I attended, described men as ‘phallic imperialists’. That idea implied not just that the male gender conferred power, but that men actively went out to subjugate and dominate women simply by virtue of their gender. Historian Barbara Taylor also points out that ‘the notion of women as powerless victims of male power never went entirely uncriticized’. Socialist feminists always believed ‘that male power over women was in a sense a derivative secondary form of power, essentially derived from who had control over the economy’. But she acknowledges an elementary consensus about male power and the moral superiority conferred on men by virtue of their gender. ‘We called that “the patriarchy”, the favourite term for that organized male power over men as we imagined it to be’ (interview with author).
Even at the time some feminists doubted just how appropriate this language was for relationships between men and women. The father clearly had authority and power, but was the model of colonization, implying capture and defeat of one type of society by another, followed by domination and slavery, really appropriate as a metaphor for the more complex bond of a sexual relationship? After all, women were not captured and enslaved against their will, even if they were curtailed by financial dependency. Indeed, many social historians have insisted that the twentieth century, unlike previous periods, is characterized by affectionate, companionate marriage rather than coercion.
Marriage could also entail advantages for women. If a woman was married to a rich man, could we really think of her as a member of an oppressed group? She might have the misfortune to be married to a violent bully or her husband might divorce her and leave her penniless. Indeed, even thirty years later, the whole sorry scenario which unfolded around Princess Diana and her marginalization by a powerful family was a reminder that even the most glamorous and apparently powerful women can suffer in a rigidly patriarchal family. In such cases, even the richest woman might experience the types of discrimination which could and did afflict women.
Then again, she might not. Instead she might remain comfortably married, and even if not ‘fulfilled’, she might partake of all the privileges and power which accrued to a powerful husband. Unless it is assumed that all men bully, exploit and control their wives, leave them as soon as their breasts sag, beat them for pleasure, rape them, stop them from experiencing any kind of personal development, then it is impossible to assume women never share in the privileges of their husbands or never, in emotional terms, have power within households.
There were other disconcerting elements in this rhetoric too. Somewhere lodged in it was an agenda for the emotions; ‘autonomy’ was seen as crucial not just economically but emotionally too and that gave work almost moral status as the principal means to this autonomy. An ambiguity towards children followed from this. Feminists, being women, were obviously concerned with acknowledging the overwhelming importance which children had in women’s lives. But in equal measures they regarded them as ‘a problem’ or ‘a threat’ to that financial autonomy. Behind all these calls for autonomy, self-determination, self-fulfilment, there was a rejection not just of the actual social and political models of male dominance, but also a rejection of a model of emotional dependency which was assumed to come with it; dependency is infantilism, commitment is imprisonment, loyalty is possession.
There were many bizarre manifestations of this, such as ‘the politics of anti-monogamy’ which elevated casual sex into an act of political liberation. I’m not sure how much people were deliberately deluding themselves in order to have a good time, but they certainly put on a good show of thinking that their own anti-monogamy stance would have repercussions at the political and social level. Anyone whose lifestyle seemed to break the bonds of mutual dependency and inter-relationships with men could find herself depicted as a paragon of feminist living. This included lesbianism, which some feminists represented as the ultimate freedom from men. Even with the fervour gone, along with the illusion of changing the world by sleeping with most of it, feminism is still equated in some minds with sexual independence.
In the 1970s none of this seemed odd to the people involved. These were experiments to find a way of life in which the unearned power of men could never again limit and control women’s potential. But what happened as society began to change and feminism, once the discourse of the powerless, became the most potent source of change?
Chapter 2 FEMINISM: A MOVEMENT BLIND TO ITS OWN EFFECTIVENESS
Most liberal-minded people, even if they disliked what they saw as feminist behaviour (usually characterized as anti-family, selfishly careerist and sometimes sexually immoral), were prepared to accept the broad ethical position that equal rights should apply to women. Consequently there was little opposition either to the Equal Opportunities or the Sex Discrimination Acts. Most people also tolerated the criticisms of men’s dominance within the family and across society generally; the restrictions this placed on women’s opportunities were all too obvious. As a result, throughout the 1970s, many of feminism’s propositions came to be accepted as common sense.
Feminists themselves, however, are not always ready to acknowledge the huge effect they have had on society. This is partly because one of the favourite sports of certain rightwingers has been to blame feminism for all the negative changes they detect in society. Victoria Gillick, Margaret Thatcher and Charles Murray are just a few among many who, over the last two decades, have blamed the ‘me-first’ philosophy of the feminist generation for undermining stable family life. This is the reductio ad absurdum of complex social changes. Feminists, though, often respond with their own simplicities. How can you blame feminism, they reply, when feminists themselves never had power? How can feminism have been responsible for major changes when it has only ever been a handful of women working on the margins of society?
It is true that individual feminists, such as Hillary Clinton in America or Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt in the UK, have only recently become prominent. Prior to the leftward shift of these countries’ governments, active participation in feminist politics was always a career handicap, but it is disingenuous to conclude that feminism was marginal. Feminism had an enormous impact on society, probably a greater impact than any other social or political ideology this century. On the other hand, feminists are not lying when they play down their impact; they felt marginalized because they met opposition, rarely benefited personally and when the real changes began to happen, they were not quite as anticipated.
Yet it was feminism which changed what women thought was desirable or possible for themselves. Once the equal opportunities and sex discrimination legislation was in place, making it illegal for women to be treated unfairly, the groundwork was there for radical changes in expectations. Educational opportunities, for example, had been steadily improving for girls since the war. But in the 1970s, there were dramatic changes. Feminists who promoted anti-sexism and equal opportunities in school, colleges and the workplace played a major part in broadening horizons. Once schools and universities became selfconscious about girls’ career expectations, then traditional assumptions about appropriate subjects for boys and girls began to break down.
Women’s actual career prospects also began to improve as a result of feminism. Changes in the job market helped quite considerably, but again it was women’s changed outlook that was critical. In the 1970s, the expanding service sector looked to a previously untapped pool of labour: women. By the 1980s it would also use the last remaining reserve of labour: mothers who, crucially, ‘matched’ the need for part-time, contract workers. This might have happened without feminism, but women’s readiness was due to a change in consciousness.
Feminism had a transformative effect on the cultural front as well. This was much more than individual feminists being influential in the media – they weren’t particularly. Individuals like Germaine Greer were regularly hauled up for bear-baiting sessions with hostile opponents. An evening with Mary Whitehouse, the prominent anti-pornography campaigner, comes to mind, for example. But apart from these one-offs, it was more a case of feminist perspectives infiltrating
