state’, had taken hold. Liberals feared this was an attempt to reverse the changes which had begun to occur in the family and sexual behaviour. They suspected a will to return to a more conventional family which would be available to care for the casualties from a dismembered welfare state. This was not a moment for backsliding. Instead, feminism sought to strengthen alliances with other groups who considered themselves targeted.
The idea that aspects of masculine behaviour could oppress women was an important insight and one which showed that class and material disadvantages were not the only ones that mattered. But it was also a Trojan horse. What came with it were the disaffected, the marginal groups, the ‘oppressed’ who found a natural home in a movement which defined itself as the rebellion of the oppressed against their oppression. By a giant non-sequitur, the logic ran that if oppression was broader than actual economic discrimination, then any group which felt discriminated against by the status quo must have a home in a movement which had made the subjective experience of oppression a valid basis for not just protest but action. Thus feminism became, in its own words, a ‘rainbow alliance’ offering a home to any group which considered itself marginal to a white heterosexual male norm: blacks, gays, the disabled. This was in spite of the fact that the sort of discrimination experienced by, for example, a disabled person might have very different roots from the oppression resulting from gender.
My memory of feminism in this period was that it was both exhilarating and mad. Exhilarating because it was a very creative time. Women were not just defining problems for the first time but were constantly coming up with new ideas to improve women’s position. Many policies and ideas we now take for granted as objectives of liberal or socialist governments were thrashed out then in workshops and seminars without funding and without formal organizations. Many of the criticisms of the old Labour and its workerist ideologies came first from feminism which spearheaded the idea of democratic alliances. Women freely volunteered their time and energy to attend conferences and workshops to discuss anything and everything which might improve women’s position; few imagined there would be any immediate rewards for themselves.
It was also a wildly frustrating time. At this point, feminism attracted some really very disturbed people and the amazing thing in retrospect was how tolerant feminism was of some crazy excesses. Feminists objected to how the tabloid press in the 1980s characterized their activities as being part of the ‘loony left’, poking fun at the way in which feminism and the Left abased themselves in the face of ever-escalating claims of oppression. But this was not all misrepresentation. At one conference, Linda Bellos, who later mysteriously became leader of Lambeth Council, listed her oppressions to an audience rendered sullen and passive by her superior claims to speak: ‘I am black, a woman, lesbian, Jewish, Polish.’ ‘You are not disabled… yet,’ countered one participant who still had the energy to protest.
People who were very damaged by personal experiences found a place to feel powerful. The more oppressed they could claim to be, the more right they had to speak. It is no longer heresy to point out how virtually everyone who identified with feminism had some level of problem with male power, for that was the nature of the movement. Autobiographies by women like Gloria Steinem (Revolution from Within, 1992) show both how women had problems and why. But there was always a fine line between those who had a problem yet nevertheless kept their eyes on the wider picture, and those who were seeking some kind of compensation for previous damage. It was often difficult to draw that line very clearly. Perhaps those who did most to effect changes for women were creatively damaged, but there must have been enough empathy with those who were seriously damaged for their use of guilt to silence and inhibit others.
What resulted were endless unproductive, unresolved discussions where the logic of the feminist rhetoric of male oppression in the most personal began to emerge. If men are the oppressors, did that mean that any sexual relationship with them was oppressive? Was any male expression of sexual interest the act of a dangerous predator? Was any expression of male sexuality the same as its most brutal expression in crimes like rape? There were some groups of women who answered yes to all these questions. Bonkers, perhaps, but not so wildly out of step that every other feminist silenced them. Rather it was the other way round. Active feminists who lived with men, loved men, had children with them, fell sullenly silent. Life was too short to waste time arguing with your supposed allies when the overarching political culture of the time was so antagonistic.
The weaknesses of the rhetoric which had led logically to this point began to emerge but it didn’t stop the bandwagon from rolling on. In the 1980s, partly as a response to the extreme conservatism of the government, there was a mushrooming of radical socialist councils which incorporated much of this rhetoric into their own politics. It was here – looking to America – that the flesh was put on the bones of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies aimed at challenging prejudice and power in situations which might in the past have been accepted as natural. In England it never quite became strong enough to deserve the title of ‘political correctness’ but it still appeared to many as an unwarranted intrusion into situations which many people thought were just too diverse and personal to call for such intervention. Had discrimination against women remained blatant, these legislative initiatives might yet have come to fruition, but by the end of the 1980s social and economic realities began to change dramatically. The economy suddenly delivered many of the objectives which feminism had aimed at, even if not quite in the form wanted. This time the arguments about covert discrimination wouldn’t quite wash. The world of gender expectations appeared to be turning upside down and feminism had few tools for understanding what had happened.
Chapter 3 A NEW GENDER LANDSCAPE
At the same time as feminism steeled itself to do battle with those intransigent aspects of male behaviour apparently standing in the way of women’s progress, the UK economy and society were undergoing seismic changes. Men’s economic supremacy, supposedly the basis for all other oppressive behaviour, was crumbling and with it the sex roles originally described by feminism. The widespread support for the conservative values of Thatcherism meant that feminists had failed to recognize the radical changes affecting women’s position, let alone to register the changes affecting men. By the 1990s these dramatic upheavals could no longer be missed. When the dust settled, it was clear the gender landscape would never be the same again.
Feminism
