went out of their way to find someone to put the case for how gender came into the issue. Often the feminist angle carried the day.
Writers and film-makers began to document women’s experiences of oppression in the home, at work and in sexual relationships. All those who fought to have women’s art and writing valued will remember the initial howls of outrage. When I wrote an undergraduate dissertation on women novelists in the nineteenth century, the ratifying committee disputed whether or not this was a valid subject in literature. Those who set up Virago, initially a collective operating with limited funds, remember similar scorn. Not long after, what had started on the margins of mainstream publishing became a commercial success. Virago made its name reprinting forgotten women authors, along with contemporary feminist ideas. They had found an audience hungry for accounts of women’s experiences or discussions of women’s concerns. The Women’s Press followed suit and then more mainstream publishers.
This was not surprising. The runaway best-sellers of the decade were all women’s novels. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1971), Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976) and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977), were novels which fictionalized the journey at the heart of the feminist project; from repression in the patriarchal family to sexual self-knowledge and a new female autonomy. Taking responsibility for your life, changing it, finding a new freedom – however watered down into more acceptable mainstream forms, this female journey was the project of the decade.
Academia was also shaken by feminism. Many disciplines came quickly under scrutiny for their neglect of female subjects or experiences. Some universities welcomed women’s studies options into their courses, others violently opposed them. But there were plenty of academics in other conventional subjects who recognized the impact. History was transformed by the writings of women like Sheila Rowbotham who showed how women had been ‘hidden from history’ English literature courses recognized how their great tradition almost invariably excluded all but a handful of women writers; even science subjects had to recognize previously excluded questions of gender. As Mary Evans says in Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought (1997), feminism introduced a new perspective into intellectual and academic life. This was ‘the recognition that the once universal he/man of academic disciplines is only one half of the reality of human existence’.
Popular magazines like Cosmopolitan carried their own version of the feminist message, asserting the need for women to become more powerful in the bedroom as well as in the workplace. These magazines saw themselves as the voice of modern women, women who had a right to be equal, who were striking out for careers, who demanded a sex life to equal men’s. Cosmopolitan may have derided dreary feminist politicos, but the main voice of modern women was feminism. It was feminism which supplied the vision of working women, and raised questions about the obstacles still in women’s way. It was feminism which argued the case for overthrowing the old repressions in pursuit of greater self-knowledge and greater autonomy.
Feminists often distanced themselves from these changes when they came about in ways not quite anticipated or perhaps even not quite wanted. Cosmopolitan is a case in point. It shared in many of feminism’s fundamental tenets, yet it carved out a version of feminism which was not always compatible with the stance of politically active feminists. Cosmopolitan’s version of sexual freedom and the objective of a have-it-all, do-it-all lifestyle, with its emphasis on consumerism and how to make yourself sexually desirable to men, often provoked ambivalence. Commenting on another new magazine, feminist academic Janice Winship sighed, ‘What’s new about pubescent girls in soft porn pics?’ (‘Magazines for Girls’, 1987) Ultimately, though, these magazines were seen more as allies than foes, a recognition that their emphasis on liberalizing sexual attitudes and the building up of the female consumer, were closer to feminism than not.
Indeed, these rapid changes in the sexual mores which had previously controlled women’s lives were probably the most significant changes of the period. In the 1970s, traditional lifestyles which had been identified as controlling and limiting women’s lives began to crumble. The institution of marriage took the most direct hit. It wasn’t just that women were winning equal legal rights in marriage, although these had profound implications for women’s status in marriage; nor was it that many women were beginning to argue that becoming a wife and mother should not spell the end of careers. Women had begun to reject the institution of marriage altogether.
Reform of the divorce law in the 1960s had made divorce easier. By the 1970s the notion of marriage as an indissoluble union had gone. Simultaneously, the new sexual freedoms, and awareness of the restrictions that traditional marriage placed on women, meant there were increasing numbers of unmarried cohabitees and children born outside marriage. The improvement in women’s economic position combined with welfare provision for single parents meant that unmarried parenthood, whether through divorce or choice, became not just thinkable but common. Combined with women winning increased rights in divorce settlements, especially around economic provision, these changes amounted to very great improvements in women’s legal status as sexual partners and mothers.
Once under attack, the old attitudes changed with astonishing rapidity. By the mid-1970s, attitudes towards unwanted pregnancies, to living together before marriage and even to having children outside marriage had been transformed. By the 1980s, the vast increase in cohabiting unmarried couples with and without children was the most significant demographic trend and the most significant source of worry to the moralists. With the exception of the two world wars, the proportion of births outside marriage had remained stable for fifty years at 4 per cent of the population. By the late 1980s, 25 per cent of all children born in England were born outside marriage.
In less than fifteen years, society had moved from viewing extra-marital sex as shameful to the abolition of all stigma for those who have children outside marriage. Indeed, in contemporary society, so total has been this change that however hard politicians try to reverse public opinion, there is no longer any real disgrace in pregnancy outside a stable relationship. In the 1990s Madonna, Michele Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster were just a few among many who had babies ‘on their own’, asserting their ‘right’ to have children. By the mid-1990s, the stigma attached to a healthy, normal-aged, single mother had disappeared so completely that the problem with this event was located in another place altogether as far as the media were concerned: people no longer worried about the morality of errant females, only whether such women had rendered men redundant altogether.
Without knowing I was part of the most significant demographic trend of this century, I did my bit for these statistics. I was able to start living with someone without having to think about taking the step of formal commitment; there was no question about not earning my own living and in so far as I thought about marriage I thought about it in negative terms as involving a loss of identity, a loss of financial autonomy, an abdication of my independence and identity to the unearned authority of someone whom I wanted to see as my equal. The question of making a formal commitment arose only when we had children. By then, however, we had been together long enough to feel that we would stay together because we wanted to and because of our commitment to the children rather than because we had been told to do so by ‘patriarchal’ institutions.
My motives were explicitly connected with feminist arguments, but I suspect they were typical of the millions of other women who made the same lifestyle choices at the same time without a similar involvement in feminist politics. Marriage had quite simply lost its hold and however much feminism might now want to distance itself from what is often called the disintegration of the family, it was at the emotional epicentre of these changes in family life and sexual behaviour. It was the feminist argument on behalf of autonomy, equality, and the need to be freed from the emotional and sexual infantilism of traditional marriage which underpinned and justified so many of the reforms in family law and practice and changes in behaviour.
Looking back at this period with the advantage of hindsight, the transformations were so rapid that it is hard not to imagine the door was already partly open when feminism pushed on it. ‘A fair wind was
