responsibility (and the hypocrisy which sometimes went with that) came under attack; The arrival of a safe contraceptive in the form of the pill made this possible. When social commentators rue the ‘60s as the era which gave birth to the ‘me generation’ whose pursuit of individual gratification destroyed the old altruistic bonds of community and family, they invariably include feminism in this.
As it happens, feminism was as much challenge to this ethos as part of it. The political and sexual libertarians of the time, embodied in magazines like Oz, were challenging the old structures, the old restrictions, and the old hypocrisies which stunted them emotionally and sexually. Early feminists, however, spotted a ‘double oppression’ of women in this libertarian talk. Sheila Rowbotham has described how, working for the radical magazine Black Dwarf in the ‘60s, she became disillusioned with its contemptuous attitude to women, ‘chicks’ as they were called in these circles. Women like her realized that if traditional society had sexually repressed respectable women while exploiting the so-called disreputable women, the libertarian agenda wasn’t much better. Even anti-establishment radicals were capable of extreme contempt for women, as the American black activist, Eldridge Cleaver, summed up when he made his unforgettable comment: ‘Women’s position in the revolution is prone.’
Without the sexual revolution there would have been no feminism. But feminism also upped the ante. What was essentially a generation freeing itself up to enjoy a consumer society based on extreme individualism, became in feminist hands a tougher and more difficult fight about equal rights and equal treatment. Feminism had focused on a deeper problem, of discrimination based on gender so that masculinity conferred advantages and femininity guaranteed disadvantages. Power was no longer being seen in exclusively political terms; it was also seen to operate in less obvious ways – through sexual assumptions, sexual behaviour and attitudes.
Everything changed so rapidly in the wake of feminism that it is easy to forget what society was like before. Indeed, when Melanie Phillips writes that contemporary family problems are caused by ‘the loss of male authority’ (Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 1998), one wonders if she has forgotten the suffering caused by the imposition of patriarchy. Maybe it is easy to forget. There is a huge gulf between the kinds of sexual and familial decisions which women were forced to take before and after this social upheaval. The Profumo affair which so scandalized British society in the early ‘60s seems to belong not just to earlier decades but an earlier century. Then it was utterly scandalous and dangerous for an establishment figure to be seen to mix with women whose sexual morality was even faintly questionable. By today’s standards what happened seems so trivial; then it was enough to bring down a government.
Even in recent years we have had poignant reminders of the restraints society once imposed on women; and of how quickly the world changed after the combined forces of ‘free love’ and feminism overturned the old morality. There was huge sympathy for Clare Short in 1996 when it became known that she had given away her baby for adoption in the mid-1960s, merely because she became pregnant before marrying the baby’s father. It has recently been revealed that Joni Mitchell, doyenne of the sexual revolution, had a baby daughter whom she too gave up for adoption. Even in the early 1960s, for a respectable girl to have a child out of marriage was a source of deep shame to many families.
There are many heartbreaking stories which explain exactly why women needed to overthrow hypocrisy and double standards. A few years ago I interviewed a woman in her eighties in connection with a television series, The Hidden History of Sex. When not quite twenty, she had become pregnant on a first date after being virtually raped. She did not fully understand what was happening and only realized when her mother challenged her that she was seven months pregnant. Her parents threw her out of the house; she found her way to a nursing home in London. Her parents ignored her, but a few days after the baby was born, her mother visited her and told her she would adopt the baby herself but that there was never again to be any mention of what had happened. The baby boy was then brought up as her brother. The woman later married and failed to have any more children, so she went out of her way to treat him specially but could never tell him. After she agreed to talk on the television programme when she was eighty and her son sixty, she told him. But he rebuffed her, asking why she had chosen to do this to him now.
Such tragedies show exactly why the sexual revolution was necessary. Women were being controlled by something deeper: age-old assumptions about appropriate lifestyles and behaviours and a contempt for women who strayed. Hence women’s demands for the right to sexual self-discovery, and the right to have a sexual life without judgement. All of this entailed challenging assumptions about sex premised on male superiority: the hypocrisy which accepted men’s sexual desires as normal but castigated women for theirs; women’s rights to control their own fertility rather than being at the whim of men’s desires (with consequent unwanted pregnancy); the taking of the male body as norm with the consequence that female health and sexual problems were regarded with a combination of neglect and disgust.
Although all these looked like exclusively sexual issues, in feminists’ minds they were intertwined and based on models of male power and female dependency. Much of the passion invested in the pursuit of sexual liberation came from the belief that challenging sexual stereotypes and pursuing personal fulfilment necessarily also spelled the end of a society based on the hierarchical father-dominated family and related notions of male supremacy. Feminism viewed this as a struggle against an old and tenacious social form; history showed that under the patriarchal model, in law, if not always in practice, women were little more than sexual chattel. Until reforms in the nineteenth century, a wife could be divorced at the man’s will, if a woman was unfaithful she lost all rights, fathers had automatic rights over children, fathers could marry off their daughters. In short, a woman’s sexuality, body and reproduction were very much controlled by husbands and fathers.
So these challenges to sexual attitudes were also challenges to the unearned power and authority of the father with its culture of dependency, emotional infantilism and misogyny. And what had until that point been taken for granted as the ‘feminine’ way to live – a journey from obedient girl to subservient wife and devoted mother – was now described as sexist, the cultural expression of the control and dominance implicit in the patriarchal family. When feminism attacked ‘patriarchy’, it was attacking the whole package of men’s power – economic, legal, sexual and emotional. Even though Ibsen’s vision of the Doll’s House had been written a hundred years previously, most feminists thought it still pretty well summed up the inevitable female subordination in the patriarchal family. This is why feminists were invariably hostile to the traditional family.
Perhaps given the state of society at the time, it is not surprising that feminism’s rhetoric was borrowed from ideas of freedom fighting and a struggle against a powerful oppressor. The parallel was appropriate but also questionable. Feminist demands and visions were couched in terms like female autonomy, women’s freedom, women’s rights, women’s self-determination. It was the language of anti-imperialist struggles, the right of colonized nations and people to define their own objectives, to win full political and economic subjectivity and to define their own status. This imagery and much of feminism’s impetus, came from the American civil rights movement.
The imagery also had a metaphorical richness. Women could see a parallel between their lives and those of slaves and colonized peoples. They felt defined as second-class citizens and restricted by their gender from having the same expectations as the other half of the population. They talked of women’s ‘colonized’ bodies, their fertility and sexuality controlled by what men wanted, not by themselves. With that rhetoric went assumptions about male power. If women were deprived of equal rights by virtue of their gender, it followed that men had corresponding advantages. Men were potent oppressors and, however diminished their own particular circumstances, they would also have this familial power over women. Consequently, women must constitute a class or caste of people whose identities and experiences as women were much more important than any other social factors.
Male power meant different things to different feminists.
